1. For many feeds it would be good to have the feed be a category. For example 'CNN' which is the name of the feed as well a category that will allow people to see where the article came from and browse accordingly. It may be good to take the feed name and make that a category itself and apply this to avocabulary chosen. e.g. News/CNN

2. Artiles/feed items should be able to have categories that are sub-categories of the feed category. e.g. News/CNN/world_news vs. News/CNN/sports.
Categories that supplied by the feed should be applied as subcategories to the feed category as in the examples above.
(if there is no subcatagory then the feed item would simply carry the feed category.)

For output it would be good to display the feed category seperately to ensure clarity between which is the feed and which is an feed item category

This way if two seperate feeds have the same subcategory, eg. NewsCNN/sports and NewsCNBC/sports ,then clicking on sports would allow the user to see all feed items that are sports related reguardless of the feed.

I understand that this may take some fiddling with the interface with taxonomy to make this happen correctly but this would be a really great feature if this module is going to shoot for mainstream. I am willing to help sponsor such functionality.

If there is another good way to do this that I am missing please let me know.

Comments

budda’s picture

budda
Primary language English
Location Cheshire
commented

1.If you set up a vocabulary for feedmanager (in the settings) you can create tags (categories/terms) for the feed - thus adding he name of the feed as a tag is possible for you, if you want it.

I have avoided structured term vocabularies because with hundreds of feeds it could mean many duplicates of the same term per feed.

A simpler way to work (I think) is to combine multiple tags to get what you want.

So to find all feed items from CNN about Sports you would do a taxonomy view of terms "cnn"+"sports". To get all sports items frrom anywhere you just do a taxonomy view on "sports".

Am I missing something bigger here?

dreed47’s picture

dreed47 commented

I think what is missing is the basic functionality of specifying one or more categories for the feed itself (not the feed items or nodes). This is the way the core aggregator module works. It doesn't use taxonomies (since feeds are not nodes) but instead uses it's own aggregator categories. I was looking at patching the news_page module to work with feedparser but news_page filters on this aggregator category (which feedparser does not have)

I'd like to see feedparser use the normal taxonomy vocab and terms to provide this aggregator category functionality. It could add a new setting for specifying the vocabulary to use. Then when creating a new feed it would provide checkboxes for all the terms listed in this new vocabulary (exactly the way the core aggregator module does) It could then store the feed-to-term association in the "aggregator_category_feed" table (again, exactly as the core aggregator module does although the association it stores is to the aggregator category instead of the vocab term)

This is one of the core aggregator features that I loose when I switch to feedparser and IMO, I think it's a critical one.

dreed47’s picture

dreed47 commented

I may do this myself as it's critical for me. If anyone has any suggestions on the approach let me know as I'd like to not fork the module if at all possible.

dreed47’s picture

dreed47 commented

Taking a closer look at the code my approach won't work as you are aleady using aggregator_category tables but you are using them in a slightly different manner than the core aggregator module does. Also, by looking at the code I realize that I can put a category directly on a feed (in a free tag manner even though I didn't specify the vocab as free tag)