RSS Syndication and News Aggregation

For the purpose of effectively describing the intended features, RSS syndication will be understood to stand for the availability of XML feeds (Atom, RSS etc) of documents from the site we are building categorised using the various available criteria, and available for external users (RSS consumption applications) to aggregate and display on other presentation media

News Aggregation is understood to refer to the ability of our website to consume XML news and information feeds from external sources and integrate those feeds into the CMS for presentation alongside internally produced documents

Setup

Drupal provides the infrastructure to subscribe-to and aggregate external feeds and categorise entire sources or specific entries into predetermined groups. For users who have blogs on our site, an icon is placed next to each blog entry prompting them to write a blog entry on the subject of the RSS feed entry. Clicking on the feed title links to the external document that is represented by the entry.

NB: There have been attempts, and there are setups that allow the extraction of entire document content for local hosting, but this approach almost always infringes on copyright and other ownership rights as it pretends to be the owning source of the presented content. In addition, it also publishes duplicate content to the Internet, and can attract SEO penalty

Example:

/aggregator/categories/1 displays all the aggregated external feed items catagorised as "Related News". A shortlist of items from the same category are also visible at the bottom of all pages in a block titled "Related News"

The Drupal CMS also provides a unique RSS feed source for every taxonomy category and every VIEWS query created. This presents a virtually unlimited number of permutations and possibilities to present website information for other XML consumers to aggregate and display. demo: If you are using an RSS capable web browser, watch for the appearance of the RSS feed icon whenever you view a list of items.

Example:

/taxonomy/term/11/feed/feed is the RSS feed path for the content at /taxonomy/term/11 The above two situations have been implemented as described and for illustration,