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Hey all, just curious to find out what kind of support there is in EE for bringing in content via feeds, from many sources.

I am thinking along the lines of a site that aggregates blog posts from say 50-60 different blogs and brings them into EE and then displays those posts based on category and other criteria.

So, the index page may have a “featured story” from blog x. Then there might also be a list of say 6-8 posts from other random blogs as well, all laid out in the style of a newspaper/news media type of site.

The design part is no problem, but does EE have built-in support for bringing in RSS feeds like I am describing, or is this something that I would ultimately have to build in on my own?

Thanks!

There are multiple ways. If you only want to display certain feeds, there is the Magpie plugin, which does exactly that. If you want to work with the content, sort it, perhaps search it, etc., your best option is another plugin, named FeedGrab which does exactly that, and puts those feed items in the local database as EE articles, allowing you to keep your own copy of the data, as it were.

You didn’t ask for it, but EE comes with native support for publishing your own feed as well.

Sweet! I love Magpie, as I use it on several Textpattern sites so that will be great for what I need to do.

Well that about does it! I had a list of 45 things that I needed EE to handle and this was really the final one. I should probably just go buy it now, huh??

I downloaded the core a while back and loved it but have since moved over to a new server, so I am going to buy a license this time and give it a go.

Thanks!

—Cory

You’re welcome. I am sure we meet again on these forums 😊

Just a quick follow-up question to the original topic.

Suppose I had a list of say 10 RSS Feeds. I would like to randomly pull the latest post from 1 of those feeds and display it on the site, totally random from the list.

I know that EE core may not support this, but is this possible with one of the plugins mentioned above?

It’s not a question of Core or Personal/Commercial as such, I think. This is not supported out of the box, but should not be too difficult to achieve. If I had to develop that, I’d use a PHP oneliner to randomly select one of the feeds, and use Magpie to display the latest entry of that feed. This is more a Howto kind of question, though, so if you want to brainstorm further, I suggest you post in that forum—it’s not exactly Pre-Sales 😊

Yeah, sorry about that! I thought of that once I posted it and figured it may need to possibly be posted in the How-To section.