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.