Tutorials: How to write a PHP & MySQL RSS Feed Generator

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a great way of getting your blog/articles to a wider audience and notify them of new posts. This tutorial will explain how to write your own PHP script to read your content dynamically from a MySQL database and write a valid RSS feed.

First things first
Start a new PHP file - this will be your generator, which will obtain the content from the database and parse it into an XML format.

Firstly, let's set some variables for your RSS feed:

$rss_title= "Yoursite.com RSS Feed";

$rss_site= "yoursite.com" ;

$rss_description= "A brief description of your site's RSS feed, about this long";

$rss_language="en";

$rss_logo="http://www.".$rss_site."/images/rss.gif";

$emailadmin="whatever@youremailis.com";

That sets up some basic variables for the RSS feed. You don't need an RSS_logo (an image associated with your feed, but it is a nice touch). NOTE: if you don't wish to have a logo associated with your feed, you will need to modify the references to the image later on.

Some kind advice - while it is useful to have an email address associated with the feed, it is advisable to have an address specially for this - because it will be in for a whole world of spam.

Setting the header
This is VERY important, this sets the output header to be recognised as XML. Include this code after your above variables.

header("Content-Type: text/xml;charset=iso-8859-1");

Connect to your Database
Here we bung in the normal PHP stuff to tell the script where to look for your articles/blogs, and secondly, define an SQL query to obtain your desired content.

mysql_connect("mysql.yoursite.com","username","password");

@mysql_select_db("database-name") or die("Unable to select DB");

With the database connection established, we need to define a query (to select the content you want your RSS feed to present).

$query = "select * from Articles ORDER BY ID DESC" ;

$result = mysql_query($query) or die("Query failed") ;

The above statement obtains all the latest Articles from our fictional database, ordering them by their ID in descending order (which should present them in a 'newest-first' manner). You can order it by a created-date if you so wish - it's basically to ensure your feed is supplying the newest content first.

Click here to proceed to page 2 and write your content to an XML/RSS file