Blog: Google Summer Of Code

Or, Check Out the Patch

This year’s Google Summer of Code season I’ve got the distinct pleasure of mentoring Aron Novak’s work for a new aggregator in Drupal 7. Aron’s well into his task and has just rolled a patch for core and an alpha 2 version – time to share why I think that this patch is important and why you should have a look at it. If you’re into aggregation and Drupal, that is.

Drupal’s original aggregator module was designed foremostly for pulling news feeds into your site and displaying in a straightforward fashion: no workflow, very basic permissioning, no API for interacting with feed items, no event aggregation, no custom parsers – to name a few limitations.

Soon contrib modules mushroomed that addressed one or the other shortcoming of the core aggregator: a list of them would start with the aggregator 2 module which was published in the fall of 2005 and would include Leech (I don’t regret its demise), Aggregation (first time use of SimpleXML for parsing in Drupal), SimpleFeed (first extensible architecture) and FeedAPI