In a recent post to PHPMaster.com Kevin Mowry shows you how to use SimplePie, a simple to use programatic feed reader you can use to parse things like RSS feeds.

If you're an avid feed consumer like I am, you might be a bit sad to see Google's recent announcement of Reader reaching end of life. Reader was simple and easy to use, but there's no reason you can't have the same functionality with your own homegrown project. The PHP library SimplePie allows for quick and easy feed consumption and display. Here's how you can get started on your own feed reader.

He helps you get it installed (via Composer) and shows you how to use some of its most basic functionality to parse the New York Times' feed. He also includes examples of getting the information back out of the SimplePie object. There's also some snippets that show how to only get the latest items and how to cache the results.

On PHPBuilder.com today there's a quick tutorial showing you how to build an RSS aggregator that can pull in RSS content and drop it into a MySQL table.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is a Web format that allows website owners to distribute their latest and frequently updated content in a standardized way. RSS feed is actually an XML document that can be easily read by using RSS reader software or built-in functions in programming languages, such as PHP or Java. In this article, the focus will be on building a RSS aggregator in PHP.

They introduce the basics of an RSS feed - a specially formatted XML document with values for individual posts (like "title" and "link". They provide the SQL structure for the "article" and "feed" tables and the code to pull out each "feed" record, parse it and drop that into the "article" table for later consumption. They show two different methods for getting the content - one using file_get_contents and another using cURL.

On the MaltBlue blog Matt Setter has a new tutorial posted about creating RSS feeds quickly and easily with the help of the Zend Framework and context switching.

Ever wanted to know how to take an existing Zend Framework application where you have posts, records, news or anything else stored in a data source and updated regularly, and make it available as a feed for your users that they can subscribe to? Well today, that's what I want to show you. Recently, during the development of the burgeoning PHP cloud development casts site, I had just that situation.

He shows you how to set up some of the routing for the RSS and Atom feeds, pointing them to specific module/controller/action paths for handling. He then creates a "_getFeed()" method that pulls together the needed content and uses the Zend_Feed_Writer_Feed component to create the feed of the correct type. This is then exported, returned and - thanks to a bit more configuration - turned into a correctly-formatted feed.

If you're a regular reader of PHPDeveloper.org, you know that there's a few articles posted here (almost) daily about what's happening in the PHP world. Unfortunately, this only scratches the surface of the quality content that's out there. In an effort to provide more PHP goodness to the community as a whole, PHP Quick Fix has been launched - a service linking to stories that don't make it on PHPDeveloper.org.

All of the stories on PHP Quick Fix (you can also follow it on twitter) are still hand-selected out of the mounds of PHP content that shows every day to ensure the best quality. There's no automatic syndication here - just more good, useful PHP (and related topics) to add to your day.

Additionally, if you're interested to see how it all works (thanks to a GimmeBar backend) check out this post on blog.phpdeveloper.org.

Rob Allen has posted a method he's come up with for displaying an RSS feed right in with the rest of the content of your WordPress blog. The key is in the simplicity of the MagpieRSS library.

My wife decided that she wanted to display a list of her latest AudioBoos in the sidebar of her blog. She looked at the AudioBoo JavaScript widget but decided it wasn't subtle enough and so she enlisted me to solve her problem. It turns out that AudioBoo has an RSS feed, so a simple plugin was required. I had a quick look on the extension site, but most are now "widgets" which her theme isn't set up for or didn't provide an unsigned list. Hence, I whipped up a small extension for her.

With the help of Magpie, a simple call to "fetch_rss" was all it took to pull in the AudioBoo RSS feed and a bit of PHP to loop through it and pull out the relevant bits. They're all displayed in a simple list - you can see it in action on her blog (look for the "Audioboo Updates" section).

On Qafoo.com there's a new tool that's been introduced to help you keep track of the current Call for Papers that are currently happening for PHP conferences. The start of the PHP conference season is in full swing, and sometimes it can be hard to keep up. Their Call for Papers Manager can keep that information at your fingertips.

The tool works quite simple: You can add CFPs you know about and which are relevant for the PHP community through a simple form. In order to remember the CFPs, you can configure two kinds of reminders: fFor upcoming CFPs and for ending CFPs. For each of these lists, you can determine when to be reminded, like 2 days before the event occurs. These lists can then be easily integrated into your normal feed reader using an RSS or Atom feed.

You can use the URL requested to get different kinds of reminders delivered to your feed reader too. If you have a conference and your Call for Papers is open or upcoming, add it to the list!

New on ZendCasts.com this screencast helps you use the Zend Framework's Zend_Feed component to create simple RSS and Atom feeds for your application.

The screencast shows you how to create a basic controller with information for a sample blog post (title, date creates, content, etc) and a simple method to create default posts. A second controller is made to handle the feed creation and two actions are created - one for RSS and the other for Atom. The posts are then parsed and pushed out to views for displaying as feeds.

The site has more great screencasts where this came from so check out their screencasts section for ones on other topics like ZendX_JQuery, working with Zend_Log, and validation with Zend_Validate.

On PHPBuilder.com there's a new tutorial looking at using the SimplePie library to aggregate RSS feeds.

PHP developers are particularly lucky as a fantastic library named SimplePie not only offers the aforementioned features but also supports both RSS and Atom formats, multiple character encodings, and an architecture that makes integration with your favorite content management and blogging platforms a breeze. In this tutorial I'll introduce you to SimplePie, showing you how easy it is to create a rudimentary custom RSS aggregator using this powerful library.

He helps you get SimplePie installed (downloaded and unpacked) pulling in both single and multiple feeds. There's no caching or storage included in the tutorial, but it would be recommended if you choose this as an option for everyday use.

In a new blog post today Sudheer Satyanarayana shows how to take a few simple lines of code (seven to be exact) and create a simple XML/RSS reader he used to pull in weather data for a simple application.

Today, I was looking for a quick way to get the current weather information on my computer. There are so many websites out there that offer the information. But I was looking for a program I could permanently install on my computer and launch it whenever I want to lookup the weather information. [...] I wrote a program to print the weather information in 7 lines of PHP code. I have published this program on Code Album github repository. You can grab it and use it.

He chose a Yahoo feed to get the weather information from their service. He includes the base code to make the request via a cURL connection and parsing it into a SimpleXML object to pull out the needed info.

New on NETTUTS.com today there's a tutorial about building a simple RSS feed for your CodeIgniter application based on the contents of a MySQL database and a standard MVC setup of files to handle the request.

In this tutorial, we will build a RSS 2.0 Feed with the PHP framework CodeIgniter. After this tutorial, you will be able to build a feed for any custom website in no time at all.

The process (like the CodeIgniter framework) is a pretty simple one. He helps you set up the MySQL database and tables via phpMyAdmin and creates a simple model, view and controller to handle a "yourdomain.com/feed" request with an RSS document. All sample code is included, ready for you to cut and paste.