I am teaching myself Drupal on lynda.com to set up my drupal cloud site at MIT. I already have another site (on wordpress.com) where I write news and want to use the aggregator module to feed that news onto the new Drupal site.
But on lynda.com the course says to turn on that feature by going to modules > and then clicking the box next to Aggregator. There is no “modules” item listed in the admin menu. I looked around and found the Feeds Importers under "Structure" but I can't seem to get it to work.
How do I do this?
ecarl@mit.edu
The Aggregator module and the Feeds module are somewhat similar but separate modules. Aggregator is a core Drupal module and isn't used much. The Feeds module is a contributed module and is generally the preferred version, as it is quite configurable.
The Modules page is generally located at /admin/modules, but on Drupal Cloud it is at /admin/people/moduleassign/list (under the People pulldown menu).
Drupal Cloud provides a limited set of modules. Aggregator isn't included, but Feeds is, and it is much more powerful.
Also, Drupal Cloud comes with a default Feed, so you probably should start with that before you head over to configure your own Feed importer.
1. Create a new page using the Feed content type: /node/add/feed
The only required field is the actual feed. Just for demo purposes, use a feed from the mit news office.
So paste this url where it says, Enter the feed url."
http://newsoffice.mit.edu/rss/school/engineering
Save the page and that will start importing the feeds. When they are imported, hit the View Items to see what you've imported.
There's a lot you can do to modify this basic setup (that's when you want to head over to Feed Importers, clone the default Feed importer, and modify it to add more options. It gets a bit tricky. I use Feeds a lot on the MIT Energy Club website. http://mitenergyclub.org/feeds/greentech-media-headlines
Good luck.
Ed Carlevale
4/29/14
myeaton@mit.edu
Thanks Ed! I managed to get a feed to show up and now I will need to play with it to make it look the way I want it to. Your explanation was helpful.
I noticed there's another module not included in Drupal Cloud, called Books, which is used to build a book structure on a web page. Have you tried setting up a content type to imitate Books?
Monique
5/6/14
rossetti@mit.edu
Hi Monique,
It would be pretty tough to emulate book functionality, but it's possible. You would need to use a combination of content types, taxonomies and views to do so.
The book module is actually included in Drupal core, but we have it disabled in Drupal Cloud for the time being. The good news is that we are going to be enabling the module within the next month or two. Keep an eye out for it in the update notes!
5/8/14