Generate RSS Feed with PHP & MySQL

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a very useful way to share content over internet. If you are running a website or blog RSS feeds can help you a lot by sharing your contents to readers. RSS feeds are based on XML markup. It holds some information about your post contents like post title, description, link, publish date etc.

In this post you will learn how we can create simple RSS feed with PHP and MySQL.

Creating MySQL Database Table

At first we need to create a database table that can hold our post contents.

CREATE TABLE `post` (
  `id` int(6) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `title` varchar(128) NOT NULL,
  `body` text NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
);

PHP Code

# configurations
$db_host = 'localhost';
$db_user = 'root';
$db_pass = 'root';
$db_name = 'test';
$max_post_limit = 10;


# set content type application/rss+xml
header("Content-Type: application/rss+xml; charset=UTF-8");

# connect to mysql db
mysql_connect($db_host, $db_user, $db_pass);
# select mysql db
mysql_select_db($db_name);

# query in db table
$query = mysql_query(
  'SELECT *
  FROM post
  ORDER BY id DESC
  LIMIT ' . $max_post_limit
);

?>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd" xmlns:feedburner="http://rssnamespace.org/feedburner/ext/1.0" version="2.0">

  <channel>

    <title>My RSS Feed</title>
    <description>w3bees RSS Feed</description>
    <link>http://www.w3bees.com</link>
    <language>en-us</language>
    <copyright>Copyright (C) 2013 w3bees.com</copyright>

  <?php while( $row = mysql_fetch_array($query) ): ?>

    <item>
      <title><?php echo $row['title']?></title>
      <description><?php echo $row['body']?></description>
      <link>http://mysite.com/post.php?id=<?php echo $row['id']?></link>
    </item>

  <?php endwhile?>

  </channel>
</rss>