How would one aggregate news from certain sites and have it automatically populate a site? (with option to choose certain criteria before went live?)

Some options off the top of my head:

> Google Alerts and pick from there, to do it manually.

> If you have specific source sites in mind, you could use iframes (though I would consider this "ugly".

> Facebook widgets are used in Wordpress to pull FB content over. Using that as the beginning of a search term, I came up with this:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/feed-pull/

> Look into "full content" rss feed plugins, which is likely what you want.

From what I've read in my quick checking just now, the variables are a bit tricky to figure out if it's new to you.

This is certainly possible in most cases. As long as these two points are true, you're in business:

1. You have permission to repurpose the content from the original source.
2. The source has an RSS/Atom feed.

If those are both true, than you can do this one of two ways:

1. Use a plugin that exists. There are numerous plugins out there which can create posts from a feed. Some are very simple and others are quite complex. It doesn't sound like a simple one will work well for you though as you have criteria you'd like the entries to meet.

Something like this one: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-o-matic/
Or this: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wpematico/
Or this: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-rss-multi-importer/

By no means is this a comprehensive list or an endorsement of those plugins. It is only to show you that a quick Google search can turn up loads of plugins loosely matching your criteria.

2. You could have someone develop a custom plugin for this. Your request is not very complicated but there are subtle issues with it such as the fact that you probably want the entries to all be created in a Draft or Pending state, you may want to use multiple sources and you will only want certain types of entries from those sources. I would expect there to be existing plugins which do this already but there is a chance that you'd be better off getting a good developer to put something like this together for you, just to make sure it works exactly the way you want it to. There are many great WordPress developers out there who would consider this a relatively simple project.

I hope this helps.

Wordpress has an endless amount of development on plugins and themes, free and paid, that can help you create exactly what you need.

I found this option in a quick search. It may be what you need http://www.wprssaggregator.com/