Wordpress Auto feed plugins


Wow this wordpress really amazed me, the very first time I use it, this plugin for auto feed posting to wordpress blog is created by Charles Johnson. The plugin support both rss feed and atom feed.

The name of the plugin is FeedWordPress , I use this plugin at my celebrity gossip site to display latest news about celebrities. You have the option to choose where is the source of your feed content, you can also specify more than one feed source for every category of your blog.

Using this plugin is very easy, like other plugin available for wordpress all you need to do is download the feedwordpress plugin from charles Johnson sitehttp://projects.radgeek.com/feedwordpress , then unzip it and upload the file to your wordpress blog site under wp_content/plugins. After that login to your wordpress admin area and click Plugins and look for FeedWordPress and click the Activate link to activate the plugin.

Here is a direct quote from Charles Johnson site about this wonderful plugin

FeedWordPress is an Atom/RSS aggregator for WordPress. It syndicates content from newsfeeds that you choose into your WordPress blog; if you syndicate several newsfeeds then you can WordPress’s posts database and templating engine as the back-end of an aggregation (”planet”) website. I originally developed it because I needed a more flexible replacement for Planet to use at Feminist Blogs.

FeedWordPress is designed with flexibility, ease of use, and ease of configuration in mind. You’ll need a working installation of WordPress (version 2.0 or 1.5), and also FTP or SFTP access to your web host. The ability to create cron jobs on your web host would be very helpful but it’s not absolutely necessary. You don’t need to tweak any plain-text configuration files and you don’t need shell access to your web host to make it work. (Although, I should point out, web hosts that don’t offer shell access are bad web hosts.)

Complete installation guide

Requirements

To use version 0.98 of FeedWordPress, you will need:

  1. an installed configured copy of WordPress 2.0.x pr 1.5.x. (It won’t work with WP 1.2 or WP MU development builds.)
  2. FTP or SFTP access to your web host

And you’ll probably also want to have either:

  1. the ability to create cron jobs on your web host, or at least
  2. a computer of your own and always-on Internet access

Installation

Upgrades

Upgrades

To upgrade an existing installation of FeedWordPress to version 0.98:

  1. Download the FeedWordPress archive in zip or gzipped tar format and extract the files on your computer. Replace your existing FeedWordPress files with the new files. Be sure to upgrade rss-functions.php if you use the optional MagpieRSS upgrade, or don’t use it yet but do want to syndicate Atom 1.0 feeds.

  2. If you are upgrading from version 0.96 or earlier, immediately log in to the WordPress Dashboard, and go to Options –> Syndicated. Follow the directions to launch the database upgrade procedure. The new versions of FeedWordPress incorporate some long-needed improvements, but old meta-data needs to be updated to prevent duplicate posts and other possible maladies. If you’re upgrading an existing installation, updates and FeedWordPress template functions will not work until you’ve done the upgrade.

  3. Take a coffee break while the upgrade runs. It should, hopefully, finish within a few minutes even on relatively large databases.

  4. update-feeds.php has been overhauled to improve performance and ease of use, and also to make errors easier to detect and eliminate. The overhaul doesn’t require any changes to your set up if you used XML-RPC pings, or command-line PHP, to do scheduled updates. It does affect you if you used curl or some other tool to send HTTP requests to update-feeds.php: your old cron job will probably not work anymore. See [Setting Up Feed Updates][] below to get scheduled updates back on track.

  5. Enjoy your new installation of FeedWordPress.

New Installations

  1. Install feedwordpress.php in your WordPress plugins directory and update-feeds.php in your WordPress wp-content directory.

  2. (Optional) Upgrade the copy of MagpieRSS packaged with WordPress by installing the new rss-functions.php (archived in OPTIONAL/wp-includes) into your WordPress wp-includes directory. Upgrading MagpieRSS is necessary if you want to take advantage of support for Atom 1.0, multiple post categories, RSS enclosures, and multiple character encodings. (Note, however, that support for transliterating between character encodings is a very complex and iffy prospect in some PHP environments, so if you intend to use a lot of feeds with alternate encodings you should make sure that your installation of PHP is up-to-date and that you keep a copy of the old MagpieRSS around to compare results.)

  3. Log in to the WordPress Dashboard and activate the FeedWordPress plugin. Go to Options –> Syndication to set up initial settings for the syndication link category (”Contributors”) by default and the RPC secret word (blank by default, but you should probably set it to something.)

  4. Set up your links for syndication through the WordPress Dashboard using Links –> Syndicated or Links –> Import and set global options however you want them using Options –> Syndication.

Setting Up Feed Updates

FeedWordPress is now ready to accept posts from its syndication sources. Unfortunately, it doesn’t yet know when to go get them. (This may be true even if you are upgrading an existing installation of FeedWordPress: your old cron job will still work if you used command-line PHP or blogging software pings to do updates, but it will need to be fixed if you used curl or another tool to send HTTP requests to update-feeds.php.)

You can load in syndicated posts for the first time by pointing your web browser to update-feeds.php. If you have WordPress installed at, say, http://www.zyx.com/blog then you should point your browser to http://www.zyx.com/blog/wp-content/update-feeds.php and log in as any user in the user database. (You may want to create a new “dummy” user for doing scheduled updates, using Users –> Authors & Users –> Add New User. Tell FeedWordPress to update all feeds, and you’ll get the first wave of posts imported into the database.

Congratulations! You should now have an aggregator site full of delicious syndicated content hot off of the newswires. Now you just need a way to keep the content freshly updated. Unless you enjoy manually browsing to update-feeds.php every hour on the hour, you’ll probably want to do this by setting up your site for automated updates.

You can pull that off in one of two ways, or by a mixture of both:

  1. The Blogging Software Ping Method: You can get all of your contributors to add you to the list of URIs that they notify of updates: while FeedWordPress is activated, it will accept XML-RPC “recently updated” pings in the standard format accepted by Weblogs.com, Ping-O-Matic, Technorati, and other services. Most blogging software allows users to add a URI to the list of URIs that get pinged on each update. (See, for example, Options –> Writing –> Update Services in WordPress, or Configuration –> Preferences –> Publicity / Remote Interfaces / TrackBack in Movable Type.)

    If you can get a contributor to add your XML-RPC URI to her services-to-ping list (if you have WordPress installed at http://www.zyx.com/blog, say, the URI to add should be http://www.zyx.com/blog/xmlrpc.php), then whenever she updates her blog, her blogging software will ping your FeedWordPress installation, and FeedWordPress will look up her feed to grab the new posts off of it.

  2. The Scheduled Update Job Method: You may very well not be able to get all your contributors to add your site to their blogging software’s ping list, and even if you do you may want to have a back-up option to catch updates later even if the ping fails to go through on one particular occasion. You’ll need to create a scheduled job to periodically check for updates on all the feeds. You’ll need either (a) the ability to create cron jobs on your web host or (b) access to another computer with a reliable, always-on Internet connection.

    If you can create a crontab on your web host, then the best thing to do is to create a cron job that will run update-feeds.php through the PHP command-line interface. For example, if you have WordPress installed in ~/www/wp (where ~ is your home directory), you might insert the following line into your crontab:

    25 * * * * cd $HOME/www/wp/wp-content ; php -q update-feeds.php

    If you don’t have access to (a), you can still save the day using another computer with always-on Internet access that sends a POST request to the update-feeds.php URI on a regular schedule. So, for example, if you have WordPress installed at http://www.zyx.com/blog, and you have a dummy user in your WordPress database with the login name ‘login’ and the password ‘pass’, then you could add the following line to the crontab on a home Linux box:

    25 * * * * curl --user login:pass http://www.zyx.com/blog/wp-content/update-feeds.php -d update=quiet

    The -d update=quiet switch ensures that (1) update-feeds.php will receive an HTTP POST request rather than an HTTP GET request (which is important, since it won’t take any actions with side-effects — such as checking for new posts — unless it receives an HTTP POST); it also tells it to suppress the HTML output that it would generate for normal web browsers, and only to output text if it encounters errors (this will keep the number of e-mails you receive from the Cron Daemon to a minimum).

    If you are using Windows XP and have a version of curl (such as the version included in Cygwin), you can create a Scheduled Task to similar effect.

Download link http://projects.radgeek.com/download/feedwordpress-0.98.zip

Filed under: Blogging by Craig

You must be logged in to post a comment.