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

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