Since I dumped Drupal I didn’t have an RSS aggregator anymore. Drupal has some good RSS aggegation features which I wanted to duplicate – I needed:

• Getting and aggregating feeds by arbitrary tags (defined by me)
• Consistent display on the DirtMind site
• The ability to feed DirtMind feeds into the system
• RSS caching so that the homepage would still show something relevant if a feed was down
• A way to auto-post to the forum for discussion on a story

I knew I didn’t want to write an RSS parser myself. It would be possible but surely someone else, in fact several someone esles, must have wanted to do this and make their super solution open source. Enter MagpieRSS which is an excellent open source RSS parser in PHP. Then it’s just a matter of tagging and sticking the stuff in a database for display on the homepage. Each “RSS Box” on the hompage is generated as simply as 

$tag = "news";
$num_stories = "15";
$rss_box = dm_generateRSS($tag, $num_stories);

Which is then fed through into a phpbb3 HTML template in the normal way. Finally I wanted a “comment now” button or similar so that people could quickly post rss stories into the forum, for this I wanted a generic approach that could also be used from a Bookmarklet so I hacked away at the forum software a bit more to add a way of making posts through a specially formed URL (no details here to avoid the spam!).

In the future I’m thinking about maybe having which RSS feeds are shown as preferences in a user’s profile. That way people can choose the boxes most appropriate for them – and maybe also have them able to add RSS feeds into the aggregator system (although maybe with admin approval!)