Wordpress rss feed as post type with image/permalink

Question

I have a friend who writes to a couple of different blogs and wants to pull stories from one that isn't so popular, onto his main blog with an rss feed and display an image from it too (since rss feeds have images, sometimes).

Displaying the rss feeds shouldn't be too hard, it's making them a custom post type that seems more difficult to me.

If anyone has any ideas, shoot.

EDIT:- Does anyone know how to get an external rss feed to appear as a custom post type in wordpress?

Tom Tom · Accepted Answer · 2012-11-13T08:20:53

A simple way may be to use Wordpress' own fetch_feed function: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/fetch_feed

A quick example (assuming you've already set up your custom post type):

function import_feed_items()
{
  $feed = fetch_feed('http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/uk/rss.xml');

  if( !is_wp_error($feed) )
  {

    if( $last_import = get_option('last_import') )
    {
      $last_import_time = $last_import;
    } else {
      $last_import_time = false;
    }

    $items = $feed->get_items();
    $latest_item_time = false;

    foreach ( $items as $item )
    {

      $item_date = $item->get_date('Y-m-d H:i:s');
      if( $last_import_time && ($last_import_time >= strtotime($item_date)) )
      {
        continue;
      }

      $post = array(
        'post_content'   => $item->get_content(),
        'post_date'      => $item_date,
        'post_title'     => $item->get_title(),
        'post_status'    => 'publish',
        'post_type'      => 'custom_post_type'
      );
      wp_insert_post($post);

      if( strtotime($item_date) > $latest_item_time )
      {
        $latest_item_time = strtotime($item_date);
      }

    }

    if( false !== $latest_item_time )
    {
      update_option('last_import', $latest_item_time);
    }

  }
  else
  {
    echo $feed->get_error_message();
  }
}
add_action('wp', 'import_feed_items');

If there is an image tag in the content you could use php's DomDocument class to grab the url and upload it to your server so you can set it as the featured image.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_insert_attachment

http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/set_post_thumbnail

Edit

corrected the timestamp check. This updated example uses the 'wp' hook to run so you can see the results quicker. It would be preferable to set this as a cron task. See http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_schedule_event

Wordpress rss feed as post type with image/permalink

4 Answers