RSS/Atom To Thread Creation Extension -- Fundraising Campaign Started

orty

Update on 8/23: The programmer has agreed to decrease his rates on this, still providing bug fixes and all the features listed below, but not necessarily add new features (he will fix existing features). Basically, he'll still be doing EVERYTHING on the list below, just might not be able to add new functionality in the future.

I've got an email into fundable.org to see if we can lower the pledge goal down $300 to $1000. Price has been lowered down to $1000 in the pledge drive.

Update: Since there appears to be several people interested in this, I've gone ahead and gotten a quote from a programmer I've dealt with many times, and created a fundable.org campaign. Read below for details or contribute here. It ends in 25 days, and no money is collected unless goal is met. I've put in some money, and would love it if you could, too :-)
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Here's what I'm looking to do for my new forum I'm creating at bendforum.com . I'm looking to take an RSS feed and create/start threads based on entries of that feed. Basically, I want to create discussions for local news based on the local news site's RSS feed. Ideally, the article's headline would be the title/subject of the thread, the excerpt listed in the RSS feed would be quoted in a blockquote in the entry, with a link to the full story below the blockquote. I could setup a cron job that would pull the RSS feed entries every xx minutes.

I'm already pulling RSS data from another site (on the same server) using the FeedManager plugin, so possibly that could be expanded upon to include these features? For the right price, I might even pay for this functionality, though I think it would be useful for a lot of people looking to foster discussion on specialized topics.

Thanks!
-Jake

ninjascience

I'm looking into this as well. I got a preliminary version going where I looped over the RSS feed and did programatic http calls to similute the submission of the new discussion form. This way I didn't have to worry about creating all the right records in the right places for each new 'discussion'. I even stole the PHPSESSIONID from an active browser session to get through authentication. It worked pretty well. This might be ideal if you're using a cronjob that runs outside of vanilla to insert those discussions.

I'd share the code, but I did it in ColdFusion (as I'm a PHP noob).

orty

Well speaking of coldfusion, the site I'm looking to pull the content from is actually running cold fusion on their site, and I'm looking to form a parntership with them, and was thinking of just seeing if I could pull their RSS feed in case they don't agree to an official partnership. But if it came down to it, ideally their content management systemwould automatically create a thread on my vanilla setup, and then have a link at the bottom of the articles for "Discuss this at BendForums.com" with a link directly to the thread. But we'll just have to see how my partnership idea goes, first.

orty

Oh man, I'd never consider myself a developer at anything ;-) But CF, I'm certainly not (and I'm down in Bend and trying to partner up with a local TV station). If I were to consider myself a developer at anything, it'd be PHP, but I'm certainly no whiz. I'll have a conversation with their guys here soon but if anybody has any other ideas for a built-in extension or something to pull via RSS, I'd love to hear it! Thanks for the code!

orty

OK, it appears that the "official" partnership isn't going to happen. So does anybody know how to do this from the RSS feed? (and BTW: I will pay a small fee for this functionality).

orty

OK, last chance for somebody on this forum to do it, as I'm going to put up something at scriptlance.com if somebody here doesn't want a few bucks.

ADM

I also would love something like this.

orty

You want to pitch into a fund to have it built, ADM? :)

ADM

Depends on how much and if it's guaranteed to have the addon built :) Also only if the addon can be released to the public on the addons site after it's done as well.

orty

Oh I'm sure I can find somebody on ScriptLance that'll build it. I've dealt with a couple of programmers on there before and I'll email them to get a price quote and maybe we can have a dropcash campaign or something (shrug).

ADM

Sounds good to me.

orty

Update: I have a programmer who's actually done some work in Vanilla before and was wanting an excuse to do something like this, is excited about the project, and will also release it as an add on and maintain it (bug fixes, etc...). Before I get a quote from him, what kind of features would everybody like to see? A few that come to mind for me: 1) Has to be a full dropin extension -- no altering of Vanilla files, etc... 2) Has to support more than one feed. 3) Has to be able to map fields in the feed to post fields (and customize output) 4) Settings have to be able to be changed via the extensions interface 5) Has to support RSS 1.0, 2.0, (and possibly atom) Any other suggestions? Anybody?

WallPhone

Possibly have comments as whispers to admin at default, then if desired the admin can change them to be public.

ADM

1) Allow individual feeds to be posted to different categories. 2) HTML support 3) Support all ranges of feeds including atom. That's all I can think about at the moment.

orty

One more thing I thought off, too (just to get my thoughts on the page): Unique userID for each feed so I can give RSS publishers access to that userID if they want to have a post removed from the site (incase something accidently got into their RSS feed).

Toivo

RSS feed= category ID?

ninjascience

or rss chanels as "users"

orty

One more thing I'd like to add here, just to document it as well: When including the "source" link in the entry, include link tracking code of some sort so that clicks to that link are tracked. Why? In case somebody gets mad at you for using their feed you can tell them how much traffic your sending them :-)

ADM

"Why? In case somebody gets mad at you for using their feed you can tell them how much traffic your sending them :-)" That should be a mute point as I would expect this addon to have a cache implemented and also people who have RSS feeds available shouldn't bitch ;)

orty

I'm more concerned about copyright violation whining than sucking up their bandwidth. The only reason I bring it up is because one of the feeds I plan on using for this is from a company with far too much time and lawyers on their hand, but they refuse to add discussion abilities to their site. I know that I could argue that I could just be setting up these things manually, but ideally if there were a tracking mechanism, then all the better.

kswei

Great plugin, would like to join in as well. Thanks