Symphony.

Not sure if this is possible but what I want to achieve with Symphony and XML is to have an activity stream. For example on my new site I am going to publish articles, thoughts and twitter quotes (this being manually entered) - but I also want to display website designs that I have tagged as Great Design through Ma.gnolia, and also Wines I have tried and tested through Cork'd.

I would like it all in one stream/xml - so basically I can write an article today, that will appear on the site as an entry, then this evening I may enter a wine into my Cork'd page, well I would like that to appear on the site as a later entry.

Is that possible?

Couldn't you add all these separate feeds as Datasources, and order/format them with xsl? You should be able to sort by time, right? I've never dealt with the xsl sort() function, but that might do the trick.

I have been playing with the idea of using an xml Page as a dynamic datasource for another Page. You could create your various streams as DSs for your Datasource page, use XSL to format and organize them in a standard way, then use the output of that Page as a consolidated Datasource. This would only really be needed when your datasources would be external and had to be decided on-the-fly.

I don't think that would be necessary for this situation. As long as you know which feeds you're working with, anything that would be accomplished on the 'datasource' page should be able to be accomplished on your output page.

I think Ashooner is on the right track. I was wanting to do something similar, but all the feeds I wanted to pull in and combine were so different that it would take a ton of work to get them to sort and display correctly -- If it was possible at all ...

I thought of 2 options and only tried the easy one.

1. You could pull all of those data sources into a page and use XSLT to create a nicely organized XML data file. Get all the dates and info all converted and structured the same way. Then use that new XML page as a data source so you can sort and format all that data for the resulting HTML page. I'm not sure if the system will allow for this feeding on itself, but it's worth a try.

2. Use Tumbr.com. Seriously. It's a really good option. You can pull in your Twitter, Flickr, YouTube or any other feed into it and it'll import new items to your Tumblog. I'm sure your cork'd feed will work with it. Then use the API to pull an XML file into Symphony.

This is the way I went, because it's a lot easier to get the data together into 1 source and Tumblr has a Markdown formatter option so I don't have to attempt to use XSLT to make my text pretty. The XML its API spits out is easy to transform, too. If you want the XSL I'm using so far on my test install, let me know and I'll get it to you.

All good, I shall investigate.

MrBlank does tumblr allow you to post to twitter and whatnot via the tumblr backend?

I like the tumblr gallery navigation, was that a default template?

Aren't you worried about duplicate content for SEO? I consider using blogger.com or wordpress.com for quick high rankings and then mirror the blog on a nice symphony site, not sure this would be a good idea...? And for he convenience of adding pictures form picasaweb to blogentries, such integration can never be offered by symphony (or can it? with RC1; like choosing pictures from your flickr account within your entry?)

So you just use tumblr to 'mix' your feeds and as a central backend for your feeds? The only difference with using pipes would be the central backend? Can't this convenience be achieved with a desktop blogging client?

Your 'real' blog entries are still in symphony, so you still have 2 backends to work with in the end, unless you do use a desktop client?

I might include facebook in the setup and mirror with this tool

Yahoo! Pipes?

how does tumbr.com compare to sweetcron ?

Tumblr only pulls content. You can't push entries to Twitter or other sites. Also, there isn't a way to dump the content into your Symphony database for archiving. Your Tumblr archives live on Tumblr.

I use it because it pulls all the content I already post on other sites and allows me a nifty bookmarklet to post new things quickly and easily.

As for the SEO concerns, I don't really worry about it. I'm only duplicating the latest Tumblr entries.

But, not only am I duplicating my content from the original sites on Tumblr, I'm even dumping it into Facebook, so I guess my SEO rating might suffer, but more of my friends can read what I'm posting in whatever way they want -- Facebook, Tumblr, my site, Twitter, Youtube or my XML feed. If Google doesn't like it, oh well ...

Yahoo Pipes might be a better option if you're worried about SEO stuff.

I believe flickr can push entries to blogs (so also symphony) So all symphony needs is a widget for posting s-twitters, and an standard for receiving pushed blogentries from flickr (I though it had that for desktop blog clients...)

How are you dumping your content into facebook? As facebook is login only it is not crawled and thus OK to have duplicate content?