I have been looking for an online planet system written in PHP for the last few days. The goal is to collect multiple RSS feeds and show them on a single site. Now it is possible to write up a script for this, and there are a few available. But I wanted something with more features. Something like the Planet in Python.
I shortlisted MetaPlanet and Gregarius. And found Gregarius to be very interesting. MetaPlanet configuration is a bit demanding, and it does not seem to be in active development any more. Gregarius on the other hand, is very well designed. Their website is also very informative and it’s under active development.
Three wishes I have for Gregarius:
1. I wish it had a calendar feature!
2. I wish I could easily make it a simple Planet, rather than an RSS Aggregator.
3. I wish it could handle img tags in the feeds better, and show proper images!
Aah! I wish I got this idea before! Tried out WordPress plugins and there are quite a few plugins that allow RSS aggregation from within WordPress! What better than that? 😉
Evaluating which one’s best!
Here is a very simple, web based, multi user (using cookies) RSS reader, with source code!
http://saraswaticlasses.net/sites/simplefeed.php
Found FeedWordPress on http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins/Syndication, and have integrated that.
Up here on Magnet Blog
Gregarius is easily extensible via plugins and themes. Someone has already made a planet style theme about Gregarius. See http://nigerianbloggers.com/ for example.
If you have a valid feed, that includes the base tag and does not show images properly. Please report them at http://svn.gregarius.net/trac/newticket
Thanks for stopping by Sameer!
I did check the plugins, and I feel Gregarius is great. I am also inspired by the way the project is managed.
I don’t know if my feed is valid! I couldn’t find a base tag in it. But I know that they did display images from my site on planet.foss.in! Now FeedWordPress too does not show my images, so I don’t know what to do! May be planet is simply smarter than the other solutions 😉
But it just feels easier to add a plugin to WP to get what I wanted. I do not want read/unread etc. I see the Nigerian blog aggregator does pretty much what I would need! Is that theme contributed back?
thank for this article. i have looking web based aggregator like planet but run in php and found these. nice 🙂