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Gregarius - an RSS/Atom Feed Reader
Ian Gilfillan
In October and November, I wrote a two-part tutorial on reading RSS feeds in PHP. Partly motivated by the chance to introduce RSS to PHP coders who hadn't yet gotten an understanding of it, it was also motivated by my frustration in struggling to find an aggregator that did what I wanted it to. This month, I introduce an RSS/Atom aggregator that, so far, does just what I need. It's called Gregarius, which I originally thought was a misspelling of gregarious, which means seeking and enjoying the company of others. I later found that it is actually from the Latin root word meaning belonging to a herd or flock. It's based upon the MagpieRSS parser. My main need was to create a number of web pages that I could visit, containing a combined list of sites and blogs that I'm interested in, ordered from newest to oldest. Gregarius achieves this easily, and comes with a neat interface, great documentation and a good (and growing) set of additional features and plugins. It will appeal to both novice users as well as more experienced developers who're looking for something to run on their own server that they can possibly extend, rather than the usual web-based versions.
Downloading and Installing Gregarius
To run Gregarius, you need PHP (recommended > 4.3), an Apache server, and either MySQL or SQLite as a database. It's available for download from Sourceforge. Once downloaded and placed in the webtree, you need to unpack or unzip it.
tar xvfz rss-0.5.2a.tar.gz or unzip rss-0.5.2a.zip This creates a directory called rss, which can be renamed if desired.
Next you need to configure it. The configuration file is extremely simple, containing only database access information. Stripped of comments, the configuration file appears as follows.
<?php
define ('DBTYPE','mysql');
//define ('DBTYPE',"sqlite");
define ('DBNAME','database_name');
define ('DBUNAME','database_username');
define ('DBPASS', 'database_password');
define ('DBSERVER', 'localhost');
//define ('DB_TABLE_PREFIX','');
?>
It's easiest to use the sample as a basis and then edit the new file.
cp dbinit.php.sample dbinit.php Simply choose between MySQL and SQLite, and then enter the database name, as well as the username, password and hostname. Next, ensure that the database has been created, and the correct permissions granted (Gregarius needs to be able to SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, ALTER and CREATE tables). Finally, point your browser to the rss directory (or to whatever you renamed it), and, if all is going well, the tables should be populated, and Gregarius will be ready for use.
Adding feeds
Now's the time to add the feeds you want to view. If you're migrating from an existing aggregator, you can simply import the OPML file for use in Gregarius (it's under Admin/OPML - see screenshot). If you're starting from scratch, first, you'll need to add any folders (Admin/Folders - see screenshot). Folders allow you to combine feeds together in a way that makes sense to you. Each feed is assigned to one folder. To add a feed, simply click on Admin and then Feeds and enter the URL, as well as the folder to which you're assigning the feed. (screenshot) You don't even have to know the specific location of the feed. If you just enter the website URL, Gregarius attempts to find the location of the feed. If it finds more than one, it offers you the choice.
After you've created some feeds and you attempt to view them (below), you may find that you are getting 404 errors. The most likely reason for this is that your server is not running the Apache mod-rewrite module, so the short url's Gregarius uses by default are not being accepted. Simply go to Admin/Config and change the rss.output.usemodrewrite setting (second from the bottom) to false (screenshot).
Viewing feeds
Clicking on Home, or going to the root directory of the installation, you'll see two main content areas. On the left, a list of all feeds, ordered by folder. On the right, a list of the individual items in the feeds (screenshot). Within a folder, you can change the order of each item by going to Admin/Feeds, and clicking the up or down arrows to move the feeds. Similarly, changing the folder order is achieved by doing the same in Admin/Folders. You can view content by individual feed (clicking on the feed), by folder (clicking on the folder name), or just a long list of all the most recent (by default - you can change this) content. An alternative way of viewing (available from version 0.5.2) is by using categories. You can assign each feed to multiple categories (by editing the feed, and adding the categories in the clearly marked input box, separated by a space - see (screenshot)). This allows more flexibility in ordering than is possible with folders.
Updating Feeds
All feeds will be updated when you click Refresh (screenshot). Feeds will also be updated if the rss.config.refreshafter option (under Admin/Config) is set to a time period (in minutes). By default it's set to 45 minutes. If you have many feeds, this may be a bit time-consuming.
Administration and configuration
You perform all administration from the admin section. Note that by default, this part of the site is available without any password protection. If your installation is publicly available, you're likely to want to protect this section of the site. The easiest way to do this is by adding a file called rss_extra.php in the root directory of your installation (rss by default), containing the code (with of course a username and password of your own choice):
<?php
define ('ADMIN_USERNAME', 'username' );
define ('ADMIN_PASSWORD', 'password' );
?>
If this doesn't work (in some setups it may bar access altogether), you'll need to handle the authentication yourself. Authentication is beyond the scope of this article, but you can read the Apache authentication documentation for more information.
The following are the configuration variables present in Gregarius 0.5.2, their defaults, and brief descriptions of what they each do. Click on Admin/Config and edit the variable you want to change (screenshot).
Conclusion
Using Gregarius has been a pleasant experience all around. Documentation is good, the code is easy to extend, and it comes with most of the features I want, as well as a well-designed front end. If you're looking to run your own PHP-based feed aggregator, give this one a try.
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