I recently had brand new bespoke WordPress Theme designed for my fashion website www.FashionStyleYou.co.uk by Dale of www.Elegantwpthemes.com and I must say that I am over the moon with it.

Heres what the site used to look like Fashion Style You Gets A Makeover

So if you are wanting a new look for your blog you could do a lot worse than to give Dale a shout, examples of his work can be seen at www.Elegantwpthemes.com and themes.rock-kitty.net, he is also available for SEO work too www.searchengine.ltd.uk.

One Problem I have found since developing Keith’s Easy Rss WordPress Plugin has been the lack of decent up to date merchant RSS feeds, but no longer is that an issue thanks to those awesome guys at Easy Content Units as they have made unit feeds available via rss*, and after consulting with yours truly they have ensured they are compatible with the aforementioned plugin.

*available only to ecu pro members.

An example feed can be seen here.

To use these feeds with Keith’s Easy Rss WordPress Plugin include in your wordpress post in this format.

[ker]rss url,number of results required[/ker]

as so

[ker]http://www.easycontentunits.com/rss/6553/3/rss2.rss,10[/ker]

Click here for full details of this wordpress plugin and to download.

More about the Easy Content units rss feed can be found on the ECU blog >> ECU goes RSS – Pro Feature

Example of an ECU rss feed in a blog post Denner Cashmere voucher code

** Plugin updated to 0.2a 6th Feb 2009 ** (see below)

Flush with the success of writing Easy Content Units WordPress Plugin I decided to have a go at the Sunshine WordPress plugin competition which is being run over on Joost de Valk’s Blog. For some time I have been using an RSS plugin called Feedlist to embed Sunshine rss feeds in to wordpress, and it does the trick but can be a little messy, so after  having had a good look round on google for something better and drawing a blank my project for the competition was a wordpress plugin that would easily pull in and parse the Sunshine rss feeds.

Where to start? well the ECU plugin I made couldn’t be simpler to use so that was first stop, then I needed to workout how to parse the rss feed and output the results, luckily during my research I discovered Function Reference/fetch rss « WordPress Codex so all I needed to do was put them together, sounds simple and it probably is if you know what you are dong, unfortunately I didn’t and spent a frustrating ten hours or more struggling with it on Saturday before giving up and going to bed with the problem unsolved. Sunday morning bingo, everything suddenly clicked in to place and I have a working plugin, very possibly I also know a bit more about php too so thats a bonus.

What the plugin does is outputs a rss feed as a list of titles and descriptions into a wordpress post or page, here is a screen shot of the output.

You are able to add a variable to change the number of results that are returned. I’ve called the plugin Keith’s Easy Rss WordPress Plugin rather than Sunshine Rss because  it works with other Rss feeds too. I’ve tested it with Amazon RSS Feeds and a couple of Feedburner ones as well on both WP 2.6.x and 2.7. Some feeds with too many parameters do fail to parse though, any thoughts

0.2a 6th February 2009 – Mod by Brian Edwards (Scifind) so that affiliate tracking in the form of  prefixes and postfixes  can be added (if just using Sunshine Rss you wont need to add any)

Download here. Still in Alpha so absolutely any feedback is appreciated.

Have fun playing.

Examples:

Sunshine Rss >> Latest Magaluf Offers from Sunshine

Purely Diamonds using Affiliate Window Prefix Tracking >> Purely Diamonds top 10 products

Mio Destino (Indy) using Postfix affiliate tracking >> Latest Lingerie from Mio Destino

Last week John Lammerton announced the launch of Easy Content Units (ECU), if you haven’t already signed up and had a play with them I suggest you do so now as they are awesome.

These days the majority of my websites are on WordPress  and even though ECU embeds pretty easily into a wordpress article I got to thinking there must be an easier way, so I looked at what plugins I was already using to embed elements into posts and decided that Youtuber fitted the bill, so a bit of hacking with the code and I came up with wp-ecu the output of which you can see below.

Click here to download the wp-ecu zip file.

Instructions

Edit the file wp-ecu.php

change ecu_mid=3  to your own id number or I will get the commission

Installation

1. Upload ‘wp-ecu’ to the ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ directory
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress

Usage

To embed one of your Easy Content Units in a post enclose the content units ecu_uid like so

[ ecu]77[/ecu ]  (remove the spaces I had to put them in to stop it parsing)

where 77 = the ecu_uid

This is an alpha release and not been thoroughly tested, I would appreciate if you could leave feedback below, or if you modify the plugin please send me a copy to have a play with, one thing I would like to see in a future release is an options page to save having to edit the file wp-ecu.php before uploading, if anyone can write something that will do the job it would be great.