Please view the updated version here

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This tutorial was on my site before It went down and I've decided to bring it here. Hope you like
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In this tutorial you will learn how to create a table in phpMyAdmin and create an RSS feed that goes along with it!
Requirements: Know basics of php, phpMyAdmin, notepad, mouse and keyboard.

Now let’s start with our SQL Table.

That simply created a table called news. The table news contains 4 rows. Each row stands for something different. So in this case, we have 4 rows.


Click to enlarge

Now lets fill the table with some random text so we can see how this RSS works.

If you don’t understand what I did above, I just simply used INSERT TO and inserted values into each row.

Now that we have the table setup, we can start with our RSS Feed for it. Since this is going to be a .php file instead of .xml, we need to specify the server that this file will have xml content.


Now lets connect to our database.


Now that we have specified our username, password, and table, we can start the main rss.


This code above is like any other rss/xml feed. We are using rss version 2.0. You can change title, description, and link to your needs. Title can be anything but normally it’s your site name. Give a little information about your site in the description and your websites link in the <link>


The above code is simply getting a query from our sql table. You can change
$sql = "SELECT * FROM news limit 5" to anything you want! Change the limit, table, or even add more information like WHERE author = 'BigDog'. That will only show the submissions by BigDog.

Hold on, we are almost done!
Now lets get the main rss.


Now lets explain.
the <item> tag defines an row the RSS/SQL feed. Since we have it so it would show 3 rows from our table, at the end you will have 3 <item> tags.

The <title> tag is what will show up in the rss. If you use Mozilla Firefox, it’s the name that shows up when you select the drop down menu.
The <author> tag shows the owner of the news or content. In our case, it would be BigDog.
The <link> tag will show the ID for us. But as you can, I've added a link before it. That link is for my news. So If I have a page called news.php and news.php?id=# will show the specified news, that will link it to the specified contact/news.

And that’s it. Now let’s end our tags and we are done!


Here is our final code!


Thank you for reading.

This post has been edited by Faken: Feb 12 2007, 09:58 PM

why are you using tinyint?
it be just as easy using int.


CREATE TABLE news (
id int NOT NULL auto_increment,
title text NOT NULL,
author text NOT NULL,
content text NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (id)
)

that would work just as well.

It must be tinyint as if you use INT then the max number of entries you can have is 127. You will just get a duplicate key error when you reach that amount.


tinyint is much much higher.

This post has been edited by .Matt: Aug 2 2006, 12:32 PM

:-) Ya, I did INT first then changed it to tinyint.

OH NO, NOT MOUSE AND KEYBOARD
Ok, seriously: This seems rather good. Thanks for sharing!

I know I know, I rased the requirements to a mouse and keyboard. I am so sorry

And you're welcome.

w00t, finally a tutorial that is explained and not another long piece of code snippet!

Thanks, I spent the whole day once trying to find how to create RSS feeeds which explained it. I love it.

Thanks for the feedback guys.

BTW. Is this code RSS validated?

No its not RSS validated and I am not worried about validation. If you are, you can go ahead and change the code to fit validation. This is simply suppose to teach people how to make one and I don't think any beginner wants to be perfect.

Lol ok...

Thanks for posting this BigDog Hope you will move this to the publishing system when we move

Dan