Recently we were putting together a demo News site theme so we wanted to populate the site with sample live data from a few news sources.
Instead of going through all the hassles we just hit Google News and setup Categories for each of the main News Indexes they sort their news into.
We then installed the FeedWordPress plugin you can get at
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/feedwordpress/
Then we setup the plugin to grab the feeds from Google’s News Site and place them into posts.
Here is a sample feed but you can go to any category on Google and select RSS on the sidebar to grab the Feed Url.
http://news.google.com/news?pz=1&ned=us&hl=en&output=rss
Once the plugin is installed and you start adding fields you need to decide whether you will add an account for every feed or use one that is already made.
I STRONGLY suggest that you make an account named Google News or or something and assign all the feed posts to that account or you are going to endup with a bunch of accounts you will just endup deleting.
I really don’t even want to go into this plugin makers mind and try to think about why they thought it was a good idea to add accounts in WordPress for every Story of Every Feed imported its just stupid. And probably a security risk.
You also need to decide if the plugin will generate local links to posts inside your content or if it will point to the original Google site. Since we are filling our sample site with content we point all the links internal but you may want to send users to the site refferenced from the feed.
Anyway you are about done now.
Once you have setup the feeds you will want to run it to grab some test data off the feeds.
Being that this is google’s feeds you don’t get full or even useable sized excerpts you just get a couple lines of text.
You might also want to pair this plugin with the hotlinkimage plugin to grab the images within the posts.
We have not had any success getting this plugin to run automated and have had to manually go in and tell it to grab new news which is annoying if you are running a site that grabs posts for news overnight but since we are only developing a Theme its not a big deal.
Our eventual site will not use google RSS imports for content it will grab feeds from Reuters and AP’s inside feed which provides full content. However the client has to get access to those private feeds (they already do) to use them on their website.
Anyway if you are looking for a way to add some news to your site this is not a bad plugin. We still have some serious issues with some of the features but for the most part with a little work you can get it to do some nice stuff.
There are also a number of other uses.
If you have a group of sites then you could share content off of each by grabing and sharing RSS feeds.
Anyway the choices are up to you to explore.
To Find FeedWordPress visit
