import

Importing Content Using The Feeds Module

This lesson shows how to automatically import content from RSS or Atom feeds with the help of the Feeds module. The process relies on cron to run periodically so that the feed processor can check for new content. The feed processor creates regular Drupal nodes from the items contained in the feed. You can choose to have the imported items published by default or not. Once the items have been imported as nodes you can then create custom paths to those using Pathauto and/or customize the display using the Views module.

Note: Click the 'full screen' icon (to the right of the volume control) in order to watch online at full 1280x720 resolution.

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Options For Importing Content

The ability to import content (also know as aggregation) from other sites is one of the great features of the Drupal platform. So while you can create content directly on your Drupal site you can also import and display content from other sites that contain RSS feeds or APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that allow you to access their content.

Why Aggregate?

You might want to give the visitors to your site a bit of variety. If your site is about sports you may want to pull a feed containing sports news from Yahoo! Sports. You may be interested in creating your own network of blogs or podcasts. In that case you would pull updates from all of the sites in your network into your Drupal install. Or perhaps you're a prolific web publisher and want to create a lifestream to help people keep track of everything you publish. You can do all of these things using the Drupal platform.

Your Options

Drupal has lots of options for aggregating content. That's a good thing because it means people of different skill levels can get more of what they want. In general there are two types of aggregation modules for Drupal. One type captures content as nodes on your site. This means the content is searchable and will have a unique link. Another type displays a stream of content without importing as a full node. This type is not searchable and will link back to the originating site.

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