Looks like just what I want. Would be really great to have it integrated into the backend so that once you have amended your _main file you can keep adding feeds to the sidebar. However, even if I did have adit the _main file each time I wanted to add one I would not mind. Top work!

Back Office integration won't happen by me. I have very limited skills in these arts so there is no way I will try to write code that will modify key files. Betcha the best way would be a table in the database, but even that would be a major effort for me to concoct.

I'm pretty much done by the way. I see a method to reduce it to one line of code for each new feed, which is where the idea of a table comes from, but that requires that you always use the same number of entries per feed. I suppose a smart fella would have 2 items in the table... hmm... hhhmmmmm......

Well - not for this weekend anyway. To my way of thinking this weekend presents a spectacular opportunity to run off a mountain and fall up a coupla thousand feet, so that's what I'm going to do.

Ed,

You are working on perhaps one of the greatest b2evo hacks ever.

I've got some ideas, but not a lot of time for working on this. But, here's where I'd like to go with this:
1. Stick the RSS in the main blog field, to replace the $MainList stuff.
2. Aggregate multiple blogs into one RSS feed. (Juggle the magpierss object/array to make this happen.)
3. Create a cron job to create/check a magpierss object for changes and email out either: [a) the new item, or b) "Hey, the site changed"] to all the people on a given list.
3a: Bonus: Add a feature that uses the getmail.php script to add someone to the mailing list, so they could send a message to b2evo_addr@example.com with a certain subject, and then be enrolled.

The last step would be setting up the backoffice to manage this stuff, but a hack would be a great start.

I realize this is a little above the realm of the hacks you usually make, but if you could get as far as you can, that would be really cool.

PM me or respond here if you want to co-ordinate on making this happen. These enhancements would satisfy the most common requests.

Good food for thought, unless you think about what you produce when you consume many feeds and generate a single product from them... 8| I'll PM you when I find myself up against a wall that I can't find my way around.

Good food for thought, unless you think about what you produce when you consume many feeds and generate a single product from them...

Aggregating many feeds together is nothing bad - that is how all the planets ( [url=http://planet.rdfhack.com/]Planet RDF[/url], [url=http://planet.gnome.org/]Planet Gnome[/url], ...) and many more sites work.

I have another food for thoughts - what will you end up with when you aggregate many posts from many feeds? Will that not be too much for the system?

(I dream of a simple RSS agregator that will aggregate the feeds, where feeds may have "labels" (be in groups) which you can group them by and where I can do a full-text search of all the aggregated articles. Articles could even be stored as a separate text files - I don't care B) )

Hi captsolo.

Um... I was thinking if you eat a lot you end up making a poop. If one wanted to think like an adult one might call a feed from many feeds a casserole.

Aggregating lots of feeds is an issue, but I think that's something for the end user to manage. I've noticed it takes quite a while for this little puppy to give up the goods even though I'm only doing 4 feeds. I have space control managed by limiting long feeds, but that won't stop someone from adding 100 feeds and displaying everything they can.

Ah well. Now I'm hungry.

Hey EdB - I like this. I've taken your weather feed and incorporated it into my site. I hope that's ok. I did have to do some str_replace stuff to get everything to validate, and I pulled the icons off worldweather and put them on my site, so not to tax their servers. Thanks for the ideas!

I have something like that on my site.. ;) I'm currently not using magpierss, but will probably switch to that when I have time because the aggregator I use have been discontinued (Onyx RSS). But it works in the same way.

What I do suggest you do is to use feed2js. That script uses magpierss, so you can still use that one + that you can export the feeds from your b2evo (or any other feed) as javascript, so people without php & xml capabilites can use the feed.

http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/

Hi Peak. I remember those guys from back when I was into Javascript a lot but had no clue about php. It seemed cool but nothing I was able to use so I forgot about them. At this point it seems like they are what I'm making - a front end for magpieRSS, so I feel they've not got much to offer me. At this point in time anyway, and it wouldn't surprise me to find out I'm wrong.

I'm writing up a semi-formal dealie about how to include a _magpierss.php in b2evo. After that I'll check out the feed2js scripts. I mean after the weekend anyway.

Thanks for the link!

Okay here's the quick and dirty. First get magpieRSS, unzip it, upload it to your skins/skinname folder. http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/

Next get this little file from my web, save it as a .php file and upload it to your skins/skinname folder. http://wonderwinds.com/blog/media/_magpierss.php.txt

Then take this little bit of code and add it to your _main.php file. http://wonderwinds.com/blog/media/_main.php.txt

That should pretty much do it except for I'm as much a traffic whore as the next blogger. http://wonderwinds.com/blog/index.php/2004/08/28/magpierss_in_b2evolution is all sorts of stuff about it, not that its hard to figure out.

Have fun.

wonderwinds.com seems to be down at the moment :'( Maybe you could post the code here?

As to your access issue, I got an email from my host last night talking about upgrading the kernel on the server I live on. Earlier today I had intermittent problems accessing some pages but it seems to be back in action.

I'd rather not post code that is likely to be modified in the near future because it makes it difficult to follow any given mods or upgrades that happen. See the "statistics deluxe hack" thread for an example. Plus I already see where I have to make some flexibility improvements based on an application of my own. Hacking my own hack was more work than it should have been!

My web should be available again. Please try again and if you still have access issues post here. We'll figure something out.

EdB, thanks so much for your work on this feature. It's so easy to setup and it seems to open up a lot of possibilities which I look forward to seeing explored.

Your humor throughout the docs and blog entries is much appreciated as well.

Hi all. I found an application for me to actually use this and figured out it just wasn't gonna work for me, so I hacked the part one shouldn't need to hack (yeah - hacked my own hack), then went back and made a better version of _magpierss. If you used this without issue then you won't need the new one. If you tried this and found it wasn't user-friendly enough then you might want to check out the latest. Same rules: you need a b2evolution blog, the files from magpieRSS, the file from me, and a little bit of stuff in your _main file.

[url=http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=55691]magpieRSS home page[/url]
[url=http://wonderwinds.com/blog/media/_magpierss.php.txt]my _magpierss.php file[/url]
[url=http://wonderwinds.com/blog/media/_main.php.txt]the bit for your _main file[/url]
[url=http://wonderwinds.com/blog/index.php/2004/08/28/magpierss_in_b2evolution]my post about making it work[/url]

Changes mostly include making sure that you can structure the tags the way you want, and a handful of true/false statements that allow you to include certain stuffs or not. I'll end up putting some more energy into this with an eye on the goals that Isaac recommended. I'll probably not reach those goals but so what. I'll know what doesn't work ;)

EDIT: Here is [url=http://wonderwinds.com/blog/index.php/2004/09/02/magpierss_in_b2evolution_revisited]one more post[/url] that goes into gory detail on what the various options do for you. The links above are still valid only I did a fair amount of improvements to it. It now (finally) shows the content of a post from an atom feed. It also links author names to their urls from atom feeds and never displays email ids, but I won't be going any further with it. It seems to me I've now got all the pieces I need to make a real-time density altitude calculator. All I have to do is modify everything :)

Works like a dream. Thanks EdB!

EdB. your links to wonderwinds doesn`t work...

how can I do ?

thanks

That's one of the problems with the web: dead links over time. Both the links in the original post in this thread go nowhere, so now I'll go back and correct that. I currently do not have a running demo of this hack. Perhaps someone who does will add their link to this thread?