#PHP RSS READER TUTORIAL FOR FREE#
#PHP RSS READER TUTORIAL HOW TO#
#PHP RSS READER TUTORIAL CODE#

This is the function that runs when the class is first instantiated. Next, we’ll create a constructor for the class. The variable $feed will hold the URL of the Flickr page we’re loading. Because this is a pretty simple class, we only need one: Now that we have our class, we need to declare all of the variables we’re going to need. We start by creating a file named flickr.php and declaring the class flickr to contain all of our code:

#PHP RSS READER TUTORIAL HOW TO#

But first, we need to tell our site how to handle this information. We want the URL of this page, which should look something like this: a moment we’ll use this URL to load our Flickr page into our website. This is not what we’re worried about, though. After you click it, you’ll get your browsers default RSS feed display, probably offering options to subscribe using a number of services. You’ll more than likely want to use the “Latest” option. The feed is located at the bottom of the main photostream, and it looks like this: Our first step is to find the RSS feed for our Flickr page. You’ll also need a server that supports PHP 5. I’m assuming for the purposes of this tutorial that you have a Flickr account, a basic understanding of PHP 5, and a good grasp on XHTML and CSS. When we’re done, it should look like this demo Flickr module. In this tutorial, we’ll build a PHP class to load and parse a Flickr RSS feed, isolate the pieces of information we need, and output formatted XHTML to the browser. We simply need to grab the content from our account, figure out how to read it right into our website, and then display it in such a way that it will mesh with the rest of our site’s design. This way, we don’t have to create any content at all. One solution is to use RSS feeds to grab the content off of our various social media sites (in this example, we’ll use Flickr). So, what we’re hoping for is a way to get the best of both worlds: how can we utilize the power of Flickr on our own website without needing to dedicate a great deal of time to solving the problem? The Solution Besides, doesn’t it seem a little silly to reinvent the wheel?

The learning experience of building such tools is great, but we don’t always have hundreds of hours to dedicate to rebuilding Flickr’s robust photo management. On the flipside, you could reverse engineer all of these tools and create your own versions of them for use on your personal website, creating the same immersive user experience you get from using social tools, but that’s a good deal of time and effort. This is great, but it limits your creativity, and it also requires your readers to remember multiple separate URLs.

#PHP RSS READER TUTORIAL FOR FREE#

With sites like Myspace, Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter, you can essentially create a full-on interactive web experience for free and with no knowledge of web design. In his PHPBuilder tutorial, Jason Gilmore introduces SimplePie and demonstrates how easy it is to create a rudimentary custom RSS aggregator using this powerful library.Īll users will need to do is provide the aggregator with a site’s RSS feed location, and the aggregator will retrieve and parse the feed, converting it into a format that the user can easily peruse.The Internet seems to be getting easier everyday.

Many of these solutions also offer a number of advanced features such as feed caching in order to reduce bandwidth consumption.įor PHP developers, the SimplePie library not only offers the aforementioned features, but also supports both RSS and Atom formats, multiple character encodings, and an architecture that makes integration with your favorite content management and blogging platforms a breeze.

Luckily, a number of open source libraries can retrieve and parse RSS feeds for you.

#PHP RSS READER TUTORIAL CODE#

Writing custom code capable of efficiently retrieving and parsing the XML which comprises a RSS feed can be a difficult and tedious process.

Php rss reader tutorial