It’s easy to add a newsfeed to a Mambo or Joomla website. The normal place for them is on the right hand column of a 3 column layout. In this example we’re doing just that.
Tag: rss
Cake PHP have launched a new version or their PHP framework and one of the snippets was the integration of SimplePie. The install and demo for normal sites is incredibly simple and the code is fully featured but held in a single file. It can even spit out the “subscribe via” links for the major sites.
All in all it appears to be very impressive.
I’m working on a post on nofollows and created a couple of pages to test the concepts (therefore if you ever link to one page, could you link to both :), alternatively just link to this post and let the user click through.)
A great many vBulletin forum owners appear to be unaware that their forums can provide an RSS feed “out of the box”.
This is a great shame because it limits the forums ability to grow and have visibility.
Now the naysayers will say one of two things
- I don’t want people stealing my content
- I want people to visit the forum and if they use feeds they might not (usually because of ad revenue)
The reality is that there are a great many forums out there all competing for the same users and you need to use every competitive advantage there is. In vBulletin it’s things like allowing users to subscribe to daily digests of posts to a forum. Pretty much the same thing result as an RSS feed but it’s turned on by default and forum owners don’t proactively turn it off.
I’m not sure I quite “get” GoogleBase just yet – in as much as Google is already indexing my sites so why do I need to submit my content all over again into this system… and who would actually use it to find stuff – surely the standard Google Search Engine is doing a good enough job?
I received my newsletter from the phpClasses today and noticed that there was a tool to make it easier to upload articles and information to GoogleBase so I thought I’d give it a try.
The code is still quite new and there are only a few options but it’s easy enough to extend and use. Documentation is needed and I’m sure it will follow. Given that the author appears to be Spanish I think it’s already pretty good.
A quick search on Google came up with this free service to intelligently parse an RSS feed into a javascript feed.
You don’t have full control of the layout but for most of us it will be more than enough.
CaRP is a “Caching RSS Parser“, thus it’s name. It comes in a variety of flavours but I tested the free version.
The only problem I had was that my host had safe mode turned on and that caused some problems in the “installation” – creating the cache folders but the manual instructions did the trick.
The scripts come with an install and example page. To get real value check their online examples which show how you can combine two feeds and take the most recent, for example.
I’ve worked with DOMIT! because it’s part of the Mambo and Joomla CMS systems so I expected this to be a doddle. Sorry, it wasn’t. There were 2 undefined constants and one code defect which all took time to identify.
There is no doubt that the code in DOMIT! is far more exhaustive than that of Magpie but, really, you don’t need it if all you’re planning to do is parse an RSS onto a webpage.