Simple Feed List
Simple Feed List is a WordPress plugin that displays a list of entries from a valid RSS feed.
Description
This is a very useful way to display RSS feed data in a list format - news updates, site updates, software updates, etc. All you need is the URL of the RSS feed.
To display a feed on your WordPress site you will need to either insert a call to a PHP function, where appropriate, into your theme or use a shortcode. Use the latter for displaying a list in a post/page and the former for displaying a list in the sidebar or elsewhere on the site.
PHP Function
<?php simple_feed_list('listurl','paras'); ?>Where..
listurl : This is the URL of your RSS feed
paras : This is an optional list of parameters, each seperated by an ampersand (&)
The paras are as follows...
limit : The number of items to display from 1 to 20 (default is 5)
desc : This indicates whether you wish to display the description on the line below. This should be "Yes" or "No" or a numeric length. If omitted, it will assume to be "No". If a number is specified this will be used as the maximum length of the description.
title : This indicates the length that you wish to restrict the feed title to (in characters). By default, this will be unlimited.
more : By default, "More..." will be displayed at the bottom of the list with a link to the list URL. If you specify "No" then this will be omitted.
nofollow : If set as "Yes", this adds a REL="NOFOLLOW" tag to the links.
target : Specify the target of any links (default is _BLANK)
cache : Modify the time that the feed is cached (specify in hours - default is 1)
The plugin will then display a list of entries from the RSS as an HTML list (i.e. with <li> and </li> around each entry).
An example would be...
<?php simple_feed_list('http://images.apple.com/trailers/home/rss/newtrailers.rss','limit=5'); ?>This would display a list of the latest 5 movie trailers from the Apple site. Descriptions will not be shown.
<?php simple_feed_list('http://images.apple.com/trailers/home/rss/newtrailers.rss','limit=5&desc=200'); ?>This would display a list of the latest 5 movie trailers from the Apple site. Descriptions will be shown, up to a maximum length of 200 characters.
The following is an example of how it could be used, with a function_exists check so that it doesn't cause problems if the plugin is not active...
<?php if (function_exists('simple_feed_list')) : ?>
<h2>Latest Apple Movie Trailers</h2>
<ul><?php simple_feed_list('http://images.apple.com/trailers/home/rss/newtrailers.rss','limit=5'); ?></ul>
<?php endif; ?>If you specify a limit of just 1, then the <li> tags will not be used, allowing you to embed the result in a sentence. For example, you could use a feed of quotes and use this to just display the latest quote.
Shortcode
A shortcode of [feedlist] can be used with any of the following parameters (only the first is required) - listurl, limit, desc , more, target, nofollow and cache. The formats of these parameters are the same as those above.
Using the Apple trailers example from above, you would write...
[feedlist listurl="http://images.apple.com/trailers/home/rss/newtrailers.rss" limit=5]
The results are presented as an unordered list - unlike the PHP function, this includes the <ul> and </ul> tags surrounding it. The exception, like with the PHP function, is if you request only one feed item to be output - this is written out without any list tags.
For help with this plugin, or simply to comment or get in touch, please read the appropriate section in "Other Notes" for details. This plugin, and all support, is supplied for free, but donations are always welcome.
Licence
This WordPress plugin is licensed under the GPLv2 (or later).
Support
All of my plugins are supported via my website.
Please feel free to visit the site for plugin updates and development news - either visit the site regularly, follow my news feed or follow me on Twitter (@artiss_tech).
For problems, suggestions or enhancements for this plugin, there is a dedicated page and a forum. The dedicated page will also list any known issues and planned enhancements.
Alternatively, please contact me directly.
This plugin, and all support, is supplied for free, but donations are always welcome.
Installation
- Upload the entire
simple-feed-listfolder to yourwp-content/plugins/directory. - Activate the plugin through the 'Plugins' menu in WordPress.
- There is no options screen - configuration is done in your code.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do you have any example RSS feeds to use?
Yes.
- The latest movie trailers from the Apple website
- Latest software updates from FileHippo.com
- Quote of the day
Which version of PHP does this plugin work with?
It has been tested and been found valid from PHP 4 upwards.
Screenshots
A sample feed list.
Changelog
1.0
- Initial release
1.1
- Added ability to specify a maximum length for the description
1.2
- Check for CDATA within the title or description and strip out the tags if found. This resolves an issue where some feeds weren't displaying (especially those provided by FeedBurner)
- Use alternative method to file_get_contents to read content of feed - this means that allow_url_fopen does not need to be switched on in users PHP configuration. This has also improved performance of the plugin - it is now approx. 50% quicker
1.3
- Ok, that last change didn't work as well as I expected - the replacement file routine isn't compatible with PHP 4. I have therefore converted this to ANOTHER version, but one that is at least compatible with PHP 4.
1.4
- CDATA now stripped from URL address
2.0
- Complete re-write using WordPress' own RSS parsing and caching
- Added functionality to read multiple parameters seperated by an ampersand
- Added new
nofollow,target,cacheandmoreparameters
2.1
- Improved the message output when a feed can't be displayed
- Added shortcode option
2.2
- Added new parameter to restrict length of feed title
2.2.1
- Added ellipsis to end of truncated title
2.2.2
- Fixed issue where
<
ul> tags were appearing for single feed output on shortcodes * Fixed issue where ampersands in URLs were encoded when using shortcodes
2.3
- Improved processing of ATOM feeds
- Ensure parameters are lower case
- Add translation to "More" text
- Modified the way that UL tags are added to shortcodes
- Write out debug information as 2 additional HTML comment lines
- Description details are only fetched if option requested
- Tidied up code
2.3.1
- When using a shortcode, the terminator for the unordered list was
- instead of
. Now corrected. Thanks to sm4r7m0u53 for identifying that.
2.3.2
- Added a number of CLASS parameters to appropriate tags for CSS styling purposes
Known Bugs
No bugs are currently recorded.
Planned Enhancements
View the Roadmap for Simple Feed List
View the Change Log for Simple Feed List
Copyright © 2000-2012 
Artiss.co.uk is checked by 
I tried your plugin but I keep getting the following error:
Warning: file_get_contents(): URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration in /home/content/a/n/t/anthonyv/html/omniai910/omnia/i910/wp-content/plugins/simple-feed-list/simple-feed-list.php on line 34
Warning: file_get_contents(http://images.apple.com/trailers/home/rss/newtrailers.rss): failed to open stream: no suitable wrapper could be found in /home/content/a/n/t/anthonyv/html/omniai910/omnia/i910/wp-content/plugins/simple-feed-list/simple-feed-list.php on line 34
# Simple Feed List Plugin : The supplied file does not seem to be in the RSS format.
Here’s a link to the page:
http://www.omniai910.com/omnia/i910/contact/
Anthony,
Thanks for letting me know about this. It’s down to a PHP configuration error on your host server. I’ve written further details, including how to fix it in a new blog entry.
Hi David – great little plugin you’ve made. I’m trying to use it in my sidebar at http://www.tributary.ca/
2 Questions:
1. Can I adjust the length of the description – if so, how?
2. I am getting a curious blank/empty marker at the beginning of the list – any idea why this might be happening.
I am completely new to this whole WP thing so your help is appreciated.
Nice work!
Hi Andy,
Glad you like it.
1. Not at the moment – unless you change the plugin code. If you want me to show you how to do this, let me know. In the meantime I’ll add it to the list of to-do’s for the next version!
2. Ok, if you can tell me where on the site (page and location on page) you’re using it I can take a look at the generated code and be able to work it out – again, let me know.
Hi there,
First of all, Thanks for such a nice plugin. It is running perfectly.
I now want to include the images within the source posts/feeds to the end results.
Is there a way to do this?
Thanks for the reply. Sadly, there is no facility to do this as it’s designed for simple text links – hence images and the such are removed to present a clean result.
If you open up the plugin code simple-feed-list.php and find line 91…
if ($desc_flag=="Yes") {echo "".strip_tags(htmlspecialchars_decode($desc));}Then change it to…
if ($desc_flag=="Yes") {echo "".$desc;}Then this MAY work, but I haven’t tested it.
The install was easy, and the link to the feed I am drawing from seems to be in place. But I don’t see any text. I see the bullets, and the style is the same as the list above the feed that shows up fine. The more link takes me to the correct page. So…
Any idea why this feed would not be displaying the text?
Hi Rick, Can you let me know the feed URL that you’re using and I’ll try it out?
Thank YOU for your reply David,
Unfortunately that didn’t work, but no worries, I got what I initially wanted. I guess that sometimes we get too picky
Keep up the good work!
Hi. I’ve set it up in WordPress, trying to pull from my Twitter account, but the RSS feed is returning this error: “Simple Feed List Plugin : The supplied file does not seem to be in the RSS format.”
Here is the source feed in question:
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/6943192.rss
Thanks for any assistance you can provide.
Marc, I’ve taken a look at this and tried it out… it appears to work. The code I used in my sidebar (to display the first 5 entries) was…
<?php if (function_exists('simple_feed_list')) : ?> <h2>Marc's Twitter</h2> <ul><?php simple_feed_list('http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/ 6943192.rss','5',''); ?></ul> <?php endif; ?>If the error message that you gave appears, this simply means that the header doesn’t state that it’s an RSS feed – the Twitter feed in your URL does contain this.
Thanks for the quick response, David. I popped the code in my sidebar template, and still got the same error. I’ll dig around a little more and see if I can sort out what’s up.
The only thing I could suggest is that your feed is coming from a different Twitter server from mine and is formed differently. Try looking at the underlying XML for the feed and see if, like mine, the second line starts with <RSS – a line beginning with this should mean the error you’re seeing shouldn’t be triggered.
Dave,
Would this work on a none WP page pulling feeds from a WP page?
Yes it would – there is no WordPress dependency within the code.
Hi there,
Like Rick above, my feed is only showing the titles and no text description.
And is there anyway to open the news in the same window?
Thanks
I’m investigating this, but it appears to be related to FeedBurner formatting. If this is happening, simply supply the raw URL of the feed – i.e. the one that FeedBurner is reading.
Can’t get this wonderful plugin to work either, im supplying a correct rss feed with the <RSS on the second line, also tried your code, it still says The supplied file does not seem to be in the RSS format.
Could there be a issue with something else? I don’t see why this wouldn’t work… I’ve tried atleast 10 different rss feeds now and all of them give me the exact same result.
It says the exact same thing when using the example rss feeds in readme.txt, so there’s definitly something else that is wrong, no rss is valid for me. Could it be that some plugin is interupting this script or is my php missing some settings? I know i don’t have f_open on for security reasons, but i don’t get any complaints about that.
Please provide me with an example feed URL, and I’ll try and find the cause for you.
I think i solved the issue allow_url_fopen is required in php for this script to work, but that comes with large security breaches that i didn’t want to cross, is there anyway else to call the rss feed without using fopen, cause the feed is localhost.
Thanks for the quick responds David! As i said earlier i got it to work when i enabled “allow_url_fopen” in php with your feeds in the readme.txt. However, my personal feed did not work, the output was blank. I’m guessing that the feed isn’t correctly output, but i was wondering if there’s anyway to modify the script to read the feed i want to use instead of changing the feed it self (probably alot harder.)
This is the feed i wanted to use:
It does validate in your script but as i said, the output is blank.
Thanks alot for the help!
It’s formatted fine, but like the aforementioned FeedBurner issue, all of the content is held within CDATA, which currently my plugin doesn’t recognise. This is something I will fix for the next release.
Awesome, thanks for the hard work, i will donate to your cause!
A question though, is it possible to run the script without having allow_url_fopen on? I’m guessing it should be possible cause the rss feed that i want to have on my wordpress is actually located on the same server. It could be found internally without supplying the http://mywebsite/application/rss instead just /application/rss…
Thanks again for the help David. (and sorry for my lousy english)
Hi David,
A very powerful plugin! I have a question and hope you can help me.
I would like to use this plugin to create an overview of the news in my niche (like some sort of news paper).
Is there a way I can have the plugin retrieve the data once every few hours and cache the data in between?
I’m asking this because I don’t want to retrieve the data for every person every single time they refresh (saves time and traffic I guess not to do that).
Hope to hear from you if you have any thoughts on this.
Again, love your work! Thanks!
This is beyond the capability of the plugin at present. That’s now to say I won’t add such a facility later, but I think there are other, more important changs, to be making first
Keep an eye out though!
Ok, Tomaí and drk – I’ve made a change to the plugin which will work with the feeds that you supplied. This was due to some feeds (including those provided by FeedBurner) holding their data with CDATA.
I’ve not yet launched this new version, but keep an eye out for it (it will be version 1.2). I also want to look at the issue over the use of file_get_contents…
Love the Plugin! having the same problem with the target defaulting to Target=”_blank”. Was wondering how I can change this open it in the same window. My feed is coming from my wordpress site and i am using it in one of my pages.
Hi Andy, in the next version of the plugin I’ll add a facility to change this. I’ve also had a separate request about suppressing the “More” at the bottom of the list, so I’ll look at this too.
Great plugin! Would it be possible to add an option to make all the links nofollow? Thanks.
Excellent idea, and one I can apply to some of my other plugins too – watch this space!
Your pulugin solved my problem about feed.
Thank you very much !
I have a question.
My Site works on Multibyte (Japanese language)
desc flag occuers encord problem in last word.
how can I fix ?
I’m currently working on a new version of the plugin that will work better with international languages – stay tuned!
Hi David,
Excellent plug-in, had it working fine locally, as soon as I uploaded the site to my server i get “Fatal error: Call to undefined function simple_feed_list()..” message.
any ideas?
As obvious as this sounds, this means that the Simple Feed List is not activated – your call to the routine isn’t working (and I’m assuming you haven’t put a check around your code to ensure that the plugin is active). Check your plugins screen again and make sure it’s 100% active.
If you still can’t find the solution, send me a copy of the code you’ve used to call the plugin.
yes it’s definitely activated – I am using the code example from your page –
Latest Apple Movie Trailers
although no joy – it takes a while to load then just displays the heading, and the rest of the page naturally fails as the php isn’t executing – this is really annoying as it was working fine locally.
David, I found a small bug with your plugin when it encounters a feed that is not reachable. My proposed fix is discussed here:
Hi, I’m trying to insert a custom field function like this
<?php get_post_meta($post->ID, 'RSS_feed', $single = true); ?>inside the RSS url location, but it is out putting an error. I was wondering if this is possible. Thanks!Hi Mike,
If I’m understanding right, I think you’d need to do this…
<?php simple_feed_list(get_post_meta($post->ID, 'RSS_feed',$single = true),'limit','descflag'); ?>Obviously, you’d need to replace ‘limit’ and ‘descflag’ with the appropriate options.
Hi,
I’m using your plugin and it’s working great, however, I need to limit the number of characters displayed in a headline so that it doesn’t wrap to two lines. Is there a way to truncate the title if longer only displaying the first say, 55 characters?
Thank you in advance for your help!
Hi Chris – no, not at the moment. I’ll add it as something to add to the next release.
How do I change the frequency at which it checks a rss feed for new updates? I would like to lower this value a bit. Thanks.
I’ve used the built in WordPress feed parser which has it’s own caching – I’m not sure how (or if you can) you modify this caching details. At some point I might also implement the option to use my own caching instead.
Hi – I just installed your plugin – added the php code to the page but nothing happens?? I have wordpress 3.0.1 – can you advise, please. Many thanks.
Adam – please send me (either via a comment – make sure you use the CODE tags, otherwise it will be lost, or via my contact form) the code that you’re using, plus the URL of the page where it appears. Thanks.
GREAT plug-in – does exactly what it claims to do! Also really wonderful “customer service.” I emailed David directly because I couldn’t get the feed list to do something I wanted, and he was incredibly responsive and helpful. I am a total newbie and am very grateful for the help.
I’m glad I could help Bess.
Hi – I have a feed I can’t get to work. I suspect it’s one of 2 possible causes. The feed URL has a username and password in it; and it is also on port 8085. Is it the port number in the url which is causing the problem or the authentication? How can it be fixed?
Cheers.
I can’t see that MagpieRSS (which the plugin uses) doesn’t support ports and passwords but, equally, I can’t see that it does. Sorry I can’t be more helpful with that answer – I’m restricted by the capability of MagpieRSS.
Ok, I created a rewrite rule to remove the port number from the feed url and the issue remains.
The URL looks like http://hostname/rss?mode=history&ma_username=username&ma_password=password
Which gives the error “Simple Feed List: The supplied feed could not be fetched and/or parsed.”
I guess it must be the username/password then.
Nice plugin, it worked for me yesterday, but tonight I checked and found feed is not updating the news from daily telegraph. Its showing yesterday’s news still!
Please visit the following link
Any clues?
Could you send me the shortcode that you used and I’ll test it.
Hi David
I think this plugin is exactly what I need but I’m having a strange problem – the first time a page with the feed list is display, it works perfectly, but on refresh (or navigating away from, then back to, that same page) I get a strange error message:
Warning: array_slice() [function.array-slice]: The first argument should be an array in /homepages/…./wp-content/plugins/simple-feed-list/simple-feed-list.php on line 91
and this:
Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /homepages/…./wp-content/plugins/simple-feed-list/simple-feed-list.php on line 105
I thought at first it might have to do with the fact that in some cases the feed consists of only one item, but that’s random, sometimes there are more, and I still get the error.
Any suggestions?
Trish – can you please provide a URL of a page where this is happening, so that I can take a look at it? Also, let me know the feed URL. However, this sounds like it may be a problem with the caching.
Can you please show an example of a shortcode using 2 or more parameters?
Is it written like this?
[feedlist listurl="http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/rss.xml" limit=5&desc=200]No, each parameter is separated by a space. The shortcode example above does have 2 parameters already in it – listurl and limit.
So, in your example it would be…
[feedlist listurl="http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/rss.xml" limit=5 desc=200]Hiya,
I have tried your RSS Feed plug. Works fine ( v3.05 ). One question – Is it possible to style with CSS?
Aidan
Yes. The list output has LI tags around each, however, you must provide the OL tags – the best thing to do is to assign an ID or CLASS to this and style the output that way.