Automatically Generate RSS feed from HTML news section of my site using PHP

The following is a sample section from the HTML file. All news stories are structured exactly the same.

Currently there are two news pages: News and Old_News. Stories can be linked to on either one of these pages and this will change. Not sure how we could get this?

<!-- start news story 13 -->
<div style="margin: 0; padding: 0 2px 8px 5px; float: right;"><br />
<img src="/images/news_icon.gif" width="95" height="85" alt="News" border="0" />
<br /><br />
<img src="/images/bullet_magnify.gif" width="30" height="27" alt="Magnifying glass" border="0" align="left" />
<div class="readmore"><a href="READMOREURL" target="new">Read more</a></div>
</div>

<div style="margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 15px;">
<a href="www.xyz.com" target="new"><img src="/images/logo.gif" width="270" height="73" alt="Some Name" border="0" /></a>
<img src="/images/story_title_cilt.gif" width="380" height="45" alt="This text will become the TITLE" border="0" />
<p>This text will become the DESCRIPTION</p>
</div>

<br style="clear: both;" />
<div class="myhr"></div>
<!-- end news story 13 -->

Here is the XML / RSS feed. Stuff before the first item will naturally be all static. The <a href=" all need to be URL encoded (&lt;a href=&quot;yada)

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<rss version="2.0">
 <channel>
  <title>XYZ</title>
  <link>Static Link</link>
  <description>Static Desc</description>
  <language>en-us</language>
  <copyright>Static Copyright Notice</copyright>
  <pubDate>Sun,14 Aug 2005 17:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
  <lastBuildDate>Sun,14 Aug 2005 17:00:00 GMT</lastBuildDate>
  <managingEditor>Static E-mail</managingEditor>
  <webMaster>Static E-mail</webMaster>
- <item>
  <title>Sample Title</title>
  <link>Link this story can be found at</link>
  <pubDate>Sun, 14 Aug 2005 16:05:00 GMT</pubDate>
  <description>Description text. <a href="READ MORE LINK">(Read More)</a></description>
  </item>

getting this to work is easy with a regex and string replacement, but an easier way is this...

make a php file called content.php inside it do this...

$title = 'Some Title';
$link ='http://www.mysite.com/index.php?story=2';
$desc = 'description about entry....';
$read = 'read more url';


Then make the .html file a .php file and same with the RSS feed. Then at the top of each file do this...


<?php

include 'content.php';

?>


then where you want to put the actual variable values do this <?php echo $link; ?> etc... that way you update the content.php file and both files will be easily outputted with new content. Much more efficient that having to use regex and replace strings and then save files etc..

I will try this--can I keep it as an html file but just call php from within the HTML? This is somewhat important.

you will need to do this... in your Apache config file or .htaccess file...

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .html

So .html files will be parsed by engine and can run PHP code withint hem, that way you keep your file extension =o)

Using Zend Win Enabler on IIS 6--still possible?

Same can be done with IIS but I dont use it so not sure about how to go about adding .html as a PHP parsable file. Looking it up  this moment....

add Application Mapping for '.html' and set the executable path to your php.exe file path. Not familiar with IIS hoping you woukd know where application mapping is.

Ok, I can do this (might need some help with the syntax but will start) I found out how to add html and xml files to the registry entries for zend to ensure the PHP interpreter will parse them.

One basic question is how am I going to attack the problem of adding new stories?

For example,

I might have

$title = 'Some Title';
$title2 = 'Some Title';
$link ='http://www.mysite.com/index.php?story=2';
$link2 ='http://www.mysite.com/index.php?story=2';
$desc = 'description about entry....';
$desc2 = 'description about entry....';
$read = 'read more url';
$read2 = 'read more url';

etc where the variables correspond to multiple titles, descriptions, links, etc. But, I don't know in advance how many stories there will be, and to add more, it would be great if I didn't have to create new XML syntax in the XML file--is there any way around this, if you get what I mean?

Another issue, the PHP interpreter is flipping out about this line

<?xml version="1.0"?>

in the XML file, which is required--should I just put it into a php print statement?