Aggregator: publishing syndicated content
The news aggregator is a powerful on-site news reader that can gather fresh content from news sites and weblogs around the web and make it available from a Drupal site using common syndication formats including RSS, Atom and RDF. (Learn more about site syndication formats.)
Please note: This module fetches syndicated content from other sites. It does not generate syndication feeds for Drupal. To enable your site's XML syndication button, turn on the Syndicate block in administer → blocks.
Users can view the latest news chronologically in the main news aggregator display or by source.
Site administrators can add, edit, and delete feeds and choose how often to check each individual feed for updated news. Site administrators can also tag individual feeds with categories, offering selective grouping of some feeds into separate displays. Listings of the latest news for individual sources or categorized sources can be enabled as blocks for display in the sidebar through the block administration page.
The news aggregator requires cron to check for the latest news from the sites being aggregrated. Drupal also provides a machine-readable OPML file of all of your subscribed feeds.
Aggregator options include
- administer your list of news feeds (prior to versions 6.x) administer → aggregator or (versions 6.x and later) administer → content management → aggregator.
- add a new feed administer → aggregator → add feed.
- add a new category administer → aggregator → add category.
- configure global settings for the news aggregator administer → settings → aggregator.
- control access to the aggregator module through access permissions administer → access control → permissions.
- set permissions to access new feeds for user roles such as anonymous users at administer → access control → permissions.
- view the aggregator page.
- run your cron job manually at your sites cron page.
- read about configuring cron jobs.
To syndicate a site's content, obtain the fully-qualified URL of the remote site's syndication page. Common filename extensions for syndication pages are .rss, .xml and .rdf. Most weblog sites that offer syndication will have an obvious link to their syndication page. Often you need only look for a red XML button, such as the one Drupal uses for site syndication.
Some sites do not make their RSS feeds as easy to find. Or maybe you want to find a number of feeds on a given topic, without extensively searching the web. In that case, try an syndication directory such as Syndic8.
In addition to providing subscribed content through the news aggregator, the Aggregator module automatically creates a module block for every feed you have subscribed to, as well as every feed category. By default, these new blocks are disabled, though an administrator can choose to enable a particular feed or category feed block by moving them to an enabled region.