I don’t know of a reason why only 6 entries would be imported if there are more.

One problem you might be experiencing is that feeds are cached, by default for 60 minutes. Adding a refresh=“1” parameter should reduce that problem.

A new version of the plugin that:

i) adds the facility to set categories for feeds
ii) clears EE caches if new entries are added

Edit: Please see the FeedGrab page to download current version

Wow! This is fantastic! Any way for the imported entries to be set as Closed? My weblog has a default status of “closed”, but Feedgrab doesn’t seem to take notice… and thanks again.

Simon | Agenzia - 23 November 2006 05:03 AM

Any way for the imported entries to be set as Closed?

Thanks for the comments. This version should obey the weblog’s default status setting.

Edit: Please see the FeedGrab page to download current version

Andrew - thanks so much for that, it’ll save me tinkering with categories. And 21 minutes? That’s a seriously quick fix! Thanks v. much again.

OK, I’ve had enough positive feedback to suggest that people are finding this plugin useful, so I’m aiming to spend a bit of time tidying it up and possibly adding some new features.

I’d be very grateful at this stage to receive any feedback that anyone has about the plugin, especially problems and feature requests, and I’d also be fascinated to know how & where people are using it (it is already being used in ways I did not expect).

If you’d rather email or ‘PM’ me if you don’t want to post on this forum, that’s fine.

Many thanks, Andrew

Hi Andrew - I’ve not come across any problems using the plugin, and it’s *super* useful! My wishlist would be: -

- a way to import entries into galleries (so I can pull flickr images into a gallery)
- a neat’n'tidy interface in the EE control (perhaps with options for setting an interval for feed-grabbing)
- some extra documentation for common tasks (flickr, myspace etc) - give me a shout if you want me to chip in on this

Can’t think of anything else!

Also, would you be interested in talking about this project?

The only thing I find that I’d like to change is if I change the title on Flickr, I’d like the title in my entry to change too.

So far I’m just using it to display Flickr stuff. But eventually I’d also like to implement my SmugMug galleries too.

One features I’d like to see:

The ability to specify the author. Right now, it seems like entries I import into the database don’t respond to the author id I’ve included in the “go” template, although maybe I’m doing it incorrectly. In case my code is faulty (and could thus be corrected now), here’s the code I’m using in the “go” template:

Thanks,
Frank

Hi Frank - Sorry that was a bug.

It should be fixed in the download below - to make the parameter name a bit more consistent I’ve renamed it author rather than author_id.

There are a couple of extra new parameters to allow more flexible categorization of entries. Firstly:

category provides a default category (id or name) to put all new entries in

Alternatively, you can use category_field and category_group to select the category on an entry-by-entry basis

category_field selects which field of the feed to use for the category. The field will be treated as comma-separated data so “Arts, Science, Technology” would add the entry to all 3 categories. New categories are created if the don’t exist.

category_group is the id of the category group that you want new categories added to.

As usual, let me know of any problems.

Andrew

Edit: Please see the FeedGrab page to download current version

What is the “__MACOSX” content in the zip file?  Is it relevant?

Douglas, the _MACOSX stuff is useless on a PC. Just delete that entire directory.

Thanks for the quick reply Sue….  And thanks to Andrew for all his hard work on this plugin.

Let me just throw out two other questions for anyone…

First, it seems to me that if someone modifies content on the original RSS feed subsequent to the import which changes an item within the RSS, there is no way to import the changes.  The imported copy will continue to reflect the older version of the RSS item.  It would be nice if the plugin could identify such a discrepancy and change the content that it had previously imported.  Is this an insurmountable problem?

Secondly, is there a way to include conditional logic to say something like “don’t import this item if the category is xxxxxx” or “only import if XML field xxx contains xxxxxx”

Hi Douglas,

Thanks for your interest…

You are right that existing items do not get updated. Furthermore, if an item’s title is changed (either in the feed or the weblog) that item will get imported again, as the title and the entry time are comnpared to test to see whether that item has been imported previously.

I’m not too happy with this and want to fix this in a future release of the plugin.

Once I can correctly identify a unique item, then it should also be possible to get items to update when they change.

I hadn’t any plans to include conditional logic, but I’m open to suggestions.

I’m currently planning improvements to the FeedGrab plugin and one of the issues I’m wrestling with is the trade off between extra features and ease of use (and efficiency to run for that matter).

I’m open to any suggestions or feature requests (from anybody) - you’re welcome to contact me ‘off-forum’ if you’d rather not post here.

- Thanks

Hi Andrew,

Sounds like this is a great plugin. I tried installing it but it broke the plugin manager—seemingly a bug that was already fixed. I get a blank screen.

I’m running the latest build, just installed it yesterday…

Any version above 0.5.3 should have fixed the majority of plugin manager problems. If you’re running a newer version than that, can you let me know what other plugins you have installed as it might be clashing with one of those - thanks.

I have the following installed:

I’ll try installing it again right now and see what happens. BTW, it’s not in the Plugins list in the Plugin Manager, is that because it’s still considered beta?

Yep, broke again…

I’ve tried 6.2, 6.1 and 5.4 now. All seem to give me a blank page on the Plugin Manager.

Thanks in advance for any efforts on your part to help me here. Not sure why I’d be having problems when no one else is except that I upgraded to all the latest EE builds (forum too). Let me know if there’s anything else I can provide to troubleshoot.