OK now that we have all the content… We are ready to display it…
But before that we should check what way is the XML document structured…
For that paste the $url string in the browser and you’ll see something like this

<!-- Copyright (C) 2000-2004 - Developer Shed, Inc. -->
<rss version="2.0">
  <channel>
    <title>Dev Shed - The Open Source Web Development Site</title>
    <link>http://www.devshed.com</link>
    <description>mos_rss</description>
    <language>en-us</language>
    <lastBuildDate>Tue, 27 Apr 2004 12:39:24 -0400</lastBuildDate>

      <item>
          <title>The Power of CSS</title>
          <link>
            http://www.devshed.com/c/a/Style-Sheets/The-Power-of-CSS/
          </link>
          <description>
            CSS or cascading style sheets are used to create a set of styles that can be applied to your fonts, ...
          </description>
      </item>
... and many more item tags...

IF you note carefully… The most important tag is the [item] tag, where there are sub tags [title], [link], [description], and these sub tags are at the level 4 The tags [title], [link], [description], [language], [lastBuildDate] which provide the general info of the website are at level 3

Now we just have to use the $vals array and get out the information, we do it using a simple for loop

for ($i=0; $i<count($vals); $i++)
{
	//get the primary info
	if ($vals[$i]['tag']=="TITLE" && $vals[$i]['level']==3) {
		$title = $vals[$i]['value'];
	}
	if ($vals[$i]['tag']=="LINK" && $vals[$i]['level']==3) {
		$link = $vals[$i]['value'];
	}
	if ($vals[$i]['tag']=="DESCRIPTION" && $vals[$i]['level']==3) {
		$desc = $vals[$i]['value'];
	}
	if ($vals[$i]['tag']=="LASTBUILDDATE" && $vals[$i]['level']==3) {
		$dt = strtotime($vals[$i]['value']);
	}

	//get the main feed
	if ($vals[$i]['tag']=="TITLE" && $vals[$i]['level']==4) {
		$arr['title'][] = $vals[$i]['value'];
	}
	if ($vals[$i]['tag']=="LINK" && $vals[$i]['level']==4) {
		$arr['link'][] = $vals[$i]['value'];
	}
	if ($vals[$i]['tag']=="DESCRIPTION" && $vals[$i]['level']==4) {
		$arr['desc'][] = $vals[$i]['value'];
	}
}

OK, Now we have all the required information only !

PHP has provided with a wonderful function file_get_contents

We first start with getting the xml feed into a string, by using file_get_contents

//the $url is the link from where XML is received
$url = 'http://devshed.com/index2.php?option=mos_rss&no_html=1'; 
$con = file_get_contents($url); //the contents are in the variable $con

//now create the SAX xml parser $xp = xml_parser_create();

Now using the function xml_parse_into_struct, we parse the xml and create 2 arrays $vals and $index, The $index contains all the info about the node nos. While the most important array is the $vals array

xml_parse_into_struct($xp, $con, $vals, $index);
// we now free the xml parser. xml_parser_free($xp);

If we print_r the $vals array we see something like this

Array
(
	[0] => Array
		(
			[tag] => RSS
			[type] => open
			[level] => 1
			[attributes] => Array
			    (
                    [VERSION] => 2.0
                )

            [value] => 

        )

    [1] => Array
        (
            [tag] => CHANNEL
            [type] => open
            [level] => 2
            [value] => 
	
        )

    [2] => Array
        (
            [tag] => TITLE
            [type] => complete
            [level] => 3
            [value] => Dev Shed - The Open...
        )

		.....
		Something like this

These days there are many websites from which you you can publish their latest information on YOUR site, How ? The XML way.

Sites like Devshed.com, Devarticles.com, XML.com provide an XML format which you can use. But since the format is XML, it can’t be just shown directly, there has to be some sort of formatting done to it. XML-Stylesheet is one way and the other one, that I’ll be explaining to you is using PHP.

Commonly you can see an image like this for feed This is the link from where you can get the XML Feed, or syndicate its content

The first and most important charecteristic for such type of a system is that the article whatever it may be must be in a database with an articleID associated with it.

So first create an table for an article like this

# Create a table for articles over here
create table articles (
  articleid int(5) primary key auto_increment,
  articlesubject varchar(255),
  articletext text
);

Once done with creating the articles table you need to create a posting table where user can post comments on the article. For that create a table as comments as follows

# Create a table for comments
create table comments (
  comid int(5) primary key auto_increment,
  articleid int(5),
  comsubject varchar(255),
  comuser varchar(255),
  comdate datetime,
  comtext text,
);

Here the articleid is the foreign key, don’t worry about foreign or home. It is just to link the comment to what article. The date time records the date, time in “YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS” format.
comtext is a text field and can store big text values.

Now once you have created the table for article, it is time to fill some values into them let us fill some easy values into it.

> insert into articles(articletext) values ('This is some easy article and is for some testing purpose only');
> insert into articles(articletext) values ('This is another easy article and is for some testing purpose only and not to be fiddled with'); 

Welcome ! to this PHP Tutorials page. I’m not a great PHP code buster, but still I feel that the tricks that I have learnt, found, should be shared with others as well.