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.

This video shows you how to display content from RSS and Atom feeds on your site by using the core aggregator module. Includes instructions on how to display imported feed items in a block.

Quicktime/iPod/iPhone Video

One of the best features of Drupal is the fact that the system generates many RSS feeds. RSS is great. It allows your visitors to subscribe to new content on your site in any number of ways. But sometimes the RSS capabilities of Drupal are a bit confusing to users. In this drop I'll do what I can to simplify the issue for you.

Front Page RSS Feed

Each Drupal site has a front page RSS feed that can be found at yoursite.com/rss.xml. This feed reflects items that have been promoted to the front page of your site. You can change the setting for this front page feed by going to admin/content/rss-publishing. Once there you can control the number of items in your feed. You can also change the setting for the RSS content by selecting Full Text, Titles or Titles Plus Teaser. Another benefit of the front page feed is the fact that current Internet Explorer and Mozilla browsers will auto-discover the feed when visitors arrive at the front page of your site.

Over the last couple of years I've come to rely on free tools from Google to assist with functionality on my Drupal powered websites. At first I just used Google's site search tool. Since then it seems that every couple of months Google has either released (or acquired) tools that can enhance your Drupal site.

Here is a list of the Google tools that I've used in conjunction with my various Drupal-powered websites.