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An Easy Way to Display an RSS Feed with PHP

c.bavota — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 05:48:41 +0000

RSS feeds are everywhere, and sometimes it’s a good idea to display one to keep people in the loop of important posts from your site, or sites you think might be relevant. Luckily, PHP 5 introduced the DOM extension which make it easy to work with XML documents. Now all it takes is just a small bit of code to fetch and display a feed.

The following code will first create a new DOMDocument() into which we will load the WordPress.org RSS feed.

$rss = new DOMDocument();
$rss->load('http://wordpress.org/news/feed/');

Then we will single out certain elements and place them into an array. For this example, I will just fetch the title, description, link and published on date.

$feed = array();
foreach ($rss->getElementsByTagName('item') as $node) {
	$item = array ( 
		'title' => $node->getElementsByTagName('title')->item(0)->nodeValue,
		'desc' => $node->getElementsByTagName('description')->item(0)->nodeValue,
		'link' => $node->getElementsByTagName('link')->item(0)->nodeValue,
		'date' => $node->getElementsByTagName('pubDate')->item(0)->nodeValue,
		);
	array_push($feed, $item);
}

Finally, we set it to display 5 posts on screen with the titles linking directly to the original post.

$limit = 5;
for($x=0;$x<$limit;$x++) {
	$title = str_replace(' & ', ' & ', $feed[$x]['title']);
	$link = $feed[$x]['link'];
	$description = $feed[$x]['desc'];
	$date = date('l F d, Y', strtotime($feed[$x]['date']));
	echo '.$link.'" title="'.$title.'">'.$title.'
';
	echo 'Posted on '.$date.'
';
	echo ''.$description.'
';
}

Put it all together and this is what you get:


	$rss = new DOMDocument();
	$rss->load('http://wordpress.org/news/feed/');
	$feed = array();
	foreach ($rss->getElementsByTagName('item') as $node) {
		$item = array ( 
			'title' => $node->getElementsByTagName('title')->item(0)->nodeValue,
			'desc' => $node->getElementsByTagName('description')->item(0)->nodeValue,
			'link' => $node->getElementsByTagName('link')->item(0)->nodeValue,
			'date' => $node->getElementsByTagName('pubDate')->item(0)->nodeValue,
			);
		array_push($feed, $item);
	}
	$limit = 5;
	for($x=0;$x<$limit;$x++) {
		$title = str_replace(' & ', ' & ', $feed[$x]['title']);
		$link = $feed[$x]['link'];
		$description = $feed[$x]['desc'];
		$date = date('l F d, Y', strtotime($feed[$x]['date']));
		echo '.$link.'" title="'.$title.'">'.$title.'
';
		echo 'Posted on '.$date.'
';
		echo ''.$description.'
';
	}
?>

Not too complicated. All you need to change is the feed you want to load (line #3) and the number of posts to display (line #14). Of course, you could always play around with the output to get it styled exactly how you want. That is totally up to you.

Using get_theme_data() when Developing a Custom Theme for WordPress

c.bavota — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 18:39:45 +0000

If you are building a custom theme that you would like to add to the WordPress directory or start to sell online somewhere, a great function that can help you out is get_theme_data(). What exactly does it do? It gathers all the theme information that you were supposed to add to the style.css file so you can use it throughout your theme.

If you download a copy of Magazine Basic, you can see it in action in the functions.php file, right at the top. To make sure it is working, though, you have to have your style.css file setup correctly. The top of that file should look something like this:

/*
Theme Name: Magazine Basic
Theme URI: http://themes.bavotasan.com/our-themes/basic-themes/magazine-basic
Description: Built for WordPress 3.0. A magazine style theme with a fully customizable layout. Theme options include site width, 1 or 2 widgetized sidebars, header logo, multiple front page grid layouts, new WP 3.0 menu system, Google Analytics, pagination, drop-down menus and tons more. Also includes dynamic SEO keywords and site descriptions. Tested in Firefox 3.6, IE 7 & 8 and Safari 4. Fully optimized for search engine ranking. Translation ready. 100% valid xHTML. Designed by Themes by bavotasan.com.
Version: 2.6.7
Author: c.bavota
Author URI: http://themes.bavotasan.com/
Tags: right-sidebar,left-sidebar,fixed-width,three-columns,two-columns,white,custom-header,theme-options
 
	The CSS, XHTML and design is released under GPL:
	http://www.opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license.php
 
*/

This is all information that you can now use with get_theme_data(). I use it in Magazine Basic like so:

$bavotasan_theme_data = get_theme_data(TEMPLATEPATH.'/style.css');

With that in my functions.php file, I can use the array of data that it provides like so:

$bavotasan_theme_data = get_theme_data(TEMPLATEPATH.'/style.css');
define('THEME_NAME', $bavotasan_theme_data['Name']);
define('THEME_AUTHOR', $bavotasan_theme_data['Author']);
define('THEME_HOMEPAGE', $bavotasan_theme_data['URI']);
define('THEME_VERSION', trim($bavotasan_theme_data['Version']));

If you are not familiar with the define() function, check out Defining a Constant with PHP.

Now you can use those four constants throughout your theme. Here are some examples that I use:

In footer.php:

 echo THEME_NAME; ?>  _e("theme designed by", "magazine-basic"); ?> Themes by bavotasan.com.

In functions.php:

echo '
'.__('Version', "magazine-basic").': '.THEME_VERSION.'
'.__('Author', "magazine-basic").': '.THEME_AUTHOR.'
'.__('Built by', "magazine-basic").': Themes by bavotasan.com
'.__('Theme home page', "magazine-basic").': .THEME_HOMEPAGE.'">'.THEME_NAME.'
';

You can also get the description and the tags. Check out the Codex for a little more info.

The Royale Flash Free Header

c.bavota — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 03:00:47 +0000

Flash is a pretty wickedly versatile application for building cool elements for websites. I built a header (or I guess it can really be used anywhere) in Flash that retrieves all of its information from two XML files. It is possible to make it a slideshow or just use it as is. It best suits sites that want to feature certain items on their main page, or really anywhere on their site. The sample I created promotes five CD releases.

Features:

Converts to a slideshow with one option change in the data.xml file
Slideshow timer control
Retrieves all information from the info.xml file
Customize background images
Compatible with all browsers
Professional looking

Here are the data options:

>
>
>0> //do you want it to be a slideshow, 0 = NO, 1 = YES
>8000> //if it is a slideshow, how many milliseconds before the slides switch
>
>

Here is what the info.xml files looks like:

>
>
>images/image1.jpg> //must be 156px by 156px to fit properly
>images/back1.jpg> // background images must be 960px by 250px
>Bob Dylan – Tell Tale Signs>
>This is where you put the description of the item.>
>http://www.amazon.com/>
>
>