I decided to delve into the world of WordPress plugin development this week. I’m a contributor to a site for film camera gear and we have a page that lists equipment for sale. We wanted to pull in an RSS feed from eBay and display it on a page. There seems to be a WordPress plugin for anything, but I was surprised that I couldn’t find one that worked the way I liked. Anyway, two hours later and I had managed to write my own. Without further ado, here’s HungryFEED.
I’m really impressed with the WordPress plugin API and distribution system. It’s well organized with great documentation. I was psyched to see the little “upgrade available” button next to my own plugin once I published it to the WordPress plugin directory! Even though I prefer object-oriented code, I have to admit the procedural style of WordPress code is consistent and easy to follow.
In the process I also had get my hands dirty with SimplePie RSS library that WordPress uses. It does a nice job of parsing all kinds of RSS but I found it a bit difficult to debug feed errors. Its also a little touchy with eBay feeds and there seems to be some glitches using set_feed_url(), so I would up accessing feed_url directly, which doesn’t seem right. But it works so it’ll have to do for now.
If you give the plugin a try, feel free to leave a comment on directly the HungryFEED page.
is hungry FEEd SEO friendly?
thanks,,
@ahmadblog it’s not designed with SEO in mind, but because HungryFEED pulls in the content on the server side, all RSS content will get indexed the same as if you typed it onto your page. As far as SEO goes, this would be better than using an ajax type of feed widget which would not get indexed.