I was thrilled to spot Wichert Akkerman’s new product “Feedmixer” (aka “collective.portlet.feedmixer”) in the Collective this evening. As its name (sort of) implies, it’s a Plone 3-style portlet that aggregates RSS feeds. Basically, a modern successor to the venerable CMFSin. Feedmixer is less than 20 hours old, and hasn’t been formally released yet. Still, being a sucker for shiny new RSS toys, I immediately set about playing with it.
I wrestled with installing it in the non-buildout way for an hour. That inspired a little rant about how important it is to continue make add-on products easily installable for non-buildout users. But, I admit, it’s hardly fair to expect non-released software to be easily installable. 
Then I punted and found a buildout on my system that I could stick it into. Two minutes later I was rolling. (And feeling even more inspired to actually learn buildout better!)
Feedmixer is cool.
Using Plone 3′s amazing new portlet manager, just add a “Feed Mixer” portlet. Configure it like this:
Feedmixer will automatically sort the entries by published date, and produce a combined view.The portlet looks like this:
If you click on the “More” link at the bottom of the portlet, you see a full-page view of the entire contents of the aggregated feed list:
Feedmixer uses the Feedparser library, which is still the best feed parsing library going, but nonetheless ain’t perfect. It seems to trip over some poorly formatted feeds, especially feeds with multimedia tags.
Feedmixer takes advatange of plone.memoize for caching, and that can be easily swapped out for instance-wide caching via memcached. (Cool!)
There are only a few little bits I’d like to see fixed:
- A friendlier URL for the full-feed view.
- Show the source (title) and author name for each feed item in full-feed view (a trivial template change, I’m sure.
Bravo to Wichert and Jarn for tackling this! This would be a great feature to add to Plone 3.1 (hint hint).
A blog post is a pretty bad place to ask for changes – I only saw this by pure luck. We are very much open for comments and feature requests, so please send an email if you have any.
I added both the author name and feed title to the entry data in the full feed listing. The URL can not be improved: since you are looking at a view of a portlet assignment you have to traverse through various items in non-content space, which requires the ++ syntax. Instead I modified plone.app.portlets a bit to at least hide the bogus [...] entries from the breadcrumb trail so you at least have one navigation related improvement as well.