(For more resources on Joomla!, see here.)

The completed news aggregation site will look similar to the example shown in the following screenshot:

Build Weird Hap’nins

Vaughan Pyre is a very ambitious webpreneur. What he really hopes for is a website that is completely self-maintaining, and on which he can place some Google AdSense blocks. Clicks from the visitors to his site will ensure that he makes lots of money. For this, he needs a site where the content updates regularly with fresh content so that visitors will keep coming back to click on some more Google ads. Vaughan’s ultimate objective is to create several of these websites.

Template

The template chosen is Midnight by BuyHTTP, which is a template that fits the theme of this unique website.

Extensions

This is, surprisingly, a very simple site to build, and much of the requirements can be actually be achieved by using the native News Feeds component. However, the News Feeds component will only list the title links to the external feed items, whereas what Vaughan wants is that the feeds are pulled into the site as articles. Therefore, we will be using an automatic article generator component. There are several of such components on the Joomla! extensions site, but almost all of them are commercial. Vaughan is a skinflint and will not pay to buy any script, so what we are looking for is free component. That is why we have chosen the following:

• 4RSS—aggregates RSS feeds and creates articles from them
• JCron Scheduler—used for cron jobs management and scheduling to simulate cron jobs through the Joomla! frontend interface at preset intervals

Indeed, were it not for the fact that Vaughan needs the content to automatically be updated, we needn’t use any extension other than the 4RSS component.

Other extensions

The core module that will be used for this site is:

• Main Menu module—creates the primary navigation functionality for the site pages

Sections and categories

New sections and categories will need to be created so that incoming article feeds will be correctly routed according to their description.

A new section will be created that we will call Feed. Under this section, we shall have three categories—Bad News, More Bad News, and Weird News.

Create a new section

We intend to create a section that will be named Feed. In order to do this, perform the following steps:

1. Navigate to the Section Manager from the Control Panel, and then click on the New icon at the top right-hand side, in order to create a new section.
2. On the next page, add the name of the section, and then save your changes.

Create new categories

To create a new category, perform the following steps:

• Navigate to the Category Manager page from the Control Panel.
• On the following page, create a new category in the same way as we created the new section. However, remember to set the Section to Feed.