Web Services: MagpieRSS

MagpieRSS 

MagpieRSS (Magpie for short) is a powerful RSS parser written in PHP by Kellan Elliott-McCrea. It’s freely available for download via http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/ and is distributed under the GPL license. Magpie offers developers an amazingly practical and easy means for retrieving and rendering RSS feeds, as you’ll soon see. In addition, Magpie offers users a number of cool features, including the following:

Simplicity: Magpie gets the job done with a minimum of effort by the developer. For example, typing a few lines of code is all it takes to begin retrieving, parsing, and converting RSS feeds into an easily readable format.

Nonvalidating: If the feed is well-formed, Magpie will successfully parse it. This means that it supports all tag sets found within the various RSS versions, as well as your own custom tags.

Bandwidth-friendly: By default, Magpie caches feed contents for 60 minutes, cutting down on use of unnecessary bandwidth. You’re free to modify the default to fit caching preferences on a per-feed basis. If retrieval is requested after the cache has expired, Magpie will retrieve the feed only if it has been changed (by checking the Last-Modified and ETag headers provided by the Web server). In addition, Magpie recognizes HTTP’s Gzip content-negotiation ability when supported.

Installing Magpie

Like most PHP classes, Magpie is as simple to install as placing the relevant files within a directory that can later be referenced from a PHP script. The instructions for doing so follow:

1. Download Magpie from http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/.
   
2. Extract the package contents to a location convenient for inclusion from a PHP script. For instance, consider placing third-party classes within an aptly named directory located within thePHP_INSTALL_DIR/includes/directory. Note that you can forgo the hassle of typing out the complete path to the Magpie directory by adding its location to theinclude_pathdirective found in thephp.inifile.
   
3. Include the Magpie class (magpie.php) within your script:

   require('magpie/magpie.php');

That’s it. You’re ready to begin using Magpie.