Success! with Plone and Feedparser

Today (Friday) ended with the perfect start to the weekend. After weeks of misery, (well, okay, it wasn't that bad was it Richard?) together we solved the issue with Universal Feed Parser working as a module within Zope (Plone) using Python. Firstly, what is Feed Parser?

Feed Parser is a Python module that downloads and parses or processes RSS, Atom and CDF syndicated feeds. The Feed Parser module gives Zope (Plone) the ability to bring RSS feeds from external sources into its environment. So as we gear ourselves up for releasing the new Ultralab website, this is a significant step forward.

Our problems stemmed from an error message which Plone reported whenever we tried to access the Feed Parser module...

This error only affects Mac OS X Server that has multiple versions / instances of Python installed. What we have discovered is that the Feed Parser module was installed using a version / instance of Python running on the server which was different to the version / instance that Zope and Plone use. A key learning moment is understanding that Zope modules must be installed using the same version of Python as the Zope environment is using.

Take a look at a sneak preview of the new website.