I believe that you cast the variable, so that you minimise the chance of sending the wrong type of variable to your script and causing it to fall over.

I also believe (but may be mistaken) that casting takes out some of the potential nasties you might get from loading unchecked data (IE injection attacks etc).

In answer to your question about having the story appear in your page. You would have to amend your method (or write a new one) that would also pull in the RSS feeds description. I doubt this will be the whole article though, RSS feeds usually only hold a summary of the story.

I am not sure what you would need to do to load this., I cant imagein ti would be that difficult though. I believe there is a get_decription() method. I would check Simplepie's documentation (http://simplepie.org/wiki/) and there API reference (http://simplepie.org/wiki/reference/start).

Mo

Yes respect to Mo.

I am able to get the description to show on the same page as the title, etc, which is great, by adding the get_description to the "foreach($items as $item)" statement to my RSSPage.php. For RSS feeds with longer descriptions (e.g., PUBMED), I would like to be able to link to a separate page on my website to display the full content. But, that seems like a fairly complicated endeavor, beyond my current ability. Also, I kept the Title and Content "casted", but not the date as I couldn't figure out how to change the date format when it was "casted".

public function getItemsFromRSS($feedNum = 0) {
include_once(Director::getAbsFile(SAPPHIRE_DIR . '/thirdparty/simplepie/SimplePie.php'));

$feedItem = array();
array_push($feedItem,$this->Feed1URL);
array_push($feedItem,$this->Feed2URL);
array_push($feedItem,$this->Feed3URL);

$output = new DataObjectSet();

$feed = new SimplePie($feedItem[$feedNum], TEMP_FOLDER);

//init the process
$feed->init();

if($items = $feed->get_items(0, $this->NumberToShow)) {
   
foreach($items as $item) {

// Cast the Title
$title = new Text('Title');
$title->setValue($item->get_title());

// Cast the Content
$content = new Text('Content');
$content->setValue($item->get_description());

$output->push(new ArrayData(array(
'Title' => $title,
'Content' => $content,
'Date' => $item->get_date ('j F Y, g:i a'),
'Link' => $item->get_link()
)));
}
return $output;
}
}

I also added a "NumberTOShow" variable to the CMS:
...
function getCMSFields() {
   $fields = parent::getCMSFields();
   $fields->addFieldToTab("Root.Content.RSS", new NumericField("NumberToShow", "Number of Items to show"));
...

Sam

This has been a great posting. I worked on this problem for several weeks. I started with Flash, it allows for xml parsing, but won't allow to pull data from a remote server. I found this and it was perfect. By the way, the google apps works pretty well, but you get very little control.

By the way, for the below listed code:

From Mo: public static $db = array(
'Feed1Name' => 'Text',
'Feed1URL' => 'Text',
'Feed2Name' => 'Text',
'Feed2URL' => 'Text',
'Feed3Name' => 'Text',
'Feed3URL' => 'Text'
);

So where does this get placed?

Also, does simpliepie parse the xml or is that the PHP parsing function? I have it turned on, but was curious.

Thanks to all who worked on this.
(p.s. don't use "view format help" It covers the post button and you can't post)

David