Drupal’s Aggregator mod­ule is respon­si­ble for pars­ing and updat­ing news con­tent col­lected from sites in var­i­ous XML-based for­mats. Such for­mats include RSS, Atom, and RDF feeds. Drupal is awe­some for cre­at­ing and man­ag­ing con­tent and even has sup­port for blog­ging, forums, and user pro­files. Although the later fea­tures are not as feature-rich as a third-party solu­tion and the Aggregator mod­ule is not an excep­tion to this. In fact, I find Aggregator to be prob­lem­atic to the point to where it is a dis­ap­point­ment. I have found a solu­tion that works well for me.

As an alter­na­tive to using the built-in Aggregator mod­ule, one can use Feed API. The Feed API is a feature-rich mod­ule. In addi­tion to sup­port­ing the stan­dard XML-based feeds, Feed API allows for the pars­ing of many more types of feeds such as iCal, the map­ping of feed ele­ments to CCK fields, the tag­ging of tax­on­omy terms to feed items, the cre­ation of nodes from each feed item, and for devel­op­ers, the abil­ity to design cus­tom parsers. Feed API is light­weight, easy to setup, and in my opin­ion, it is a great alter­na­tive to Drupal’s Aggregator module.

My prob­lems with Aggregator had noth­ing to do with setup; it had to deal with feeds that were sev­eral weeks old. I could cre­ate a new feed and all new items would be pulled in. However, after a week or two, I started to notice that no new feed items were being updated. When I go into the mod­ule to check what is wrong, I get error mes­sages about my RSS feed being mal­formed. The only way to fix the issue was for me to delete the feed and re-add it, but this became some­thing that I had to do on a weekly basis. To this day, I still can­not fig­ure out why the feed works one day and then the next day, the orig­i­nal feed that you used ends up bro­ken. This is what forced me to seek out alternatives.

I am happy with Feed API thus far. I have it to where it gen­er­ates feed items into a new con­tent type. This allows me to cre­ate views for these feed items like I would any other con­tent type. Instead of cre­at­ing a view of “Aggregator” type, I can cre­ate a view of “Node” type and design my views like I have before. To me, this is more flex­i­ble and eas­ier to setup my data than deal­ing with the Aggregator, which is not con­sid­ered a Node type.

As an alter­na­tive to Feed API, one might want to check out the Feeds mod­ule, which is the intended suc­ces­sor to Feed API. I am going to assume that it is more stream­lined and is eas­ier to setup than Feed API. I do plan to try the Feeds mod­ule to see how it com­pares to FeedAPI. It is to my under­stand­ing that Feed API will be obso­lete and replaced by the Feeds mod­ule some­time in the future. More infor­ma­tion about the Feeds mod­ule can be read here.