Support » Plugin: Advanced RSS » [Plugin: Advanced RSS] improvements

  • asceta

    (@asceta)


    Hello Stephen,

    sorry for putting this text in several places, but I hoped to contact with You in some way.

    I did some changes in your plugin. Your plugin is awesome and I’m impressed about flexibility and powerfulness. I use it on number of my blogs, for providing RSS content (news, pictures from DA, pictures from some sites with RSS channels etc).

    I was asked to create some ‘robot’ for YouTube videos, taken from RSS feed (ie, YT user uploads videos, one could see them via RSS channel, I wanted to use this RSS channel as a source for ‘newest video from…’ box on some blog).

    So, I had to do some improvements to your plugin… I hope you don’t mind it. A couple of things:

    1) of course, I had to make a new XSLT template, which puts video in widget. This XSLT takes YouTube links (in RSS channel you’ll see youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEOID links), converts them to ‘/embed/VIDEOID’ code (through ‘jp_xslt_replace’ function), adds some video parameters and encloses them into <iframe> tags. If course, there’s also some other minor elements in this XSLT template, for my custom needs. I assumed that only one, newest video would be shown in widget, so it is possible that one may want to change XSLT. I didn’t make any checks for multiple video case.

    2) in php5.php plugin file I’ve added new variables for width/height of presented objects, as setting width/height of YT videos through XSLT template was a terrible thing… I tried and gave up- on almost every blog I’d have to use different templates, as those blogs use different width on their sidebars. So, now those new parameters (width/height) are set up via widget box as any other parameters (like link, title, number of items etc.) – that’s why I did changes in php5.php file. Also, I wanted to achieve a simple solution for other users, for blog redactors and so on. In php5.php I’ve set up defaults for those variables, and made some simple sanitization. I’ve assumed that range 1-2000 of pixels for width and height is enough for 99,9999% of blogs 🙂

    And, it works, as you can see there: http://siriusastro.pl/ (I put plugin with changes on working blog, as my changes seem to be ‘stable’ and working properly). You will see video in left sidebar, on the top of it. For me- it looks just great.

    Of course, I can provide modified files. I’m not a programmer, I only try to understand what’s under the hood… so, maybe I did some foolishness that should be checked/corrected.

    Again, I hope you don’t mind those ‘improvements’. Your plugin is my favorite one for any RSS-related purposes. I can only recommend it for everyone.

    One think that could be done in better way is to reloading XSLT files- one have to deactivate/activate plugin, and to make changes in php5.php file for include new ‘static’ templates. On the other hand- you can’t put all things in ‘dynamic’ templates – for instance, I couldn’t pass this through adding ‘dynamic’ template:

    <xsl:value-of select="php:functionString('jp_xslt_replace','/(.*)watch\?v=([-_0-9a-zA-Z]{11}).*/si','http://www.youtube.com/embed/\2?fs=1&iv_load_policy=3&loop=0&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showsearch=0&theme=light&wmode=transparent', link)" />

    as plugin somehow denies to put anything with ‘&’ (ampersand) sign- refuses to validate template. This string is working properly only via ‘static’ XLST template.

    Thank you in advance for any response.
    Arek

    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/advanced-rss/

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