Plugin: FeedGrab

Oops, bad URL. No more error messages but it is not populating the blog for some reason.

Thanks to all of you who have sent in reports that it does not seem to be adding the entries to your weblogs.

To help me fix this I’d be very grateful if can you send me some more details so I can try and replicate the problem.

It would be useful to know:

any error messages you are getting what version of EE you are using the contents of template you are using to call FeedGrab details of the weblog (eg, field names) you are trying to insert the entry into

You’re welcome to email these if you don’t want your details on the forum.

Many thanks again to everyone testing this.

Hi Andrew:

Terrific concept, and it’s almost there! I’ve tried dragging the info out of my last.fm rss feed into my weblog, and I keep running into a problem in which the template will grab the first 6 entries then stop. I’ve posted the output below:

First run with zero entries in weblog:

Fetching: http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/DigiFiend/recenttracks.rss
Checking: Afro Celts – Mother
Found: Afro Celts – Mother
Checking: Afro Celts – Anatomic
Found: Afro Celts – Anatomic
Checking: Afro Celts – Beautiful Rain
Found: Afro Celts – Beautiful Rain
Checking: Afro Celts – Sene (Working The Land)
Found: Afro Celts – Sene (Working The Land)
Checking: Afro Celts – Mojave
Found: Afro Celts – Mojave
Checking: Afro Celts – My Secret Bliss
Found: Afro Celts – My Secret Bliss

Subsequent runs:

Fetching: http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/DigiFiend/recenttracks.rss
Checking: Afro Celts – Mother
Checking: Afro Celts – Anatomic
Checking: Afro Celts – Beautiful Rain
Checking: Afro Celts – Sene (Working The Land)
Checking: Afro Celts – Mojave
Checking: Afro Celts – My Secret Bliss

Those songs in the above listing were from approx 1 hour ago.

Deleting the entries from the weblog resets the process of successfully grabbing the first six entries and stalling.

Hope this helps!

I don’t know of a reason why only 6 entries would be imported if there are more.

One problem you might be experiencing is that feeds are cached, by default for 60 minutes. Adding a refresh=”1” parameter should reduce that problem.

A new version of the plugin that:

i) adds the facility to set categories for feeds ii) clears EE caches if new entries are added

Edit: Please see the FeedGrab page to download current version

Wow! This is fantastic! Any way for the imported entries to be set as Closed? My weblog has a default status of “closed”, but Feedgrab doesn’t seem to take notice… and thanks again.

Any way for the imported entries to be set as Closed?

Thanks for the comments. This version should obey the weblog’s default status setting.

Edit: Please see the FeedGrab page to download current version

Andrew - thanks so much for that, it’ll save me tinkering with categories. And 21 minutes? That’s a seriously quick fix! Thanks v. much again.

OK, I’ve had enough positive feedback to suggest that people are finding this plugin useful, so I’m aiming to spend a bit of time tidying it up and possibly adding some new features.

I’d be very grateful at this stage to receive any feedback that anyone has about the plugin, especially problems and feature requests, and I’d also be fascinated to know how & where people are using it (it is already being used in ways I did not expect).

If you’d rather email or ‘PM’ me if you don’t want to post on this forum, that’s fine.

Many thanks, Andrew

Hi Andrew - I’ve not come across any problems using the plugin, and it’s super useful! My wishlist would be: -

• a way to import entries into galleries (so I can pull flickr images into a gallery)
• a neat’n’tidy interface in the EE control (perhaps with options for setting an interval for feed-grabbing)
• some extra documentation for common tasks (flickr, myspace etc) - give me a shout if you want me to chip in on this

Can’t think of anything else!

Also, would you be interested in talking about this project?

The only thing I find that I’d like to change is if I change the title on Flickr, I’d like the title in my entry to change too. 😊

So far I’m just using it to display Flickr stuff. But eventually I’d also like to implement my SmugMug galleries too.

One features I’d like to see:

The ability to specify the author. Right now, it seems like entries I import into the database don’t respond to the author id I’ve included in the “go” template, although maybe I’m doing it incorrectly. In case my code is faulty (and could thus be corrected now), here’s the code I’m using in the “go” template:

{exp:feedgrab url="http://boydston.blogspot.com/rss.xml" 
                          weblog="215" 
                          title="title"
                          date="pubDate"
                          author_id="47"
                          category="2"
                          use="link|description" 
                          fields="external_link|body" }

Thanks, Frank

Hi Frank - Sorry that was a bug.

It should be fixed in the download below - to make the parameter name a bit more consistent I’ve renamed it author rather than author_id.

There are a couple of extra new parameters to allow more flexible categorization of entries. Firstly:

category provides a default category (id or name) to put all new entries in

Alternatively, you can use category_field and category_group to select the category on an entry-by-entry basis

category_field selects which field of the feed to use for the category. The field will be treated as comma-separated data so “Arts, Science, Technology” would add the entry to all 3 categories. New categories are created if the don’t exist.

category_group is the id of the category group that you want new categories added to.

As usual, let me know of any problems.

Andrew

Edit: Please see the FeedGrab page to download current version

What is the “__MACOSX” content in the zip file? Is it relevant?