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.

Aggregation Without Nodes

Aggregator is a core module that imports and displays content on your site. Aggregator powers the Mets News and Mets Blogs sections on my I Heart Mets site. Also, check out my recent Feed Aggregator Setup video.

Simple Pie can be used as a standalone php script where you copy the code into a Drupal page. SimplePie also works along with a couple of other Drupal modules that parse feeds into nodes. See Simple Pie in action via my lifestream on a Drupal 5 site.

FriendFeed is a contributed module (D6 only) that utilizes the FriendFeed API to display updates from a particular account on the FriendFeed site. See an example of what this looks like on my sandbox or via the screenshot below.

Aggregation With Nodes

FeedAPI is a contributed module that utilizes Simple Pie as a feed parser. FeedAPI has releases that support Drupal 5 and 6.

Activity Stream is a contributed module that aggregates information from a variety of social services. This is generally regarded as a lifestreaming module, providing functionality that is similar to FriendFeed. Activity Stream currently has a release that supports Drupal 5.

Aggregation is a contributed module that imports items from RSS and Atom feeds. Aggregation currently has a release that supports Drupal 5.

Choosing A Module

Your choice of aggregation module really depends on the needs for your site. Start with your Drupal version. Most aggregation modules support Drupal 5 but only a couple currently work on Drupal 6. Also consider whether or not you need to import items as nodes. If you are importing merely to provide news items as variety for your visitors then aggregating without nodes may work for you. If you want to create a searchable lifestream or network then aggregating with nodes is probably the way to go.

Also Consider

However you choose to aggregate it will also be very important to get to know Cron, which will assist you with automatically checking feeds for updates.