How to quickly Parse WordPress RSS Feed using PHP

The easy way to parse RSS (Really Simple Syndication) fee from wordpress blog in your personal site using PHP is with PEAR:XML_RSS package.

Installing XML_RSS

Step1 :  run Pear install XML_RSS   

The chances are you endup with an error saying XML_RSS requires XML_Tree….. so run  “pear install –alldeps XML_RSS’  this will download XML_tree…..  But later on you might found out that XML_RSS is not working complaining about XML_parser is not found. I blindly assumed that –alldeps will takecare that but it didnt. so you need to do “pear install XML_Parser” also. So in short…..

pear install XML_Parser
pear install XML_Tree
pear install XML_RSS

Step 2: Grab RSS Feed from wordpress and copy to your local disk

There is no point in fetching RSS and parsing when every time user hits or refreshes your webpage as the content is not that dynamic (atleast for me). So I would cache the rss feed and refresh every 24 hrs.

So the php code goes like

<?php
require_once “XML/RSS.php”;
$cache_file = “/tmp/nlakkakula.wordpress.rss”;
if(!file_exists($cache_file) || (filemtime($cache_file) < time() -86400))
{
copy(“http://nlakkakula.wordpress.com/feed“, $cache_file);
}

Step 3: Parsing the Feed

XML_RSS has getItems() method, which grabs all items into an array to make your life easy.

so the rest of the code is

$r = & new XML_RSS($cache_file);
$r->parse();
echo “<h3> Recent Blog Entries From WordPress </h3>”;
echo “<ul>\n”;
foreach ($r->getItems() as $entry)
{
echo “<li><a href=\”".$entry['link'].”\”>”.$entry['title'].”</a></li>\n”;
}
echo “</ul>\n”;
?>

This simple PHP scriptlet grabs WordPress feed and shows the items in your website.

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