johanneswilm sent me this private message:

Hey,
I saw you removed this feature recently. We have been using this feature
extensively and I filed a bug report to get it in to start with. May I ask
why it was removed? Is there an alternative way to simulate the same
behavior?

Comments

alex_b’s picture

alex_b commented

First: my apologies for removing the "forced author for feed items" feature without further ado.

Then: until we find the best solution here, please use revision 1.1.2.1 of feedapi_node module - the revision before the 1.1.2.2 which removed the author feature.

Could you explain your use case? We should find out whether we should bring back this feature or whether there is another good way of implementing this functionality.

There are several reasons why we removed this feature from feedapi_node:

* it didn't handle the case of feed item's author = feed's author, which is the most straight forward case and the current's DRUPAL-5 branch behaviour (rev 1.1.2.2).
* the previous functionality lacked security checks - a user with feedapi advanced options could have created nodes for any other user in the system
* overall simplification of feedapi_node module
* better performance - the previous implementation loaded a user for each feed item node to be created
* setting designated author for a particular content type can be done easily in and add on module

Check out: http://cvs.drupal.org/viewvc.py/drupal/contributions/sandbox/alex_b/desi... - this module lets you set a particular author for particular node types - would this help you?

johanneswilm’s picture

johanneswilm commented

Hi,
we operate the site indymedia.no. It is a newssite, with a mix of syndicated and "home grown" articles. We syndicate a number of blogs or activist news sites. The items of each of these are to be owned by the registered users of the blog owners. This way they can go in and change individual news items in case something doesn't look quite right. Often this has to do with their original article being designed for a specific background color, etc. . Most of them know how to write html-code in nodes, but wouldn't know how to administrate feeds. That is why the ownership of the feed itself is not assigned to them.

There are a bunch of different authors, each owning the items of a feed and maybe also a number of comments, and nodes directly written to our site. So if I understood the purpose of your module right, it doesn't really cover what we need.

As to the reasons for removal:

1. I didn't notice that. It worked fine here to say have the user johanneswilm create a feed and then to automatically have that user be the feed item author.

2. ok? maybe the security is more fine grained now, but if you have enough access rights, you can also now just create an entire feed in the name of someone else.

3,4,5: probably true. However this is some quite basic functionality that is now suddenly gone.

I really hope you manage to bring this feature back somehow.

alex_b’s picture

alex_b commented

What about

# 1 assigning the feed node author to the blog user
# 2 deny blog user role "edit own [feed node type]" permissions
# 3 grant the role who creates feed nodes "administer nodes" permissions to be able to explicitly set the author (like in #1).

As long as you can do #3, this would effectively do the same, won't it?

(I am still exploring options here...)

johanneswilm’s picture

johanneswilm commented

It takes a lot of work to change it all, but yes it does. Thanks for the advice. I guess you have to count on doing that when using betaware.

alex_b’s picture

alex_b commented

How many feeds would you have to reconfigure? You could write a script for it:

// Something along the lines of:
foreach ($feed_nids as $feed_nid) {
   $feed_node = node_load($feed_nid);
   $feed_node->uid = $feed_node->feed->settings[somewherehereisauthoruid];
   node_save($feed_node);
}
alex_b’s picture

alex_b commented
Title: Bring back author feature on feedapi_node » Bring back author feature on feedapi_node?

More accurate title.

@johannes: could you solve your issues?

jakchapman@groups.drupal.org’s picture

jakchapman@groups.drupal.org commented

I know I'm a little late to this, but I have a slightly different use case for this feature that can't be solved by the above workaround, since the items each feed that I am accessing do not all have the same author.

alex_b’s picture

alex_b commented

could you explain your use case?

jakchapman@groups.drupal.org’s picture

jakchapman@groups.drupal.org commented

Basically, I'm aggregating content from sub-sites of a multi-site installation that shares users and vocabularies, but not content. The hub site will display everything from the feeds of the sub-sites. That part is not a problem with regular feeds, but if I can create nodes from the feeds, then I can also enable search across all sites and lists by taxonomy term across all sites. But it would be necessary to retain the original author, since the items within a feed will not all be authored by the same user. Does that make any sense? If there's a better way to do this, I'm open to it. I'm pretty new to Drupal, so it seems likely I've missed much :)