Recently i generated a rss feed from business listings for one of my client’s website. Also, i merged this listings feed into client’s existing blog rss feed. Here’s how i did it.
First of all i initiated a $rss string variable with necessary rss header tags in it. (code is written in php)
<?php
$rss = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title><![CDATA[ClientsWebsite.com - Somethings Directory]]></title>
<link>http://www.ClientsWebsite.com</link>
<description><![CDATA[ClientsWebsite is the online source for doing something!]]></description>
<lastBuildDate>'.date('D, d M Y h:i:s O').'</lastBuildDate>
<docs>http://www.devarticles.in</docs>
<language>en</language>
';
//Then i wrote a (sql) query to fetch latest 20 entries
$query = "select `id`, `title`, `description` from `listings` where `status`='Active' order by `id` desc limit 20";
$reso = mysql_query($query);
//then i iterated through each records to create individual rss feed items
while($row=mysql_fetch_assoc($reso)) {
$rss .= '<item><title><![CDATA['.$row['title'].']]></title><link>http:www.ClientsWebsite.com/listing.php?id="'.($row['id']).'</link><description><![CDATA['.$row['description'].']]></description></item>';
}
// i put <![CDATA[]]> there so that any special characters or html tags do not break the XML structure of my feed
$rss .= '</channel></rss>';
header ("content-type: text/xml");
echo $rss; //finally outputting the feed to web browser
?>
It was a quite simple process to create rss feed dynamically on fetching records from database table.
Following the additional bit of code i put there in order to merge the above generated rss feed into existing blog rss feed. This is how it came. When i had finished iterating through the listings from database table i read my blog feed and extracted feed items and merged them into the listings feed items. Here’s the complete code once again.
<?php
$rss = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title><![CDATA[ClientsWebsite.com - Somethings Directory]]></title>
<link>http://www.ClientsWebsite.com</link>
<description><![CDATA[ClientsWebsite is the online source for doing something!]]></description>
<lastBuildDate>'.date('D, d M Y h:i:s O').'</lastBuildDate>
<docs>http://www.devarticles.in</docs>
<language>en</language>
';
$query = "select `id`, `title`, `description` from `listings` where `status`='Active' order by `id` desc limit 20";
$reso = mysql_query($query);
while($row=mysql_fetch_assoc($reso)) {
$rss .= '<item><title><![CDATA['.$row['title'].']]></title><link>http:www.ClientsWebsite.com/listing.php?id="'.($row['id']).'</link><description><![CDATA['.$row['description'].']]></description></item>';
}
$source = file_get_contents('http://www.mysiteaddress.com/blog/feed/rss/');
preg_match_all("'<item>(.*?)</item>'si", $source, $match, PREG_SET_ORDER);
if(sizeof($match[0])>0) {
foreach($match[0] as $item) {
$rss .= $item;
}
}
$rss .= '</channel></rss>';
header ("content-type: text/xml");
echo $rss;
?>
I hope it helps someone.
