Hi OSTraining,
I require a tutorial for a Joomla extension.
I'm interested in the Feedgator Extension which can be found here ->Feedgator
This extension creates articles from RSS feeds, so you can go to googlenews or another and do a search for a particular subject, then get the feed link from the RSS icon at the bottom of the googlenews page, - then you enter the feed address into the feedgator component and set up cronjobs and you have a constant stream of news coming into your site for that subject.
I really need to understand how to configure this extension properly, but the settings are too complicated for a newbie such as myself to figure out.
I'm having problems with different styling displaying for different feeds and images not displaying properly.
There is only limited documentation for this extension, support is non-existant and it's the only extension of it's kind that I know of.
Best I can find for documentation is here ->Documentation
I don't know who else to ask for help with this, so I thought I'd ask here.
Many Thanks,
- Scott

Hi ScottM73,

Thank you for bringing this up.

When enough people are interested (or agree) to wanting a specific tutorial, that is when we know it's time to create one.

Hi Tessa,
What if I was to offer a $100 tutorial bounty to anyone who creates this tutorial?
Maybe this would tempt people more.
Even - tutorial aside, I'd pay a $100 bounty for anyone who can get my site issues relating to this extension figured out.
I really don't care how it happens, but I really need this functionality working properly.
This extension has plug-ins for K2 and Kunena.
- Scott

Hi Scott

No problem at all here. I've used FeedGator a lot of two or three sites and I'll be happy to do a tutorial for you. It'll be up before the end of today.

Hi Scott

Have a look at this and see if you'd anything explained in more detail: www.ostraining.com/blog/joomla/feedgator/

Hi Steve,
Thanks for creating this tutorial so quickly.
I'm really glad that someone here has some experience with this extension.
The $100 bounty is yours.

Unfortunately though it doesn't exactly answer all my questions, or fix all my issues so I'll need to pick your brain for some more info.
Maybe you could ammend the tutorial to include info for the types of questions and issues I'm having.

Before I even get to Feedgator functionality itself, I'd like to ask about the copyright implications of using the Full Text of an article as opposed the just using the Intro Text. I do intend to provide a link back to the original news site on all the articles I import, however, I'm not sure about the rules of what I am allowed and not allowed to do.

Am I allowed to display the Full Text of an article as long as I provide a link back to the original article? or does this break copyright laws?
- Or am I legally required to only display the Intro Text from the feed.
What is the correct way to do this without breaking any copyright laws?

These first questions are important, because they have implications on how I would build the site. You see if I only import Intro Text, then clicking the read-more link for that category blog item, which would normally take you to the full article, would actually just take you to a single duplicate of that Intro Text on its own page (which is pointless), and I would somehow have to change the link for the read more on the page the article was featured to go directly to the original news site article, if you get me.
- In which case I might consider having the entire original news article URL load in a very large sized pop-up, if this is within the 'rules', and if I can figure out how to do it - so that the reader doesn't really leave the site at all.

If I am legally allowed to display the full text (as long as I display the link to the original article, which I will) then the normal category blog layout is ok without having to change the read-more links.

So the basic difference is all these extra individual article pages that would be created if I can display the Full Text of an article.

With the tutorial you created I've mostly gotten about as far as the tutorial describes, but I did not know how to delete the import history and start again which is a handy thing to know.

I built this site Here a few weeks ago and was playing around with Feedgator.
I've actually added not 1 but 2 feed urls into the Manage Feed URL's section of Feedgator.
These are - Google News search feed and Bing News search feed.
I have K2 installed, (I don't know how to use it yet - I'd like to have tutorials to learn it - I think it's added functionality could be useful on this site) but both feeds and also Feedgator global configuration is set to 'Native Joomla Content Plug-in' Content Type.
I am getting different types of styling coming through the different feeds, sometimes it is displayed in divs with a image and sometimes there is different styling.
Sometimes images dont display at all or the wrong images display in the wrong articles.
Basically it's all weird, I'm not sure if the different styling is coming from either the different feeds, the RT template, K2 or what. I suppose I need to figure out how to remove any stying that might be coming in and set some kind of standard styling for everything, including moving the image from the left side to the right.
I have a custom.css file added to this site to which I can add my css changes, I've already made 1 change to the size and font of some of the headings but there is still other styling coming in as well it's all weird for me because I'm still fairly new to web design - I just gotta figure out how to make it all work and look the way it should.
Also how to set up cronjob so that this works automatically without having to manually mangage the imports.
Many thanks for writing this tutorial, hope you are able to add a little more info to the tutorial and help me with my other questions and issues.
I'll have a bit more of a play around with it over the next day or so and try to figure out a little more whats going wrong.
I'm not sure how to PM on this site yet, if you can help me with my site issues I will send my admin details, also I'll need your paypal to pay the $100 bounty I promised.
Also, I'm not sure if the K2 and other plug-ins are actually included in the last Feedgateor version, meaning you might not need to install these plug-ins seperately because they are already there - I need to check this to make sure your tutorial is correct.
Sorry for the long reply, but it mostly sums up all my questions, thoughts and issues.
Thanks again,
- Scott

Hi Scott

This depends 100% on the license that the site you are copying from puts on it's own content. There's no single copyright law that covers content. It's all case-by-case and even if it wasn't, so much content is published in so many legal jurisdictions that it would be impossible to keep up with anyway.

You can check every site to see what their rules are but here's one that should cover the vast majority of situations:

Re-use content, even the full text, but make it very obvious what the source of the content is by providing a clearly visible attribution and link back to the original article.

www.ostraining.com/blog/joomla/k2/
www.ostraining.com/blog/joomla/k2-part2/

That means your feeds will skip K2 and simply go into Joomla articles.

Try setting Text Handling > Get Source Full TextWhat do you have set under the "Images and Extensions" tab? Is Save Images set to Yes?

Go to Components > FeedGator > Configuring automatic imports using cron and follow the instructions there. Do they help?

Don't worry about that :) It's all part of being a member on the site.

Scroll to the very bottom of the tutorial. The plugins need to be installed separately.

Hi Steve,
Thanks for the information.
I started looking at the first part of the K2 tutorial.Yes it was, but the relative URI was set to no instead of yes which is how you set it up in your tutorial.

>>Also how to set up cronjob so that this works automatically without having to manually mangage the imports.<I haven't gotten that far yet but I'll do so when I get there.

>>Also, I'm not sure if the K2 and other plug-ins are actually included in the last Feedgateor version, meaning you might not need to install these plug-ins seperately because they are already there - I need to check this to make sure your tutorial is correct.<Yes you were right. I'm not sure why I thought I didn't need to install them - maybe I forgot that I'd actually done it last time I installed feedgator.

I've spent quite a lot of time getting nowhere today and I'm just about at the point where frustration is about to really set in.
I must have installed Joomla at least 6 times on the localhost and one 3hr upload for a live site, (after deleting my other test site) mostly all a waste of time. I seemed to encounter more problems than I solved, and I'm at the point where I'd happily pay someone to do it for me and then look at how they did it, to figure out how it's supposed to be done. I'm disappointed to say I'm really not getting anywhere and its the same way I've felt about this cursed extension since the day I first installed it over a month ago - and I've had enough.

Right now, I cant even get past installing Joomla,K2,Feedgator and the K2 plugin, meaning I'm in a worse situation than I started.
I've tried this a number of different ways - local host and live site - RT Rocketlauncher template and standard joomla 2.5.3 (no template)installs.
Tried installing K2 before and after Feedgator.
I can't install the Feedgator K2 plugin -
I get an error saying 'Unable to detect manifest file' and 'error installing COM_INSTALLER_TYPE_TYPE_FGPLUGIN' every time.

I did have the K2 plugin working previously.
Before I deleted my site I seperated my 2 feeds and sent them to different categories so I could compare styling and there was different styling coming in from different feeds.
Wrong Images displaying and seperate styling for different feeds were still a big issue.

I really think I'm going to have to pay someone properly to fix this site for me because I just cant see myself getting all the little tiny issues im encountering with this fixed myself, I'm just not good enough to do it myself.

I had problems after importing, where I wanted to change settings delete my import history/ articles and import again, but it just spat out errors and would not import again which left me stuck.

Your tutorial was good for basic install and functionality on a standard Joomla install but to try and strip out styling from the feeds and then add styling to multiple feeds to match the template and add K2 fuctionality as well - well I need someone to show me how because I'm not good enough to figure it all out on my own, no-chance - especially when I can't re-import my articles.

This whole thing is messed up.
I hate going backwards.

I'm truly thankful for the time you put into creating this tutorial at my request, but I'm sorry to say it really hasn't helped me at all.

I'm going to play my Xbox and kill something now.

- Scott

Hi Scott

I'm sorry you feel that way.

We can recommend some paid Joomla developers if you need hands-on help with your site: ostraining.com/joomla-developers

There are also quite a few alternatives to FeedGator which are commercial and will likely come with better documentation and support directly from the original developers:
extensions.joomla.org/extensions/social-...n/automatic-articles

Alternatively, if you do have a live site with this on, send me a login to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and I'll get it set up for you.

Hi Steve,
I tried to amend my previous post but I think you got to it first, so I'll move what I said to here.

I think my mistake was trying to install the plugins in the normal joomla extensions install area.
I went to the plug-ins tab in Components>Feedgator and there is a seperate place to install the feedgator plugins there.
No errors this time, I just had to make sure the plugins were published.
Ok thats fixed...
Sometimes I find I just have to push through frustration and try a little bit harder.
I can't figure out how to delete the import history following the tutorial info though.
I'm getting an error on that page 'Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in C:\xampp\htdocs\administrator\components\com_feedgator\views\feedgator\view.html.php on line 504'
and although no feeds displayed initially I changed the states (eg published/trashed.) and they showed up.
I can check the boxes on each item, but I dont know how to delete them, theres no delete button.

So now I'm back to where I started.

I don't mean to sound angry if I did, I just get frustrated when things dont go the way I want. Its all part of the game I guess, but I do get frustrated with things at times. Sorry, I just spent a lot of time today achieving little - I guess everyone has days like this. I just lack patience.

- Scott

Hi Scott

No problem at all. I hope we can get you over this bump.

Yes, calling the extra Feedgator plugins is confusing. It conflicts with the normal Joomla terminology.

Warnings are not normally serious problems and won't stop things from happening on your site. Now if you see an Error, particularly a Fatal Error, that's worse.

Try deleting those imported articles from Content > Article Manager.

Hi Steve,
I have tried deleting the articles completely and this works ok.
The problem is I cant seem to re-import the same articles when I try again.
Which isn't so bad if you know what you're doing, and you get it all working right the first time, but for hopeless me I ran out of articles coming in each time I tried to change something and test it. Which is part of the reason I did so many installs today.

I'll just start again tomorrow.

- Scott

Thanks Scott

Here's what I'd recommend when you try again: install it online.

Local installations are really more trouble than they're worth: www.alledia.com/blog/general-cms-issues/...ot-worth-the-effort/

That way, if you run into problems again, you can email me the login details and I can take a look for you.

Hi Steve,
Thanks for the reply and info.
Although I first learnt Joomla last year with Xampp, (and I'm still just learning), I do build my sites online now.
My hosting has unlimited databases so I'm good there.
I've got Akeeba Admin Pro, but still havent figured out how to use it properly -ie. restore from backup; so I'm still uploading the normal slow FTP way, - which takes about 3hrs for a RocketTheme Rocketlauncher demo template or about an hour just for a standalone Joomla site.
It's mostly for the reason that if I do have issues while I'm learning that others can see the problem for themselves in order to help me that I prefer them live.
I just used the local install on my laptop today because it only takes a couple of minutes to install a site and quickly test something; and also because its just at the end of summer here in Australia where I am and still hot and I only have aircon in my bedroom so I tend to use the laptop in there where its cooler in the daytime, and my PC (which is a much better setup) at night.

I've just started uploading another site for this now, so I'll have it back together sometime later today.

I'm fairly sure that I wont have any issues with things relating to the tutorial, but more advanced things that are going to come after that.
I know that different styling comes in on the different feeds and the only way I know of that might style the different feeds the same is K2 which is templates in templates? So I really need to look at this and get an better understanding of K2 and the next process of styling this stuff (images, text and K2) to look and function the way it should, if you get me.
- Because I have no idea how it works.

Sorry if I seemed harsh earlier about the feedgator tutorial - It's actually a really helpful and easy to understand tutorial. I'm just worried about the stuff that comes next - styling multiple feed data to all look the same.
Many thanks,
- Scott

Hi Scott,

Glad you got most of that sorted out. I am a lot like you, I like to get it all correct from the beginning. I'm always worried about what complications I'm going to run into because I'm kind of a perfectionist.

But it seems if I just deal with them one at a time. They eventually get solved. Keep asking questions. We all learn from it.

Let us know when the next roadblock comes up. There are some really bright people on the forum. We all like to help.

Cheers,
Ed

Hi Ed,
Thanks for the kind words.
Yeah I'm glad I figured it out too, sometimes its the simplest things that trip me up. I'm a little bit of a perfectionist too, I like to do everything right and know exactly what needs to be done. But you can't know everything when your learning, and this sometimes gives way to frustration when I get stuck on something and feel like I'm not moving forward.
I can keep my cool for only so long, then I lose it. lol
I am going to try and keep at this until I get it figured out.
It's good to know I'm around people with similar interests / level of knowledge and that help is on hand when I need it.
I look forward to making more friends here.
- Scott

Scott,

I understand your frustration. When you are learning something it only gets easier by the time. With patience you will master Joomla. Trial and error really helps with learning too.

Remember - Sometimes a fresh mind can help brings new ideas. :-)

Let us know if you have any questions. ;-)

Hi Tessa,
Yes your right. Joomla has started to get easier for me as I get a little bit better, but theres so many other aspects to learn as well, extensions, fireworks, coding etc.
I put my site back together today.

I got mixed results with Feedgator as I expected, but it looks different today than it did yesterday. Some settings must be different somewhere.

I installed only the Feedgator extension and when I clicked plugins found that the K2 plugin was already there without installing it as I first said, but it was unpublished, so I had to publish it.

I actually got on to the guy that looks after this extension, I emailed asking about one of the plug-ins - fg_internalplg_com_content and he replied saying it's the plugin that FG uses to import content in com_content. It's released within the main package and separately just in case he needs to release an update to the plugin only.

I gave him the link to the tutorial here.

He might have a look and hopefully offer some more info.
It's good he replied.

- Scott

That is great you emailed the creator of the extension. Hopefully you get a response soon. Keep us updated. :-)

Ok heres a couple of things I've figured out, tips to improve the tutorial.
*Make a note not to try and install the plugins in the normal area and go to Components>Feedgator>Plugins to install them.
*On the tutorial, it lists the plugins for Feedgator, one of which is The K2 plugin and its version 1.7.2. I've found there is a K2 plugin already built in, its version 1.7.3 - Its already there in the plugins section (I install K2 first) It there but its not published.
*Maybe make a note that if your adding multiple feeds its good to set up your global settings first.
*Links - I found that an extra setting users may want to use is setting Target Trackback Frame to _blank if they want links to open in new windows.
I'm still playing around with it...
- Scott

Thanks Scott! If you have any more suggestions, please let us know.

Kind regards,
Nick

Hi Nick and everyone,
I think I might have come across a solution for Feedgator.
There's a module I found on the JED called:
"Latest News +" - Latest News Module with Thumbnail and Date.
It's like an improved version of the Joomla Native 'Latest News' module.
extensions.joomla.org/extensions/news-di...lay/latest-news/5434
(Theres quite a few extensions in this category that might work just as well.)
I guess it's more of a work around than a solution, but this work around might actually be better than trying to get Feedgator set up properly, because I think it might even improve functionality.
Feedgator has an option to be able to display an image in both the intro text and main article, but setting this option forces the image in the main article to also be a thumbnail - if I understood the set-up info correctly. (And displaying images is what was what I was having so much trouble with anyway.)
This Latest News + module automatically creates a thumbnail (you can specify size) which it saves in the same folder as the original.
So if I set up Feedgator to import full source text and large sized images, and then use this module to create the content for the main (list of) articles page, I will end up with intro sized thumbnails and intro text on the main articles page, and full text and large image on the individual article page.
But I cant use K2 or Zoo for my articles because this module only finds native Joomla articles, not Zoo or K2 items.
I could use the plug-in Extravote (better than Joomla) as well as getting the addmore buttons script and putting in a custom html module, assign it to fake module position and use {loadposition example} to get social buttons in articles, but I dont know of many tidy looking comment systems. There's SliComments, I tried, it's ok, uses gravitar or your website avatar but if you dont have either it displays a stupid gravitar logo instad of nothing at all.

Anyhow, I'll have a bit more of a play around in the next few days.
- Scott

Thanks Scott

I'm glad you've made progress on this and let us know if you come across and specific questions about any of these extensions.

Hi Steve,
I think I've made a little progress but I'm still some way from sorting it out entirely.
I'm getting full size images and full source content, but having issues with images and links, duplicate articles and also configuring K2 properly.
I think I might be able to make it work with K2 but I'm not totally convinced yet.
If not Latest News + is an option that might fix the issues somewhat.
You can see what I've done -> HERE <- (I've tidied it up a little and named everthing so you can easily see whats what) and on the native news tab (for anyone else reading) - I've set up both Latest News and Latest News + modules if anyone wants to look and compare the functionality between them. That module was installed straight into a RT template, no other css has been added.

I'll maybe need to adjust the layout better before I can test more.
The cron does seem to be working on its own though, so at least I'm getting automatic articles.
I impulsively bought OB Full Text RSS but I couldn't even get it to work.
So I've contacted them for support and maybe I'll have some luck with that if Feedgator proves too difficult to get right.

Thanks Scott.

For what it's worth, we use obRSS on our site to create RSS Feeds for external use and it's been a very solid extension so far. Hopefully OB Full Text RSS will work well for you.