I've now created the "Refeed Lite" plugin, which is based on the Refeed plugin, but created primarily to be easier to install by reducing external dependencies. It has the following differences:
- It depends on far fewer Perl modules, and the ones it does need are bundled with it, so there is nothing else to install.
- It use MT Perl API directly for posting, which should be faster than the web-service API it was using.
- "Feed Autodiscovery" is no longer supported. (It was an undocumented feature of Refeed). You have to know the actual URL of your feed now.
- Time zone handling may have gotten worse. This is likely fixable. Patches welcome.
- There is now a hidden feature to specify which category from a particular feed are published into. When you are adding one-feed-per-line, you can now add "||Your Category Name" after the feed URL. Don't include any spaces before or after the bar. A patch to have separate fields for the URLs and categories would also be welcome.
- We no longer prefix the feed name in the title. A patch to make this an option would also be welcome.
Installation
- Download the zip file and upload the "Refeed Lite" directory into the "plugins" directory in your MT installation.
- To configure Refeed Lite, go to the Plugins management page in your MT installation, and click on Refeed Lite to set up your feeds.
![](/mt/mt-static/support/assets_c/userpics/userpic-1-100x100.png")
Mark, thanks for your plugin. It seems to work very well, and I will configure my main blog to use it.
Is there any way to trigger a (partial) rebuild after the plugin has created new posts? I think this is the one feature I find missing in Refeed Lite.
Hi, I use MT 3.2. I installed the plugin, it shows up as "enabled" on my main MT plugins page, but there's no link to click on. The name of the plugin is not an active link.
If I go to the "plugins" folder on the settings page of an individual blog, on the entry for Reefeed Lite there's a link for "show settings." When I click it a window comes up with two empty entry fields and two buttons, "save changes" and "cancel."
Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks.
Christian,
The plugin doesn't create new posts on its own. They are only picked up during a rebuild. You can use a tool like mt-rebuild to trigger periodic rebuilds.
Konrad,
I have never tried this plugin with MT 3.2 and am uncertain about the compatibility. I'm not sure why it's not working for you.
Mark
Mark, thanks for your reply. Yes, I'll take a look at mt-rebuild. So far, the plugin works fine on my installation. The only issue I discovered is that trackbacks and comments are disabled for the entries created (even though my defaults say otherwise).
Hi Mark,
I have the following version of MT
"Movable Type Enterprise version 4.21-en with: Community Pack 1.6, Enterprise Pack 1.1, Professional Pack 1.2"
Q1: Will this plugin work with my version of MT?
Q2: How do I use this plugin? I configured the rss feeds in the MT Plugin Settings - What Next ? Do I need mt-rebuild ?
Thanks,
Ashish
Ashish,
It sounds like you are using the same version as me. I expect it will work.
You don't need mt-rebuild if you are fine with only having the site updated when you choose to manually rebuild it.
Hi mark,
I use Movable Type Pro version 4.23-en with: Community Pack 1.61, Professional Pack 1.21 but it does not work!
why? could you please help me? i really need this plugin.
thanks
how to call it inside a template ..
help the rookie
The "hidden feature to specify which category [items] from a particular feed are published into" appears to work properly only if you have ONE feed. I have the following text in my Feed URIs window:
http://friendfeed.com/bloy?service=internal&format=atom||FriendFeed
http://friendfeed.com/bloy?service=facebook&format=atom||Facebook
Only items from the second listed feed are categorized properly; items from the first listed feed are not placed in any category. So the "Facebook" posts are categorized, but the "FriendFeed" posts aren't.
I tried switching the order, so it reads:
http://friendfeed.com/bloy?service=facebook&format=atom||Facebook
http://friendfeed.com/bloy?service=internal&format=atom||FriendFeed
Same result, in reverse: this time the "FriendFeed" posts are categorized, while the "Facebook" posts aren't. So the common denominator is, whichever feed is listed on the BOTTOM, is NOT categorized. Strange, eh?
Also, a patch for the time-zone problem would be most welcome. :)
Brendan,
This is likely due to a bug in XML::FeedPP. There is a slightly newer version here:
http://search.cpan.org/~kawasaki/XML-FeedPP-0.38/
You can read the "Changes" file to see what changed since "0.35", the version I shipped. You could try a manual upgrade of that, or see about getting that module updated to work better.
Is there a way to create entries that belong to a specific category? I want to separate the entries produced by RefeedLite from the rest.
And also, I cannot figure out what causes Refeed to work from time to time. I mean, sometimes when I rebuild the blog - nothing happens. Then later, suddenly, the entries are created. Does Refeed works only when it wants :) ?
I suspect it has something to do with Feeds.App, which runs via cron on every our.
One more question.
I want to display the url of the feed next to the link (like in google search results). I'm trying to trim the url to make it look more human. Example:
http://yada.com/blah/blah to become yada.com
Is there a way to do this with regular expressions? I tried with the Regex plugin, but I'm not a technical guy and it's too complicated..
I was wondering if the plugin author would be so kind as to provide an example of how to get this into a template. What is the code used to display the feed(s) on a page? There doesn't seem to be any code examples on this or the original ReFeed plugin. Any help is greatly appreciated.
No template updates are needed. You set it up using the admin interface, as seen in the screenshot of the Refeed plugin:
http://btrott.typepad.com/typepad/refeed.html
The functionality is to repost content from other feeds. Thus, the way it shows up in templates is as a regular blog post would.
I tried to get Refeed Lite to work, but I ran into one problem. Setup of the plugin seems okay and I added three feeds in the plugin settings. However, when I try to rebuild my blog (which has no entry in it), nothing happens and no errors are reported both in Activity Log as well as Apache error log.
How can I debug this? What could go wrong here? I am running MT Open Source v4.1.
Thanks!
I'm glad some other people are enjoying my free, open source plugin, but I don't have time to provide ongoing, free support for it. I suggest asking for support on a Movable Type forum or in a place were Perl people hang out, like http://www.perlmonks.org/
You are also welcome to continue post here, but I can't personally promise any particular response time.
The license of my plugin allows anyone else to take it and improve the code and documentation, and provide free support it from themselves. You are welcome and encouraged to do anything of those things yourself, or recruit or hire someone to do so on your behalf.
Mark,
thank you for making the plugin available to the community! I understand that support is something you do in your free time, much appreciated if you look into the comments here and maybe give some hints.
I posted on the MT forums, here is a link to my question and how I solved my problem:
http://forums.movabletype.org/2009/06/refeed-lite-not-working.html
Regards,
Jonas
A fork of this plugin has appeared on GitHub. Currently the only change is to upgrade some bundled external dependencies.
I endorse this fork, although I have not personally tried it.
The address:
http://github.com/jayallen/mt-plugin-refeed-lite/commits/master