Creating a Media Aggregation site

The process of creating a media aggregation site has various stages. Firstly you need to evaluate what kind of Media Feeds you want to pull into your site. Then you need to work out how you want to present them. Then you need to set up a series of content types to host the data that you are pulling in from. You'll then need to install and configure tools for reading the Media Feeds and parsing that data into the relevant parts of the custom content types you've set up. You may need to create some additions to the current tools to process some Media Feeds. 

After that you'll need to create content template alterations to display this metadata and to be able to wrap the media files in relavent players so that they'll stream from your site. You need to set up some custom views to display certain content types together and some separately and to be able to output some good aggregated Media Feeds yourself. Also you'll also probably want to create an intelligent search tool to allow users to search through the incoming content

And let's no forget, if you want to allow your users to upload their own video onto the same site then you'll need to set up similar systems to deal with media uploaded to your site and to control how that is dislayed.

• A summary of these steps could be listed like this;
• Evaluate the kinds of Media Feeds you need to import
• Create a design for your site
• Set up relevant content types
• Install and configure FeedAPI and Embedded Media Field to parse feeds
• Add any additionally needed Processors to Embedded Media Field
• Create needed Views and RSS feeds
• Theme these Views altering the content templates
• Create a search tool  

Evaluation of kinds of Media Feeds

Certain types of feeds are easier to import than others. A lot of work has been done on a module for CCK called Embedded Media Field. The following still shows the different providers that you can set to work in conjunction with this module.

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If we aggregate feeds from these providers then the Embedded Media Field module can do a lot of hard work for us. The way this is done is by using the FeedAPI module. It allows us to map the Original URL of the video sharing website to the Embedded Media Field.  When entering the content  the module automatically determines which content provider is being used. When displaying the content, the proper embedding format is used. Or we can then present it to our users in flexible way when we theme our media aggregation site. 

What if the website that we want to import feeds from isn't in this list? Well we have different options in this situation. We could use the ability of the Feed API to map different part of the incoming feed to different CCK fields that we create. Or we could use the frame work of the Embedded Media Field to do achieve the same effect. What we would have to do is to write a Provider for the kind of feed we want to aggregate.