SimplePie is a PHP development library for reading RSS. It’s amazingly simple, well documented and full featured. I have written 4 RSS readers for portals and virtual desktops using it, and it’s alsways been a pleasure to work with. Here is the link:
http://simplepie.org/
When would you use this? Anytime you want to pull an RSS feed into a page for a decision or display. Almost everything has an RSS feed. You can pull in multiple feeds, have them automatically cached and aggregated, and choose a sort method. It will also automatically find RSS feed URLs if you give it a URL to any site. Combine this with something like Dapper: http://www.dapper.net/ and there’s no limit to what you can integrate into your project!
Here’s some sample code to show how easy SimplePie is:
require_once(‘SimplePie/simplepie.inc’);
$feed = new SimplePie(array(‘http://suddendevelopment.com/?feed=rss2′,‘http://LegalizeThought.com/?feed=rss2′));
$feed->handle_content_type();
$htmlOut = ”;
//====|| Get RSS items for feed||====\\
foreach ($feed->get_items() as $item){
$htmlOut .= ‘<div class="rssItem">’;
$htmlOut .= ‘<div class="rssTitle"><a href="’.$item->get_permalink().‘">’.$item->get_title().‘</a></div>’;
$htmlOut .= ‘<span class="rssDescription">’.$item->get_description().‘<br></span>’;
$htmlOut .= ‘<span class="rssDate">’.$item->get_date(‘j F Y | g:i a’).‘</span>’;
$htmlOut .= ‘</div>’;
}
print $htmlOut;
?>
