PHP - RSS builder

Question

I have a old website that generate its own RSS everytime a new post is created. Everything worked when I was on a server with PHP 4 but now that the host change to PHP 5, I alwa

Answer 1

I would use simpleXML to create the required structure and export the XML. Then I'd cache it to disk with file_put_contents().

Answer 2

At swcombine.com we use Feedcreator. Use that one and your problem will be gone. :)

Here is the PHP code to use it once installed:

function feed_simnews() {
    $objRSS = new UniversalFeedCreator();
    $objRSS->title = 'My News';
    $objRSS->link = 'http://link.to/news.php';
    $objRSS->description = 'daily news from me';
    $objRSS->xsl = 'http://link.to/feeds/feedxsl.xsl';
    $objRSS->language = 'en';
    $objRSS->copyright = 'Copyright: Mine!';
    $objRSS->webmaster = 'webmaster@somewhere.com';
    $objRSS->syndicationURL = 'http://link.to/news/simnews.php';
    $objRSS->ttl = 180;

    $objImage = new FeedImage();
    $objImage->title = 'my logo';
    $objImage->url = 'http://link.to/feeds/logo.jpg';
    $objImage->link = 'http://link.to';
    $objImage->description = 'Feed provided by link.to. Click to visit.';
    $objImage->width = 120;
    $objImage->height = 60;
    $objRSS->image = $objImage;

    //Function retrieving an array of your news from date start to last week
    $colNews = getYourNews(array('start_date' => 'Last week'));

    foreach($colNews as $p) {
        $objItem = new FeedItem();
        $objItem->title = $p->title;
        $objItem->description = $p->body;
        $objItem->link = $p->link;
        $objItem->date = $p->date;
        $objItem->author = $p->author;
        $objItem->guid = $p->guid;

        $objRSS->addItem($objItem);
    }

    $objRSS->saveFeed('RSS2.0', 'http://link.to/feeds/news.xml', false);
};

Quite KISS. :)

Answer 3

Not a full answer, but you don't have to parse your own XML. It will hurt performance and reliability.

But definitely make sure it is well-formed. It shouldn't be very hard if you generate it by hand or using general-purpose tools. Or maybe your included HTML ruins it?

Answer 4

There are lots of things that can make XML malformed. It might be a problem with character entities (a '<', '>', or '&' in the data between the XML tags). Try running anything output from a database through htmlentities() when you concatenate the string. Do you have an example of the generated XML for us to look at so we can see where the problem is?

Answer 5

I've used this LGPL-licensed feedcreator class in the past and it worked quite well for the very simple use I had for it.

Answer 6

PHP5 now comes with the SimpleXML extension, it's a pretty quick way to build valid XML if your needs aren't complicated.

However, the problem you're suggesting doesn't seem to an issue of implementation more a problem of syntax. Perhaps you could update your question with a code example, or, a copy of the XML that is produced.