Drupal 7 module: Aggregator

Aggregator module is part of Drupal 7 Core and is used for publishing syndicated content.

This module is a powerful feed reader that is part of the core as mentioned above. When this module is enabled, the Aggregator can fetch syndicated content from other websites.

The Aggregator module can gather, read and display variety of contents such as news, text, images, etc. Data are gathered from external sites and blogs around the Internet.

The Aggregator module fetches content from other sites and it does not generate syndication feeds.

The Aggregator module is using common syndication formats including RSS, Atom, and RDF.

Enable Syndication Note:
To enable XML syndication on your site, you need to turn on the Syndicate block in Dashboard > Structure > Blocks. But this is not part of Agrgregator module!

Aggregator module usage for website visitors
General public visiting your website can do the following:
- View the latest feed content chronologically in the main news aggregator display
- View the latest feed content by source

Aggregator module usage for website administrators
Drupal site administrators can perform following operations:
- Add, edit, and delete feeds
- Choose how often Aggregator checks each individual feed for new content
- Tag individual feeds with categories, offering selective grouping of feeds in separate displays
- Enable or disable blocks for every feed and feed category in the block administration page
- List the latest news for individual or categorized sources to display as blocks in the block administration page

Aggregator and cron
The news aggregator requires cron process to check for the latest news from the sites being aggregated. Drupal 7 cron is part of Core so there are no worries about this anymore.

Aggregator and Blocks
This module is providing subscribed content through the news aggregator. But the Aggregator module automatically creates a module block for every subscribed feed as well as every feed category. By default all these blocks are disabled. Bud site administrator can choose to enable a particular feed or category feed block by specifying an enabled region.

In the next blog post I'll describe how to configure this module, when I will be creating feed aggregation for my site www.marekpisch.com.

Comments

Here is the list of some Drupal/PHP/MySQL related RSS feeds:
Drupal News: http://drupal.org/node/feed
Planet Drupal RSS: http://drupal.org/planet/rss.xml
Drupal Association News: https://association.drupal.org/node/all/feed
PHP News: http://www.php.net/feed.atom
Zend Developer Zone: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ZendDeveloperZone

Can not really find any feed on for MySQL at this time.