RSS Digest
RSS Digest is a plugin that creates daily digests from an RSS or Atom feed that you specify.
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description
RSS Digest fetches items from the RSS or Atom feed that you specify and posts them to your blog in a daily digest.
A common use is to create a daily digest of items you’ve posted to social networking sites such as Delicious, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Unlike the other couple of WordPress plugins providing similar functionality, RSS Digest features a settings page for easy configuration. (No editing code… Yay!)
Feature summary:
- Supports RSS and Atom feeds
- Easy to use configuration settings page
- Daily or weekly digest at the time of your choice
- Configurable digest title, category and author
- Publishes the description field, allowing you to annotate your imported links
- Digests may be published automatically, or posted as drafts or pending
- Based on the latest WordPress feed fetching technology for enhanced performance and scalability
installation
Upload the RSS Digest plugin to your blog, Activate it, then Configure it (Settings > RSS Digest) to set your feed information and digest preferences. Easy peasy.
frequently asked questions
What feed types does RSS Digest support?
RSS Digest supports all major versions of RSS and Atom, namely
- RSS 0.90
- RSS 0.91 (Netscape)
- RSS 0.91 (Userland)
- RSS 0.92
- RSS 1.0
- RSS 2.0
- Atom 0.3
- Atom 1.0
Can I use RSS Digest with WordPress 2.7 or earlier?
RSS Digest uses the ‘fetch_feed’ library, which is new to WordPress 2.8. As a result, RSS Digest currently only works with WordPress 2.8 or later.
Can I remove the text “This digest powered by RSS Digest” from the bottom of each post?
Yes, but we hope you won’t 
Whether the attribution text appears is controlled by the “Give credit to RSS Digest” setting on the configuration page.
Perhaps you’d consider leaving it on for a limited time before removing just to help us get the word out?
I’d like to see feature XYZ. Can that be added?
Possibly. Leave a comment on the plugin’s homepage with your feature request and we’ll see what we can do.
screenshots
1. A sample digest.
2. The configuration settings page.
changelog
1.03
- FIXED: Removed CSS clear after credit line, which broke some themes and isn’t needed in most
- FIXED: Settings page displayed incorrectly
1.02
- Fixed: Fixed error preventing inline CSS in HTML head from being recognized
1.01
- Other: Improved upgrade from 0.6x to remember items already fetched
1.01
- Fixed: Plugin now fully compatible with WordPress 2.9.2
- Fixed: Better timezone handling; display server timezone on options page
- Fixed: URL character handling bug
- Fixed: Rewrote scheduling method, replacing homemade scheduler w/ wordpress cron. Should eliminate duplicate posts seen on some sites.
- Added: Added additional debugging information for scheduling system
- Added: Greater scheduling granularity (minutes vs quarter-hours)
- Added: Display local time on settings page
- Added: Choose post status (e.g. publish, draft, pending)
- Added: Allow use of post authors without publish status. Note: WP seems to allow plugins to post as users who don’t otherwise have the ability to post.
- Added: Use timestamps to choose feed items published since last digest
- Added: Allow custom tags to be applied to each digest
- Added: Clean up options on deactivate
- Added: Allow user to specify minimum number of items per digest
- Added: Allow user to suppress item descriptions
0.6
- Added: “Preview” option
- Added: “Post Now” option
- Added: “Reset Settings” option
- Added: Ability to append date to title
- Fixed: Author setting not applied correctly
- Fixed: CSS clear after “credit” line
- Other: Added debug logger
0.5
- Initial version.
I would love to see some formatting options. Right now I set it to create a draft, and then I go in and manually edit it all. It’d be great to be able to design the layout and still have it autopost.
Fist off, this plugin is flippin awesome!
However, It would be great if you could incorporate more than one RSS website post at a time.
Why i chose your plugin over others.
-freakin easy to use
-the auto posting is dope!
-allows the post to go to categories and since i have my site set up to have categories to go to pages, the post goes directly to a page.
What i’d like:
ability to have it store more than one RSS feed to auto post but still keep the functionality of posting to a specific category for each and specific title for each.
Hello!
Thanks for the great plugin!
I “share” via MobileRSS on iPhone, and each day a digest gets posted on my blog – which subsequently gets posted to Twitter & Facebook! It’s made sharing so much easier!
I have a few feature suggestions:
- Add a header for the post
- Add a footer for the post
- Select How Many Words the description uses (as some feeds include the whole post) and a trailing ellipsis [...]
-
- If RSS Digest automatically prevents duplicate URLs, a way to clear the cache or selectively remove single URLs from the database
Also, I suspect there might be a bug? I ran a preview of a post and subsequently tried to post it at a later time but was told there were not enough posts, despite having “shared” several posts (and it being available on my feed), and the minimum feed quantity set at 3.
Thanks again for this very useful poster!
Hi – been using this plugin (latest version) and have made some of my own edits to add some content to the results. These all test out fine when in Preview, but I’ve been seeing instances of duplicate and sometimes triplicate posts. I’ve turned debugging on and after previewing it only shows the feed name in the error log along with “RSS Digest: Fetched 20 items” and no errors, so I am guessing the error is somehow with the cron scheduling (or one of my edits creating an error that sends it into multiple schedules)?
Thanks!
Sorry for the prior comment it is late.
is there a way I can set your plugin to feed to specific page on my site?
I use word press and I would like to add a news link / page. I want the rss feed to only be seen on that page.
is there a way I can set your plug in to feed to specific page on my site?
I use word press and I would like to add a new link and I want the rss feed to only me seen on that page.
Unfortunately, there’s not currently a way to do that with RSS Digest.
Hey, I use the “Map Categories to Pages” Plugin and it works great. I have all my categories mapped to pages and this RSS plugin can post to specific categories which will post to that page that you have mapped.
OH! and if you haven’t tried Reeses panutbutter cups on smores then you are missing out.
The More You Know
=========*
How often does the rss get pulled? and how is SCRD_CACHE_OVERRIDE used?
The RSS gets pulled when it’s time to post a new digest.
SimplePie, which WP uses under the covers, has built-in caching. SCRD_CACHE_OVERRIDE allows us to reduce the cache period temporarily so we can make sure we get fresh content from the feed.
I’ve got an exact error;
Problem fetching feed [A feed could not be found at http://unehistoireafontainebleau.com/feed.xml
could u help me pls?
thanks
Any way that you can get the digest to be mailed out without having it post the Weekly Update to your blog? Maybe choosing the “draft” setting?
I guess I’m missing something really simple. What’s the code that I paste in a page to show the RSS?
Zach,
Right now the way it works is that it creates a blog post at the schedule you choose. That said, allowing you to put the digest on a page using a short code is a good idea that has been suggested by others.
Sam
How do I get the your RSS Digest to appear on one of my pages? I can’t find a short code anywhere that I can copy and post on my page. Thanks -
Right now the way it works is that it creates a blog post at the schedule you choose. That said, allowing you to put the digest on a page using a short code is a good idea.
The plugin is absolutely brilliant! It’s exactly what I’m looking for. The only issue I’ve had with it so far is that because I post quite a number of items to my RSS daily (all of which I’d like to see in the Digest), I just set the Maximum number of items per Digest to 1000. I was pretty surprised when my digest actually only contained 20 (despite the fact that I’d posted a significant amount more than that on that day). Is there a trick here that I’m missing?
Have you tried pulling the feed address up in a browser to ensure it is actually publishing that many items? Most feeds have a default limit of 10 to 20 items.
I’m using the Shared Items from my Google Reader account. It can be found at http://www.google.com/reader/shared/mstone0802. It LOOKS like there’s more than 20 there, and previously when I was using Shared Items Post, it regularly posted more than 20 (though it didn’t post all of the items in the feed for the current day either).
When I open that page in a browser, I only see 9 items. When I open my own shared items I see the same number, leading me to believe that that is the limit Google has set. The items would need to be collected more frequently than daily in order to keep up with this feed — I’m working on a way to do this but I don’t have anything today.
Thanks for the great plugin in Sam. It’s working perfectly for me but not bringing the images from my feed in. I have used other rss plugins that do this but they don’t have the functionality that your plugin offers. Is there something I need to add to make this happen? Any help much appreciated.
You can post the feed URL and I’ll let you know if anything jumps out at me.
Thanks for the plugin, happy to use on their websites! Waiting for updates!
Hello!
I’d like to run multiple instances of the plugin, to get a feed posted purposes. I teach social studies, and would like one feed with world news, and one with economics specific links. Is that possible? Other than that, love the plugin!
I have the same question!
sam,
very well done! like the plug in, have you thought about pulling in the featured image/thumbnail into the feed? pulling a feed from a photography site, would be a nice enhancement…
http://www.richardmfagan.com/rfagantest/?p=31
Hi Sam, I’ve been testing this plug-in prelaunch and really like it. Have a couple feature requests for your consideration:
1) Intro/Outro text boxes on settings page where we can type some canned, recurring text to be inserted before/after the RSS headline pull. I suppose one could hack your code and insert some canned intro/outro text but text editors or even plain text boxes on settings page would be much cleaner and better for future upgrades.
2) Would be nice if on settings page there was an option to toggle on/off settings to include things like article publish datestamp and article source (e.g. The Washington Post) to post to front-end in addition to just headline:
Head Line Head Line Headline Headline
Source Name (PublishDate)
Also, I’m experiencing the previously reported issue with the auto-publish status setting. The plugin builds a new post draft with updated feed links at chosen time but then schedules it to publish like 5 hours later instead of publishing immediately.
Other then that…really loving your work and look forward to seeing it mature further!
I’ve got a beta version of the plugin available if you’d like to try it out. The scheduling algorithm is reworked and it has extensive debugging options that might help us get to the bottom of the issue if it still occurs.
If you are handy with SVN, just pull down trunk. Otherwise I can send you a zip file. In either case you will need to delete the existing directory (or move it someplace outside wp-content) and replace those files with the new ones.
Please please please let me know if you (or anyone else) does any testing with it. It’s been “on the shelf” for a while, but I don’t want to push it live until I get a few reported successes with it.
Don’t have subversion access but happy to beta for you. Feel free to email the zip to my addy from these comments. look forward to it and will get back to you with any observations.
Hi there,
Sorry to keep submitting questions, but I think I’ve figured out what’s causing the problem with RSS Digest auto-posting. I just noticed this line in the log:
WP HTTP Error: Operation timed out after 10000 milliseconds with 0 bytes received.
Is there any way to adjust the timeout to a higher number?
Thanks much.
-joe
Joe,
I think you will need to modify WordPress core to do this. WP uses the SimplePie for feed handling, and SimplePie has a set_timeout function, but it is not exposed by WP.
Shouldn’t be hard to try though. See the example in the docs below and find the fetch_feed() function in wp-include/feed.php. It should be clear what to do if you compare the two code blocks.
http://simplepie.org/wiki/reference/simplepie/set_timeout?s=timeout
Be advised that modifying WP source code is generally frowned upon as it can make upgrading difficult… You will always need to keep track of this change and whether your upgrade messed with it.
Hope this helps,
Sam
hi, i would like to know if is it possible to import multiple rss from different websites, and convert them into different posts with your plug-in.
at first looking seems that your plugin is designed to import rss from one single website.
can you help me?
Actually, nevermind! I think I was using an older version.
Now I just need to figure out why it didn’t update last night…
Sam, the posting-time issue seems to have been fixed, but I simply cannot get RSS Digest to post on its own no matter what I do. I enabled error logging and have gotten this:
[Sat Dec 25 14:01:33 2010] [error] [client [IP redacted]] RSS Digest: About to post digest. Scheduling next digest for Sun 2010-12-26 17:00:00 EST 2010.
[Sat Dec 25 14:01:33 2010] [error] [client [IP redacted]] RSS Digest: Feed URL [http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=[myPipeIDhere]&_render=rss]
And nothing else. Of note is the fact that it’s scheduled to run at 17:00 (as you see above), not 14:00 — could that be the source of the problem?
Thanks for any help you can offer, and happy holidays.
Hi, and thanks for an awesome plugin. Quick question and/or bug report: When I use the Post Now debug option, it actually schedules the post for five hours in the future. Any way I can fix that on my end? (I know a tiny bit of PHP…)
Best,
-j.
Hi! This is awesome and I’d love to use it on my new blog re-launch. I can’t seem to figure out how to use it for more than one feed, though. For example, I need to use this for the Food, Style, and Travel sections at least and possibly others.
Nevermind, I see that others have asked for this feature!
I’m trying to get this work, but failed. Scheduled digests are not appearing. I can only use debug options (preview, then post now after resetting settings). Can you point me somewhere? I’m using WP3.0.1. Thanks
Hi Grzegorz,
The next (not yet released) version of RSS Digest has a number of enhanced debugging features as well as bug fixes. Would you be interested in running it as a beta tester? It is quite stable and is the version I am currently running on my blog.
If so, let me know if you are familiar with Subversion or if you would need me to send you a zip file and instructions.
(Anyone else who’s interested let me know as well.)
Sam
Hi Sam,
I would like to try the new beta.
I have a feed that won’t work …and I really can’t figure out why …it’s this feed:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/hip-hop-dk-events
Best …,
Andy
Is there a possiblity to bring multiple digests, i.e. from more than one RSS-feed?
Hi Thorsten,
This is often requested but not currently available in RSS Digest. It is possible to use a third party service like Yahoo Pipes to combine your feeds and set RSS Digest up to point to your pipe.
How would you want your digests organized? Should each feed appear separately, or should everything be interspersed?
Hey Sam,
I’d also like this feature (multiple digests). In my situation, I’d want to have different feeds publish to different categories–essentially just having more than one copy of the RSS Digest options page but still one cron job.
Thanks for a great plugin!
Sorry it took me a time to get back here… What I’m looking for is having the feeds shown in separate digests, with author’s name etc choosable seperately. For example, I can publish feed 1 on Mondays with author’s name 1, feed 2 on Tuesdays with author’s name 2 and so on.
i´m also in need of that feature, it works fine with one feed now, but i would love to use more!
Hey Sam, are you getting any closer to this being launched? I love your plugin, but it’s limitation to one feed is making me look elsewhere! Help!
One other thing: could you add the ability to display just the summary text from the feed? I’m using this with my Google Reader shared feed, and my comments are in the section, whereas the entire texts of the posts I’m sharing are in the section. I just want to display links and my comments (summaries).
Whoops, let me try that again, without the HTML tags:
The plugin should be displaying {summary} if available, and {content} only if a {summary} doesn’t exist.
If you’d like to post a link to your feed I can take a look.
Nice plugin for WordPress, thank you for providing it
I do have one question. It appears to max out at 20 articles from a feed, no matter how high I make the settings. It would be nice to go over that number.
Thank you
Hi, Are you sure your feed returns more than 20 items? Please check that first by visiting the feed URL in your browser, then post the feed URL here.
It appears that this is the probleem. Both the RSS-feed from Twitter and from Google Reader return just 20 items. I didn’t expect that.
Thank you for helping out.
I know this may sound crazy to many people, but could you add the option to post the digest *monthly*? It’s what works best for my blog (I only post a couple times a month).
Or, since so many people seem to be missing the weekly post feature (hint: uncheck all but one day), maybe you could add a “Post every __ days” box. That way, people could just put 1 for daily, 7 for weekly, 30 for monthly, .042 for hourly, etc.
I’ve been looking for an alternative to Lifestream, which is conflicting with another plugin, and isn’t really focused on digests anyway.
Thanks!
I hear you, but then users would want control over what day of the month
I would eventually like to see a full recurrence editor like you’d find in your PDA or Outlook calendar. I think that’s the only thing that will satisfy everyone’s need. No promises on timeframe for that, but I’d be happy to review any contributed patches.
Hi! I need the digests of several RSS feeds in my blog. What can I do?
Thanks
Having probs w/rss digest; not posting any idea? or plugin conflicts? sometimes will not pull preview and when it does, it won’t post. need help.
J.S.,
Try turning on the debug logging option by changing the line at the top from:
define(‘SCRD_DEBUG’, 0);
to
define(‘SCRD_DEBUG’, 1);
This will then add logging data to your web server’s error log. Filter the lines containing “RSS Digest:” and post them here or email me and I’ll take a look.
I’m using RSS Digest in my blog for showing latest Twitpics once a week, but it seems to have a bug on my WP 3.0.
After installation and set up it runs automatically one time and after that a new post doesn’t appear a week later.
There are no error messages.
Max,
You can try turning on the debug logging option by changing the line at the top from:
define(‘SCRD_DEBUG’, 0);
to
define(‘SCRD_DEBUG’, 1);
This will then add logging data to your web server’s error log. Filter the lines containing “RSS Digest:” and post them here or email me.
I’d like to use this on a page as a regular update. Is there a way to have the rss post to a page instead of the home page?
Thanks, Jim
James, this would probably require a bit of work to do, and is not something I’m planning. I’d imagine there are other plugins that do this.
With the latest version of WordPress, I install and get:
Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.
Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_NEW…etc
Anyone have a fix for this?
Hi Hillary,
RSS Digest requires PHP version 5.0 or higher, and my guess is that you are using PHP 4.x. I'll make this more clear in the docs and clarify the error message.
Sam
I can’t seem to preview any feed url in my settings page. Using the latest (3.0) WordPress installation and I was hoping to eventually setup a category specific feed, but I can’t even get the default one to work…help?
http://website.com/category/categoryname/feed/
and
http://website.com/feed
both don’t work…
Never mind. sorry. I was being silly.
Remember to “UPDATE RSS DIGEST OPTIONS” prior to using the “Preview” Debug Button Option….I was forgeting to update my options before testing them. Perhaps disabling that button unless the options are updated??
Super helpful plugin!!
Hi! there is no option to post one by one news? instead of "couple of news" inside 1 post, with a generic title -I disagree with this-?
Ideal for me: post one by one post, by new articles appear. kind regards!
Consider this my vote for a weekly digest function as well, otherwise great stuff!
The latest versions (1.x) support weekly digests. Just uncheck the days that you don't want your digest to appear.
Sam… tried to install it but I keep getting a fatal error. I promise you are long and glowing review and link back if you can help me to get this to work. I keep trying every new WordPress update but it won’t let me activate the plugin.
I get: Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_NEW in [my site url]/wp-content/plugins/rss-digest/rss-digest.php on line 105
If its a simple matter of hacking up the code, I’m all for it but I’m not seeing what’s wrong there.
Hillary,
That error typically means that your server is running PHP 4.x, rather than version 5.x which is required by the plugin. Check with your host for details on switching to PHP 5.
Sam
Just wanted to add that I tried this one my other websites and got the same error. Might this be related to the fact that I’m hosted by GoDaddy or something?
Hi Hillary,
Can you try to install and run this plugin: WordPress PHP Info and send me or post your PHP version?
Sam
Giving RSS Digest credit breaks my theme because of the "clear all."
Sorry to hear this. I may pull the clear from a future version when I have time to retest against a few common themes. Thx
I've posted RSS Digest 1.01 up on WordPress.org, so you should be able to upgrade via the Plugins admin page. Please do so and let me know if you experience any issues!
Please see this page to try out a new beta version of RSS Digest that fixes compatibility issues with the latest WordPress and provides many of the features you have requested: http://geekfactor.charrington.com/2010/04/annou…
This will be in the next beta.
for sure, please post it. i see that facebook changes the way they do
things a lot…. thanks!
This will be fixed in the next beta. If you're comfortable in code and need an immediate fix LMK and I'll post the details.
Sounds like a cool feature. If you've got a patch to shoot over, I'm happy to take a look!!! Thanks! You can email to my first name at charrington.com.
Yes, this was added in a previous beta (mentioned earlier in this thread). Some folks have had problems getting this installed, and it will be replaced shortly anyway.
I'm very close to posting a new beta that will fix any issues and introduce new features. Stay tuned, I should have it posted within the next few days.
The problem seems to be related to several timezone bugs that were introduced in 2.9.
Any plans to create a weekly digest or more configuration items for timing?
also the ability to configure it to post as 'published' or 'draft' or 'private' would be nice too. I wanted to see how it worked and whatnot before i turned it on, so I modified the plugin to do it that way anyway.
I'd be happy to contribute if you want some help
Any plans to add Weekly Digest functionality? Don't want to send my readers away with daily posts.
Any plans to update this for the newest version of wordpress? Not working in 2.9.X
Any plans to update this for the newest version of wordpress? Not working in 2.9.X
Hey, do you keep up w facebook? seems they change things around often. Im trying to get a fan page feed
http://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?formatx…
which works in google reader but in rss plugin for wordpress i get error
Problem fetching feed [A feed could not be found at http://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?formatx3…
thanks!
andy
I got exactly the same problem with my twitter feed. Any idea ?
I just tried your twitter feed against the latest RSS Digest version and it worked fine. What specifically is the problem? What version are you running?
I’ve got the same exact error when trying to use the feed http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/12760282.rss – works everywhere BUT in rss digest plugin. Same error as andyux.
Any thoughts?
Thanks!
Thanks for RSS Digest. Unfortunately, it seems to have stopped working with update to WP 2.9.1. Everything seems to work in preview, but the plugin won't post the content. Any advice?
Tom,
Did you ever get that problem fixed? I seem to be having the same problem here.
Can you elaborate on the problem you’re seeing? The latest version of RSS Digest (1.02) should work fine on WordPress 2.9x.
The blog I have it installed on had 2 new posts since the last digest. When the time came for it to pull, it never went. The posts were posted mid-morning Monday and RSS digest was set to go early Tuesday morning. It never went. I’m going to test again this week and will report back on any issues.
any fixes? I too have this problem
I don't see the option to post weekly digest am I missing something?
To Post Weekly, only select ONE day. :]