Now available here for download here 
. If you upgraded WordPress but didn’t upgrade the widget, please don’t post saying that the widget doesn’t work. If you’re looking for advanced usage tips, check here.
I realize that the title of this post says “v1.5.4,” but feel free to comment about later versions too. I update the thing too frequently to start a new post every time I make a change. (Don’t worry, most changes are minor and you don’t usually need to upgrade unless you want to.)
Okay. That’s all. Post comments if you have them. Might want to try that “search” box at left if you think somebody may have had your question before.
44 Comments
Many people have requested an option to convert encoding. I’ve been too lazy to do it. But you lucky folks get the option now, thanks to Christoph Juergens. Go get v1.6 from wp.org.
Hi Adam
I’ve been using your great little plugin for a while now and was wondering if I can increase the number of feed items displayed to greater than 10. I thought I could probably edit the plugin, but I’m no coder and when I thought I’d figured out what to change, it didn’t work. I’m surprised nobody else has asked this but maybe they’re all smarter than me :-) Any pointers please as I would really like to display more than 10 on one particular feed. Thanks in advance.
Mo
Mo,
Download a more recent version of the plugin. Right near the top, you’ll see an option that lets you change that. In fact, the recent versions defaults to 20 or so, I think.
I should clarify that “right near the top” refers to the PHP file. The max is hardcoded into the file.
Hi Adam
Sorry I wasn’t referring to the number of Widgets I can have, rather the number of items displayed per feed. This still appears to be limited to 10.
Hmm. Gimme a minute here…
Just uploaded a new version. Give it a whirl. You may need to wait up to 15 minutes for wordpress.org to update its repository to reflect my upload.
There’s now a setting at the top of the PHP file that will do what you want.
Hi Adam,
Thank you sir, you are even faster to respond than my host and they are quick, but then I’m paying them! I’ll give it a half hour or so and download the new plugin – and again, thanks, I really appreciate your help.
Worked like a charm. Just about perfect now for my needs, thanks so much, definitely some real good karma coming your way Adam :-)
Hi Adam. Thanks for your work on this. Its a great widget. I’ve been studying the .php file and my theme’s css file for a couple of hours and still can’t figure out the solution to this problem:
I’m using the Quadruple Blue SEO theme on auburnbrewclub dot org. The css colors the sidebar headers orange, but does not anticipate that the header will be linked. When I activate the link title to url option, the linked header for the RSS widget is showing up as a light blue, the same as the regular links in the sidebar.
I cannot figure out what to change in the css to make the linked header orange like the rest of the header. your help is greatly appreciated.
John,
From a quick glance at your CSS, it looks like you’ll need this line:
#left_sidebar ul li .sidebar_header a{color:#fa9944;text-decoration:none;}Put it at the end of the CSS (not the beginning) so it overrides anything else in the file.
P.S. If you’re using Firefox, I strongly recommend the Web Developer add-on. It makes answering questions like this incredibly easy.
That did the trick. Wow. You are a really nice person to give this away and support it so well. Thank you. I’ll give the add-on a try.
Hello Adam and thank you very much for the great widget. I have tried using this on my k2 blog at [link] but seemed to have run into a bug.
The bug seems to be that certain feed URLs just aren’t parsing correctly, and an error msg shows – ‘An error has occured; the feed is probably down. Try again later.’ – this is despite the fact that the feed is working perfectly.
The feed in question here is ‘http://www.dannychoo.com/rss/eng/’
I just cannot get this feed to parse. The strange thing is that it seems to show correctly the first time I set it up but when I refresh the page it stops working.
I have listed 2 RSS feeds using the widget, one working and the non-working one on my blog for your reference. I would appreciate it if you take a look at this !
Blaue:
I’ll look at it when I can, but I’m up to my neck right now in my real work and it may be a little while. In the meantime, here are a few things to try:
First, try displaying the feed using the built-in RSS widget. Does it work? In particular, does it update if you come back a couple hours later if you leave it in the sidebar? My widget uses the built in WordPress parser, and the answers to these questions help me know whether it’s the widget or the wordpress backend causing the bug.
Second, be aware that several people have had problems with this widget in K2. Although the K2 developers claim that their “modules” can handle any widget, they are wrong. In particular, their modules system doesn’t work well with widgets that have multiple instances, like this one. At least, that’s what I gather from feedback I’ve had from people using K2. And that might explain why it’s the second instance of this widget that is giving you problems.
Hello Adam and thank you for taking the time to check on this.
The feed does not work in the build-in RSS widget at all. ( in the case of your widget it does work once until the page is refreshed )
I look forward to a favourable reply from you soon.
Hola
WP 2.2, KB RSS 1.6.1, iTheme
I simply cannot get the widget to display anything at all :-(
I am using this feed: [link]
When checking “Link title to feed URL?” the header links to [link]
Pls advice
TIA
./cjessing
Blauereiter: Since my widget piggybacks on WordPress’s feed parsing capabilities, then it’s a good bet that the problem you’re having is being caused by WordPress’s
wp-includes/rss.php. But I’ll take a look at it when I can. Given my current workload, it will probably be a couple of weeks.Cjessing: I’ll answer the easy question first. The reason that the “link title to feed url” option uses that particular link is that the feed tells it to. Every well-formed feed will specify the source website’s URL. That’s the URL specified by the feed, so that’s the one that gets displayed.
Now the more difficult question: Why it isn’t displaying. Are you getting an error message, or nothing at all? It may help if you give your site’s URL so I can take a look.
Sure thing: [link]
Cjessing: In the widget’s options, what do you have in the bottom textbox?
Adam: I have changed it so its
^title$
Adam: and that should have been “I haven’t changed it”
Gonna try one more time…
The bottom text box shows:
<li><a class=’kbrsswidget’ href=’^link$’ title=’^description$’>^title$</a></li>
Hello Adam, thank you for the great work on this plugin. I have a RSS feed from Flickr and the part I would like to extract instead of the default ^title$ is in [atom_content], inside an
img src=""HTML tag. This doesn’t seem possible according to your advanced tutorial, but by any chance, would you have know some hidden trick?Thanks in advance…
Enro:
I’m away from my regular computer (and will be for a while yet), so it will be a couple weeks until I can give you a real answer. But from what it sounds like, you’ll probably need to fiddle with the PHP code to do what you’re trying to accomplish. You’re on your own for a couple weeks though–sorry.
Adam:
My problem seems to be related to the particular feed I’m using:
[link] does *not* work
[link] works just fine
Any thoughts?
TIA
Hi Adam,
Thanks for making this widget available.
I am having a small problem that I am hoping you can help me solve. I am attempting to get your widget to display the HTML code that is inside the RSS feed. I followed your advice on the other page to take out the strip_tags part out of your file. I tried removing all of them and removing just one of them (removing one at a time and then restoring).
Currently I can get either of the following results:
Title of post (uncentered)
or I can get:
Title of post
There is more to the feed that I want to display but the same results apply. Either it has the HTML code visible or it doesn’t render the HTML.
Since this is a feed from another of my sites, there is not an issue with that.
Thanks in advance.
Adam:
I’m a real beginner but I’ve installed your widget and it seems to work fine but I have a message on the screen that says:
“An error has occured; the feed is probably down. Try again later.”
Obviously I’ve done something wrong but I’ve read your support forums carefully and can’t find any remedy.
Please help,
AlanH
Adam:
Great plug in! It’s doing exactly what I was dreaming of! But one quick question. To add the date of the feed posting to the widget, you would use
^pubdate$(according to my feed), however, this is how my “pubdate” is listed in my feed:I would like to have the date read as “Jul 16, 2007″ – or the full month, if that’s even possible – in the top part of my widget.
How do I modify the
^pubdate$to only display the information I want? Or do I do something entirely different?Thanks in advance!
~C
Thought I drop my nearly worthless hack. First off, thanks for the pluggin, it rocks.
Secondly, I found that I wanted to link the Title of the KB RSS section, not so much to the RSS feed itself, but to the category section. So like, I had News category and I wanted to show 5 or so New items, and I wanted the title News to link to the category with all the other older items.
tag on the title.
Anyway, I think it would be useful to some that know even less PHP than I (there’s got to be a few, although my skillz is sad), that the Basic options should let you add your own link to the title, OR just simply let the user tag up the title the way he wants. Right now, when you save, it, it strips out any extraneous tags.
Anyway, this hacks requires some user friendly change to make it nice, but I think you’ll run into people that would surely appreciate such a change, if possible. But seems like this project is done. Anyway, thanks again.
Ack! Comment weirdness.., sorry. peace.
All:
I’ve just returned home from a trip. I’m up to my neck in my real job. I’ll get around to all these comments in a few days.
Your plugin is nice, I am using instead of the kings rss plugin that seem to no longer be compat with WP 2.2/
Your plugin works well with somedomain.com/feed but not so well with somedomain/news/category_name/feed
It will show the feed at initial load, but then error on subsequent page loads.. is a it a cacheing issue?
Adam-
The plugin seems to be having problems reading these two feeds:
[link]
[link]
The error I get is:
“An error has occured; the feed is probably down. Try again later.”
The feeds are up and working.
Thanks,
Taylor
Everybody:
Several of you have pointed out the “An error has occured” thing. I’m aware of the bug and will get to it in a few days.
Thanks for looking into it Adam. As always, your efforts on the plugin are appreciated!
Same here, thank you for lending all the support for this plugin.
Answers at last!!
Okay, here’s answers to a couple of issues.
First, the most annoying bug is that “an error has occurred” thing. That wasn’t a bug until the most recent version of WordPress came out. I think I’ve fixed it. Try it out and let me know. My main concern is whether the feeds will still update correctly, so pay attention to whether your feeds update. (Wait at least an hour, since caches are held for one hour.)
Second, some of you want to put HTML into the title field. Go for it. Download the new version. If you’re on WP-MU and still want to strip tags from the title, just go into the plugin file and set KBRSS_WPMU to true.
Third (Enro and Carolyn): I’ve put some information into the FAQ that may help, but ultimately, these are customizations that you’ll need to code yourselves. Doing so shouldn’t be all that difficult if you take a look at the FAQ first.
I think that I have answered all of the questions except the one about the Danish feed not displaying. But there were lots of comments that came in while I was traveling, so it’s possible I’ve overlooked something. If that’s the case, post a note here as a reminder.
Hi Adam – First off welcome back.
Well I don’t want to put HTML into the title field. I want it to display all the HTML. Basically it’s a single post feed that I want to display the whole post. It’s all pre-formatted, so I want to display all of the HTML codes.
Currently I can either get it to display the title and text with no HTML code or I can get it to post (edited so that you can see the coding)
(center)Title(/center)
(bold)Text(/bold)
(a href=”link address”)Link Name(/a)
The code is plainly visible. It’s like something is preventing the html to be rendered. That’s the best way I can explain it.
Richard,
Have you upgraded to the newest version? I’m not sure I completely understand what you mean, but if I do, then the new version should solve it.
Hello Adam and thank you for the new version. Unfortunately, the “An error has occurred” bug is still not fixed it seems – Let’s wait for other users to verify this. I installed the new version, and the same error appears – the feeds will appear the first time it is parsed, then display the error message once the page is refreshed. I also waited an hour to be sure that it wasn’t a caching problem. I am starting to think its the MagpieRSS that comes with WordPress that is the culprit afterall.
Any ideas ?
regards,
blauereiter
Hi Adam,
I downloaded the widget today from the link you provide, so I assume it’s the latest version. Unfortunately I am getting the error message too. I have tried various feeds to ensure that it wasn’t just an incorrect link I was using, but alas they all return the same error. Appreciate all the work you put into this widget – thank you!
Blauereiter and Tracey:
If you are using the latest version of the plugin (1.7), then this error is being caused by WordPress’s native RSS parsing functions (in wordpress/includes/rss.php). Unfortunately, that means there is nothing I can do. My only suggestion is to be sure that you are using the most recent version of WordPress.
Hello Adam and thank you for all the support help again. Let’s hope WordPress will release a new version that will fix the bug in the near future.
regards,
blauereiter
Thanks for your efforts, Adam. Seems I am running the latest release of WP, so I guess we’ll have to wait and hope that they address this issue.
Cheers,
Tracey