WordPress has built in functions for displaying basic RSS sidebars.
This will display 10 items from a feed in an list of links, for example:
<?php
include_once(ABSPATH . WPINC . '/rss.php');
wp_rss('http://example.com/feed/',10);
?>
If you want more complex behavior you can code it yourself easily enough. Read this for more info:
http://codex.ww.wp.xz.cn/Function_Reference/fetch_rss
“…you can code it yourself easily enough”
That’s easy for you to say 😉
I tried your suggestion to pull in a technorati feed and it did indeed display the feed, but the format was incredible bad – a mess really.
Any suggestions on my original error? This should be easy enough to figure out, should it not… my sidebar just can’t “see” the function.
I have no idea about those plugins. I’ve never used them, because I’ve never needed to. WordPress has all the built in RSS functionality you really ever need.
but the format was incredible bad – a mess really
That really doesn’t tell me anything useful. Define “incredible bad”. Even better, what HTML does it produce? It’s infinitely customizable, but you do have to know HTML in the first place.
A simple unordered list is what the wp_rss function produces. If that looks “incredible bad”, then I’d say you have a major CSS problem, because that’s pretty standard for putting a list of links in a sidebar, and I can’t believe a plugin would produce anything else by default.
All I want is the Post Title… not the author, blog title, date, Technorati icon, etc. I can manage the HTML, that’s not the problem. I guess what I need to do is modify the wp_rss function, correct?
Got it. I had to give myself a five minute crash course in RSS elements and then I removed the description item from the output of wp_rss, included one of my css classes, etc. I’m good to go.
Modifying wp_rss would not be the correct way to go. Copy it into your own code and modify it there instead. Better yet, look at the fetch_rss function and use that instead to make whatever you want to make:
http://codex.ww.wp.xz.cn/Function_Reference/fetch_rss
Modifying core code is always a bad idea. What happens when you upgrade?
Thanks. I copied it into my own functions.php file. Working great.
