Question

I am using SimplePie RSS to aggregate 4 feeds and they are being sorted by the date (descending) and in the code it is set to echo out the pubDate but it is not showing it. It just prints a blank element.

For sanaties sake (as the code file is tens of lines long I have it in a *.txt file on my server which can be found here: http://feeds.powercastmedia.net/feeds.php.txt

I am completely lost.

Cheers!,
Phill

Answer 1

Try placing other information in the echo calls to ensure that those lines are actually being called, and that the output is being displayed in the expected manor –

<title><? echo "Title: ".$item->get_title(); ?></title>
<link><? echo "Permalink: ".$item->get_permalink(); ?></link>
<pubDate><? echo "PubDate: ".$item->get_date(); ?></pubDate>
<description><? echo "Description: ".$item->get_description(); ?></description>

This kind of “debug output” can help with debugging all sorts of things. It should help you figure out exactly where the problem is originating from.

Also, I noticed that you have numerous unnecessary PHP opening and closing tags, where multiple lines could be consolidated into a single, cleaner code block (Ex:)

<?php if ($success): ?>
<? $itemlimit=0; ?>
<?php foreach($feed->get_items() as $item): ?>
<? if ($itemlimit==10) { break; } ?>

Could be cleaned up to be:

<?php 
if($success)
{
    $itemlimit = 0;
    $items = $feed->get_items(); // This might also help, as PHP sometimes has issues when iterating through arrays returned directly from functions
    foreach($items as $item)
    {
        if($itemlimit == 0) break;
...

In fact, most of the file could be within one pair of PHP tags.
Just a suggestion.