Creating RSS feed

I have a site I would like to generate an RSS feed for it. I'm using PHP and mySQL on the site right now. Now I found the the structure for RSS 2.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rss version="2.0">
  <channel>
    <title>Example Channel</title>
    <link>http://example.com/</link>
    <description>My example channel</description>
    <item>
       <title>News for September the Second</title>
       <link>http://example.com/2002/09/01</link>
       <description>other things happened today</description>
    </item>
    <item>
       <title>News for September the First</title>
       <link>http://example.com/2002/09/02</link>
    </item>
  </channel>
</rss>

Code (markup):

Right now I populate the homepage with the newest articles. I query the database and then display the article titles, links, etc... To create a RSS feed for the newest articles do I simply generate a file using the above structure and then name the file something and this is my RSS feed? Is it that easy?

How do I automatically update the RSS feed? Can I put PHP code in the RSS feed in order to query the database and pull the latest articles?

 

Yes, you just need to create a file that looks like what you have. You can either make some sort of a schedule task or cron to run you php script that creates the file, or just have it created automatically when your site changes. I do it both ways for different sites.

Php file examples here

-Erik

 

Can the RSS file be a PHP file and simply generate the correct headers so it appears to be an XML file?

 

I don't do it that way, but I see no reason why it wouldn't work.

-Erik

 

You can also use one of the many existing PHP classes out there. I use one (feedcreator) on my arcade site that formats the XML and such for me. I just pass the data to the different pieces through a sql query.

 

You can use php file to create the rss/xml feeds and you do need to use the header to output the right format:

header('Content-type: text/xml'); 
echo "<" . "?" . "xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"ISO-8859-1\"" . "?" . ">";

PHP:

then just echo the xml code as normal.

 

Thanks everybody.

All those RSS feed services are not needed at all. Setting up a feed for your site is actually pretty easy.