Keith’s Easy Rss WordPress Plugin

** 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