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. Setting different cache age for different feeds using Magpie RSS – PHP RSS Parser
2. 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