SimplePie gets widgetised

After being nudged by Danny about an RSS reader I started a fair while back and never finished, mainly because I didn't have a use for it, I felt obliged to create an RSS Reader widget .... mainly to stop him nagging my arse off ;). Fortunately I'd come across an RSS Reader class a tad ago called SimplePie which would make the task a LOT easier, although it took a bit of pissing about to get it working the way I wanted. If you want to skip all the usual babble you can download the current version of the plugin here ( AM RSS Reader ), it does come with some system requirements which can be found on SimplePies System requirements page.

Installation and usage

Installing is the same as every other widget, download the file, unzip it, upload the am_rss_reader_plugin folder to your blogs folder. Meander over to admin > global settings > plugin install > install new plugin ( damn that's a hell of a path ), click the install link for the plugin. Now wander over to your skins widgets and click add new widget for whatever skin container you want it in. On the widgets settings page choose a custom title for the feed, the maximum number of items you want to display and slap in the feeds url ( note to self : validate the feed url ). If you feel brave you can play with the items html ( see the readme for replacement values ), the chances are that you won't need to change it. Once you have all your settings done, hit save. That's it, you now have the feed in your skin wherever your container is.

So, what can it do?

The short answer is "quite a bit actually", the long answer is that it has a bunch of settings which it utilises in a magic ceremony that results in the RSS feed being spat out, wherever you placed the widget, in a totally customised way. This magic is carried out by unemployed elves who are desperate for work now that christmas is over. So not only will you have a really cool widget, you'll also be helping save the elves, now is that cool or what? Of course this means that the widget stops working around the beginning of december for a few weeks but such is life ;) Rather than repeat all of the settings, what they do, why and how I actually made a readme ( yeah I know, me write a readme, whatever is the world coming to? )

Semi-technical stuff

Due to the fact that I dislike having folder permissions set to "let the world rape me", which is unavoidable on some shared hosting, I decided not to use SimplePies caching system, which uses files, and instead the results are cached in the database. You can set the cache duration to absolutely anything you like, the default is 60 minutes. At the moment I've only enabled the simplest of the SimplePies abilities, ( ie/ you can get post author, content, url, date, title ), but if anybody really wants some of the other functionality that's available with the class then just holler, it's not that difficult to incorporate them.

As always this is a pre-release version, although it's been tested in most 2.x flavours, so if it breaks let me know .... if it doesn't break then it'll be released as soon as I come up with a post that doesn't involve elves ;)

¥

*edit* You can now see the widget in action on my Feeds I read page.