How to Import and Display RSS Feeds in WordPress Perishable Press

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Perishable Press
Import and Display RSS Feeds in WordPress
Published Sunday, April 26, 2009 @ 2:35 pm 53 Responses

Importing and displaying external RSS feeds on your site is a great way to share your
online activity with your visitors. If you are active on Flickr, Delicious, Twitter, or Tumblr, your
visitors will enjoy staying current with your updates. Many social media sites provide exclusive
feeds for user-generated content that may be imported and displayed on virtually any web page. In
this article, you will learn three ways to import and display feed content on your WordPresspowered website without installing yet another plugin.
On the menu for this tutorial:
Importing and displaying feeds with WordPress & Magpie (simple method)
Importing and displaying feeds with WordPress & Magpie (advanced method)
Importing and displaying feeds with SimplePie (WordPress not required)
Sound good? Lets get to it..

Importing and displaying feeds with WordPress & Magpie (simple method)
If you only need to display the titles of a feed, you can take advantage of the built-in WordPress
function, wp_rss(), which provides WordPress with essential feed-fetching and feed-parsing
functionality. All you need to do is place the following code into the desired display location
within your theme template file (e.g., sidebar.php):
<?php include_once(ABSPATH.WPINC.'/rss.php');
wp_rss('http://domain.tld/your-feed/', 7); ?>

In the first line, we include the required wp_rss() function from the rss.php file (rssfunctions.php in older versions of WordPress). In the second line, we specify two parameters:
the first is our feed URL and the second is the number of titles to display. Simply edit these two
parameters and enjoy the results.

Importing and displaying feeds with WordPress & Magpie (advanced method)
Magpie provides an XML-based RSS built with PHP. WordPress uses Magpie to parse RSS and
Atom feeds and display them on your website. Magpie parses feeds for two different WordPress
functions:
wp_rss() - fetches and parses feeds for instant/automatic output
fetch_rss() - fetches and parses feeds for advanced/customized output

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Each of these functions uses the Snoopy HTTP client for feed retreival, Magpie for feed parsing,
and RSSCache for automatic feed caching.
The wp_rss() function fetches and parses feed content and then outputs an unordered list
containing each of the feeds post titles (see previous section). The fetch_rss() also fetches and
parses feed content and will output the results according to your specific script configuration.
Instead of just spitting out titles, the fetch_rss() function enables us to display any available
feed data in customized format. Lets look at an example.
<?php
include_once(ABSPATH.WPINC.'/rss.php'); // path to include script
$feed = fetch_rss('http://domain.tld/your-feed/'); // specify feed url
$items = array_slice($feed->items, 0, 7); // specify first and last item
?>
<?php if (!empty($items)) : ?>
<?php foreach ($items as $item) : ?>
<h2><a href="<?php echo $item['link']; ?>"><?php echo $item['title']; ?></a></h2>
<p><?php echo $item['description']; ?></p>
<?php endforeach; ?>
<?php endif; ?>

Once placed in the desired location in your WordPress theme template file, the previous code will
output the title and description (content) of the seven most recent feed items. Simply edit the three
variables in the first three lines of the script and you are good to go. Then, once you see that
everything is working as intended, feel free to modify the markup as you see fit. Before moving
on, lets walk through the method in sequential fashion:
Include the script - specify the path to rss.php (or rss-functions.php in older versions
of WordPress)
Specify your feed URL - specify the URL of the feed you would like to display
Limit number of items - edit the two numbers to reflect the numbers of the first and last
feed items, respectively
Empty check - before running the loop, check that the feed isnt empty
Begin the loop - begin the standard foreach loop
Display the items - for each feed item, display the post title, title link, and post content
Wrap it up - close the loop and end the empty check
Notes on using WordPress/Magpie
If you are calling feeds that may or may not include a description, you may want to avoid the
output of empty paragraph elements ( <p> ) by wrapping the description with a conditional check
like so:
<?php if (isset($item['description'])) : ?>
<p><?php echo $item['description']; ?></p>
<?php endif; ?>

Also, if the feed isnt showing, try replacing the associated line with this:
$feed = @fetch_rss('http://domain.tld/your-feed/');

For an alternate way of checking for the presence of a working feed, replace the empty check with
this:
<?php if (isset($rss->items) && 0 != count($rss->items)) : ?>

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You can also clean up feed output by taking adavantage of WordPress built-in filtering
functionality:
<?php echo wp_filter_kses($item['link']); ?>
<?php echo wp_specialchars($item['title']); ?>

Here are some of the variables that are available from your feeds (not sure if all of these work):

$item['link'] - post permalink

$item['title'] - title of the post
$item['pubdate'] - post publication date
$item['description'] - post excerpt or content
$item['creator'] - post author (does this work?)
$item['content'] - post content (does this work?)

Note that when using the $item['pubdate'] variable, the default output will look like this:
Mon, 11 Jul 2050 01:11:11 +0000

Fortunately we can clean this up a little bit by parsing it with PHPs substr() function like so:
$pubdate = substr($item['pubdate'], 0, 16);

Which will output the following date format:

Mon, 11 Jul 2050

And, finally, an alternate loop format that defines the number of items to display without using the
array_slice() function:
<?php for($i = 0; $i < 5; $i++) { $item = $rss->items[$i]; ?>
<!-- loop content -->
<?php } ?>

Importing and displaying feeds with SimplePie (WordPress not required)

For more robust feed fetching in the most simple way possible, SimplePie is the perfect choice.
SimplePie is a blazing fast PHP class that is easy to learn and simple to use. With a few quick
steps, you can use SimplePie to retrieve and parse any RSS or Atom feeds and display them on
any PHP-enabled website (WordPress is not required). SimplePie works great with its default
settings, but it is also highly customizable. You can use SimplePie to display any type of data
from any number of feeds, and it even works without WordPress. Sound good? Heres how to
setup SimplePie in three easy steps:
Download SimplePie and unzip
Place the simplepie.inc into a folder named php located in the web-accessible root
directory of your website
Create a folder named cache (also in the web-accessible root directory) and make sure
that its writable by the server (i.e., CHMOD to 755, 775, or 777)
Thats all there is to it. Once SimplePie is properly setup on your server, you may check that its
working by uploading the following code to the web page of your choice (edit as specified):
<?php // basic functionality check - edit script path and feed url
include_once $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/php/simplepie.inc'; // script path
$feed = new SimplePie('http://domain.tld/your-feed/'); // feed url

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<h1><?php echo $feed->get_title(); ?></h1>

<p><?php echo $feed->get_description(); ?></p>

If the feed title and description dont appear on the page, check the path to simplepie.inc in the
first line and also verify that the feed URL is correct and that the feed is working properly.
Once everything is working and flowing like butter, the possibilities are endless. To get you
started, lets expand the previous testing code to include the title, link, content and date for the
seven most recent feed items:
<?php
include_once $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/php/simplepie.inc'; // path to include scrip
$feed = new SimplePie(); // bake a new pie
$feed->set_feed_url('http://domain.tld/your-feed/'); // specify feed url
$feed->set_cache_duration (999); // specify cache duration in seconds
$feed->handle_content_type(); // text/html utf-8 character encoding
$check = $feed->init(); // script initialization check
?>
<h1><a href="<?php echo $feed->get_permalink(); ?>"><?php echo $feed->get_title(); ?>
<p><?php echo $feed->get_description(); ?></p>
<?php if ($check) : ?>
<?php foreach ($feed->get_items(0, 7) as $item) : ?>
<h2><a href="<?php echo $item->get_permalink(); ?>"><?php echo $item->get_title(); ?>
<p><?php echo $item->get_description(); ?></p>
<p><small>Posted on <?php echo $item->get_date('j F Y @ g:i a'); ?></small></p>
<?php endforeach; ?>
<?php else : ?>
<h2>Feeds currently not available</h2>
<p>Please try again later</p>
<?php endif; ?>

That is the code I start with when implementing SimplePie on client projects. It serves as an easyto-customize template that incorporates plenty of functionality and outputs feed content in
common format. Lets walk sequentially through the code for better understanding of functionality
and proper use.
Setting the variables
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.

Path to the SimplePie script - edit according to your specific setup

new SimplePie - setup a new instance of SimplePie feed variable
Feed URL - specify the URL of the feed you would like to display
Cache duration - specify how long the feed should be cached (seconds)
Character encoding - ensures that content is in text/html, UTF-8 format
Script check - sets a variable upon successful script initialization

Format the output

1. Feed title and link - wrapped in <h1> tags and placed before the loop because only one title
exists for each feed
2. Feed description - wrapped up in paragraph tags and placed before the loop because only
one description exists for each feed
3. Initialization check - if the $check variable is set, then continue processing the script
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4. Begin the loop - standard foreach loop with parameterized argument for setting the
number of feed items to display
5. Feed items - for each feed item, display the post title, title link, post content, and post date.
6. End the loop - terminate the recursive processing of feed items
7. Else condition - if the $check variable is not set, then display the following code
8. Else message - text/markup to display if the initialization check fails and the feed is not
displayed
9. End the if condition - conclude the script by terminating the if condition
Notes on SimplePie
It is possible to merge feeds into a single stream by replacing the associated lines with the
following:
<?php
$feed = new SimplePie();
$feed->set_feed_url(array(
'http://domain.tld/your-feed-01/',
'http://domain.tld/your-feed-02/',
'http://domain.tld/your-feed-03/'
));
?>

Also, you can truncate the number of words that appear in the content of each feed item by using
PHPs substr() function:
<?php echo substr($item->get_description(), 0, 180); ?>

In the foreach() loop, you may specify the number of the first and last feed to process by editing
the 0 and 7 in the following line:
<?php foreach ($feed->get_items(0, 7) as $item) : ?>

For WordPress users who would rather not mess with all of the under-the-hood code stuff, there
is an awesome SimplePie plugin that automates just about everything. It should be noted,
however, that the SimplePie plugin consists of two different plugins and requires a significant
amount of time and effort in order to implement. Its a great set of plugins, but I would argue that
the manual implementation method is easier.
Finally, keep in mind that your feeds are cached according to either the default setting or your
specified cache duration. The default caching duration is one hour, which is suitable for most
implementations. Dont forget that, for caching to work, SimplePie must have write access to the
cache directory (see above).
With SimplePie, the options are endless. This tutorial is enough to get you started, but you should
check the SimplePie Wiki for more comprehensive documentation.

Feed em!
With these versatile, easy-to-use techniques for importing and displaying external feeds, virtually
anything is possible. If you are using WordPress, you can take advantage of the built-in Magpie
functionality and display feeds quickly and easily. For non-WordPress users or for those seeking
more control over the feed importation and display process, you will find all of the flexibility you
need with SimplePie. These methods will help you provide more content to your readers and do so
without getting locked into using yet another needless plugin. So go forth and feed that insatiable
audience of yours! :)

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Copyright2009PerishablePress

About this article

This is article #686, posted by Jeff Starr on Sunday, April 26, 2009 @ 2:35pm. Categorized as
WordPress & tagged with feed, loops, php, rss, tips, tricks, tutorials, WordPress. Updated on May
19, 2009. Visited 71575 times. 53 Responses
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Dialogue
53 Responses Jump to comment form
1 Peter Westwood
April 27, 2009 at 12:06 am
SimplePie is in trunk for WordPress 2.8
It would be good to update this to include what will be available then!
2 Jeff Starr
April 27, 2009 at 7:09 am
Yes, I thought about waiting until 2.8, but figured I could just update the article when it is
released. I am looking forward to SimplePie and WordPress working together hopefully it will
mean even more flexibility for designers and developers. Cheers!
3 Frank
April 28, 2009 at 2:33 am
Nice post! I think it is better for the date you use the function of WordPress for formating the date
with the options of the blog:
$pubdate = date_i18n(get_option('date_format'), $pubdate);

Best regards
Frank
4 Jeff Starr

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April 28, 2009 at 9:20 am

Excellent tip, Frank thanks! :) The workaround mentioned in the post was a bit insufficient.
This looks like it will work much better. Thanks for sharing!
5 Frank
April 28, 2009 at 11:21 pm
@Jeff: thanks for your answer; a small modification for my tipp:
$pubDate = date_i18n( get_option('date_format'), strtotime( $item
['pubdate'] ) );

This works fine and the return is a date in the format of the blog-options.
6 Jeff Starr
April 29, 2009 at 9:21 am
@Frank: Perfect! Thank you for the follow-up :)
7 teddY
May 1, 2009 at 11:15 pm
Wow, a really handy tutorial, Jeff! If it werent you writing this tutorial, I wouldnt have found a
way how to parse my Digg feed so that I can display it on my blog. I know that Wordpress has a
function to import a RSS feed, but I have no idea how to process the information contained in it.
Your guide saved me from all the need of Googling and piecing together snippets of code from all
kinds of webpages, especially for the parsing of the time (pubdate). I have no clue how to change
the way it is displayed until you wrote about it.
Im considering to install a WP plugin called Lifestream to better manage all my social website
activities (mainly Twitter, Digg and Flickr), and it seems to be a nice nifty plugin to try out. Of
course, if it all fails, I can always use your failsafe method :)
8 Thomas Scholz
May 4, 2009 at 10:12 am
Passing an URL to the SimplePie constructor triggers the automatic modus. Any later
configuration attempts will fail. See: http://simplepie.org/wiki/reference/simplepie/start for details.
9 Jeff Starr
May 4, 2009 at 11:50 am
@teddY: Always good to hear from you! Yes there are tons of great ways to use the feedimporting methods described in this article. There are many configurational options and different
ways to use this type of functionality not just with social media feeds, but with any other type
of feed imaginable. I have several blogs to which I regularly publish content, and so having an
easy way to import the various feeds makes it easy to display all of my content in one place.
The Lifestream plugin for WordPress looks pretty cool. I recently discovered Sweetcron, which is
a robust and standalone (& self-hosted) lifestream application. Its pretty cool I setup a test site
and have been playing around with it, but there is tons of configurational options and stuff you can

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do with it. I have seen some pretty sweet implementations around the Web. Maybe something to
check out! :)
10 Jeff Starr
May 4, 2009 at 12:12 pm
@Thomas Scholz: The article has been updated with the correct information. Thanks!
11 davis
May 11, 2009 at 1:44 pm
Jeff,
Thanks for this! Works perfectly and easily!
I have, hopefully, a quick question for you though.
Using Wordpress/Magpie advance as listed above:
What about if i want to pass a variable for the URL.
Maybe an RSS feed URL listed in the User.
I have this to echo the user name(s) field value(s) (using a plugin to create a custom field in which
i place the url) :
$values = get_cimyFieldValue(false, 'TWITTERFEEDURL');
foreach ($values as $value) {
$user_id = $value['user_id'];
echo $value['user_login'];
echo cimy_uef_sanitize_content($value['VALUE']);
}

But if instead I wanted to pass the text value of that field into
$feed = fetch_rss('http://domain.tld/your-feed/');

How would I do that?

My attempts have proven my knowledge lacking ;)
12 Jeff Starr
May 12, 2009 at 3:59 pm
@davis: Ugh! I wish I could help but unfortunately that exceeds my limits of knowledge on the
topic as well. Very soon, WordPress 2.8 will be released and will be using SimplePie instead of
Magpie. Perhaps this will provide enable you to get the help you need via the actively moderated
SimplePie help forum..?
13 davis
May 12, 2009 at 4:22 pm
ah, no worries Jeff.

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I actually made it work making a variable equal to the function pulling the user field data (in this
case being created by a plugin, but would work similarly for the website text field) - then i
placed that variable into fetch_rss including all of that in a foreach after the data was retrieved
and rss script included.
in my case (and in the event it helps someone else) the code is this:
include(ABSPATH.WPINC.'/rss.php'); // path to include script
$values = get_cimyFieldValue(false, 'FEEDURL');
foreach ($values as $value) {
$user_id = $value['user_id'];
$FV = cimy_uef_sanitize_content($value['VALUE']);
$feed = fetch_rss($FV); // specify feed url
$items = array_slice($feed->items, 0, 3); // specify first and last item
echo "".$value['user_login']."";
foreach ($items as $item) {
echo "<a>". $item['title']."</a>";
}
echo "";
}

now im off to try and filter the user role for which all of that is processed - wish me luck! haha.
thanks again Jeff!
14 Jeff Starr
May 12, 2009 at 4:53 pm
Good luck and thanks for the followup with code solution. Very cool. I tried formatting it with
some indentation and whatnot, so let me know if anything is incorrect.
Now I know who to contact if I ever need some feed-parsing ninja skillz! ;)
15 Zeeshawn
May 13, 2009 at 4:04 am
Awesome article Jeff, Clear , to the point and so easy to follow. Ill be disposing of my plugins
and coding up my own code from now on. Love it mate.
16 mccormicky
May 13, 2009 at 4:29 am
Sweet! Now if only I had had all this info last fall. I would have suffered a lot less
17 Jeff Starr
May 13, 2009 at 4:09 pm
@Zeeshawn: Awesome, great to hear it thanks for the feedback! :)
@mccormicky: I know what you mean. I should have written this article a year ago. I think it took
me that long to understand it all myself. Oh well, at least its here for next time! :)

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18 Serge
May 19, 2009 at 8:17 am
Hi every one, youve done a great piece of code here.
I was fighting to get one of my own categories listed as RSS in separate page in vane before
ive come here.
I m barmen, not a code ninja
Just a note about WP 2.7:
1 i couldnt include my own feed using your code (got a warning for the second display about
function array )
2 have given the feed to google feedburner and set the feed url of the last one
result: Worked as a swiss watches and fixed as well the problem of the Frenchy letters le
etc
Thanx a lot for your being born.
the result is upgrading here : http://www.monmillion.fr/boutique/
19 Mark
May 25, 2009 at 10:16 am
Man, I would love to get what @davis (comment #13) did working on my site but I am so far
failing miserably. Help? Thanks!
20 Jeff Starr
May 27, 2009 at 7:35 am
@Serge: Im speechless! Thanks for the feedback :)
@Mark: I wish I could help here, but I am not familiar with the details of the technique. Hopefully
davis will drop in again and lend a hand..
21 davis
May 27, 2009 at 9:17 am
@mark
one thing to keep in mind before i break this down: the get_cimyFieldValue is a function created
by the plugin Cimy User Extra Fields ( http://www.marcocimmino.net/cimy-wordpressplugins/cimy-user-extra-fields/documentation/ )
I used it to create a field in the User profile. In this case a text field that i placed an RSS feed url
into.
knowing that, here is the walk through.
include(ABSPATH.WPINC.'/rss.php'); This is including the RSS magic
$values = get_cimyFieldValue(false, 'FEEDURL');
This is saying the variable $values is equal to the function created by Cimy User Extra Fields
false and FEEDURL are options for that in this case FEEDURL is merely what i named the new

text field i created with the plugin.

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So its essentially just saying that I want $values to be the values of the new fields in the user
profile, and Im calling to the new field FEEDURL specifically - again that could be named
anything.
foreach ($values as $value) {

Here it is saying run this for everyone of them

$FV = cimy_uef_sanitize_content($value['VALUE']);
This line ive created the variable $FV to be equal to another function created by the plugin (one to
echo the text of the field i created) and called upon in the $values line above.
$feed = fetch_rss($FV); // specify feed url
- Here im just telling it that $feed is equal to fetch_rss function with a feed value of the
variable $FV which i created to call the function cimy_uef_sanitize_content which
understands we are looking at the text field value for FEEDURL per the $values =
get_cimyFieldValues() line above.
$items = array_slice($feed-&gt;items, 0, 3); // specify first and last item
This is styling the $feed

The rest is echoing to the page.

echo "".$value['user_login']."";

This echos the user login name and below it is saying for each $item (that are pulled from
$feed, that is fetching from $FV that is equal to cimy_uef_santize_content() that is limited
from $values to FEEDURL) echo each feed entry as follows.
foreach ($items as $item) {
echo "<a>". $item['title']."</a>";
}
echo "";

I hope that helps to explain what i did.

I still have to figure out how to only apply this whole thing to only one class of users (or to
specific users) but i havent jumped back into yet to tackle that one.
22 Patternhead
June 5, 2009 at 7:09 am
Great article Jeff.
Im using WP 2.71. Does anyone happen to know if Magpie writes the cache to a table or to a file
(I read somewhere that it adds entries to wp_options).
23 Jeff Starr
June 7, 2009 at 6:09 pm
@Patternhead: I think you are correct there is no file that I know of that is used by Magpie and
no information about setting permissions etc for such a file. If I remember correctly, there is a
magpie field in the options table, as you suggest. If anyone has any specific information on this
please share. Thx.
24 westi

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June 7, 2009 at 10:11 pm

Yes WordPress does store the cache of the feed in the options table using a number of options
(named magpie_x I think).
WordPress 2.8 feed functions, which now use SimplePie, will also cache in the options table but
using the new transients functionality. What this does is store the information in the db unless you
have installed an object cache plugin to use some thing like memcache for the WordPress object
cache -then the transients are just stored in the cache.
25 Patternhead
June 8, 2009 at 12:30 am
@Jeff @westi Thanks for the info. Thats interesting. So in terms of performance, I wonder which
is quicker. Reading the cache from the DB or the disk.
I prefer to keep the DB as clean as poss so Ive gone for simplepie (not the plugin) but this is a
pretty big file 340kb so maybe it would be more efficient to just let WP use the DB for caching.
Im planning to use 2.8 when we get RC1 so may have to take another look at this issue then. I
havent use memcache before. Sounds like an idea for a future post Jeff ;)
26 Jeff Starr
June 8, 2009 at 12:47 pm
@westi: Thanks for posting! :)
@Patternhead: Yes, that is a great idea for a post! Looking forward to 2.8 :)
27 Brian
June 13, 2009 at 8:49 am
Hi, Thanks for this code. I had it working correctly at one point but made the mistake of including
small images in WordPress codes which prevented the RSS feed from working correctly.
However when I removed these I found that new items did not appear in the WordPress page
although they do in the WordPress feeds.
Using phpMyAdmin I have looked at the database expecting to find a file (either the last one
displayed on the page or the one after) with some peculiar setting but no.
Ive deleted and re-entered all the affected bits but to no avail. The problem is displayed on
http://www.middlesbroughlourdes.co.uk/latest-news
where the sidebar links show the correct items but the body doesnt.
Any ideas?
28 Brian
June 13, 2009 at 10:42 am
Hi, Without doing anything on my part the problem described in my last post has disappeared.
Curious.
Once again, thanks for the code.

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P.S. Just for the record I was using WP 2.8 on Safari 4 (Mac) and could see the exact same
problem in iCab 4.6.0 and Camino 1.6.7.
29 Jeff Starr
June 15, 2009 at 6:14 pm
@Brian: Glad to hear you got it working thanks for posting the follow-up comment stating that
the issue has been resolved. Much appreciated :)
30 Lekha
July 21, 2009 at 9:12 pm
This is by far the best bit of information I have laid my eyes on!!!!!!!
kudos to you!!!
31 Ray
July 22, 2009 at 2:55 am
Hey Jeff,
Great post as always!
Also great comments by the visitors.
Didnt know that WP stores RSS cache in the DB. That doesnt sound very nice.
I think Im going to go with the manual SimplePie method.
Just adding my two cents, but probably the lightest RSS parser library is lastRSS. Its also quite
extendable, although not as full-featured as SimplePie.
By the way, you might want to update your tutorial for WP 2.8+ now ;)
32 Josh
July 23, 2009 at 1:11 pm
What if you wanted to include a custom field that is the url to the rss feed? Im having difficulties
since its php within php. Do I have to store as a variable first?
33 Josh
July 24, 2009 at 1:06 pm
I figured it out! You need to include global $post.
ID, 'rss', true);
wp_rss($rssfeed, 5);
?>

34 Josh
July 24, 2009 at 1:07 pm
Oops looks like it stripped the code. Let me try that again.

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:
k

Page 14 of 25

{
w -

35 Jeff Starr
July 25, 2009 at 4:43 pm
Thanks for the follow-up post, Josh glad to hear you got it working :)
(sorry for the code hassle WordPress likes to gobble PHP!)
36 Tim
July 25, 2009 at 7:49 pm
How can we use the simple pie method described above now with WP 2.8?
37 Jeff Starr
July 26, 2009 at 8:22 am
Hi Tim, as of WordPress 2.8, we can include and display feeds according to the SimplePie
documentation. The only difference is that we use this:
<?php $feed = fetch_feed( $uri ); ?>

To return the feed as a standard SimplePie object. Everything else is according to the SimplePie
documentation.
38 Corey O
August 2, 2009 at 6:53 am
Is there any way to include an image while displaying the feed titles and description?
39 Jeff Starr
August 2, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Hi Corey, I think this may help:
http://perishablepress.com/press/2007/02/04/feed-your-image-via-atom-or-rss/
40 Corey O
August 4, 2009 at 7:17 am
Thanks Jeff,
Nice site by the way. The background image is pretty awesome.
41 John
August 17, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Good bits, will pass them along!

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Very useful site overall, thanks for sharing.

42 WebDev.im
August 30, 2009 at 8:49 pm
Very nice site. I will be trying to integrate your feed code into my site pronto.
Thanks for the resource.
43 National Reporter
September 3, 2009 at 3:46 am
I was searching for a tool that would help me to feed articles for me to my website and i found it
here and i think its very useful stuff , i need more closely look to include it in my wordpress,
thanks for sharing and am going to use it in my blog right away.. Thank You.

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help me in plain english

Mon, 31 Aug 2009

This has got to be the most ironic comment I have ever read:
hi i dun a stupid noooby mistake and dint think about encrytion i just put a pass in the change
pass box and now when i attempt to see my main.php or index.php its sayin password no and error
how can i reset back to having no password or were can i edit the bit so that a pass is
automattically seen or if not posable how can i make it so i can put in the pass i made at some
point so i can login this way? the 3rd is most prefered as this will help me with other projects i am
planning as i am a php noob :s plz sum1 hu is clever help me in plain english
Thanks, jay you made my week with that one.

Redirection After Registration

Tue, 04 Aug 2009

After searching high and low for an unobtrusive method of redirecting users to a custom URL
after registering at a WordPress-powered site, I finally resorted to (gasp) hacking the core. I
simply could not find a better way of doing it that didnt require a ton of additional code. I found
several ways of redirecting users to various URLs after logging in and out, but absolutely nothing
seems to exist on redirecting users to, say, the home page, or better yet, back to the current page
after registering as a subscriber (or whatever role the Admin has set for new registrations). Indeed,
the only way to direct a user to some page other than the default WordPress Registration
complete. Please check your e-mail. screen (which looks just like the WP Login page, btw) is to
hack the wp-login.php file.
Thus, for the sake of remembering this technique, helping others, and/or inspiring someone to
find a solution, heres how to hack WordPress to change the page that users are directed to after
they register (via submission of a username and email address). First, open the wp-login.php file
and find the line that says, wp_redirect('wp-login.php?checkemail=registered');.
Thats the key right there. To change the location, replace the part that says, wp-login.php?

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checkemail=registered with the URL to which you would like to direct the newly registered

users. You may use full URLs or even relative paths to a specific file. Thats all there is to it. Its
still hacking the core, but not by much ;)
Remember, if youre going to hack the core, make a note of the change(s) and refer to it
before/after each subsequent upgrade.

A 500KB wp_options Table is Too Much

Thu, 09 Jul 2009

After my server crashed, I found myself restoring my sites WordPress database. While there, I
decided to dig around a bit and make sure everything was up to snuff. While looking through the
wp_options table, I was surprised to discover that WordPress seems to cache around 400KB of
Planet WordPress dashboard feeds (among other things). Thats a little extreme if you ask me,
so I decided to clean things up and reduce my overall database size by around half a megabyte.
Heres how I did it using my archaic 2.3 version of WordPress and phpMyAdmin.
Step One: Take Some Notes
Before doing anything, copy and paste a few text snippets from your dashboard feeds. This will
enable you to easily locate the oversize options fields for removal in Step Three. Note: permalinks
from the various feed entries make for good search candidates.
Step Two: Kill the Feed
Place this in your themes functions.php file (props to Michael Shadle for the code):
function remove_dashboard_feeds() {
remove_action(admin_head, index_js);
}
add_action(admin_head, remove_dashboard_feeds, 1);
Step Three: Clean up Your wp_options Table
Once that is done, you may clean up your database by doing a quick search for some of the text
snippets (permalinks work great) that you copied from the dashboard feeds in Step One. The field
(s) that you find should be named something like rss_123abc, where the 123abc is some
long, apparently random alphanumeric string. Once you have disabled the feed via functions.php,
feel free to reduce the size of your database by deleting the field(s) used to store data for the
dashboard feed.
Doing this saved me an extra ~400KB of space, which is much-needed as the size of my
Perishable Press database continues to grow.

Stop Errors when Running Multiple Themes

Sat, 30 May 2009

Another quick WordPress tip for anyone running multiple themes in WordPress. If your site
provides users the option of selecting from a number of different themes, you may have noticed
errors like this in your PHP error log:
[28-May-2009 05:46:50] PHP Warning: main(): Failed opening //press/wpcontent/themes/requiem/searchform.php for inclusion

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(include_path=/usr/lib/php:.:/usr/php4/lib/php:/usr/local/php4/lib/php) in //press/wpcontent/themes/default/sidebar.php on line 6

[28-May-2009 05:49:02] PHP Warning: main(//press/wpcontent/themes/requiem/searchform.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory
in //press/wp-content/themes/default/sidebar.php on line 6
These errors happen when a user loads a page using a non-default theme that calls the
searchform.php file via the following code:
Since the template path is based on the default theme, this code will attempt to locate
searchform.php in the default themes directory. Thus, non-default themes that contain this code
will produce the PHP errors shown above.
Fortunately, eliminating this problem is as easy as replacing the TEMPLATEPATH with the
actual path to the file in your theme. Something like this:
..where the (ellipses) represents something like, home/public/domain or similar, depending
on your setup. This path must be the absolute path to work properly. Repeat this process as
necessary for any other instances of TEMPLATEPATH.
Thats all there is to it no more pesky PHP errors for missing template files! :)

Maximum Characters for Google Meta Tags

Wed, 27 May 2009

I was going to post this on Twitter, but the service was down or otherwise not responsive (as it
frequently is), so I decided to post the information here at Tumblr instead.
After trying to determine the maximum number of characters allowed for meta title, keywords,
and description tags, I realized that the answers are not always clear, even where Google is
concerned. One SEO site says one thing, someone in the Google forums says another. Bloggers
and designers all seem to have their own opinions.
Fortunately, many of the proclaimed answers I encountered all seem to converge on a common set
of values for the three meta tags. Here are my findings:
meta title tag: Perhaps the most widely agreed upon max-character value of the bunch, 60
characters (including spaces) seems to be the common denominator for the all-important title tag.
Of course, you can make your titles as long as you want, but keep in mind that Google will only
display the first 60 characters.
meta description tag: Lots of disagreement on this one, with some experts claiming a 160character maximum (including spaces) and others saying that the value is more like 150. The
range of values for the description tag ranged from over 200 to around 150, with 160 being a very
common value. Thus, to be on the safe side, I recommend meta description tags of no more than
150 characters.
meta keywords tag: How many keywords can you stuff into the meta keywords tag? Well, that
all depends on how many characters each of them contains. Lots of disagreement on this one, with
lots of folks pointing out the utter foolishness of even bothering with meta keywords. Oh well, I
still use them, and have determined that 800 (including spaces) seems to be a safe number of
maximum characters for the meta keywords tag.

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Of course, I am only blogging this info for my own future use, but I like to think of myself as a
reliable source of information, so perhaps these max-character values will be useful to you as well.
If you would like to chime in on the topic, please do so via Twitter. Any previous comments may
be seen by clicking here.
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