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[[!template id=plugin name=aggregate author="[[Joey]]"]] [[!tag type/useful]]

This plugin allows content from other feeds to be aggregated into the wiki. Aggregate a feed as follows:

\[[!aggregate name="example blog" dir="example"
feedurl="http://example.com/index.rss"
url="http://example.com/" updateinterval="15"]]

That example aggregates posts from the specified RSS feed, updating no more frequently than once every 15 minutes, and puts a page per post under the example/ directory in the wiki.

You can then use ikiwiki's [[ikiwiki/blog]] support to create a blog of one or more aggregated feeds. For example:

\[[!inline pages="internal(example/*)"]]

setup

New users of aggregate should enable the aggregateinternal => 1 option in the .setup file. If you don't do so, you will need to enable the [[html]] plugin as well as aggregate itself, since feed entries will be stored as HTML.

The [[meta]] and [[tag]] plugins are also recommended. The [[htmltidy]] plugin is suggested, since feeds can easily contain html problems, some of which tidy can fix.

You will need to run ikiwiki periodically from a cron job, passing it the --aggregate parameter, to make it check for new posts. Here's an example crontab entry:

*/15 * * * * ikiwiki --setup my.wiki --aggregate --refresh

Alternatively, you can allow ikiwiki.cgi to trigger the aggregation. You should only need this if for some reason you cannot use cron, and instead want to use a service such as WebCron. To enable this, turn on aggregate_webtrigger in your setup file. The url to visit is http://whatever/ikiwiki.cgi?do=aggregate_webtrigger. Anyone can visit the url to trigger an aggregation run, but it will only check each feed if its updateinterval has passed.

usage

Here are descriptions of all the supported parameters to the aggregate directive:

  • name - A name for the feed. Each feed must have a unique name. Required.
  • url - The url to the web page for the feed that's being aggregated. Required.
  • dir - The directory in the wiki where pages should be saved. Optional, if not specified, the directory is based on the name of the feed.
  • feedurl - The url to the feed. Optional, if it's not specified ikiwiki will look for feeds on the url. RSS and atom feeds are supported.
  • updateinterval - How often to check for new posts, in minutes. Default is 15 minutes.
  • expireage - Expire old items from this feed if they are older than a specified number of days. Default is to never expire on age.
  • expirecount - Expire old items from this feed if there are more than the specified number total. Oldest items will be expired first. Default is to never expire on count.
  • tag - A tag to tag each post from the feed with. A good tag to use is the name of the feed. Can be repeated multiple times. The [[tag]] plugin must be enabled for this to work.
  • template - Template to use for creating the aggregated pages. Defaults to aggregatepost.

Note that even if you are using subversion or another revision control system, pages created by aggregation will not be checked into revision control.

internal pages and aggregateinternal

This plugin creates a page for each aggregated item.

If the aggregateinternal option is enabled in the setup file (which is recommended), aggregated pages are stored in the source directory with a "._aggregated" extension. These pages cannot be edited by web users, and do not generate first-class wiki pages. They can still be inlined into a blog, but you have to use internal in [[PageSpecs|IkiWiki/PageSpec]], like internal(blog/*).

For backward compatibility, the default is that these pages have the ".html" extension, and are first-class wiki pages -- each one generates a separate HTML page in the output, and they can even be edited.

That turns out to not be ideal for aggregated content, because publishing files for each of those pages is a waste of disk space and CPU, and you probably don't want to allow them to be edited. So, there is an alternative method that can be used (and is recommended), turned on by the aggregateinternal option in the setup file.

If you are already using aggregate and want to enable aggregateinternal, you should follow this process:

  1. Update all [[PageSpecs|ikiwiki/PageSpec]] that refer to the aggregated pages -- such as those in inlines. Put "internal()" around globs in those PageSpecs. For example, if the PageSpec was foo/*, it should be changed to internal(foo/*). This has to be done because internal pages are not matched by regular globs.
  2. Turn on aggregateinternal in the setup file.
  3. Use [[ikiwiki-transition]] to rename all existing aggregated .html files in the srcdir. The command to run is ikiwiki-transition aggregateinternal $setupfile,
  4. Refresh the wiki. (ikiwiki -setup your.setup -refresh)