X-Cart forums

[geckoday]

Here's my solution using RSS and a Smarty plugin to pull the latest posts from any wordpress blog.

Create this file include/templater/plugins/function.sr_wpfeed.php:

PHP Code:

<?php
if ( !defined('XCART_START') ) { header("Location: home.php"); die("Access denied"); }
## -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
## Smarty plugin "sr_wpfeed"
## Purpose: Return wordpress RSS feed
##          Snow River X-Cart web store
##
## Author: Ralph Day, Snow River
##
##
## -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
##
## Changelog:
##
## 2009-10-26 Created (RD)
##
##
## -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
##
##
## Sample usage
## ------------
## {sr_wpfeed var="someposts" wpsite="http://www.snowriver.com/uggs-and-more" num=2}
## {foreach from=$someposts item=somepost}
##   <h2>
##     <a href="{$someposts.link}">
##       {$someposts.title}
##     </a>
##   </h2>
##   {$someposts.description}
##   <br>
## {/foreach}
## 
##
## Parameters
## ----------
## var [string] (required)
##      Name for Smarty variable to return feed array in
## 
## wpsite [string] (required)
##      URL of Wordpress site
## 
## num [integer] (required)
##      number of posts to return
## 
## 
## -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

function smarty_function_sr_wpfeed($params, &$smarty) {

  global $sql_tbl;
  global $store_language;

  $required_params = array('var','wpsite', 'num');

  foreach($required_params as $_key => $reqd_param) {
    if (!isset($params[$reqd_param]))
      $smarty->trigger_error("sr_wpfeed: required attribute '$reqd_param' not passed", E_USER_ERROR);
  }

  $var      = '';
  $wpsite = '';
  $num = 0;
  foreach($params as $_key => $_val) {
    switch($_key) {
      case 'wpsite':
      case 'var':
          if (!is_array($_val)) {
              if ($_val <> '')
                $$_key = $_val;
              else
                $smarty->trigger_error("sr_wpfeed: '$_key' cannot be an empty string", E_USER_ERROR);
          } else
              $smarty->trigger_error("sr_wpfeed: '$_key' cannot be an array", E_USER_ERROR);
          break;
          
      case 'num':
          if (!is_array($_val)) {
            $$_key = (int)$_val;
            if ($$_key < 0 || $$_key >25)
                $smarty->trigger_error("sr_wpfeed: '$_key' not between 1 and 25", E_USER_ERROR);
          } else
              $smarty->trigger_error("sr_wpfeed: '$_key' cannot be an array", E_USER_ERROR);
          break;

      default:
          $smarty->trigger_error("sr_wpfeed: attribute '$_key' not recognized", E_USER_NOTICE);
          break;
    }
  }
    if(!$xml=simplexml_load_file($wpsite.'/feed')){
        $smarty->trigger_error('Error reading XML file',E_USER_ERROR);
    }
  $posts = array();
    foreach($xml as $item){
        for($i=0; $i<count($item->item); $i++){
            if($i<$num){
        $posts[] = array('link'         =>  (string)$item->item[$i]->link
                       , 'title'        =>  htmlentities($item->item[$i]->title,ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8')
                       , 'description'  =>  $item->item[$i]->description
                       );
      }
        }
    }

  $smarty->assign($var, $posts);
}
?>

Then in whatever template you want to display the posts in you can display the posts something like this:

{sr_wpfeed var="someposts" wpsite="http://www.snowriver.com/uggs-and-more" num=2}
{foreach from=$someposts item=somepost}
  <h2>
    <a href="{$someposts.link}">
      {$someposts.title}
    </a>
  </h2>
  {$someposts.description}
  <br>
{/foreach}

This should work in any version of X-Cart as it doesn't use any X-Cart functions. Also there are no modifications to X-Cart php code so it doesn't get wiped out by upgrades.

[promart418]

This didn't work for me. My site is *.co.uk and my blog is *.co.uk/blog/.

I copied everything 100%, then just changed the URL to match my wordpress blog homepage.

What did I do wrong?

[promart418]

p.s. I currently use simplepie to display RSS feed snippets. Could there be a conflict?

[geckoday]

Sorry, my example usage has a mistake. You need to use $somepost instead of $someposts inside the foreach loop like this:

{sr_wpfeed var="someposts" wpsite="http://www.snowriver.com/uggs-and-more" num=2}
{foreach from=$someposts item=somepost}
  <h2>
    <a href="{$somepost.link}">
      {$somepost.title}
    </a>
  </h2>
  {$somepost.description}
  <br>
{/foreach}

[promart418]

Hi,

I added:

{sr_wpfeed var="someposts" wpsite="http://www.promartsupplements.co.uk/blog" num=2}
{foreach from=$someposts item=somepost}
  <h2>
    <a href="{$somepost.link}">
      {$somepost.title}
    </a>
  </h2>
  {$somepost.description}
  <br>
{/foreach}

but I got the following errors:
Warning: simplexml_load_file() [function.simplexml-load-file]: http://www.promartsupplements.co.uk/blog//feed:1: parser error : Document is empty in /home/promarts/public_html/include/templater/plugins/function.sr_wpfeed.php on line 91
Error: Smarty error: Error reading XML file in /home/promarts/public_html/Smarty-2.6.19/Smarty.class.php on line 1092
Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/promarts/public_html/include/templater/plugins/function.sr_wpfeed.php on line 95

Any ideas what is causing the errors?

Thanks,

[geckoday]

That's puzzling as http://www.promartsupplements.co.uk/blog//feed properly returns the XML data so it shouldn't be empty. If you have ssh access on your server what does this do?:

wget http://www.promartsupplements.co.uk/blog//feed

If that can't download the XML and you can in a browser check with your host to see why you can't load local URL's.

[cflsystems]

Just installed this for a client - works great. Thanks Ralph

[cflsystems]

Saw just one glitch - double and single quotes in description are converted to some other characters (I suspect some toher special characters are affected as well). I tried html_entity_decode and htmlspecialchars_decode but no luck. Do you have any idea Ralph?

[geckoday]

That's Wordpress converting quotes to smart quotes. Here's a link on how you can turn them off in Wordpress:

http://www.lancebledsoe.com/how-to-turn-off-wordpress-smart-quotes/

If you want to leave them as smart quotes on your wordpress blog but convert them back for the RSS feed you'll need to add some code to convert them. Here's a discussion of how that can be done.

http://shiflett.org/blog/2005/oct/convert-smart-quotes-with-php

[cflsystems]

Thanks Ralph