|
How To Display An XML Feed On Your Website
|
By William Lee
[Hits: 29949]
|
|
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) has taken off in a big way. Justas satellite television beams more channels into your home thanyou can watch, RSS allows to you display an endless amount ofother peoples content. Whilst RSS XML feeds are plenty, there'snot as much in the way of clear, simple instruction when itcomes to making use of those feeds.
If you're one of the webmasters who uses a content managementsystem that makes using RSS XML feeds as simple as specifying afeed URL then you're fortunate in that respect. For others, theoptions available tend to be offered by developers of thesoftware and the usage instructions provided can often beriddled with technical jargon. Many cry, "Use my feed", butfewer tell you how.
One of the best and easiest ways I've found to show the contentfrom an RSS XML feed on one of my websites is to use a readymade PHP parser. Now, don't worry about what that means, justthink of it as somthing that someone has already created; ablackbox that makes it easy for you to use content from RSSfeeds and display it on your website.
For this guide, I've used MagpieRSS because it's compact, workswell and is distributed under the GPL, which basically meansit's free for you to use. Now, MagpieRSS is written in PHP soyou'll need a compatible hosting account that allows you toexecute PHP scripts.
For the purposes of this guide, I'm assuming you've some levelof basic knowledge about websites e.g. you know how to FTP,change file permissions etc. Covering the basics of running awebsite is beyond the scope of this article.
Instead, let's cover what are probably the most difficult steps;displaying the content from an RSS feed on your website.
1. Download the latest stable release of MagpieRSS. 2. Extractthe contents of the ZIP file onto your computer. 3. The corefiles you need from the ZIP package are rss_cache.inc,rss_fetch.inc, rss_parse.inc, rss_utils.inc. You'll also needthe extlib folder together with the Snoopy.class.inc file insideof it. 4. Create a new file to display your RSS feed. I'vecalled mine, index.php. Inside this file, copy and paste thecontents of the file referred to below and save it. 5. Uploadall of the files and the folder mentioned in steps 3 and 4 toyour hosting account. Put them into the desired location, butensure that the Snoopy.class.inc file is still within the extlibfolder. 6. Then visit the file you created in step 4 using yourweb browser.
That's the basics of it. Once you've got this far, customisingthe way you present the content of the feed is relatively easy.Just refer back to the MagpieRSS website for guidance on how todo this.
|
|
|
|
