Aggregator Module

About the Aggregator Module

Drupal's Aggregator module helps you get fresh content (RSS feeds) from other sites and places it, in summary form, on your site. It is pretty cool and powerful module if you want to get fresh automated content for your Drupal site.

With this module, you can:
* add, edit, and/or delete feeds (RSS content from another site)
* decide how often those feeds are updated
* group them into similar categories

What is RSS

But first, let's cover some basics in case you are wondering what is RSS anyway? Have a little read of the hyperlinked article than come back to install your very own Aggregator module.

Fresh Automatic Content for Your Drupal site

There are many reasons why you might want to have fresh content on your site. Some of them would be:

• less work while still getting fresh content for your pages (e.g. getting news updates from news sites, or relevant sites of interest)
• it can be automated = less work!
• if you have more than one site, you can have content from some of your other sites show up here - a means of getting traffic to your other sites

Drupal Aggregator Module

Drupal Aggregator is a core module that comes with your Drupal installation. It comes disabled by default but you can easily enable it. It can get fresh content from other sites, make it available from your Drupal site using common syndication formats like RSS, Atom, and RDF.

Enable Aggregator

Administer > Site Building > Modules > tick/check Aggregator box > Save Configuration

User Permissions

As with any other module, once you enable it, you need to make sure that appropriate permissions are given: to the administrator so you can perform the required admin; to the users so that they can access/read as per specified in the permissions.

Then click 'save permissions'.

Feed Aggregator

As soon as you have enabled the Aggregator module, you will find that under your Content Management, there is a new type of content: Feed Aggregator.

From here you will be able to add new feeds, add categories, and more.
Each time you add a feed from a site, that feed will have its own block.
You need to enable that block and choose the region you want to place it.
(I will come to that later. Let's do this step by step).

So let's go and add a Feed.

Add a Feed

First, you need to find a site you want to get content from. Find their RSS icon/link > right-click> copy the full URL.

There are 3 fields here you need to attend to:
Title:
Would be a good idea to put the name of the source site. This does not have to be the same as what will be displayed to visitors. It can have a different displayed title (as we will see later when we get to the part about enabling this block). But having the name of the source site here will be useful to you from an admin point of things.

URL:
This is where you paste the full RSS url you just copied.

Update Interval:
From this drop-down box, you can specify how frequently the feed from this particular site should be updated.

Then save.

After saving, you will note that there are no feeds displaying on your site. This is because as I mentioned above, each feed you add to your site will automatically become a block - that is initially disabled (i.e. not visible).

Make Feed Block Visible

Here you will note that the newest feed block you have just added will appear under the 'Disabled' blocks.

As always, use the drop-down box to specify which region you would like the block to appear and then 'Save blocks'.
Click the 'configure' link next to the block to specify who can see it and what pages it should appear on. Save.

It is actually in the 'configure' that you can specify if this feed block is to have another more meaningful title (otherwise it will take the default - which is the title you gave when you added the feed; which in my case was the name of the site "shCREDO"), or even no title at all.

After you do all this and no feed seems to be displaying where you wanted it to, then you might just need to manually update the feed this time.
Administer > Content Management > Feed Aggregator
And click on the 'update items' link for that feed.

Summary

There obviously are a few more things you can do and tweaks you can employ, but it should be pretty straight forward from here and you can just play around till you are happy with the results.

Note: If you want the feed links to open in a new window, please have a look at article fond on Drupal.org: "Open aggregator links in new browser window"