SimplePie. The best pie you will ever get!

So, I was wondering what Mark used for grabbing RSS articles. I used the MagPieRSS script, but Mark recommended me SimplePie. This truelly is the best pie you will ever get. Honestly. At least, it helped to make my life one or two steps easier, in addition to MagPieRSS.

Let me explain
MagPieRSS will grab the feed, and then process it, and return a big object with all the rss feed items, and tags and whatever in it. You then go through all of these items, and find out what you have to use in order to display the content for example. (Some feeds use others use others use ... well, you know what I mean). And that is what made it so stupid. Having multiple if statements and whatever, just to check out what the content tag was, what the date tag was.

SimplePie is different. It includes the most popular tags, and automatically detects which one to use for the feed. You simple use a function from a class, and voila, you have the content, date and title, all in one place.

Auto-discovery
Also, SimplePie has some basic auto-feed discovery built-in. You just say phpcookies.com, and it will go and look for the feed on that particular site.

So once again, SimplePie ROCKS!

Thanks Mark :)

45n5 (946) says on November 18, 2007:

yeah, i always had problems with magpie that's why the last time I finally decided to look elsewhere and have been pleased with simplepie so far

glad you liked it.

Stu says on November 18, 2007

SimplePie is one sweeeeet script!

Especially useful if you are pulling feeds like Flickr or Youtube.

There are plenty of config examples on their site too, so pretty much anything you want to do, you'll find a code example which can be reasonably easily hacked to fit your needs.

Noice! :-)