A few months ago, I needed to bring in an XML feed from another provider. This wasn't a RSS feed that I could use feeds API on but an XML with fields related to lake levels, etc. In the past, I had used the built in simplexml features in PHP 5 to do this job. The problems I had in the past were that the feed would go down for hours to days at a time. This would only serve to break my site. It seems that every time I edited my code to compensate for an error caused by the buggy feed the next time it would cause a different error.
Since I'm rebuilding this site in Drupal, I decided to take a fresh look at whether there were Drupal modules that would be helpful.
The Yahoo Pipes module allowed me to bring the XML into Yahoo Pipes, manipulate and bring it into my site. It includes caching, and so far I haven't been able to break it no matter what happens to the feed. A little warning about this module: It is just an API, you will need to write some code to actually pull in and display the pipe information on the site. In my case, I made a custom module that creates a block with my lake level information. http://drupal.org/project/yahoopipes
Now that I had my block created, I needed to be able to reuse the current lake level value so I could post warnings on certain items in a view that I created depending on criteria. Using views_customfield, I was able to put PHP in a views field and have it compare the feed value to one of the values in my view and produce a warning symbol in my view. http://drupal.org/project/views_customfield.
