Creating RSS 2.0 Feeds - Creating RSS 2.0 with PHP

Great RSS 2.0 support for PHP is to be found in the feedcreator.class by Kai Blankenhorn at http://www.bitfolge.de. Unlike the previous section's XML::RSS, feedcreator.class can only create RSS feeds; it can't parse them. No matter: it's very good at that indeed.

As illustrated in Example 4-10, the function for each feed element is named after the element, so it behaves pretty much as you would expect.

Example 4-10. A PHP script using FeedCreator that produces RSS 2.0

<?php
include("feedcreator.class.php");

$rss = new UniversalFeedCreator();
$rss->title = "Example Feed";
$rss->description = "This is the feed description";
$rss->link = "http://www.example.com/";

// Image section
$image = new FeedImage();
$image->title = "example logo";
$image->url = "http://www.example.com/images/logo.gif"; $image->link = "http://www.example.com"; $image->description = "Visit Example.com!"; $rss->image = $image;

// Item Loop
$item = new FeedItem();
$item->title = "Entry one";
$item->link = http://www.example.com/entryone;
$item->description = "This is the content of the first entry";
$item->author = "Ben Hammersley";
$rss->addItem($item);
// End Item Loop

?>

This is a very simple script. As you can see from the resulting feed, Example 4-11, it produces only one item. We'll be using it for more complicated things later on in the book, so in the meantime, once we've passed over the example output, we'll take a quick look at some of the special features.

Example 4-11. An RSS 2.0 feed created with PHP

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <!-- generator="FeedCreator 1.7.1" -->
<rss version="2.0">
    <channel>
        <title>Example Feed</title>
        <description>This is the feed description</description>
        <link>http://www.example.com/</link>
        <lastBuildDate>Thu, 16 Sep 2004 20:16:22 +0100</lastBuildDate>
        <generator>FeedCreator 1.7.1</generator>
        <image> 
            <url>http://www.example.com/ images/logo.gif</url>
            <title>example logo</title> 
            <link>http://www.example.com </link>
            <description>Visit Example.com!</description>
        </image>
        <item>
            <title>Entry one</title> 
            <link>http://www.example.com/ entryone</link>
            <description>This is the content of the first entry</description>
            <author>Ben Hammersley</author>
        </item>
    </channel>
</rss>

Next: Caching and saving >>
 

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