Member Avatar for CreatorZeus

I have been racking my brain trying to think of how this would work to no success. Can anyone explain how this could be done?

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by JorgeM

Dani AI

Generated

Short answer for : yes — pull the rows with MySQLi and emit a well-formed RSS document. was right that the feed is XML, and 's example shows the basic layout, but real-world feeds should handle encoding, dates, HTML in descriptions, and safe DB access.

Practical checklist before you output anything: set the MySQLi charset to utf8mb4, use prepared statements if the query takes input, return only the most recent N published posts, use absolute URLs, and format dates with PHP's DATE_RSS (RFC‑2822). Put HTML post bodies inside CDATA so aggregators don't choke, include a stable <guid> for each item, and send the MIME type application/rss+xml; charset=utf-8. Also add simple HTTP caching (Cache-Control / Last-Modified or ETag) so clients and proxies don't re-request constantly.

A robust pattern is to build the feed with DOMDocument (or SimpleXML) instead of echoing raw strings — this avoids escaping bugs and makes CDATA easy. Example (MySQLi + DOMDocument):

<?php
$mysqli = new mysqli('host','user','pass','db');
if ($mysqli->connect_errno) { http_response_code(500); exit; }
$mysqli->set_charset('utf8mb4');

$stmt = $mysqli->prepare(
  "SELECT id,title,slug,content,created_at
   FROM posts WHERE status='published'
   ORDER BY created_at DESC LIMIT 20"
);
$stmt->execute();
$res = $stmt->get_result();

$dom = new DOMDocument('1.0','utf-8');
$rss = $dom->createElement('rss');
$rss->setAttribute('version','2.0');
$dom->appendChild($rss);

$ch = $dom->createElement('channel');
$ch->appendChild($dom->createElement('title','Example Blog'));
$ch->appendChild($dom->createElement('link','https://example.com'));
$ch->appendChild($dom->createElement('description','Latest posts'));
$rss->appendChild($ch);

while ($row = $res->fetch_assoc()) {
  $item = $dom->createElement('item');
  $item->appendChild($dom->createElement('title',$row['title']));
  $item->appendChild($dom->createElement('link','https://example.com/post/'.$row['slug']));
  $item->appendChild($dom->createElement('guid','https://example.com/post/'.$row['slug']));
  $item->appendChild($dom->createElement('pubDate', date(DATE_RSS, strtotime($row['created_at']))));
  $desc = $dom->createElement('description');
  $desc->appendChild($dom->createCDATASection($row['content']));
  $item->appendChild($desc);
  $ch->appendChild($item);
}

header('Content-Type: application/rss+xml; charset=utf-8');
echo $dom->saveXML();

Troubleshooting notes: if get_result() isn't available, bind_result()/fetch() is the fallback. Run the final feed through a validator and test in a few readers. Watch timezone handling for pubDate, and never expose drafts or private posts.

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Member Avatar for pritaeas

An RSS feed is nothing more than an XML file. What exactly is the problem you're having? You can retrieve the data as usual, and then create a feed by applying a template.

Member Avatar for JorgeM

Here is the basic structure of an RSS feed.

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?> 
<rss version='2.0'> 
<channel> 

  <title>Website related title or RSS Feed Title </title> 
  <link>URL to your site</link> 
  <description>Description for your Site/Feed</description> 

  <item> 
    <title>Item Title</title> 
    <link>Item URL </link> 
    <description>Items description </description> 
  </item> 

</channel> 
</rss>

Then, create a php page...something like this...

<?php

// your db related code...

header("Content-type: text/xml"); 

echo "<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?> 
<rss version='2.0'>
<channel>
<title> *** </title>
<link></link>
<description> ***** </description>";

while( // $row data from your db query)
{
$title=$row['title']; 
$link=$row['link']; 
$description=$row['description']; 

echo "<item> 
<title>$title</title>
<link>$link</link>
<description>$description</description>
</item>"; 
} 
echo "</channel></rss>"; 
?>
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