Basic WordPress Feed importer

Just a basic how-to here: making your own Feed importer tool to add some feeds in your WordPress themes. WordPress offers a bunch of useful tools to manage feeds, and among other cool stuffs, a method to import feeds : fetch_feed(). Given the feed’s url, you get back the feed content. Piece of cake 🙂 This goes in your theme’s functions.php:

function get_friends_feeds($friends = array(), $display = 2) {
    include_once(ABSPATH.WPINC.'/feed.php');
    $feeds = array();
    
    if (count($friends) != 0) {
        foreach($friends as $friend) {
            $rss = fetch_feed($friend);
            if (!is_wp_error( $rss ) ) :
                $maxitems = $rss->get_item_quantity($display); 
                $rss_items = $rss->get_items(0, $maxitems); 
            endif;
            
            if ($maxitems > 0) {
                foreach($rss_items as $item ) {
                    $feeds[$item->get_date('U')] = array('_href'  => esc_url($item->get_permalink()),
                                                         '_title' => esc_html($item->get_title()),
                                                         '_desc'  => strip_tags($item->get_description()),
                                                         '_date'  => $item->get_date('j<br />M'));
                }
            }
        }
    }
    
    return $feeds;
}

Note that this part only returns an array containing the feeds you want as objects; what to do with them depends on what you want. I use it to show me a simple bulleted list. This goes in my theme’s home.php, put it wherever you want:

<?php $feeds = get_friends_feeds(array('http://feeds.boston.com/boston/bigpicture/index', 'http://fluxbb.org/forums/extern.php?action=feed&type=atom')); krsort($feeds); ?>
<?php if (count($feeds) != 0) : ?>
        <div>
          <ul>
<?php foreach($feeds as $feed) : $feed = (object) $feed; ?>
            <li>
              <?php echo $feed->_date; ?>: <a href="<?php echo $feed->_href; ?>" title="<?php echo $feed->_title; ?>"><?php echo $feed->_title; ?><br />
              <?php echo long_excerpt($feed->_desc, 25); ?></a>
            </li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
          </ul>
        </div>
<?php endif; ?>

get_friends_feeds() takes two parameters: first is an array containing all your feeds url, second is an integer to limit the returned items. Default is 2. Pretty simple way to get a few feeds to dynamize a bit your blog 🙂 I might make some Widget integration of that thing so that it can be include directly from Dashboard without editing the templates’ code. Feel free to use and abuse!

Note: the ksort() call on $feeds could be done directly into the get_friends_feeds() method; I chose not to do so to keep the liberty to order feeds’ items by date on a global scale or to let them ordered by feed if I want to. Anyway, you may modify this code however you want, so… Go ahead!