Incorporate RSS Feeds Into Your Website
We recently needed to incorporate an existing RSS feed into one of our websites. After a bit of research, we stumbled upon SimplePie, and incredibly easy to use PHP class for integrating feeds into your website.
We were able to successfully pull in an existing RSS feed within five minutes of skimming the documentation. It then only took a few minutes of tweaks to the PHP and CSS to get a finished product. Wow. Maybe the name comes from being “easy as pie?”
Need to incorporate an RSS feed into your website? We highly recommend you check out SimplePie!
WordPress Custom Fields
Using WordPress custom fields is a great way to add meta data to your posts that you can manipulate easily. Say, for instance, that you would like to include a picture with all of your posts, but you would like to be able to access it from outside of the standard the_content() or the_excerpt() functions. By using custom fields you can simply define a key and a value that can be accessed at any point with the get_post_meta() function.
Say you define a custom field key called Image-Slice, with a value that creates a link to the blog post using an image tag:
Wordpress Custom Field
You can then access that field from within the loop by using a simple php snippet:
<?php $key="Image-Slice"; echo get_post_meta($post->ID, $key, true); ?>
I’ve found this technique very useful to create websites that use a custom field as a design element.
