Populate IndieKit post DB from feed

[gerwitz]

Is your feature request related to a problem?

I would like to take advantage of Indiekit as a syndication platform, without necessarily using Micropub. An analogous situation would be wanting to retroactively syndicate old posts, but on an ongoing basis.

Describe the solution you’d like

I imagine a plug-in that is triggered by a web hook endpoint and consumers a configured RSS feed, importing entries. Each entry would be checked that it includes a mandatory minimum set of fields (including a content store path?), and for a valid publication URL.

Describe alternatives you’ve considered

This could be done as an external service, by submitting micropub "updates" with content already in the content store. But this feels like an authentic Indiekit plugin.

Additional context

No response

[sentience]

I too would like the option to use Indiekit to syndicate posts that I added to my content store by means other than Indiekit.

The way I imagine such a plug-in working, rather than having Indiekit consume a separate feed, would be for Indiekit's content store plug-ins (e.g. GitHub) to be able to read the content of my site, using the same configuration options it uses to publish new content. Being able to trigger a refresh of this via a web hook would make sense to me.

[gerwitz]

I was considering that at first, but I worry that teaching IndieKit to read from the content store adds an unnecessary amount of complexity. Maybe there is some way to build upon Front Matter but even that tool which exists to tackle this problem doesn't fit every site. It feels like a trap for IndieKit to take that on.

[gerwitz]

I just found myself wishing I could update posts already in the IndieKit database via changes made directly to my git repo, so now I have two reasons to want this 😄 … unfortunately it is going to be months before I have project time to put into it.

[aciccarello]

While we are making big requests, if Indiekit is able to interpret the files directly, I'd love more functionality available without the database at all since I haven't been very successful getting mongodb working with a hosted server. I recognize that's fundamentally changing the architecture though.

[gerwitz]

This issue has veered into "notice and parse updates to the content store" which would be awesome (and enable the CRUD mentioned in #581 ) but … I still want to simple add and syndicate new posts via a plugin that pulls from a feed.

I guess this could be an endpoint plugin that fetches and parses a feed, then somehow uses endpoint-micropub/lib/post-data.js to save posts.

If I understand correctly, it seems endpoint-posts only proxies the micropub endpoint. So I presume this is The Right Way to create a new post in the DB, but we might have to wait for mp-destination support if we want to prevent these being sent to the content store.