Feedfeeder
A product which pulls down remote syndicated feed items (ATOM, initially) and creates first-class Plone content based on those entries.
Current release
No stable release available yet.
Experimental releases
Upcoming and alpha/beta/candidate releases
- Alpha releases should only be used for testing and
development.
- Beta releases and Release Candidates are normally
released for production testing, but should not be used on
mission-critical sites.
- Always install on a separate test server first, and make sure
you have proper backups before installing.
Feedfeeder 1.0 (Release candidate 3)
Released Oct 04, 2008
In this release we added a number of new features and bugfixes. Now compatible with Plone 2.5, 3.0 and 3.1. Also available as egg on the cheese shop (Products.feedfeeder).
Project Description
Feedfeeder has just a few things it needs to do:
- Read in a few ATOM feeds (not too many).
- Create FeedfeederItems out of the entries pulled from the ATOM feeds. Any feed items that contain enclosures will have the enclosures pulled down and added as File items to the feed item.
- This means figuring out which items are new, which also means having a good ID generating mechanism.
Wait, no existing product?
There's a whole slew of RSS/ATOM reading products for zope and plone. None of them seemed to be a good fit. There was only one product that actually stored the entries in the zope database, but that was aimed at a lot of users individually adding a lot of feeds, so it needed either a separate ZEO process (old version) or a standalone mysql database (new version).
All the other products didn't store the entries in the database, were old/unmaintained/etc.
In a sense, we're using an existing product as we use Mark Pilgrim's excellent feedparser (http://feedparser.org) that'll do the actual ATOM reading for us.
Product name
The product feeds the content of ATOM feeds to plone as document/file content types. So "feedfeeder" sort of suggested itself as a funny name. Fun is important :-)
Product structure
I'm using archgenxml to generate the boiler plate stuff. There's a 'generate.sh' shell script that'll call archgenxml for you. Nothing fancy.
The feedfeeder's content types are:
How it works
A feedfeeder is a folder which contains all the previously-added feed entries as documents or files. It has a 'feeds' attribute that contains a list of feeds to read.
Feedparser is called periodically (through a cron job?) to parse the feeds. The UID of the items in the feed are converted to a suitable filename (md5 hex hash of the atom id of the entry), that way you can
detect whether there are new items.
New items are turned into feed items.
Tests
The look-here-first test is the doctest at 'doc/testDocIntegrationTests.txt'.
Testing is best done with zope's zopectl. 'instancemanager <projectname> --test feedfeeder' will do that for you if you've set up instancemanager. Otherwise 'bin/zopectl test -s Products.feedfeeder'.
