Simple PHP RSS Reader Wordpress Plugin

// December 4th, 2009 // Development, PHP, Web Development, Wordpress

I wanted to add some articles into a page on one of my Wordpress sites. I wanted something very simple and easy to use. It has been a long time since I had written a plugin.

First things first, start with declaring what your plugin is called, your name, version, your URL and other information at the top of the PHP file like this:

/**
* @package RSS Reader
* @author Mark Robson
* @version 0.1
*/
/*
Plugin Name: RSS Reader
Plugin URI: http://www.whiteforest.co.uk
Description: Pull in RSS articles into your site
Author: Mark Robson
Version: 0.1
Author URI: http://www.whiteforest.co.uk/
*/

I then started off with the core of the functionality, in this case the read_rss() function. First thing to do is set up a DOMDocument, and then load in the document using the objects load() function, passing in the rss feed you want. As this is a very basic plugin and I knew exactly what feed I wanted, I simply hardcoded it. It wouldn’t be too difficult to either store the feed in a database, or pass it in when the feed is embedded in a post. For now we will leave it like this.

function  read_rss()
{
$xmldoc = new DOMDocument();
$xmldoc->load('http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/world/rss.xml');</code>
 
$info = "";
 
foreach ($xmldoc->getElementsByTagName('item') as $feeditem)
{
$info .= '<h3><a href="' . $feeditem->getElementsByTagName('link')->item(0)->nodeValue . '"> ' . $feeditem->getElementsByTagName('title')->item(0)->nodeValue  . </a></h3>';
$info .= "<p>" . $feeditem->getElementsByTagName('description')->item(0)->nodeValue . "<p>";
}
echo $info;
}

Ok, so that all works. It pulls in the title, and link to the article, and also the description of the post. That is all I needed right now. Next, we want to embed something in the particular post we are bringing the feed into. In this case, I want to place a comment in the post, which will then trigger Wordpress to replace that, and insert the rendered feed into the content. This is done with this:

function  setup_rss($content)
{
if(! preg_match('<!--rssfeed-->', $content))
{
return $content;
}
else
{
read_rss();
}
}

Ok, now that is just about ready. Now we need to tell Wordpress to look for each instance of the above This is done simply by adding a filter on the post content using:

49	add_filter('the_content', 'setup_rss');

Here is the final code:

/**
* @package RSS Reader
* @author Mark Robson
* @version 0.1
*/
/*
Plugin Name: RSS Reader
Plugin URI: http://www.whiteforest.co.uk
Description: Pull in RSS articles into your site
Author: Mark Robson
Version: 0.1
Author URI: http://www.whiteforest.co.uk/
*/
 
function  setup_rss($content)
{
if(! preg_match('<!--rssfeed-->', $content))
{
return $content;
}
else
{
read_rss();
}
}
 
function  read_rss()
{
$xmldoc = new DOMDocument();
$xmldoc->load('http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/world/rss.xml');
 
$info = "";
 
foreach ($xmldoc->getElementsByTagName('item') as $feeditem)
{
$info .= '<h3><a href="' . $feeditem->getElementsByTagName('link')->item(0)->nodeValue . '"> ' . $feeditem->getElementsByTagName('title')->item(0)->nodeValue  . '</a></h3>';
$info .= "<p>" . $feeditem->getElementsByTagName('description')->item(0)->nodeValue . "<p>";
}
 
echo $info;
}
 
add_filter('the_content', 'setup_rss');

One Response to “Simple PHP RSS Reader Wordpress Plugin”

Senica Gonzalez says:

January 8, 2010 at 7:30 pm

Perfect. Thanks.

Whiteforest