Aggregate and import with Feeds!

Feeds is a powerful new import and aggregation framework for Drupal. You would want to use Feeds if your problem is "I need to aggregate news RSS" or "I need to import these 1000 users from a CSV sheet on my hard disk" or "can I import taxonomy terms from that odd XML file supplied by my city administration?".

All of these problems can be addressed with Feeds because they are essentially the same: You've got a source of data somewhere, you'd like to get it into Drupal, parse it and then do something with it.

The purpose of Feeds is to consolidate much of the infrastructure we use today to import or aggregate data into Drupal. Feeds has been used so far for tasks as diverse as

• Aggregate news (with and without PubSubHubbub)
• Post SMS to Drupal
• Synchronize users between Drupal sites
• Import logs from Amazon S3

In this session I will give you real world examples where Feeds is in use right now and a drive through how you configure it for your needs. Finally I will give an introduction to the architecture of Feeds and how you can write your own custom import plugin for Feeds in no time.

This session is for you if

• you are a site builder with the need to import or aggregate content to Drupal
• you maintain one of the many import or aggregator modules and you would like to get a better idea of what Feeds can do for your module
• you have this odd crazy import project and you actually don't think Feeds will work for you

Alex Barth is the maintainer of Feeds and the development lead on Managing News. Before he decided it was time for a new import and aggregation module in Drupal, he was co maintainer and co mentor of the FeedAPI project, shameful maintainer of the Leech project and enthusiastic maintainer of the FeedAPI Mapper project. He works for Development Seed and lives in Washington DC.