I was very excited to get an email from Gareth Bult this morning announcing his release of PloneRSS.  It provides a solid, scalable, smart way to create content items in Plone from inbound RSS feeds, and is based on the lessons he learned in creating CMFFeed last year.

This is a capability that has been missing from Plone until now (although Gareth made an initial run at it with CMFFeed) and I think it's a tremendous boon to sites that need to aggregate content from a network of partners... for example groups running a coalition or collaborative activism campaign, or maybe different departments in a university.  (I wrote about the need for better aggregation tools a while back.)

PloneRSS uses MySQL to store its data, which allows feeds to be cached and shared among many Plone instances.  RSS news items are then transferred into local ZODB's to allow for local searching, etc.  PloneRSS uses cron to automate the refreshing of feeds.  Gareth does a nice job of laying out the rationale behind his design choies in the PloneRSS Design Document.

I'm very excited to start putting this through its paces, and I'm confident that this will be the building block for some really cool collaboration functionality in Plone.  I hope it will get some attention as the Snow Sprinters think about aggregation and syndication.

Thanks, Gareth!

UPDATE: Clarified that items are transferred from MySQL to ZODB, thanks Gareth!

UPDATE 1/26: New URL for project's permanent homepage.