Drupal’s Feed API

I’m at DrupalCon Boston.  Well, actually, no, I’m at a friend’s house with tea because I came down sick today and couldn’t make it back to the convention center.  And while there are a ton of things I want to report back on (Dries “State of Drupal” speech, Boris Mann’s scoping web projects for Drupal talk, etc etc) I thought I’d point to something smaller and simpler first.

Yesterday my friend in the education world, Bill Fitzgerald of DrupalEd and OpenAcademic, showed me his implementation of Feed API.  If you don’t want the discussion of where it came from, just skip ahead to the next paragraph for the functionality discussion.  I had talked to Bill before about the challenges at schools of using a local server for student portfolio work (with DrupalEd, for example), and having a public-facing school site hosted on an ISP – a setup most schools have right now.  What was the best practice for getting approved student portfolio work published on the main, public-facing schools website?  Using an RSS feed seemed to be a good idea, but I was worried about a) the feed not pulling in the data permanently, just as temporary RSS data, so old posts would fade out as it were on the feed, b)
the elegance of feeding multi-field and multi-media feeds.  (I tried out Leech last year, but the second issue above was a problem for me).

Bill’s implementation of FeedAPI is superb, thanks in part (as he acknowledges) to the Feed API team.  The OpenAcademic feed site pulls in the full text (and images and video – and authors, and tags) of several eduction-related blogs.  Not only that, but it also creates a tag cloud of imported tags too, including author names.  There are several more things going on here – read about how it was implemented here.

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