Extension:SimpleFeed

This extension outputs the contents of an RSS feed. It is very customisable. As a result, no editing of the PHP source is required as everything is done in the wiki page.

This extension works well with old PHP versions. The simplepie framework is deprecated and not longer maintained (in the version which this extension is using). We at The Document Foundation switched to Extension:RSS as this extension is maintained by the WMF!

Prerequisites

SimpleFeed needs following prerequisites:

1. MediaWiki 1.23

Installation

1. cd ./extensions/
2. git clone https://github.com/dennisroczek/simplefeed
3. set correct write permissions using chmod (www-user, or equivalent, should be allowed to write). Permissions are usually 755, 775 or 777. See setting permissions for cache directory
4. chown -R www-data: /var/www/sites/mywiki.org/extensions/simplefeed/*
5. Add require_once "$IP/extensions/SimpleFeed.php"; to LocalSettings.php
6. If you are in a corporate environment, check out any proxy servers or firewalls.

Usage

Simple Method

The url address must be between the [...] tags. For example: http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/front_page/rss.xml

Customized Method

The url address must be between the [...] tags. For example: == [{PERMALINK} {TITLE}] == '''{DATE}, by {AUTHOR}''' {DESCRIPTION} This will pull the BBC News feed and output five posts. For every post, it will output the data between the feed tags, replacing {PERMALINK}, {TITLE}, {DATE}, {AUTHOR} and {DESCRIPTION} with the appropriate information.

Customization

You can customize the output by using the following:

url

The URL of the feed. This argument is not optional.

entries

The number of post entries to output. This defaults to 5, but can be any number. 0 is unlimited.

type

If this is set to "planet" then the post title and author will be retrieved from the title. For example, a post in a planet/aggregator could have a title "Joe Bloggs: MediaWiki is great". If type="planet" is set, then {TITLE} will become "Mediawiki is great", and {AUTHOR} will become "Joe Bloggs".

date

The format of the date to output. This conforms to PHP's date function syntax. This defaults to j F Y (E.g. 3 March 2007).

sort

If you specify sort="asc" then the feeds will be displayed in revers order.

limit

A possibility to limit the description to a maximum of XXX characters.

Further examples

Using an aggregator's feed

<feed url="http://planet.debian.org/rss20.xml" type="planet">
== [{PERMALINK} {TITLE}] == 
'''{DATE}, by {AUTHOR}''' {DESCRIPTION}
</feed>

This will remove the author's name from the title of the post, and setting its value to {AUTHOR}.

Changing the date format

<feed url="http://planet.debian.org/rss20.xml" date="h:i:s d/m/y T">...

Changes the date format to, in this example, "23:20:04 24/03/2007 GMT".

Todo

The following feature(s) to be added:

1. Check whether the URL given is a correct address. If SimplePie can't read it, output something.

2. Clean up the regular expressions.