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SimplePie RSS class and CodeIgniter

June 18th, 2007 | Posted in Codeigniter, Development, PHP | 14 Comments

Users of the latest version of Simplepie (Version 1.0.1) have been getting errors when passing in the feed url. The error refers to a missing method “feed_url()”. This is due to a change in Simplepie, to set the feed url you must now use “set_feed_url(your rss url)”.

A pet project of mine which I will unleash upon you all soon required the home page to read in an RSS feed. Since I am a CodeIgniter whore I soon learnt that amongst its many libraries and helpers that there wasn’t an RSS reader.

This was easily solved using an open source PHP RSS class called SimplePie. Simply, I can’t imagine ever needing anything else. Not to mention the ease of getting it to work within CodeIgniter. By placing simplepie.inc in the libraries directory and renaming it to simplepie.php, I could now use its methods to parse and display my RSS feed.

Within your controller:

PHP [Show Styled Code]:

function index() {
	$this->load->library('simplepie');
        //$this->simplepie->feed_url('http://www.digg.com/rss/indexdig.xml');
        // You may have encountered an error where it couldn't find feed_url. This is due
        // to a change in the latest version of simplepie. Simply, feed_url is now set_feed_url
        $this->simplepie->set_feed_url('http://www.digg.com/rss/indexdig.xml');
        $this->simplepie->init();
        $data['dig_feed'] = $this->simplepie;
}

PHP [Show Plain Code]:

function index() {
        $this->load->library(’simplepie’);
        //$this->simplepie->feed_url(’http://www.digg.com/rss/indexdig.xml’);
        // You may have encountered an error where it couldn’t find feed_url. This is due
        // to a change in the latest version of simplepie. Simply, feed_url is now set_feed_url
        $this->simplepie->set_feed_url(‘http://www.digg.com/rss/indexdig.xml’); 
        $this->simplepie->init();
        $data[‘dig_feed’] = $this->simplepie;
} 

Passing the $data array holding the parsed feed data to the view template made displaying the data a breeze. get_items() returns all feed data as an array. Optionally, if you wish to only display the first 5 items, get_items takes 2 parameters, the starting position and quantity to return. Passing in 0,5 as arguments returns the first 5 items.

PHP [Show Styled Code]:

echo "
";
foreach($dig_feed->get_items() as $item) {
	echo "
Show Plain Code]:

echo "<ol>";
foreach($dig_feed->get_items() as $item) {
        echo "<li><a href=’" .$item->get_link() . "’>" . $item->get_title() . "</a></li>";
}
echo "</ol>"; 

Any problems then let me know.

hamza

// July 13th, 2007 at 11:31 pm

One Word : Beautiful , am using simple pie and it’s quite powerful soon as i used codeigniter i integrate it …
keep up the great work

Fiaz

// July 14th, 2007 at 11:34 am

Glad you found it useful.

Hamza

// July 20th, 2007 at 2:27 am

Yes it’s very useful , i often use the Wordpress as a Framework , make the special plugins , and customize , but the code igniter made it more easier , as example year ago i used simple pie with wordpress , for http://www.medpeek.com , with codeigniter it’s only take a mins especially with this tutorial :)

gunnard

// August 5th, 2007 at 5:49 am

This tut looks perfect but I can’t get simplepie to work, my code is straight copied from you and I have the simplepie.inc renaimed to simplepie.php .. my error is
“Fatal error: Call to undefined method SimplePie::feed_url() in /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/wootmovie/system/application/controllers/main.php on line 17″
line 17 looks like ” $this->simplepie->feed_url(’http://www.digg.com/rss/indexdig.xml’);
”
whats going on?

// August 5th, 2007 at 9:55 am

Thanks for highlighting this. It seems the very latest version has changed resulting in the error you are getting.

Instead, change feed_url to set_feed_url.

I have updated the tutorial.

Federico Fasce Location: Italy

// August 23rd, 2007 at 4:29 pm

everything seems working fine, except one thing. I get a cache error:

A PHP Error was encountered

Severity: User Warning
Message: ./cache/f70d607810b0be605b26c22d878878b4.spc is not writeable
Filename: libraries/simplepie.php
Line Number: 1623

But my cache directory (the one installed by codeigniter) is in fact writeable. Should I set up a new cache dir for Simplepie? If so, where?

Other question: special characters such as accents are not shown correctly. My html uses utf-8 as charset. Is there a way to show the feed results in utf-8 too?

thank you!

// August 23rd, 2007 at 7:55 pm

I specifically set my cache folder to be the CI cache folder using:

simplepie->set_cache_location(’full system path to CI cache folder’);

HTH

// August 25th, 2007 at 10:37 am

thank you. I’ve got another question, is maybe very stupid, but I’m not much of a coder.
The code you provided is perfect if you have only one rss feed to display.
Let’s say I want a popurl like webpage, with some RSS feed displayed in different ways. I think I must have a standard simplepie function to fetch RSS from each different source, and then different views for each different block.

Now… I’m not sure how to do this and where to put this function. Should I create a library with a sngle Rss fetch function?

Thank you!

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