SimpleFeed
March 26, 2007
I was looking for a MediaWiki extension that could read RSS feeds and output them onto the page. The trouble was, the extensions I found either didn’t work, or were very uncustomisable. For example, for one that actually worked, adding this to the wiki page:
<feed>http://jonnylamb.com/feed/</feed>
forced this output on me:
<h3><a href="http://jonnylamb.com/2007/03/22/minimo-bongo/">Minimo Bongo</a></h3>
<small>22 March 2007, by jonnylamb</small>
<h3><a href="http://jonnylamb.com/2007/03/22/durham-visit/">Durham Visit</a></h3>
<small>22 March 2007, by jonnylamb</small>
<h3><a href="http://jonnylamb.com/2007/03/22/musically-active/">Musically Active</a></h3>
<small>22 March 2007, by jonnylamb</small>
<h3><a href="http://jonnylamb.com/2007/03/05/age/">++age</a></h3>
<small>5 March 2007, by jonnylamb</small>
This is not ideal. Instead of looking further for a better extension, I wrote one. It is called SimpleFeed and it lives on the Extension:SimpleFeed page on mediawiki.org.
It is simple for two reasons:
- It uses the SimplePie feed parsing library
- It’s exactly that- simple.
Here is a quick tour on how to use it:
Once it is installed, one can choose the syntax each item is outputted in. For example:
<feed url="http://jonnylamb.com/feed/">
== [{PERMALINK} {TITLE}] ==
<small>{DATE} by {AUTHOR}</small>
{DESCRIPTION}
</feed>
For each item from the feed, the curly-bracketed words get replaced with their corresponding values. Note the use of wiki-markup as this is then parsed by the MediaWiki parser, producing something like this:
<a name="Minimo_Bongo"></a><h2> <span class="mw-headline"> <a href="http://jonnylamb.com/2007/03/22/minimo-bongo/" class="external text" title="http://jonnylamb.com/2007/03/22/minimo-bongo/" rel="nofollow">Minimo Bongo</a> </span></h2>
<p>22 March 2007 by jonnylamb
</p>
<p>I shoved
[...]
So of course there’s a whole load of MediaWiki stuff added which makes it integrate into the wiki much better, and the killer feature is the customisation possible!
There’s more information on its mediawiki.org page.