Tips, Tricks, Tutorials, and Screencasts

There are all sorts of cool things you can do with SimplePie and feeds. These are some of the most popular code snippets and samples we've come across. Feel free to add your own, but if there's a similar one to what you're wanting to post, please see if you can merge your notes into the one that already exists.

These are tutorials about how to do things. For questions or issues that are frequently asked about SimplePie, check the Frequently Asked Questions page. If you're looking for some cool sites and tools to inspire you, check out the Sites that have integrated SimplePie page.

If you would like to see a tutorial for something here, add the title (in the same format as the other tutorial links) to the requested_tutorials section.

Screencasts are either QuickTime 7 files (compressed as H.264/AAC) or are Flash Video (.flv), and may be wider than a 1024×768 screen resolution. Assumes that you have gotten through the Introduction to PHP tutorial (as noted in the minimum requirements), and understand that a feed has information associated with it, and a feed contains one or more items which also have information associated with them.

• Introduction to SimplePie (10:56; High/Low)
  This screencast by Ryan Parman discusses the creation of a simple page, feed auto-discovery, mashing and sorting multiple feeds by time and date, favicons, and PHP5 method chaining.
• Creating the Digg SimplePie Add-on (22:13; High/Low)
  This screencast by Ryan Parman discusses the creation of SimplePie Add-ons including extending and overriding the built-in SimplePie classes. Uses Digg's custom RSS tags as the application of this Add-on.
• Integrate SimplePie and CodeIgniter (23:40; Low)
  This screencast by Elliot Haughin discusses how to integrate SimplePie into your CodeIgniter projects.
• Add SimplePie to Firefox 2 (0:30; High/Low)
  This 30-second “screen spot” by Ryan Parman shows how easy it is to add SimplePie as the default feed handler in Firefox 2.

• Only display items from the last 24 hours
• Changing timezones in a timestamp
• Translate timestamps into another language
• Use Relative Dates
• How to group multiple posts by day
• Date-based CSS class

• Sort multiple feeds by time and date
• NewsBlocks Demo 2.0
• Limit the number of items per feed to be used with Multifeeds
• Generate a new feed using SimplePie's multifeed support
• Building your own Alltop or PopURLs

• Grab custom tags or attributes
• How do I get a thumbnail from a YouTube feed?
• Only display images from a feed
• Flickr Lightbox
• Google Calendar on your website
• Flickr Photo Feeds mit SimplePie überwachen (German)

• How to do item paging
• Shorten titles and descriptions
• How to edit part of the feed before parsing it
• How to make description links open in a new window
• Sorting by custom criteria instead of date

• Integrate SimplePie and CodeIgniter
• CodeIgniter + SimplePie: Like peas and carrots
• SmartyPie: Feeding the Smarty PHP Template Engine with SimplePie

• Setting up a cron job for SimplePie and SimplePie Plugin for Wordpress