Making RSS Display Example

RSS feeds are often used in nontraditional ways. Web browsers have various ways of displaying RSS feeds, separate RSS software exists to read them, and even email clients are starting to display the output of the RSS.

With all this, though, one thing is often overlooked: simply reading in the RSS feed from another website and displaying it on your own website. The followong code creates a basic function that reads in a remote RSS feed, specified by a URL, and generates an HTML definition list from it, making the title a link and including the description. It also includes the title of the feed as a paragraph first.

If you want to use this in a live web page, you can wrap it inside a <div> tag to control/apply additional formatting.

<?php
// Create a function that will turn an RSS feed, into a definition list:
function rss_dl($url) {
    // Begin by loading the RSS feed into SimpleXML:
    $rss = simplexml_load_file($url);

    // Ok, output the title of the feed just as a paragraph block.  People
    // can use stylesheets later to make it look as they wish:
    echo <<<EOSNIPPET
<p>
  <a href="{$rss->channel->link}">{$rss->channel->title}</a>
</p>
EOSNIPPET;

    // Now begin our definition list:
    echo "<dl>\n";

    // Loop through all items to make definition entries from them
    foreach ($rss->channel->item as $i) {
        // The title with link:
        echo "<dt><a href=\"{$i->link}\">{$i->title}</a></dt>\n";

        // The description as the dd
        echo "<dd>{$i->description}</dd>\n";
    }

    // End our list now, we are done
    echo "</dl>\n";
}

// Test this out:
rss_dl('http://acorn.atlantia.sca.org/calendar.xml');

// And try it again:
echo "<br /><br /><br />\n";
rss_dl('http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss');
?>

Hope it helps.

Creating an RSS File With PHP

RSS is a specific XML format that has been created for the sole purpose of syndicating "news" type information. It considers your information to be a channel and for that channel to have multiple items. Each item in turn caan have certain information included, such as a title, URL, and description. RSS is used regularly now by news websites, blogs, and podcasts.

For full specification, you can visit http://www.rssboard.org/, which hosts the current keepers of the standard. As an example, the code below generates a small RSS feed from an array of news items.

<?php
// Create our array of news stories.
// These might have come from a database originally:
$news = array(
  array('Man hates politics', 'http://example.com/23423.php',
    'A man has been found that hates politics.  Politicians are surprised.'),
  array('Cat eats mouse', 'http://example.com/83482.php',
    'A cat was found eating a mouse.  The mouse was very surprised.'),
  array('Programmer gets hired', 'http://example.com/03912.php',
    'A programmer has received a telecommuting agreement, and is happy.'),
    );

// Now, first to create our RSS feed, start with the appropriate header:
header('Content-type: text/xml');

// Echo out the opening of the RSS document.  These are parts that just
//  describe your website, and what the RSS feed is about:
echo '<?xml version="1.0" ?>';
echo <<<EORSS

<rss version="2.0">
  <channel>
    <title>Not So Nifty News Stories (NSNNS)</title>
    <link>http://example.com/nsnns.php</link>
    <description>The best news stories we can legally find!</description>
    <language>en-us</language>
    <copyright>Copyright 2006 - NSNNS</copyright>
    <webMaster>webmaster@example.com</webMaster>
    <generator>A Custom PHP Script</generator>
EORSS;

// Now that we've taken care of that, we can echo out each news item
// So just start looping through them!
foreach ($news as $item) {
    // Well, not much fancyness needed, just echo them out:
    echo <<<EOITEM

    <item>
      <title>{$item[0]}</title>
      <link>{$item[1]}</link>
      <description>{$item[2]}</description>
    </item>
EOITEM;
}

// Almost done.  Just need to print a few closing tags now and that's it:
echo <<<EOCLOSE

  </channel>
</rss>
EOCLOSE;
?>

As can be seen from examining the code, this script starts off with some data. In this case an array of data refers to various news stories including a title, a URL, and a description of the story. Using this data, it generates an RSS feed that describes all of this news. The data more likely would have come from a database in a real example.

Hope it helps.