We’re in the process of setting up our Planet-like website Kaplak Stream. I’ve done some extensive reading and testing of the two most prominent aggregation plugins for WordPress and WordPress MU : Guillermo Rauch’s WP-o-Matic plugin and FeedWordPress by Charles Johnson (aka RadGeek) of Feminist Blogs. This article will examine the pros and cons of both these plugins, in their present state.
Both aggregation tools are open source and distributed under a GPL license, which means that anyone may adjust the workings of these plugins and re-publish their version. They are each however developed and pioneered by one developer only, and rely heavily on the committment of their developers.
WP-o-Matic
WP-o-Matic is developed by 16-years old Argentinian wunderkid Guillermo Rauch, who has done a remarkable job. Schedules are very easy to organize. They are called campaigns, and each campaign can fetch as many feeds as you like. Campaigns are executed by cron, which runs on the server and executes the fetching script at specified intervals. If you can’t get cron from your web host, the WP-o-Matic script can be executed by Webcron. Webcron has been a free online service until recently. Now, the service must be paid for, however (at a very low price, one may add).
Pros
- Wonderfully flexible customization options of each campaign, directly accessible from a brilliantly designed WP admin interface: specified expressions or URL’s can be transformed, and additional custom text or code added to each post in the campaign (such as ads). Great stuff.
- Uses cronjobs for executing the script, which should provide the greatest reliability, if you can get it.
Cons
- Doesn’t use timestamp of fed posts, if they are older than the time window set for the campaign. I.e. if a post is months old and you’ve set your campaign to fetch every hour, posts will be timestamped with the time of feeding it, rather than the original timestamp. This sometimes means older posts are published in the wrong or opposite order of the feed, which messes up the chronology of a blog. This, combined with the bugs which makes it difficult to re-run fetches without completely removing the campaign, makes correcting the timestamps a very tedious affair. If timestamps are important to you, this is a no-no.
- Uses Unix/Linux cronjobs for fetching feeds, which is good if you can get it – and know how to set it up, but not all can or do.
- Seems unreliable when used without Unix cron. Campaigns are not processed at all, or processed at the wrong time intervals.
- Bugridden – small bugs such as campaigns not resetting properly, when reset. Complete campaigns and posts have to be deleted if one wants to re-fetch a feed to test a new configuration.
- Uncertainty if the plugin is supported and developed further by it’s developer. Last release is from October 2007. Guillermo (who has now turned 17) recently announced his continued support for WP-o-Matic and the release of a new version in the near future, along with a new website specifically for this plugin.
FeedWordPress
I initially had problems with feeds from Google Reader (and Twitter, for that matter) – titles showed, but content disappeared. At first I thought this was a general problem with Atom feeds, but it turned out it’s because WordPress (even the latest versions) comes bundled with an outdated Magpie RSS parser. At first glance, the problem wasn’t fixed by exchanging the rss.php and rss-functions.php with the updated ones bundled with FeedWordPress, but reinstalling these files and re-entering the feeds did in fact solve the compatibility problems with Atom feeds. At first, coming from WP-o-Matic’s advanced campaigns setup, I wasn’t impressed with the interface provided by FeedWordPress initially, and the hazzle I had with Atom feeds gave me the impression that this plugin was no match for WP-o-Matic. But as I worked with it, FeedWordPress turned out to be an extremely competent agent for the job.
Pros
- Extensively well documented
- Seems to be the more stable and reliable candidate of the two. Works great with WordPress’ built-in cron alone.
- Built-in API for WP themes and plugins to use
- Maintained, supported and seems to be actively developed by the developer (last build 8 May 2008)
- Works great with timestamps – fetches all timestamps from feeds 100% correctly.
Cons
- Can’t add custom text or code to the posts of each particular feed, except if one utilizes the API. If one utilizes the API from a WP theme, custom changes will apply to all syndicated posts, when they are displayed on the site. This is a solution in cosmetics only, in that the custom layout and text is applied only in the visuals – and not reflected in the actual contents of a post. One has to access the API from within a plugin, which hooks itself up with an action or filter in WordPress, to actually ‘inscribe’ posts with custom text or code, which stays with the post, no matter how it is skinned or re-published by other sites. This requires a bit of PHP coding/hacking skills.
- Can’t import tags. Tags can be imported by FeedWordPress as new categories, however, which somewhat alleviates the problem, but forces you to go with the category system over tagging or both.
Conclusions
Both these plugins reviewed here possess tremendous power, at the point of your fingertips. None of them are perfect, however, and both still need work, but I’m impressed with both. What they can do, and the power and speed of which these plugins work, is impressive. I’d love to have FeedWordPress feature the powerful customization scheme of WP-o-Matic, and I’d really like to have WP-o-Matic use the WordPress cron so reliably and steadily as FeedWordPress does. And I’d really really like to have WP-o-Matic just get timestamps right, with the ease of FeedWordPress.
However much I adore the flexible and powerful customization interface (the ‘campaign’ setup) of WP-o-Matic, we have to go with the more stable candidate of the two, which is FeedWordPress, IMHO. Especially since we can’t get cron right now, and are reluctant to pay for it right now, if we can get something which works great at this level, without paying for it.
We’re going with FeedWordPress, for these reasons mainly :
- It works well, even without setting up cronjobs (using WordPress’ built-in cron).
- It deals well with timestamps. There’s no messing around with the chronology of posts.
- It is the best documented plugin of the two, and it has an API which makes it easy for us to tweek it for our uses.
- And we have greater trust in it’s developer Rad Geek/Charles Johnson to continue support and development for this plugin.
When using free software plugins, I find picking the ones you want to use comes down to what killer feature you really want and which developer you trust the most to deliver it and continue development and support.
Timeline
← Get WordPress MU To Stop Worrying And Love Embedded Stuff
→ An Open Letter to LinkedIn
19 comments ↓
Hopefully, with WP-o-Matic 1.0 with plugins support and a smart pseudocron, you’ll reverse you decision :)
Guillermo, thanks for the comment! Sounds like great stuff. I’ll stay tuned, and I’m really really looking forward to it, as I really liked your plugin and I have great respect for your talents :-) As I wrote in the above, I especially liked the wonderful customization tools. The present release just turned out to be a tad too unreliable for us.
I’m trying to find a plugin that would parse my Google Reader Shared Items RSS feed 1x/day and auto-post the newest links. Would either of these fit the bill?
@murph FeedWordPress does the job. I have used it successfully with my own Google Reader Atom feeds, and they work well. The WP-cron built in will work for you the way you describe.
WP-o-Matic parses Reader’s Atom feeds well too, but I found it too unreliable. There may be other reasons you may want to go with it, especially if you can get Unix/Linux cron, and don’t need to fetch a lot of old items (which will make you unable to use the timestamps of feed items).
EDIT: After reading your comment again, I’m not sure if you want your blog to actually parse and post the items or just leave a list in your sidebar of your latest shared headlines. If it’s the last, you’ll be able to find plenty of plugins which may do a better job than the two plugins examined here, which are focused mainly on actual posting of fed items.
thanks Morten. i am looking to actually get them posted on the blog (and therefore my site’s RSS feed). i am using a Google embed to show them on the sidebar of my blog now, but those who only read my feed never see those links unless they click through.
Hi, I’m currently trying to aggregate my contents on various social network (facebook, plurk) into Wordpress. Some folks called this “lifestreaming”
Especially plurk – your posts there will become obscure in as little as 24 hours ! Things moves very fast there.
That would be easy – however, I’d like to aggregate the comments as well :)
Especially plurk – the comments are what made it worth it.
I’ve looked high and low, however I still haven’t managed to find anything that will do this (aggregate the posts and its comments)
Any ideas ??
Can’t be of much help I’m afraid. It’s a big problem that many of these services are proprietary and not concerned with providing users with options of getting their “content” out.
Plurk offers feeds from your plurk stream (and others’ plurk streams?), so as you say, you can easily fetch those with FeedWordPress or something similar. It doesn’t look like Plurk offer feeds from comments to individual plurks, though, but I could be wrong.
Facebook is a whole other department, as they don’t offer feeds or exports at all – let me know if you discover methods to retrieve your stuff from there.
Alright, thanks. I guess it’s FriendsFeed then : http://blog.slaven.net.au/wordpress-plugins/friendfeed-comments-wordpress-plugin/
Looks like it’s harvesting other’s contents via their APIs.
Now if only FF is able to show the comments as well – then we’re set.
Thanks for your reply.
You’re welcome – wish I could be of more help. Took a look at your blog – is that Indonesian?
I’m just curious. I wonder how well we’ll do with feeds of mixed languages in Kaplak Stream. I wonder how well our Calais autotagger plugin would do with a blog of mixed languages such as yours.
[...] Find our earlier review of FeedWordPress and WP-o-Matic here. [...]
Holy Wow ! Kaplak Stream looks AWESOME.
If you’d like to test, I might be able to help. A friend of mine also own an extensive network of blogs, multi language, at AsiaBlogging.com
He’d definitely be interested on such things that will enable him to fully maximize his existing content.
When you’re ready to test Kaplak Stream,let me know.
Thanks.
Great :-) I’d appreciate it greatly. We’re almost ready, but every time I say that another detail appears to be dealt with, but will be _soon_!
I’ll add you to my Kaplak GMail-group and be sure to get in touch when we ask for more feed submissions :-)
Dear friend,
I too have made a similar but better plugin called YAAB-Autoblogger. Yaab has all features of wp-o-matic and in addition it can create automatic blog carnivals in your site. Also it supports SMS blogging and Youtube cloning. Ebay product syndication and automated content rewriting are upcoming features. After all I myself is a doctor ( not a programmer ). I started making this plugin for my personal use, but when I doveloped it, it was highly impressing and I have planned to release it for public. Kindly download it from http://www.psypo.com/yaab , try it and if possible please review it in your valuable blog
Thank You
Satheesh
Satheesh, thank you for these great news! I look forward to taking a closer look at Yet Another Autoblogger! :-)
Sometimes I wish that the talents of you and all your great comrade autoblogging pioneers (Guillermo and RadGeek and others) would combine forces to work on one great open source GPL’ed plugin, root out all the bugs and combine the truly great features of each plugin with the other.
I don’t know why that’s not the case – all would benefit, I think, from a joint effort. But I certainly welcome any effort or new project which makes it less painful to aggregate web content for normal, no-tech-savvy web publishers.
[...] Yet Another Autoblogger or YAAB in short. It is developed by Satheesh Kumar, who was kind enough to post a note on the blog about it just recently : I too have made a similar but better plugin called YAAB-Autoblogger. Yaab has all [...]
i also prefer feedwordpress over wp-o-matic due to cron problems and uncotability with newsest wordpress versions in the soft.
Hi there, what do you mean by reinstalling these files?
>
At first glance, the problem wasn’t fixed by exchanging the rss.php and rss-functions.php with the updated ones bundled with FeedWordPress, but reinstalling these files
sorry, please ignore my previous comment, found the answer in the readme file!
there is no configuration link in the admin panel for either of these plugins. anybody else have this problem? or does it get edited in the code? Thanks
Leave a Comment