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
2. Parsing News Feed using PHP & MagpieRSS and making it scroll

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