How is this better than the built-in aggregator?

It's better because feed items become nodes and can be managed as nodes, as opposed to ending up on a page.

Couldn't have said it any better. Thanks lambert.

Couldn't have said it any better. Thanks lambert.

and how about the second question? is it possible to migrate aggregator data (items and settings) into aggregation?

Actually no, but this does sound like something worth looking into.

I'm also wondering about the differences between Aggregation and Aggregator. I don't see why having feed items as nodes is necessarily better, I'd rather keep the feeds separate. What happens to older feed items when they disappear from a feed, are the nodes deleted? Do you provide views and blocks so that I can, at a minimum, replace Aggregator with Aggregation and everything still works the same? Can I run Aggregator and Aggregation at the same time? I'm just trying to get an idea what the benefits are and how much work I would need to put into trying this module out.

First of all, if you don't have PHP 5 and PHP-curl extensions then you definitely can't use this module.

Having items as nodes means you can publish/unpublish/sticky, you can use all the modules that affect nodes like comment modules, rating modules, access modules, whatever modules. You could theme items as you would theme any other node type, no special considerations. In the couple of next releases we will *probably* add the capability of aggregating images as nodes, this is already there but not activated although this would probably be a pretty simple patch, it simply has less priority than other issues we're working on. We're also on the lookout to aggregating audio & video using the audio & video modules respectively.

You can use the common views module to build blocks, specific views integration is planned on the next release thanks to one of the submitted patches, but the current views functionality should work fine. Likewise you can use views to create page listings. When the items are deleted the nodes themselves are deleted.

In general, the aggregation module seems to work with many many more feeds than the built-in aggregator, check the issue queues to confirm this.

The aggregation module is totally separate from the aggregator, you can run them side by side. A very low priority to-do is providing some import mechanism from aggregator, but this is really way down on our priority list.

Hope I answered your questions.

Yes, thanks (apart from the autodelete of old nodes ;). It just seems overkill for a site that only needs a little block with links to postings on other blogs, rather than having aggregation as a big part of what it does.

Just for the record, you can choose weather the keep or delete old nodes when you create the feed.

No new follow-ups so I'm closing this issue