Question

I’ve recently started developing a portfolio website which I would like to link to my wordpress blog using simplepie. It’s been quite a smooth process so far – loading names and descriptions of posts, and linking them to the full post was quite easy. However, I would like the option to render the posts in my own website as well. Getting the full content of a given post is simple, but what I would like to do is provide a list of recent posts which link to a php page on my portfolio website that takes a GET variable of some sort to identify the post, so that I can render the full content there.

That’s where I’ve run into problems – there doesn’t seem to be any way to look up a post according to a specific id or name or similar. Is there any way I can pull some unique identifier from a post object on one page, then pass the identifier to another page and look up the specific post there? If that’s impossible, is there any way for me to simply pass the entire post object, or temporarily store it somewhere so it can be used by the other page?

Thank you for your time.

Answer 1

I stumbled across your question looking for something else about simplepie. But I do work with an identifier while using simplepie. So this seems to be the answer to your question:

My getFeedPosts-function in PHP looks like this:

public function getFeedPosts($numberPosts = null) {
    $feed = new SimplePie();    // default options
    $feed->set_feed_url('http://yourname.blogspot.com');    // Set the feed
    $feed->enable_cache(true);  /* Enable caching */
    $feed->set_cache_duration(1800);    /* seconds to cache the feed */         
    $feed->init();  // Run SimplePie.
    $feed->handle_content_type();
    $allFeeds = array();
    $number = $numberPosts>0 ? $numberPosts : 0;
    foreach ($feed->get_items(0, $number) as $item) {
        $singleFeed = array(
            'author'=>$item->get_author(),
            'categories'=>$item->get_categories(),
            'copyright'=>$item->get_copyright(),
            'content'=>$item->get_content(),
            'date'=>$item->get_date("d.m.Y H:i"),
            'description'=>$item->get_description(),
            'id'=>$item->get_id(),
            'latitude'=>$item->get_latitude(),
            'longitude'=>$item->get_longitude(),
            'permalink'=>$item->get_permalink(),
            'title'=>$item->get_title()
        );
        array_push($allFeeds, $singleFeed);
    }
    $feed = null;
    return json_encode($allFeeds);
}

As you can see, I build a associative array and return it as JSON what makes it really easy using jQuery and ajax (in my case) on the client side.

The ‘id’ is a unique identifier of every post in my blog. So this is the key to identify the same post also in another function/on another page. You just have to iterate the posts and compare this id. As far as I can see, there is no get_item($ID)-function. There is an get_item($key)-function but it is also just taking out a specific post from the list of all posts by the array-position (which is nearly the same way I suggest).