An Easy Way to Display an RSS Feed with PHP

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(' & ', ' &amp; ', $feed[$x]['title']);
	$link = $feed[$x]['link'];
	$description = $feed[$x]['desc'];
	$date = date('l F d, Y', strtotime($feed[$x]['date']));
	echo '<p><strong><a href="'.$link.'" title="'.$title.'">'.$title.'</a></strong><br />';
	echo '<small><em>Posted on '.$date.'</em></small></p>';
	echo '<p>'.$description.'</p>';
}

Put it all together and this is what you get:

<?php
	$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(' & ', ' &amp; ', $feed[$x]['title']);
		$link = $feed[$x]['link'];
		$description = $feed[$x]['desc'];
		$date = date('l F d, Y', strtotime($feed[$x]['date']));
		echo '<p><strong><a href="'.$link.'" title="'.$title.'">'.$title.'</a></strong><br />';
		echo '<small><em>Posted on '.$date.'</em></small></p>';
		echo '<p>'.$description.'</p>';
	}
?>

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.