Extension:RSS Reader

This RSS Reader extension tries to provide a tool for including RSS feeds inside various articles across your wiki. It is best used on specialty pages made so that users can easily track the news, etc. This extension was made because all the other RSS extensions did not work or performed poorly on MediaWiki 1.10.

Usage
This extension is a parser extension and thus is used by the wiki users. The function adds an   tag to use inside articles.

The tag
The custom tag is called  . For instance, if you put  http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/world/rss.xml  then you will create a feed to BBC World news. You can add more than one feed in a single   tag to have them display in columns. Do so by adding "|" between the feed urls. Thus,  firsturl|secondurl|thirdurl  will create a reader with 3 columns, displaying items from all 3 feeds.

By default, the reader will display all the items in the feed. If you want to display upto a maximum of a certain number of items, then add number=n (where n is the max number) inside the rss tag:  http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/world/rss.xml  will display the last 10 stories from BBC World.

Installing

 * 1) Create a folder called RSSReader in your extensions directory
 * 2) Download the lastRSScode and save it in your newly created folder as lastRSS.php
 * 3) Create a file called RSSReader.php in your new folder
 * 4) Copy and paste the RSS code into your new file
 * 5) Create a folder called cache in your RSSReader folder
 * 6) In LocalSettings.php, add the following line:

Code
";   }    return $output; }

?>

Possible Issues
There is very little error checking in this code, since it was made for one specific use. Therefore, it is possible to run into a number of issues or errors that you would have to fix yourself or report in the discussion section of this article.

Different Directory
If you do not install this code in $IP/extensions/RSSReader/ then there could be some issues. It does not matter much for RSSReader.php but lastRSS.php has to be located at $IP/extensions/RSSReader/lastRSS.php. If you place lastRSS.php somewhere else, then you have to go into RSSReader.php and change the line  to the new path to lastRSS.php.

Warnings

 * This extension turns off parser caching for all the pages on which the   tag is present. This could result in server strain if rss tags are present on many high traffic pages.

Warning: Cannot modify header information
This bug happens when there is extra whitespace at the end of a file (most commonly lastRSS.php). Make sure there are no trailing spaces or linebreaks after the closing php tag (?>).

Acknowledgement

 * lastRSS.php was not written by the author of this extension. lastRSS.php was written by Vojtech Semecky and licensed under GPL. If you want more information about lastRSS.php check it's site

Future Improvements

 * Expand on error checking
 * Provide more options for the user both inside the article and from LocalSettins.php
 * Move over to a database cache instead of a "cache" folder
 * might require some rewriting of lastRSS
 * Decouple HTML and CSS to include a seperate .css file for skining