Plugin Resource for WordPress and WPMU
April 27, 2009, 6:20 pm The DFE News Harvester Plugin

For those who are serious about cataloging and displaying news from across the Internet in one blog, I’ve created the DFE News Harvester Plugin. DFENH allows you to register a variety of news feeds, read them within WordPress, select the articles you’d like to publish and publish them as posts in a blog.

DFENH also works with WP meta data to provide a number of bits of data that you might want in a news article, such as a title, a secondary “teaser” title, an image with credit and a brief summary. It’s up to you how you want to actually use this metadata on your site: DFENH does not offer any method of displaying metadata on the site.

Another feature of DFE News Harvester is it’s ability to automatically create tags for each article based on it’s title. When a list of articles is submitted for publication, DFENH automatically breaks the title up by words, eliminates unnecessary words like “by, the, if, etc” and creates tags for each of the remaining keywords.

This is a plugin which will work in either WordPress or WordPress MU. However, this is not a plugin meant to run in the /mu-plugins folder and I have not tested it for that use.

To install, simply download from WordPress.org, drop the entire /dfe_news_harvester folder into your wp-content/plugins folder and activate through the Control Panel of your blog.

Is This a Splog Plugin?

You can use this plugin however you like, but I would submit that there are far more efficient methods of creating a splog than this plugin provides. This plugin is geared towards providing updated news content in a way that is administration-heavy, relative to splogging tools. It does not harvest content off the original website by itself, it does provide a method of renaming links and providing your own summary of articles.

I trust that everyone who uses this plugin does so with the utter-most respect for original content on the web!


Download this plugin

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14 Responses to “The DFE News Harvester Plugin”

  1. The Titles to Tags Plugin | HN.Net WordPress Plugins
    May 3rd, 2009 | 12:40 pm

    [...] moons of inactivity. Updates include some revamping of the code based on my experiments with it in another plugin, improved documentation in the plugin itself and bug fixes including the phantom tags commenters [...]

  2. Vi
    May 16th, 2009 | 9:32 am

    I am trying to implement this plugin in wordpress. It is installed and activated, but when I try to use the management interface, it fails with this error:

    Fatal error: Call to undefined function get_site_option() in /home/username/wp-content/plugins/the-dfe-news-harvester/news_harvester.class.php on line 32

    This happens on all of the options. Any help you can provide is appreciated.

    Thanks,
    Vi

  3. Thomas Belknap
    May 16th, 2009 | 9:50 am

    Vi, sorry ’bout that. I need to correct the plugin so that it tests whether the site is WordPress or WordPress MU. I’ll get a patch in place in the next few days.

    Thanks for telling me about the problem!

  4. batts
    May 31st, 2009 | 9:17 am

    I cannot get this to work…it is a great idea and is something I need for my site. when I put in the feed, and hit submit, it says information missing or gives me a blank page. Please let me know when you have solved the problem. Great work thus far.

  5. Thomas Belknap
    May 31st, 2009 | 10:01 am

    Hmmm. . . Can you send along some screenshots of your problem? Thank you.

  6. gary
    June 1st, 2009 | 3:35 am

    great idea but I’m having same problem as batts:

    information missing or gives me a blank page

  7. Thomas Belknap
    June 1st, 2009 | 6:49 am

    Gary and Batts: please download the plugin again from WP and tell me if that fixes the problem. Looks like there were a few calls to update_site_option I missed. Funny that it wouldn’t just bomb out on us, but there it is.

    Thanks to both of you for helping me out by reporting the bugs!

  8. ijed
    June 6th, 2009 | 10:52 am

    Hi,
    I’m new to WP so apologies if this is a basic question, but how do I use the plugin?

    I downloaded it to my plugin folder, activated it then went to the tools section, added some cnn feeds and it kept saying that no feed has been configured.

    Help!

    thanks

  9. ijed
    June 6th, 2009 | 10:59 am

    I think I figured it out, it seems to be working and the problem is most likely to do with the theme I selected.

    Thanks

  10. vestel ebys
    June 13th, 2009 | 1:03 pm

    thanks a lot

  11. Christopher Phillips
    July 18th, 2009 | 12:55 pm

    Perhaps I do not understand how the plugin is supposed to work, but here is what I am experiencing:
    Added feeds, all worked as advertised. Load feeds, get list of articles. Check box. Edit title as desired. Publish article. New article shows up in posts again as advertised. No content appears, only title. Title links back to itself. The only thing appearing in the content pane are the words “Added via DFE News Harvester.”

    Running WPMU 2.8.1 and DFENH version 0.8

  12. Thomas Belknap
    July 18th, 2009 | 1:08 pm

    @Christopher: thanks for the question. The data that you’re entering into the fields is meta data. Therefore, to get it to display you’ll want to use get_post_meta:
    http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Custom_Fields
    http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_post_meta

    You’ll want to use the meta value link instead of the the_permalink version:

    $link = get_post_meta($post, 'link_url', TRUE);
$link_text = get_post_meta($post, 'link_text', TRUE);
$subtitle = get_post_meta($post, 'subtitle', TRUE);
?>
<a href="" rel="nofollow"></a>
  13. Todd
    August 24th, 2009 | 11:23 pm

    How or where do I define the number of characters or words to show in the title of the feed? It looks like it cuts off the title at some point.

  14. rhydayric
    September 5th, 2009 | 7:05 am

    Thanks!

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