I understand the development of Drupal is a collective effort. I have some ideas for improvements in Drupals import.module. I would be willing to donate money towards improving the syndication section. If you are familiar with www.newsisfree.com they have perfected the layout for a large syndication site. Drupal is very close but I think it could use a little more work The design thus far has been excellent but the goal should be to take the product to the next level.
I have some ideas that I would like to kick around. The current default templates layout is really good when syndicating a small number of sites. But problem arise when the number of site you want to syndicate feed grow beyond 20. The pages become very cluttered and contain too much data. To avoid clutter we should be able to easily configure the tool bar and control the number of items listed. Clean up of the database needs to be improved on and several other enhancements.
Possible Improvements:
Latest News: (configurable by x number of hours)
News by source: (Alphabetical and configurable by number of sources per page. Import several hundred feeds and in the current layout option it gets ugly. The sources need to be subdivided below the mother page)
News by topic: (Existing Bundles are fine but the option should allow bundles descriptions to be listed on the main navigation bar in the import section)
Example: Latest News - News By Topic - Computing - Technology - Linux - Windows - News Sources
or
Example:
News By Topic (Mother Page)-->(Daughter Pages) Computing - Technology - Linux - Windows etc
This [import.module] that has had a lot of fantastic work has some of the configurable items that are missing with the current release. The current release is lacking feed management configurations and has Taxamony integrated, bundles should be kept but Taxamony really allows the syndicated items to be tied into the power of drupal.
Cron.php needs to be optimized when we try to run a cron job on a hundred syndicated feeds the process usually fails as it either times our something is killing the process.
The MySQL database can grow at an amazing rate a configurable cron job is needed to clean up the database. What takes up the most space is the search element. There needs to be a way to limit the words that are put into the search database maybe make only headline titles searchable. 100 news feeds imported in a 24 hour period resulted in a database growth of 7 megabytes with 4 megs residing in the search element. Which for those running on servers with limited database quotas.
I welcome others thoughts but my goal here is to support the expansion of the syndication section.
Comments
funding import.module
I, too, think that import module needs to go to the next level. I am not enough of a programmer to do the job, would help. I could even see tossing in a few bucks if that was what was needed.
----Martin----