ikiwiki/doc/plugins/aggregate.mdwn

[[template id=plugin name=aggregate included=1 author="[[Joey]]"]]
[[tag type/useful]]

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

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

That example aggregates posts from the expecified 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 [[blog]] support to create a blog of one or more
aggregated feeds.

## setup

Make sure that you have the [[html]] plugin enabled, as the created pages are
in html format. 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

## 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 blog 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 blog if they are older than
  a specified number of days. Default is to never expire on age. (Not yet
  implemented.)
* `expirecount` - Expire old items from this blog if there are more than
  the specified number total. Oldest items will be expired first. Default
  is to never expire on count. (Not yet implemented.)
* `tag` - A tag to tag each post from the blog with. A good tag to use is
  the name of the blog. Can be repeated multiple times. The [[tag]] plugin
  must be enabled for this to work.

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