Developer's Corner

Although feeds aren't a new invention, lately they are getting more popular. Using feeds, we have an easy and convenient way to publish content, either news or any other sources (blogs, articles, etc.)

I had to implement feeding capabilities to a PHP application I'm working on, and I've been suggested to use FeedCreator, an open source library written, by Kai Blankenhorn, which provides support for the following feeds:

• RSS (0.91, 1.0, 2.0)
• PIE (0.1)
• MBOX
• OPML
• ATOM
• HTML
• JS

The most diffused are undoubtedly RSS and Atom, but if you need less known format you can.

Adding feeds to your application is as simple as writing the following code (taken from the library documentation):

include("feedcreator.class.php"); 

$rss = new UniversalFeedCreator(); 
$rss->useCached(); // use cached version if age<1 hour 
$rss->title = "PHP news"; 
$rss->description = "daily news from the PHP scripting world"; 

//optional 
$rss->descriptionTruncSize = 500; 
$rss->descriptionHtmlSyndicated = true; 

$rss->link = "http://www.dailyphp.net/news"; 
$rss->syndicationURL = "http://www.dailyphp.net/".$_SERVER["PHP_SELF"]; 

$image = new FeedImage(); 
$image->title = "dailyphp.net logo"; 
$image->url = "http://www.dailyphp.net/images/logo.gif"; 
$image->link = "http://www.dailyphp.net"; 
$image->description = "Feed provided by dailyphp.net. Click to visit."; 

//optional 
$image->descriptionTruncSize = 500; 
$image->descriptionHtmlSyndicated = true; 

$rss->image = $image; 

// get your news items from somewhere, e.g. your database: 
mysql_select_db($dbHost, $dbUser, $dbPass); 
$res = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM news ORDER BY newsdate DESC"); 
while ($data = mysql_fetch_object($res)) { 
$item = new FeedItem(); 
$item->title = $data->title; 
$item->link = $data->url; 
$item->description = $data->short; 

//optional 
item->descriptionTruncSize = 500; 
item->descriptionHtmlSyndicated = true; 

$item->date = $data->newsdate; 
$item->source = "http://www.dailyphp.net"; 
$item->author = "John Doe"; 

$rss->addItem($item); 
} 

// valid format strings are: RSS0.91, RSS1.0, RSS2.0, PIE0.1 (deprecated), 
// MBOX, OPML, ATOM, ATOM0.3, HTML, JS 
echo $rss->saveFeed("RSS1.0", "news/feed.xml");

What makes it so special is that it is really simple to use.

The libray is open source, released under the LGPL license.

For more information and to download the library, click here