Magpie & RSS

Real Simple Syndication

• RSS is an xml-based format for sharing and distributing web content, such as news headlines.
  
  
• Using an RSS reader, you can view data feeds from various new sources, such as CNN.com, including headlines, summaries, and links to full stories.
  
  
• There is a good PHP RSS reader called Magpie that we can use to put the latest new from various sites on our pages.
  

• Started in 1996; mostly developed in 1999
  
  
• Example: http://edition.cnn.com/services/rss/
  

• RSS solves a number of problems that both web developers and web users have faced for years.
  

Magpie, in the Author's Words

• I wrote magpieRSS out of a frustration with the limitations of existing solutions. In particular many of the existing PHP solutions seemed to:
  
  
• Use a parser on regular expressions making for an inherently fragile solution
  
  
• Only support early versions of RSS
  
  
• Discard all the interesting information besides item title, description, and link
  
  
• Not build proper separation between parsing the RSS and displaying it
  
  
• In particular I failed to find any PHP RSS parsers that could sufficiently parse RSS 1.0 feeds...

Magpie RSS

• A powerfull RSS parser written in PHP http://magpierss.sourceforge.net
  
  
• Easy to retrieve and render RSS feeds
  
  
• Simple (a few lines of code).
  
  
• Supports all tag sets found in all RSS versions as well as your own made up tags.
  
  
• Low bandwidth usage (caches feed contents for one hour).
  
  

Putting Magpie to Work

1. Download Magpie.
2. Extract to includes directory.
3. include magpie/rss_fetch.inc to your script
4. Use the channel, image, items, and textinput properties of your rss object to display news.