Thursday, October 18, 2007

FirstRSS Plugin for WordPress

FirstRSS is a simple RSS aggregator plugins for WordPress. Use FirstRSS to insert an RSS feed into a post or page without having to touch PHP or HTML.

(SideRSS has been superseded by WordPress Widgets.)

Features
  • Simplicity
  • GPL open source licence
  • List format or paragraph format in posts and pages
  • No XSLT processor required

Requirements

  • WordPress 2 or greater
  • PHP 4 or greater

Download

Ideas

Use Technorati to display reciprocal links! Set the feed URL to "http://api.technorati.com/cosmos?key=API_KEY&url=URL&format=rss". Get your api key here! Replace "API_KEY" with your api key and "URL" with your website's URL.

Use del.icio.us to display your blogroll! Set the feed URL to "http://del.icio.us/rss/USERNAME/TAG". Replace "USERNAME" with your username and optionally "TAG" with a tag.

Display news from the Digg, Slashdot, and countless others.

Reviews

John Dilbeck of Random Neurons Firing
"firstRSS, by Chris Hatcher, is an outstanding plugin for syndicating (publishing) RSS feeds in your WordPress 2 pages... I tested several solutions before I found firstRSS, which worked the best and was, by far, the easiest to use... Thanks, Chris, for an elegant and easy-to-use way of syndicating these feeds."

David Gilmour of David’s Exc-el Blog
"What has to happen for people to 'get it'? ... But what if you could put a little RSS feed reader right inside your blog post? The firstRSS WordPress plugin lets you do just that... Maybe, by enabling a kind of RSS 'show and tell', firstRSS could help us demystify the whole thing?"

Craig Babcock of RSSolve
"One such application is FirstRSS, a nifty RSS aggregator plugin for Wordpress developed by Chris Hatcher. Ultimately, it was his solution that I preferred as it was the cleanest and simplest to use."

Example of List Format

The Seattle Times: Home
Copyright 2007 The Seattle Times Company

Fewer can afford to buy a house in King County, report says
Monorail activist loses bid to change viaduct ballot
Leonid Milkin: "I'm learning to live without my family"
...

Example of Paragraph Format

The Seattle Times
The Seattle Times: Home
Copyright 2007 The Seattle Times Company

Fewer can afford to buy a house in King County, report says
Buying a home in King County has moved further out of reach for the typical wage earner. A typical household would have had to bring in...
Monorail activist loses bid to change viaduct ballot
Former Monorail activist Peter Sherwin has lost his bid to change the ballot language on two Alaskan Way Viaduct measures on a March 13 advisory ballot.
Leonid Milkin: "I'm learning to live without my family"
His wife, kids and sister-in-law were killed in their home in July. As he tries to move on, Leonid Milkin wants justice and to understand why they died.
...

Plugin Lists

Codex List of Plugins | WordPress Plugins DB

46 comments:

MB said...

The RSS plugin is great. How would I go about caching the feed so that it doesn't fetch it every 15 minutes?

Hatch said...

The default cache age is one hour. To change this, go to the Plugin Management page and click Edit to the right of FirstRSS. Insert the boldfaced line:

// --- Initialize ---
define ('MAGPIE_CACHE_AGE', 24*60*60); // 24 hours
require_once (ABSPATH . WPINC . '/rss-functions.php');

mb said...

Thanks - works great now...

Mr Chris said...

So simple. So easy. So thankyou!

Alex said...

Thanks so much for this plugin, it works great. I was wondering how hard it would be to modify to sort the content of the feed by alpha order.

Adam said...

Hi, does this require a database? I've tried 'content related rss plugin' and it caches everything into wp options in database which is taking diskspace...

and also, how do i customize the feeds that i want to show?

Thanks

Adam said...

Like for instance if I'm showing yahoo feeds, it will show like 10 feeds or more, how can reduce the number say i only want to show 2 items

FuckeZeFlies said...

This plugin is very usefull and works perfectly.

I would like to use it in my single template but [rsspara:xx] does not works. How can I do it ?

Rémy said...

Thanks for your work !
I've a problem with enclosure url="monimage" type="image/jpeg"

I don't succeed to print the value of the enclosure url. Is anybody have ever had the same problem ?

Jan said...

This is nice and simple. How do I make it work in the sidebar?

scottmunson said...

Hi,
Great Plugin!
How can I get it to update less often, say once per week?

Thanks!

Hatch said...

Scott, see second comment down, but use the following line:

define ('MAGPIE_CACHE_AGE', 7*24*60*60); // 24 hours

kanjigirl said...

I've been looking for a plugin like this for hours today. However, if I try to put more than one feed on a page (not a post, but a page) only the last one will work. Is there a way to post more than one feed per page?

And, can I limit the number of items to 5 rather than 10?

Mark I. said...

Hi! This is great. I have the same question as the last commenter. How do I change the number of items to list from ten to another number?

Thanks. :)

fh_evert said...

You should change the code in firstRSS.php:
// Item title, description, & link
$i=0;
foreach($rss->items as $item) {
if($i < 5) {
$title = $item[title];
$link = htmlentities($item[link]);
if ($title != '') $disp .= "\t$title\n";
}
$i++;
}

But I have the same question about the use of more then one rss-feed on a page like kanjigirtl stated!

Timothy Latz said...

How do I combine two different functions?

One is to show the results of a post meta section and the other is to include rsslist in the resulting output..



The post meta "Most Recent Posts" should spit out the list of most recent posts. In each post meta field on the admin page of each entry, I add the rss feed for each particular site..


Any ideas? I can't put php in this comment =/


A sample entry from my site is:
http://www.bestgreenblogs.com/directory/a-little-greener-everyday/

Mike said...

For me the rss feed shows in the single post, but in the Recent Posts list the code only displays (overflows the column in FF; wraps in IE).
Can anyone suggest the code syntax in a test widget to get the results in the sidebar?
Thanks.

Admin said...

Great plugin, but I can't seem to figure out how to limit the number of links it posts.

What do I need to modify to limit the number of links shown?

Test blog said...

Can I get a copy of SideRSS? I remember it being a great plugin. I don't use Widgets, but I need SideRSS.

Thanks
Steve

homecook said...

Love the plugin except for some reason the feed only shows once and if I click on one of the feed subject and then click the back browser I'm getting this error
Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/***/public_html/******/blog/wp-content/plugins/ujc_firstrss/firstRSS.php on line 88

any ideas as to why or how to fix it?

net-income said...

I love this plugin and I would like to be able to modify it to suit my site.

1. How do I set it up so that I only get 4 rss paragraphs instead of the 10 I get now.

2. Is there anyway I can modify the look of the feed?

Please, please help!

Great script!!!!!

s.nisbet said...

Hatch - absolutely brilliant. All I needed to do was aggregate a pile of articles from a non-webby DB backend to a single page on a departmental Site. I tried some more complicated Aggregators, hours mucking about with posts being created and ....

excellent to see a nice, simple and for a WP plugin READABLE piece of code.

God be with you brother - (I like that you know Christ even more!)

Nibb said...

ps: ...
I have noticed tho that the
Created by FirstRss
bi-line is getting added to every page. Is that normal behaviour?

I'd rather leave the line in so you get your due, but I only want to see it on a page that actually includes the plugin. I'm using it on the main admin blog of a WPMU site.

cheers

God bless again

Hatch said...

I have noticed tho that the
Created by FirstRss
bi-line is getting added to every page. Is that normal behaviour?

No, it should only get added to pages where the plugin is used. You are welcome to take it out. If you look at the code, it is clearly labeled.

Andrew Wickliffe said...

is there any way to get rid of that link to the rss source? the first thing that shows up...

thanks

giles said...

For those wishing to display multiple feeds on the same page, and/or limit the number of posts that firstrss displays, you could use Yahoo pipes.

Here is a pipe somebody else made earlier.

Simple! The only downside is you need a yahoo account.

Kristi Barrow said...

HI Hatch, I tried to use this to show my friends facebook status, but I received the error, ERROR NOT FOUND! I noticed that you mentioned this doesn't work with all feeds. I have used Yahoo pipes in the meantime, but would prefer to use your solution! Any chance of updating? Cheers!

Jennifer Wilson - Agent Solutions said...

Hey there!

I was referred to your plugin and I can't seem to get it to work properly. I am creating a new blog/site and there are tabs (jtabber.php) for "Recent" and "Popular" posts. I want the "Recent" tab show my most recent posts from my other blog. (make sense?)

When I add your "list" code to my template code in the jtabber.php this is all that shows up when I go to view the site:

[rsslist:http://www.agentsolutions.ca/blog/feed/]

It doesn't populate with my most recent posts. I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong, or if the problem lies within the template itself.

Any thoughts?

Anonymous said...

Hey hatch!
How can i set all urls for opening in new window in description variable ?

if ($desc != '') $disp .= "\t$desc\n
";

Anonymous said...

Hi, I love your plugin, but I was wondering if it's possible to make it fetch multiple feeds on a single page?

At the moment, on my blog it only fetches the last one.

Crespire said...
This post has been removed by the author.
Crespire said...

I had deleted my other comment because I realized that the way I did it was messing up other aspects of Wordpress.

Anyway, I've fixed the script now so that it works. There's a slight issue with the final output in that return does not get me what I want when there are feeds involved.

http://codepad.org/wPDZr5Ik

Here's the updated plugin at work:
http://blog.simmonli.com/my-feed-roundup/
http://blog.simmonli.com/2008/12/here-have-a-feed/

Privatbloggen said...

FirstRSS - Exapanded do not work together with WP-PostRatings () :/

Anonymous said...

does this plugin work with wordpress2.7??????

Jerry said...

Very nice
Crespire how did you get the google news feeds to show up? I tried and it didn't work

It would be nice if there was a space between each headline or a bullet point as it gets confusing when there are headlines that wrap around onto the next line

Vicki's Husband said...

Hello Hatch,

Like many I've been trying to find an easy to use way to list other RSS feed. Your's works clean and simple!

Any chance of getting the cut/paste code to be able to modify the number of links displayed? I don't "code" so it's got to be simple. Sorry.

Your work is much appreciated!

firman said...

i have download,... and it shoul be instaled toninght. thanks for share..
regars

Mr. Harris said...

Yes, this plugin works with Wordpress 2.7.1

I run a website that runs WP 2.7.1, and I use the FirstRSS plugin on it to show an RSS feed from Youtube

Go check it out to see it in action:

http://yvlife.com/yoville-videos/

(makes a cheap video site LOL)

Lissa said...

hi! great plugin! thanks!

could you help me with editing the plugin. based on the post i created (http://cfcontario.ca/?cat=137) the titles are redundant. is there a way to fix that? ...also, how do i make the link to the reading open a new page or tab? if not, how would i expand the Scripture text?

please advise. thanks!

Anonymous said...

I too was searching for hours and am so glad I found your plugin! It works great!

Clive said...

Just what I was looking for but is there a way for the feed links to 'open in new window'?

You should have a 'Buy Me A Beer' button here somewhere :-)

Rejean said...

Hello,

this is my first foray into the world of displaying rss feeds, and i chose your plugin because it seemed the simplest one to start with. Nice work, easy to understand and modify. thanks!

I noticed like others that only one feed would get replaced even if you put more than one in a post.

If you want to fix this, simply move the call to str_replace at the very end to the end of the foreach loop instead, and replace
it as follows:

:
snip
:
$find = $val[0];
$replace = $disp;

$content = str_replace($find, $replace, $content); // new line here ****
}

// --- Return ---
return $content . $appendage; // modified return line ****

prayworld said...

Hatch,
Could I talk with you about doing some WP development for me? We have an RSS project we need some help with.

Thanks,
Wayne Dillard
www.prayercentral.net

Anonymous said...

I tried the code for cutting down the amount of feeds shown per feed with no luck. I did implement the code above which allows for multiple feeds.

Does anyone have another option for making it possible to show less than 10 feeds per feed?

adrenalini said...

hi :) nice piece of code :)

still...

I have a feed: www.computerabc.org/feeds, which i "regenerated" since first use with your plugin. now, when i use this feed on my homepage the plugin gets me an out-of-date feed. any suggestions how to "refresh" the plugin information?

while i did not solve the problem I temporary use feedburner feed on my homepage.

Raquel said...

I've been using your plug and it's been working perfectly so far until today. I added it to a new site, and the pages I create with it display fine at first. Then after a few minutes, I get a 404 error. I'm displaying ebay feeds. Any suggestions? BTW, I have another site displaying ebay feeds that works fine and I've never had this problem.