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FeedGrab ExpressionEngine plugin

Tuesday, August 29th, 2006

Andrew Weaver

Category: , ,

FeedGrab is a plugin for pMachine’s Expression Engine to provide it with the ability to import data from 3rd party web feeds (RSS or ATOM), such as flickr or delicious.

A possible use is for a Tumblelog (such as this one on jeffcroft.com) or Adactio’s Elsewhere, to create a place to tie together various strands of data scattered across the internet.

Download: FeedGrab plugin latest version

See the brandnewbox tumblelog for a working demo.

A forum thread exists on pmachine.com for bug reports, feature requests etc.

UPDATE: I’ve added a FeedGrab tutorial.

Comments

1. .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
5th Oct 2006 at 11:06 am

Hello!

At my site this plugin do not add anything.
I setup a grabing template and a news weblog to grab into. While manually grabing feeds using template I recieve:

Fetching: http://ma.gnolia.com/rss/full/tags/nature
Checking: Articles and Information about Nature, Nutrition, Health and Medicine
Checking: A Truly Stunning Land Gift
Checking: Pattern Language.com
Checking: WhatBird | identify birds | bird identification guide | north america
Checking: Geoffrey Philp’s Blog Spot: John Maxwell: Jamaica at Another Crossroad
Checking: Backyard Birder | A reader blog about birding with Dorothy A. Borders
Checking: Animal Planet :: Backyard Habitat
Checking: WhatBird | identify birds | bird identification guide | north america
Checking: South Dakota Birds and Birding - Home Page
Checking: A Nature Haven - Original Australian Photography : CafePress.com
...

But no news are added to the blog :(( What i do wrong?

2. .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
5th Oct 2006 at 11:13 am

Hi Yukki

I’m currently fixing a problem with the method the plugin uses to check for duplicate entries. I should get a new version up this week.

There’s a forum thread here with more details.

3. .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
5th Oct 2006 at 11:21 am

Me again :)

Sometimes for new feed i receive

Fetching: http://ma.gnolia.com/rss/lite/tags/underwater
Checking: fuji underwater housing
Date: 2006-10-02T12:01:57 +0300 (Mon, 2 October 2006 02:01:57 PDT)
Found: fuji underwater housing

But again no entries added to weblog section.

4. .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
5th Oct 2006 at 11:31 am

That suggests it *should* be getting added. Is there any sign of it when you look in the EE interface?

Let me get a new version of the code working (today or tomorrow). This will remove a couple of known issues and should make debugging a bit easier.

Thanks for your feedback

5. .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
6th Oct 2006 at 12:22 pm

OK - I’ve fixed a couple of bugs and uploaded a new 0.5.4 version (see link above).

6. Robert
6th Oct 2006 at 9:41 pm

Hi Andrew, first, thanks for taking the time to make this. it is appreciated. Second, I too am having a problem. I get the same feed as Yukki above did but my blog does not get updated. I’ve tried to set up a new blog to test it and that too fails to update. Any idea where I am going wrong?

7. .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
9th Oct 2006 at 11:20 am

Thanks to all of you who have sent in reports that it does not seem to be adding the entries to your weblogs.

To help me fix this I’d be very grateful if can you send me some more details so I can try and replicate the problem.

It would be useful to know:

any error messages you are getting
what version of EE you are using
the contents of template you are using to call FeedGrab
details of the weblog (eg, field names) you are trying to insert the entry into

You’re welcome to email these if you don’t want your details shown.

Many thanks again to everyone testing this.

8. Robert
9th Oct 2006 at 11:43 am

Hi Andrew, the problem rests between my ears. I used the weblog name rather than the id number. Changed that as well as tweeking the field names and everything works fine. Thanks once again.

9. .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
9th Oct 2006 at 1:17 pm

No problem, Robert, thanks for letting me know.

The error checking is v. weak at the moment - the plugin should catch that kind of error, really.

10. Robert
20th Oct 2006 at 5:22 pm

Hi Andrew, one quick question: The feeds I grab include table formatting. Any suggestions on how to strip that info out?

Many thanks, Robert

11. .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
23rd Oct 2006 at 9:11 am

The FeedGrab plugin won’t do anything clever to parse out the table information, but you might be able to do something clever when displaying the field.

The PHPStringFun plugin is quite good if you know PHP a little.

12. .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
24th Dec 2006 at 10:08 pm

Hi!
Nice info, big thx.

13. Emily
4th Feb 2007 at 9:46 am

Andrew,
Thanks for your work on this! I’m wondering if I need to continually run the “go” page or if this refreshes automatically to pull in new data from feeds?

Thanks again,
Emily

14. .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
4th Feb 2007 at 2:44 pm

Hi Emily,

You’ll need to run the ‘go’ page to update unfortunately. I use a ‘cron’ job to periodically hit the page.

15. mmo
14th Mar 2008 at 1:48 pm

Thanks for the plugin! working great for one of my blog sites.

16. Mike
11th Aug 2008 at 4:54 am

Wonderful plugin. This will cut down the time taken immensely.

17. Adventure Art Travel
19th Sep 2008 at 4:46 pm

Anything that helps make sense of the information overload gets my vote, thanks for sharing.

18. .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
30th Sep 2008 at 11:39 pm

Hi,

I would love to use this plugin to get RSS data, but then be able to add some static data to each db entry at the same time. Is there a way for me to modify it and add a tag to do that? Something like:

{exp:feedgrab url=“http://ma.gnolia.com/rss/lite/people/ajweaver”
                  weblog=“WEBLOG_ID”
                  title=“title”
                  date=“pubDate”
                  use=“link|description”
                  fields=“magnolia_url|magnolia_body”
                  static=“Judd was here|andrew was here”
                  staticfields=“who|who_else”
}

You get the idea. Can you point me in the right direction?

Thanks,

Judd

19. Andrew Weaver
1st Oct 2008 at 9:27 am

Hi Judd,

This is on my list of things to do. I’ve often wanted to do the same thing, but I have not yet had a chance to add it to the plugin. Hopefully I will get to do it soon…

Andrew

20. .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
4th Dec 2008 at 5:15 pm

I’m trying to grab a atom feed and add the data from the feed into an
expression engine weblog using feedGrab.When run, It works fine for
all fields execpt the body content. In this particular feed the node
for the body content is called ‘content’. Instead of putting the body
text from the feed in, it inserts it as ‘array’?

Does anyone have any idea’s why this could be happening as the correct
field name’s and node names are being specified.

21. Andrew Weaver
5th Dec 2008 at 10:25 am

Hi Daniel.

The plugin’s capabilities are limited by the MagpieRSS library that it uses to parse the feeds.

If you can email me the url of the feed I’ll take a look.

Andrew

22. Sunny-Avandia lawyer
12th Feb 2009 at 6:55 am

Thanks again for your valuable information.

23. Gamer
24th Feb 2009 at 10:28 pm

Perfect solution. Good article. Short but to the point.

24. Jack Brighton
13th Mar 2009 at 8:16 pm

Is there a way to grab the Title from the Channel information, so as to display the RSS feed source?  I haven’t been able to figure that out.

25. Andrew Weaver
18th Mar 2009 at 11:35 am

Hi Jack,

At the moment you cannot grab the channel information, sorry.

Andrew

26. .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
25th Mar 2009 at 12:06 pm

Hi Andrew, I moved my feedgrab site to a new host. Feedgrab does not likes this for some reason. It has stripped out all <  > tags. awhat gets published is a lot of unformatted html. Do you have an idea what might cause this? Also, in EE version 1.6.7 the plugin manager is blank again.

Cheers

Robert

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