If you ever faced a scenario where you had to parse the rss feed with image thumbnails placed inside “enclosure” tags, SimplePie is the perfect solution. In fact SimplePie can parse mediaRSS. There are several other php classes such as Magpie which can do the job as well. Magpie can parse rss2.0 enclosure but not mediaRSS and I had hard time getting enclosure parsed with Magpie. After spending hours, I tried Simple Pie and it worked like a charm.

SimplePie is a fast and feature rich PHP class that is very simple to use.

In few steps, you can use SimplePie to retrieve and parse any RSS or Atom feeds and display them on any PHP website. SimplePie also allows you to incorporate any type of data from any number of feeds. Here’s how you can setup SimplePie in three steps:

• Download SimplePie and uncompress it
• Place the “simplepie.inc” into a your “includes” folder under root directory of your website and include it into your calling script
• Create a directory named “cache” (also in the web-accessible root directory) and make sure that it’s writable by the server (i.e., CHMOD to 755, 775, or 777)

Here’s the sample code to fetch, parse, cache, and display your external RSS and Atom feeds and mediaRSS on your website using SimplePie:

define('SIMPLEPIE', '/path/to/simplepie.inc');
 
 require_once(SIMPLEPIE); //include the simplepie class
  $url = 'http://www.parorrey.com/blog/feed/';
  $feed = new SimplePie(); // bake a new pie
  $feed->set_feed_url($url);  // provide feed url
  $feed->set_cache_duration (3600); // specify cache duration in seconds
  $feed->handle_content_type(); // text/html utf-8 character encoding
  $check = $feed->init(); // script initialization check
 
  if ($check){
 
  foreach ($feed->get_items() as $item) {
 
  if ($enclosure = $item->get_enclosure()) 
   $thumb = '<img src="'.$enclosure->get_link().'" 
       alt="'.$item->get_title().'"/>';
  else $thumb = '';
 
  $rss_feed .= '<div class="rssItem">
  <span class="date">
 '.$item->get_date('j F Y @ g:i a').'</span>
  <h3><a href="'.$item->get_permalink().'" 
       title="'.$item->get_title().'"
      target="_blank" rel="no-follow">'.$item->get_title().'
       <br/>'.$thumb.'</a></h3>		
<p>'.$item->get_description().'</p></div>
<div class="spacer dash"></div>';      
 
 }
}
 
echo '<div id="rssNews">'. $rss_feed .'</div>';

SimplePie also allows you to merge different rss feeds into one single stream.

$feed = new SimplePie();
$feed->set_feed_url(array(
	'http://your-domain1.com/your-feed1/', 
	'http://your-domain2.com/your-feed2/', 
	'http://your-domain3.com/your-feed3/'
	));

Here is where the cache directory should exist if you are using the default cache location:

/path/to/your/feed_page.php
/path/to/your/cache/
/path/to/simplepie/way/deep/in/directory/simplepie.inc

Please note that using ./cache (dot-slash-cache) means that the cache directory will be relative to the page that’s calling SimplePie, not SimplePie itself.

Hope that helps.

Cheers!

Related posts:

1. Setting different cache age for different feeds using Magpie RSS – PHP RSS Parser

If you want a radio button selection to show certain Div contents and hide some other Div on the web page, and on another radio button selection, you need a different Div associated with that radio button hiding the unwanted one, read on.

This can be achieved very efficiently using jQuery. We can put the code inside “click” or “change” event of radio button group,

$("input[name$='group_name']").click(function(){
  }

and after getting the value of selected radio button by this:

var radio_value = $(this).val();

We can simply hide or show our required Divs using following:

 if(radio_value=='Yes') {
  $("#yes_box").show("slow");
  $("#no_box").hide();
  }

Here’s putting every together, simply put this code in your page inside script tags and it will work.

$(document).ready(function(){
 
  $("input[name$='group_name']").click(function(){
 
  var radio_value = $(this).val();
 
  if(radio_value=='Yes') {
    $("#yes_box").show("slow");
     $("#no_box").hide();
  }
  else if(radio_value=='No') {
   $("#no_box").show("slow");
    $("#yes_box").hide();
   }
  });
 
  $("#yes_box").hide();
  $("#no_box").hide();
 
});

Hope that helps.

Cheers.

No related posts.

Uploading files to server is a daily chore every webmaster has to do and if you do it using some ftp client where each and every file and image, no matter how small it might be, is uploaded separately, it’s a real pain. Sometimes, It takes hours to get these files uploaded and even then some files are skipped somehow.

A very easy solution to this tedious task is to upload a compressed zip or tar file and uncompress it on server. If you have SSH access or your hosting control panel provide you extracting your compressed file, it’s very helpful. For instance, CPanel and HSphere provide both zipping and unzipping of files and folders on server. But not all hosting environments allow you to unzip files on server without SSH access.

An easy way to unzip file on server is to use following php script.

Just provide the zip file name and destination folder to extract files in the script and it will extract your files for you saving you hours of uploading headache.

  $destination = '/destination'; //blank for root folder
 
  $zip = new ZipArchive;
 
  $zip_file = $zip->open('www.zip');
 
  if ( $zip_file ) {
 
  $zip->extractTo(dirname(__FILE__).$destination);
 
  $zip->close();
 
  echo 'files successfully extracted to
      <strong>'.dirname(__FILE__).$destination.'
     </strong> directory.';
  }
  else {
  echo 'No donuts for you. :(';
  }

Hope it helps.

Cheers!

Related posts:

1. Copying files from remote server to another server through SSH

PHP/MySQL datetime formatting bypassing UNIX_TIMESTAMP

Formatting MySQL date to something useful has been a pain for PHP developers for a long time.

Usually you would make your query return the datetime using UNIX_TTIMESTAMP and then using PHP date function, format it to your heart’s content like this:

  echo date("F jS, Y h:i:s A", $row->date);

But this method has a downside, you can’t use the * and have to put all the fields in the query to use UNIX_TIMESTAMP for datetime field and have it returned as timestamp.

A better way of doing this is, especially in the scenario when you have to use * in the query, by using PHP5 DateTime Object. This way you can avoid UNIX_TIMESTAMP.

$myDate = new DateTime($row->date); 
$date = $oDate->format("F jS, Y h:i:s A ");

Hope it helps.

Cheers!

No related posts.

In a FBML Facebook App, your quick jump menu will require a little tweak to work in FBJS properly.
Just change your standard js jump menu from:

<select onchange="goto(this.options[this.selectedIndex].value)">
    <option value="page.php?id=1">Page1</option>
    <option value="page.php?id=2">Page2</option>
    <option value="page.php?id=3">Page3</option>
</select>

To this:

<select onchange="document.setLocation(this.getValue());">
   <option value="page.php?id=1">Page1</option>
   <option value="page.php?id=2">Page2</option>
   <option value="page.php?id=3">Page3</option>
</select>

Cheers.

Related posts:

1. Facebook requires every developer to verify his Facebook account to create new applications
2. Facebook applications will automatically upgrade to new data permissions on June 30
3. Facebook Graph API authentication OAuth 2.0 replacing Require Login

I was adding some features in one of my older website for a client and saw this warning:

Warning: Unknown: Your script  possibly relies on a 
session side-effect which existed until PHP 4.2.3.
Please  be advised that the session extension
 does not consider global variables as a 
source of data, unless register_globals is enabled.
You can disable this  functionality and 
this warning by setting session.bug_compat_42
 or  session.bug_compat_warn to off, respectively. 
in Unknown on line 0.

You can simply resolve this and make this warning disappear by avoiding using the same names for session variables and normal ones.

In my case, I just had to change the following code to:

$_SESSION['type'] = $type;

To this one:

$_SESSION['category_type'] =  $type;

That’s it!

Cheers.

No related posts.

So out of curiosity or some Facebook application development prospect forced you today to check on a Facebook application and which brought you here to this blog post.

After signing up for Facebook Apps and downloading facebook-platform.tar.gz, you find a sample application named ‘footprints’ inside it. Footprints App is kinda ‘Hello World’ of Facebook applications.

You uncompress the facebook-platform.tar.gz file and follow instructions available in the README file.You are required to do a number of steps before seeing your FB App ‘Hello World’:

• Setup the DB information in the config.php file,
• Create the required table in your DB as described by config.php
• get the app registered on Develop Page,
• Setup application name, get API Key and Secret key
• Add these keys in the config.php file
• Upload the whole directory on your online server,
• Open your FB Developer’s page, select your demo application,  and click ‘Edit Settings’, add Canvas Page URL on Facebook for your application, and add Canvas Callback URL (where you uploaded your application) on Canvas page.

Now to view your application, you open this http://apps.facebook.com/your-footprints/ where your-footprints is what you defined in the Canvas Page URL.

Pretty cool, isn’t it? Yeah right as long as you don’t type in your friend’s name and click ‘step’.

This is the warning message on line 52 and a fatal error on line 58 as soon as you hit ‘step’

"Warning: Missing  argument 3 for FacebookRestClient::notifications_send()"
"Fatal error: Call to  undefined method FacebookRestClient::feed_publishActionOfUser"

To remove this warning and fatal error, follow these steps:

Just add a third argument (any string would do) in function notifications_send() call. Just add this on line 52 in lib.php.

 '<a href="http://apps.facebook.com/fc-footprints/">See all your Footprints</a>.','your_app_name');

In the same lib.php file, on line 58, replace function feed_publishActionOfUser with feed_publishUserAction which is defined in facebookapi_php5_restlib.php

And by the way, don't forget to change this URL http://apps.facebook.com/footprints/ in lib.php on several places to your own application's url e.g. http://apps.facebook.com/your-footprints/

I hope that helps.

Cheers!

Related posts:

1. Facebook Graph API authentication OAuth 2.0 replacing Require Login
2. Facebook requires every developer to verify his Facebook account to create new applications

A while back I had to develop a news widget/ticker as part of my PHP website development project.

First part was to fetch news items regularly via RSS feed, cache the feed and parse it for displaying and for this I used MagpieRSS. Second part was to show the parsed news items as scrolling text or news ticker on a web page.

But first things first, check the demo of what we are talking about Demo MagpieRSS News Scroller.

Here is the PHP code for fetching and parsing the news items using MagpieRSS.

First of all, include the Magpie class:

require_once(MAGPIE_DIR.'/rss_fetch.php'); //where MAGPIE_DIR is the path to magpie dir

Provide the url and set number of items to be displayed (Ideally these should come from Database as I did in the said project managed via admin panel of CMS.):

$url = 'http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/business/rss.xml';
 
$num_of_items = 10; //set  $num_of_items = 'All' to show all items;

Now parse the feed and store all the data in the $rss_news_items variable to be displayed in the page later.

if ( $url ) {
 
  $rss = fetch_rss( $url );
 
  $rss_feed_name =  'Channel: ' . $rss->channel['title'] . ' Updated: '. $rss->channel['lastbuilddate'] ;
 
   if($num_of_items=='All') $num_of_items = sizeof($rss->items);
 
	if(sizeof($rss->items) < $num_of_items)  $num_of_items = sizeof($rss->items);
 
	$rss_news_items = '';
	for ($i=0; $i < $num_of_items; $i++) {
		$href = $rss->items[$i]['link'];
		$title = $rss->items[$i]['title'];
		$description = $rss->items[$i]['description'];
		$date = $rss->items[$i]['pubdate'];
 
		$rss_news_items .= '&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="bgwithtext"><b>'.$title.'</b> - '.$date.'</span><span class="linkTextOnly">&nbsp;<b><a href="'.$href.'" target="_blank" rel="no-follow">'.$description.'</a></b></span>&nbsp;';
  }
 
}

Now having parsed the RSS feed, we need to make news items scroll on page and for this I used this Scrolling News Ticker by Mioplanet.

echo $rss_feed_name.'<br/>
<div id="TICKER" STYLE="overflow:hidden; width:520px">'.$rss_news_items.'</div>
<script type="text/javascript" src="webticker_lib.js" language="javascript"></script>';

Don’t forget to place “webticker_lib.js” from Mioplanet website in the same directory as your php page. You may also want to place following css class in your style sheet.

I selected Mioplanet js scroller due to its usefulness. You can set the ticker directon from left to right or otherwise, ticker speed and its styles easily.

.bgwithtext{ color:#000000; background-color: orange; padding: 5px; }

I have put together a working php script with all the dependent files in this zipped folder Download PHP MagpieRSS News Scroller script. Just make sure you have ‘/cache’ directory at the root of your website and it is writable by php script (with chmod permissions 777).

Hope that helps!

Cheers.

Related posts:

1. How to fetch, parse, cache, and display your external RSS and Atom feeds and mediaRSS on your website using SimplePie

MagpieRSS is a XML-based RSS parser in PHP. MagpieRSS supports most RSS versions including modules and namespaces. Magpie RSS also supports caching which is kind a must while parsing any feed because you don’t want to fetch the feed for every hit on your website and risk getting banned.

Although Magpie RSS is really useful and I’ve used it in many projects, one of the feature which is missing from Magpie is setting different cache ages. I had to setup few feeds in a website recently and set different caching age for different feeds. If you are facing similar problem, read on to check the solution.

I made few following changes in the code of function function fetch_rss inside ‘rss_fetch.php’ file.

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 /*added 2nd parameter for setting different cache age and set existing MAGPIE_CACHE_AGE as default */
function fetch_rss ($url, $magpie_cache_age=MAGPIE_CACHE_AGE) {
    // initialize constants
    init();
 
    if ( !isset($url) ) {
        error("fetch_rss called without a url");
        return false;
    }
 
    // if cache is disabled
    if ( !MAGPIE_CACHE_ON ) {
        // fetch file, and parse it
        $resp = _fetch_remote_file( $url );
        if ( is_success( $resp->status ) ) {
            return _response_to_rss( $resp );
        }
        else {
            error("Failed to fetch $url and cache is off");
            return false;
        }
    } 
    // else cache is ON
    else {
        // Flow
        // 1. check cache
        // 2. if there is a hit, make sure its fresh
        // 3. if cached obj fails freshness check, fetch remote
        // 4. if remote fails, return stale object, or error
 
       //we are not using constant MAGPIE_CACHE_AGE rather using parameter age **added by parorrey**
	   $cache = new RSSCache( MAGPIE_CACHE_DIR, $magpie_cache_age );

And that was it. Now you can call the function fetch_rss with the cache age different than the default MagpisRSS cache age defined in constant MAGPIE_CACHE_AGE.

 
$rss = fetch_rss( $url , 3600 * 12 );  //3600 * 12 means 12 hours

You can call the function with one (default) parameter and it’ll still work just fine albeit caching the feed to default cache age.

 
$rss = fetch_rss( $url  );  //default cache age

Hopefully it’ll help someone setting different cache ages for different RSS feeds in MagpieRSS.

Related posts:

1. How to fetch, parse, cache, and display your external RSS and Atom feeds and mediaRSS on your website using SimplePie
2. Parsing News Feed using PHP & MagpieRSS and making it scroll