Replace Planet with FreshRSS

[norcross]

this tool is abandoned. let's discuss and narrow down some requirements about what we need.

[Ipstenu]

We need to keep feature parity so...

1. A unified RSS feed (or whatever it is that Planet dumps) to show on people's dashboards
2. An easy way to add/remove feeds from the list of feeds
3. A front end that shows the feeds as relatively nice HTML

[toderash]

"WP Asteroid, the Planet-Buster!"

• Feed list is a CPT, basic metaboxes to add
  • Feed Title
  • Feed Description
  • Site URL
  • RSS URL
  • Feed Category
  • Button to just go and discover all the above based on the URL or RSS url
• Fetch feeds every n minutes
• Cache results
• Generate Page with tag-stripped excerpts
• Generate Combined RSS feed
• Generate RSS feed per category

That's it.

[toderash]

Also for shits & giggles, support OPML import/export.

[norcross]

putting aside architecture or WP specific approaches for a moment, i'm seeing the following initial v1 requirements:

• store a list of individual feed sources with relevant metadata
• fetch content from each source on a time interval
• store n number of recent posts
• generate a single RSS feed of all sources, ordered by most recent date
• generate a page layout with each available feed and their most recent n posts

does the above list give us complete feature parity @Ipstenu @toderash?

currently Planet doesn't support categorization (or it's not being used) which isn't a bad thing, but is an enhancement feature

[toderash]

@norcross yeah, whatever approach fits the bill is fine :)

Your summary covers it, except needs a method for updating feeds. Prefer an admin UI for that. The other enhancement I'd keep is the strip-tags & truncate the feed content output. Right now we're doing that with css hacks.

[norcross]

ok, for "updating feed", are you referring to the data elements for each feed, getting the most recent feed content, or both?

[toderash]

yeah, could I have been more vague? I'm referring to maintaining the list of feeds to aggregate.

[Ipstenu]

That looks right, @norcross - I would love a way easier way to manage the damn list of feeds!

[toderash]

I wasn't looking, but this strolled across my path today anyhow. https://freshrss.org/ || https://github.com/FreshRSS

PHP, actively maintained, AGPL, extensible. Also built with simplepie, generates RSS & OPML outputs, e.g., https://demo.freshrss.org/i/?a=rss&hours=168

Not an endorsement, but before putting in build time, it's worth checking for simple alternatives.

[norcross]

@toderash on a cursory look, it seems like this tool may work. i haven't had a chance to set it up locally yet to confirm. this could give up the back-end for all the management and feed creation, and then we'd need to theme it a bit for the front-end display. i set up a quick local instance and put a few of our feeds in there. it pulls everything in correctly, allows for individual sorting (using their default front-end UI) so theming it wouldn't be an absolute requirement, but something we'd wanna explore once we have more branding aspects in place.

[joedolson]

Discussed in the TSC meeting, and determined that FreshRSS is the tool we should move forward with. @Ipstenu and @chuckadams will own getting the system installed and running in our hosting, then we'll figure out the next steps with theming, etc.

Targeting 2nd quarter 2026.