A new aggregator for Drupal 7

Overview

This session presents a replacement for the existing aggregator module in Drupal 7 core. It is not just geared towards coders but to anybody who's dealing with aggregation in Drupal. We'd like to show you what's exciting about the new aggregator, talk about new possibilities it opens up and ask you for your feedback.

Background:

Drupal core's aggregator module wasn't designed with a wide range of use cases in mind. It supports aggregation of RSS and Atom feeds to a configurable set of categories on your Drupal site. But there is much more that users want to do with aggregation in Drupal aside from simple news aggregation, e. g.:

* Import iCal feeds to events
* Import to complex content types with custom fields
* Support workflow, access control or commenting on feeds or feed items
* Import special feed formats like NewsML

These and other demands have lead to a plethora of aggregation modules in contrib land: aggregator2, leech, simplefeed, aggregation and feedapi are just some of them. Most of them satisfied specific use cases and failed to cover the wider field of scenarios, hence none of them made the breakthrough to being the prevalent solution.

After a first attempt with FeedAPI in 2007 Aron Novak did it again for Google Summer of Code 2008: he took on the task to come up with a solution fit to replace ye olde aggregator. The result is a simple yet extensible and efficient architecture that should serve us well as a basis for the coming years.

Agenda

* Give an overview over existing aggregation modules in Drupal and its properties
* Explain why a new aggregator in core is better than the module-that-fits-best out there
* Present architecture of new aggregator for D7
* Present important features and explain specific design decisions
* Real world examples of what the new aggregator does or enables us to do:
** aggregate lightweight feed items or nodes
** lazy instantiation of feed items
** high performance setups
** (more to be announced when presentation is ready)

Goals

* Give you a good understanding of what's in the box
* Get your feedback on specific design decisions
* Do another step away from "many similar incompatible modules that do the same thing but slightly different" towards "many compatible modules that give you more flexible and better options"
* Inspire you to think beyond the current boundaries in aggregation

Resources

This is not mandatory by any means, but if you want to prepare for this session, we recommend to

* Test drive the new aggregator: http://drupal.org/project/new_aggregator or http://drupal.org/node/236237 (patch)
* Read the architecture outline http://groups.drupal.org/node/12772
* Have a look at the code