Padraic Brady has put together a very comprehensive post on his blog today about using the Zend_Feed component of the Zend Framework to help with the aggregation of content from other sites (like RSS and Atom feeds).

In this entry I explore Zend_Feed from the perspective of someone aggregating RSS and Atom feeds with a view to building a database of uniquely identified content for later presentation in a "Planet" style application. [...] In fact all we create here is a simple command line script to aggregate content frequently (e.g. just set up cron to run it every hour or so) into a database for later presentation.

He guides you through each step of the way:

• Setting Up Database And Models
• The Aggregator Script Foundation
• Using Zend_Feed to get common data for RSS/Atom entries
• Putting It All Together

There's plenty of code (and SQL to insert) in the post and he explains each point well, helping to make the development process smoother. There's even a summary section to toss in a few extra bits of information just in case you missed them along the way.

Cal Evans, of Zend Developer Zone (and PHP Abstract) fame has launched a new site to help PHPers with keeping all of their PHP podcasts in one place - PHPPodcasts.com - an archive site to give people searching for PHP podcasts a "one-stop shop".

phppodcasts.com is not a replacement for any of the existing feeds, it won't be on iTunes because it's not in competition with the owners podcasts. It's an archival site and a place for people to explore the different podcasts available for PHP developers before subscribing to them.

Currently, there's four podcasts under the PHPPodcast umbrella - Zend's own PHP Abstract, php|architect's Pro PHP podcast, the phpBB podcast and the CakePHP group's own podcast, The Show.

Know of a PHP-related podcast that you think should be added to the site? Let Cal know - Cal [at] this domain.

As Chris Shiflett mentions today, there's a new web development security aggregation site that's been launched - Planet-Websecurity.org [feed]. Christian Matthies has headed up the project:

Those of you who have spoken to me recently may already be aware of this project, but for those who don't, I am pleased to announce the launch of Planet Websecurity, founded with the intention to bring together similarly themed news and rants related to Web security and to display them in one place.

Included in the list of blogs/sites aggregated are the blogs of: Chris Shiflett, Robert Hansen, Sid Karunaratne and Christian himself.

In a new tutorial over on PHPBuilder.com today, they demonstrate how to create and work with one of the most popular data exchange formats on the web today - RSS.

Recently I was looking for an RSS aggregator. I was having surprising difficulty finding one that did exactly what I wanted. [...] I began seriously considering writing my own. This month, I show you how to create a basic RSS reader yourself.

He gives a simple primer to what RSS is and what it looks like (explaining the XML spec) and includes an example of what a simple document looks like. He uses the older XML functionality in PHP (expat) to do the parsing and includes to code that he uses to get the job done.

In this post he mentions the updates he's made to allow the class to send aggregate types (arrays, objects, etc) as well as the ability to use standard HTTP authentication.

He also notes (in this post) he added the ability, via a javascript library, to handle the unserializing of the PHP pulled from the remote server.

For more in formation about the class, you can check out his detailed page...