Aggregation tools such as WP-o-Matic and FeedWordPress just got a promising little brother, and I’m currently playing a little with it in the Kaplak Labs. The name of this nice little plugin for WordPress is 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 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
I have only just played around with this plugin a little, but it looks fairly promising. Here are my initial comments and feedback for further improvement (which I also posted on Satheesh’s blog) :
- I can’t get YAAB to fetch multiple posts in separate posts, like FWP or WP-o-Matic does. It fetches only the latest post or saves the complete feed into a single post, no matter what values I provide it with. I’m sure this is easily fixed or explained.
- YAAB is very userfriendly and has an almost cartoony tutorial-like quality. I like the little character who helps guide setting up a feed for aggregation. Neat stuff, but it makes me wonder how flexible the plugin will be for more “unusual” type feeds.
- I also like the template very much. It’s very similar to what Guillermo did in WP-o-Matic, and I liked it there too :-)
- However, there are no variables for author, date posted, permalinks back to the source, or other data included in the feeds. Would be nice to be able to extract all the information in the feed, and place it where I want in the post. Also would be nice to have a regex like functionality to replace terms or code in a feed item, like the one used in WP-o-Matic. But especially the author and source/permalink information is crucial, IMHO.
- There are no functionality for tagging incoming posts, or fetching the tags included in the feed. Also a bit crucial in my book.
- YAAB has some very promising YouTube feeds functionality which makes it easy to set up an autoblog with automatically embedded YouTube videos. I haven’t played with it yet – but I will :-)
As previously stated, I have absolutely no idea how flexible this plugin is yet when it comes to feeds from Twitter Search and other such weird Atom sources. But as this is the first version, I’ll worry about that later :-) Keep up the good work, Satheesh!
Kaplak Stream is based on a Wordpress MU install (currently v2.6.1), where a network of niche sites are fed one or more feeds on a particular subject in the ’stream’ or from particular online services, using feed aggregation tools.
Building the setup for Kaplak Stream so far has revealed a path ridden with challenges (as one might expect). WordPress MU, which is a tremendously powerful package, is not as widely used as it’s popular little sister, and therefore is less well documented and supported, which goes too for the compatibility and effects of various plugins.
One initial thing which gave rise to some trouble, was to get WordPress MU to stop worrying and love embedded stuff such as YouTube videos and widgets. WordPress MU was designed for great environments hosting thousands of blogs, with thousands of different users, and has a higher security threshold than regular WP. And there’s no way to turn this filtering of tags off in the Admin interface.
Now, there’s a plugin called Unfiltered MU which will remove this filtering of posts and thus allow the embedding stuff. Unfortunately this plugin works only with posts actually published using the Admin interface editor. It doesn’t work with imported posts (from your old single-WordPress setup), and apparently it doesn’t work with aggregated posts either. So if you setup MU and want it to import an old blog or set it up to aggregate items from a feed, you still got trouble.
I found out one has to manually edit kses.php to enable the tags used by embedded stuff, at one’s own peril. For our purpose, however, we’re not concerned with security in the sense that we are the only users of our system, for the time being.
At your own peril (I underscore the fact that you may put your setup at risk enabling these HTML tags, but hey, life is dangerous) : Put in these tags and something along the lines of the below code into your “allowed” arrays in kses.php : object, embed, param, script.
'object' => array (
'id' => array (),
'classid' => array (),
'data' => array (),
'type' => array (),
'width' => array (),
'height' => array (),
'allowfullscreen' => array ()),
'param' => array (
'name' => array (),
'value' => array ()),
'embed' => array (
'id' => array (),
'style' => array (),
'src' => array (),
'type' => array (),
'height' => array (),
'width' => array (),
'quality' => array (),
'name' => array (),
'flashvars' => array (),
'allowscriptaccess' => array (),
'allowfullscreen' => array ()),
'script' => array (
'type' => array ()),
Pick the ones which you need for your videos or other embedded media to work. Allowing the ones listed will allow video embeds from most providers, incl. YouTube, Google Video, Viddler, Blip.tv and others as well as widgets from a lot of sources. It works on posts aggregated by FeedWordpress for instance, which was my problem with the “Unfiltered MU” plugin.
