I am planning to create a plugin to do this – I was going to call it my “RSS Posting bot” – with options to post new items to either a single thread or start a new thread for each item, and config to say who (which bbPress user) the bot should post as. Other than general design, however, I’ve not really got too far. Should I take it that you would like such a plugin created? If so, any other features you’d want?
Hey Paul thanks for the reply. That’s exciting news, and I think it would be a very useful feature for bbPress
As long as the individual posts from wp show up as properly formatted threads, I don’t think theres much more that would be required. Anndd I actually have a small budget set aside for this, so if you shoot me an email me maybe we can work something out and get this done? My email is simon.raize[at]gmail.com
Cheers bro!
No need to re invent the wheel here guys. Just DL
@bingsterloot – you are quite correct, no need to reinvent the wheel. Your plugin looks good! For someone synchronizing with their own WordPress, your plugin looks like the perfect solution.
That said, the “Rss Poster Bot” is still something I will pursue as it will allow me to draw on news/posts from a variety of other sources so long as I have a feed. Think of it this way:
- a post is made to your favourite news web site
- the “Rss Poster Bot” pulls the feed and sees a new item
- the bot now makes a post to your bbPress forum, starting a topic
- local users are able discuss that news item
I’ll give it a shot in my spare time and see how it turns out.
ah ok i see paul…..that actually sounds VERY cool. But would you be able to pull the whole post or how does it work.
I am looking forward to see what you come up with.
This looks hugely useful…. but two ideas to make it more useful:
1) If it’s based on RSS, you could conceivably pull other blogs in.
2) It would be cool to have a switch where an admin could choose to pull posts in or not, based on categories or something like that
3) Some way to let people know that a discussion has been spawned in the forum indicated on the original post…
I’ll add in
4) Ability to sort posts per bbPress category, based on WP category
(example: I post a blog post to News and that gets posted to the bbPress category News).
vBulletin comes with this functionality built in, and I find it very useful. I used it for the “School News” category on my forum, where it pulls in headlines from the school newspaper. In this case, they have chosen not to include full text in the RSS Feed, but for feeds that do, it can be readily displayed in the thread that is created. I’m looking for a similar application here, to allow me to pull feeds from other sites in my network and drive traffic to them from my forum community.
Hope this works out, I’m looking forward to applying it.
May i suggest that this NOT be a BBpress plugin but rather a WordPress plugin. It seems like a cURL post might be a better solution, and alot less hassle than an RSS feed parsing.
Just my two cents.
There are plenty of 3rd party libraries that deal with the feed reading. Thus far I have a working admin screen that relies on AJAX services to validate a given feed URL. Combination of a GOOD rss library on the backend, and the encode_json() method from PHP means I’m golden for right now.
Milestone 1 of the plugin is complete – administration page to handle a single feed. Milestone 2 is starting – using that data to actually monitor the single feed. When Milestone 2 is completed I’ll grab a couple of people to beta test.
Sounds great paulhawke. I would very much like to beta test if possible ;O)
Keep up the good work
Thanks for the update Paul, I’m up for some beta testing when your ready
Paul,
I know this may be really obvious, and apologies if it is, but PHP’s built in functions for handling json are very much release dependant. There was a large change from php5 to php5.2 as i recall.
It’s 5.36am here, so you’ll have to forgive me for the lack of links, but i’d do a little googling into that. At the end of the day you either stats a minimum PHP version, or test for the php version and do and if/else.
