MagpieRSS

MagpieRSS provides an XML-based (expat) RSS parser in PHP.

MagpieRSS is compatible with RSS .9 through RSS 1.0, and supports the RSS 1.0's modules. (with a few exceptions)

News!

• MagpieRSS 0.51 Released
  • important bugfix!
  • fix "silent failure" when PHP doesn't have zlib
• Feed On Feeds Uses Magpie
  • server based PHP RSS aggregator built with MagpieRSS
  • easy to install, easy to use.
• MagpieRSS 0.5 Released
  • supports transparent HTTP gzip content negotiation for reduced bandwidth usage
  • quashed some undefined index notices
• MagpieRSS 0.46 Released
  • minor release, more error handling clean up
  • documentation fixes, simpler example
  • new trouble shooting guide for installation and usage problems
• Magpie News as RSS
  • releases, bug fixes, releated stories as an RSS feed
• MagpieRSS Cookbook: Simple PHP RSS How Tos
  • answers some of the most frequently asked Magpie questions
  • feedback, suggestions, requests, recipes welcome
• MagpieRSS 0.4 Released!
  • improved error handling, more flexibility for script authors, backwards compatible
  • new and better examples! including using MagpieRSS and Smarty
  • new Smarty plugin for RSS date parsing
  
  

Why?

• use a parser based on regular expressions, making for an inherently fragile solution
• only support early versions of RSS
• discard all the interesting information besides item title, description, and link.
• not build proper separation between parsing the RSS and displaying it.

Features

• Easy to Use

  As simple as:

  require('rss_fetch.inc');
  $rss = fetch_rss($url);
  

• Parses RSS 0.9 - RSS 1.0

  Parses most RSS formats, including support for 1.0 modules and limited namespace support. RSS is packed into convenient data structures; easy to use in PHP, and appropriate for passing to a templating system, like Smarty.

• Integrated Object Cache

  Caching the parsed RSS means that the 2nd request is fast, and that including the rss_fetch call in your PHP page won't destroy your performance, and force you to reply on an external cron job. And it happens transparently.

• HTTP Conditional GETs

  Save bandwidth and speed up download times with intelligent use of Last-Modified and ETag.
  See HTTP Conditional Get for RSS Hackers

• Configurable

  Makes extensive use of constants to allow overriding default behaviour, and installation on shared hosts.

• Modular

  • rss_fetch.inc - wraps a simple interface (fetch_rss()) around the library.
  • rss_parse.inc - provides the RSS parser, and the RSS object
  • rss_cache.inc - a simple (no GC) object cache, optimized for RSS objects
  • rss_utils.inc - utility functions for working with RSS. currently provides parse_w3cdtf(), for parsing W3CDTF into epoch seconds.

Magpie's approach to parsing RSS

This makes it very simple support the varied versions of RSS simply, but forces the consumer of a RSS feed to be cognizant of how it is structured.(at least if you want to do something fancy)

Magpie parses a RSS feed into a simple object, with 4 fields: channel, items, image, and textinput.

channel

items

<item rdf:about="http://protest.net/NorthEast/calendrome.cgi?span=event&ID=210257">
<title>Weekly Peace Vigil</title>
<link>http://protest.net/NorthEast/calendrome.cgi?span=event&ID=210257</link>
<description>Wear a white ribbon</description>
<dc:subject>Peace</dc:subject>
<ev:startdate>2002-06-01T11:00:00</ev:startdate>
<ev:location>Northampton, MA</ev:location>
<ev:enddate>2002-06-01T12:00:00</ev:enddate>
<ev:type>Protest</ev:type>
</item>
	

Is parsed, and pushed on the $rss->items array as:

array(
	title => 'Weekly Peace Vigil',
	link => 'http://protest.net/NorthEast/calendrome.cgi?span=event&ID=210257',
	description => 'Wear a white ribbon',
	dc => array (
			subject => 'Peace'
		),
	ev => array (
		startdate => '2002-06-01T11:00:00',
		enddate => '2002-06-01T12:00:00',
		type => 'Protest',
		location => 'Northampton, MA'
	)
);

image and textinput

Usage Examples:

require_once 'rss_fetch.inc';

$url = 'http://magpie.sf.net/samples/imc.1-0.rdf';
$rss = fetch_rss($url);

echo "Site: ", $rss->channel['title'], "<br>\n";
foreach ($rss->items as $item ) {
	$title = $item[title];
	$url   = $item[link];
	echo "<a href=$url>$title</a></li><br>\n";
}

Todos

RSS Parser

• Swap in a smarter parser that includes optional support for validation, and required fields.
• Support RSS 2.0 (as much as I'm annoyed by it)
• Improve support for modules that rely on attributes

RSS Cache

• Light-weight garbage collection

Fetch RSS

• Attempt to auto-detect an RSS feed, given a URL following, much like rssfinder.pydoes.

Misc

• More examples
• A test suite
• RSS generation, perhaps with RSSwriter?

RSS Resources

• RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters is a great place to start.
• RSS Workshop: Publish and Syndicate Your News to the Web is also a good introduction
• Finding More Channels on how to find RSS feeds.
• Hammersley's Content Syndication with XML and RSS is a blog covering RSS current events.
• RSS-DEV mailing list is generally a very helpful, informative space, with the occasional heated debate
• RSS Validator

License and Contact Info

coded by: kellan (at) protest.net, feedback is always appreciated.