Another little project - MotoGPod

The last couple of weeks, on and off, I've been doing another Drupal site for a podcast that I'm a big fan of. The host already has a website, but is finding it a bit cumbersome to keep editing the HTML by hand, and he sees the advantages of a CMS (comments, automatic RSS feeds, easier to edit, etc).

So, we created a basic Drupal site, implemented a really simple theme (that's what he wants), enabled a few modules, added a few custom blocks, etc. No programming whatsoever. He was impressed... Then we get to the interesting part:

Since his site already has more then 90 episodes (with hand crafted descriptions, and MP3 files to download), we didn't want to go and create all of those by hand. So we used feedapi (a Google Summer of Code project) to pull the RSS feed from the existing site, and create a bunch of audio nodes from it. We had to hack around a little bit to make the RSS feed item processor download the enclosures (MP3), and create nicely formed audio nodes from it, but it's working really nicely now.

Unfortunately, the (simple) feed/item processors that come with feedapi don't have hooks that allow other modules to use their "internal data", so we added that to feedapi. We could have just cut'n'paste the code, and changed a few lines, but I believe it's usually better to make the existing solution a bit more general. Anyway, I've submitted a feature request to get those changes rolled into FeedAPI.

One other note - the guy is currently hosting his site on Dreamhost. We did a trail deploy onto there, and it's as slow as we feared. Dreamhost have a reputation for really slow MySQL databases, and that does seem to be the case (though the webservers are plenty fast enough).

[EDIT] Site is now live, removed/updated links to dev site.