The concept behind Agrifeeds has remained, in its core, the same. It harvests items from a collection of almost 200 feeds, in English, Spanish and French, and it offers the possibility of creating new feeds by filtering the aggregated content. The new version however has embellished and enriched the content being imported, thus enriching the items of the feeds it offers.

This has been accomplished with the use of both contributed modules, and modules that have been written purposely for Agrifeeds. For the sake of brevity, those modules that are either well known, or those that have been included mainly for visual purposed (e.g. the Calendar plugin for Views), will not be described in detail.

The inner workings of Agrifeeds can be seen in the diagram below.

The inner workings explained

The inner workings of Agrifeeds can be separated into two sections: the input and the output. During the input content is created, enriched and enhanced, while the output is all about conveying this content to the rest of the world, through the website itself and of course in the format of feeds.

The Input

As you can see from the diagram, the input depends entirely on the cron. The modules that do most of the work are:

• Feeds
• Feeds xPath Parser
• Feeds Image Grabber
• Feeds Fulltext
• Automatic Tagger
• Synonyms
• i18n Taxonomy

Feeds Fulltext and Automatic Tagger have been written purposely for Agrifeeds, so their workings and functionalities will be explained in further details in future posts. Only their role in the big picture will be explained here, along with that of the other modules.

Feeds downloads the items, using Feeds xPath Pparser to extract data from the xml of those feeds that use extra namespaces, such as ags and ev. Feeds Image Grabber extracts one image for each item, embellishing the website in its presentation. Afterwards, Feeds Fulltext retrieves the entire text from the original article, linked to the item, since very often only a few lines of text are present, if not none at all. Automatic Tagger, i18n Taxonomy and Synonyms work together to extract information about the country the item is related to, if it isn’t already present.

This is, in a few words, what happens behind the scenes.

The Output

The output is mainly created with the help of the well known and widely popular module Views. These are the modules that help along. The two Views RSS plugins have also been written for Agrifeeds, but they won’t be described in detail here, as their function, as much as it is useful, is also very easy to comprehend.

• Views RSS
• Views RSS ags (plugin)
• Views RSS ev (plugin)
• Calendar

Agrifeeds offers many different lists of feed items to the user who is browsing the website, such as the latest news, an events calendar, the vacancies archive, and many more. The user can also filter the items in whatever fashion he or she likes by using the Advanced Search and filtering by subject, type,  feed source, country, language and keywords.

All these lists, the filtered ones included, have feeds associated to them to which people can subscribe, or that can be imported by other websites. Views RSS takes care of creating the xml for the feeds, and the two plugins help along by giving Views RSS the possibility of inserting the ags and ev namespaces as well.

More details on the two modules written for Agrifeeds, Feeds Fulltext and Automatic Tagger, will soon follow this post.