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rss2php and rss-homepage

This page is about rss2php - the library of PHP scripts to parse RSS feeds. If you just want a nice looking page for all of your RSS feeds, you probably want rss-homepage.

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rss2php

rss2php is a library of php scripts to parse and interpret rss feeds from websites. The data that the scripts process can then be used to create one page, showing news from many different sites for example.

Getting Started

rss2php requires a web server running PHP to work.

• Extract the archive to a folder that can be served to clients on your web server.

• Open up example.php (wherever it is) in your web browser. This will show you a very basic example of what is possible.

• Read example.php and use it to create your own pages to parse RSS feeds.

• Modify update.sh to save the feeds you want to the directory where you extracted the archive.

• You will probably want to add update.sh to a cron job so that it downloads the feeds every so often.

More Information

rss2php is a library of php scripts that will parse RSS feeds, and give an output for php pages.

You can use the library to parse multiple RSS feeds and display them on one web page, exactly how you want it to be displayed.

At the moment rss2php contains:

• rss.php - the main RSS parsing script

• default.php - a default config file with instructions on how to create your own

• slashdot.php - an example config file for parsing the Slashdot RSS feed

• example.php - a sample page that contains the output for Slashdot and BBC news feeds using the slashdot and default config files

• update.sh - a very simple script to download and cache the RSS feeds needed (this will probably need to be modified by you - it downloads cached feeds to ~/public_html/rss so you might want to change this)

• bbccache.xml and slashdotcache.xml - cached feeds from the BBC and Slashdot

Normally, rss2php is set to use RSS feeds that have been locally cached (as XML files). However, to get news in (mostly) real time, you need a way of updating these local caches. My method is to run update.sh as a cron job every 30 minutes, as this script will download the RSS feeds to local XML files, and then every time the web page is reloaded, it does not need to wait to open remote RSS feeds.

Acknowledgements

A portion of the actual RSS parsing code is from a PHP tutorial by Kevin Yank, and the tutorial can be viewed at:
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/php-xml-parsing-rss-1-0/4

Changelog

• Version 0.2

  • This release is mainly bug fixes, but I bumped it up to version 0.2 as this is what rss-homepage (a complete suite to output an aesthetic home page very easily with multiple feeds) will probably be based on.

  • Cleaned up the file structure (all files are in one folder)

  • Added acknowledgment of portions of the code in release notes

  • Renamed the output page to example.php

  • Added references to rss-homepage in example file

  • Updated some config files (very minor fixes)

• Version 0.1

  • First release, containing rss.php - parser file, default.php - default config file, slashdot.php - slashdot config, Slashdot and BBC caches, index.php - an example output page, and update.sh - a simple update script.