Add a WordPress news feed to Magento in 5 steps

I’ve explored several ways to integrate WordPress and Magento on one site, but this has to be the quickest in terms of set up time and site speed.

Integrating WordPress on a Magento site

WordPress can be called into your Magento build with plugins and various code snippets, but I found loading up even the bare bones of both cms/ framework’s databases and core files, had too much of a negative effect on a site’s load time.

Calling in a WordPress latest new feed using RSS

Using WP’s latest post RSS news feed is the quickest way to get your WordPress posts displaying on your Magento homepage.

Step 1 : Create a new file wordpress-homepage-feed.phtml and add the following code into your file

<?php /* called in cms {{block type="core/template" template="page/html/wordpress-homepage-feed.phtml"}}*/ ?>
 
<?php     $channel = new Zend_Feed_Rss('http://www.mysitename.co.uk/news/feed/');  ?>
 


<div id="wp-feed" class="RoleBlock">


<h2><a href="/news/" title="My site news"><?php echo $channel->title(); ?> News &amp; Events</a></h2>


     
     <?php foreach ($channel as $key=>$item) {  ?>
      


<div class="post-block">


<h3><a href="<?php echo $item->link(); ?>"><?php echo $item->title(); ?></a></h3>




<?php echo $item->description(); ?>

        
        </div>


  
     <?php } ?>
        
</div>

Step 2: Change the Zend_Feed_Rsspath to point to your site’s RSS feed.

This can be found in the head of your WP blog, by viewing the site’s source. You might also need to check the /news/ link path is correct for your site set up.

Step 3: Save this within your Magento install at;

\app\design\frontend\default\[theme]\template\page\html

and upload the file to your live server.

Step 4: Login to your Magento cms and include the new file.

Within CMS>Pages, find your homepage and add the following block call in the code view.

{{block type="core/template" template="page/html/wordpress-homepage-feed.phtml"}}

Step 5: Adjust the number of posts shown

To change the number of posts displayed on your Magento homepage, you need to login into your WordPress cms. Find Settings> Reading > Syndication feeds show the most recent, and alter the number.

So that’s it, you can add a publish date to your feed by using;

<?php echo $item->pubDate(); ?>

Thumbnails in your RSS feed

You can also add thumbnails to your RSS feed by adding the code to your WordPress function file.

function insertThumbnailRSS($content) {
global $post;
if ( has_post_thumbnail( $post->ID ) ){
$content = '' . get_the_post_thumbnail( $post->ID, 'thumbnail' ) . '' . $content;
}
return $content;
}

add_filter('the_excerpt_rss', 'insertThumbnailRSS');
add_filter('the_content_feed', 'insertThumbnailRSS');

Linked thumbnails in your RSS feed

You can add linked thumbnails to your RSS feed by adding this code to your WordPress function file.

/*include thumbs in RSS for magento feed*/
function insertThumbnailRSS($content) {
    global $post;
    if ( has_post_thumbnail( $post->ID ) ){
        $content = '<span class="img-thumb"><a href="' . get_permalink() . '">' . get_the_post_thumbnail( $post->ID, 'thumbnail' ) . '</a></span>' . $content;
    }
    return $content;
}
 
add_filter('the_excerpt_rss', 'insertThumbnailRSS');
add_filter('the_content_feed', 'insertThumbnailRSS');

 

Add a formatted publish date

As requested in the comments, you can add the post’s publish date, modifying it’s format using WordPress’ date and time format options. The option below strips the time text.

<em><?php echo date('l, F jS, Y', strtotime($item->pubDate())); ?></em>

Display a message if the feed is unavailable

One drawback with the current code is that a problem with the feed itself could cause display issues on your own page. If the feed site is down or the feed is blocked, your site might suddenly have a big empty gap on your page.

Feed Function

A way around this is to wrap the code in a function, with a catch to display a message if there is an issue retrieving the feed.

<?php /* called in cms {{block type="core/template" template="page/html/wordpress-homepage-feed.phtml"}}*/ ?>
 
<?php function display_feed() { try { $channel = new Zend_Feed_Rss('http://www.mysitename.co.uk/news/feed/'); } catch (Zend_Feed_Exception $e) { echo ' The news feed is currently not available. '; return; } ?>
 


<div id="wp-feed" class="RoleBlock">


<h2><a href="/news/" title="My site news"><?php echo $channel->title(); ?> News &amp; Events</a></h2>


     
     <?php foreach ($channel as $key=>$item) {  ?>
      


<div class="post-block">


<h3><a href="<?php echo $item->link(); ?>"><?php echo $item->title(); ?></a></h3>


            <em><?php echo date('l, F jS, Y', strtotime($item->pubDate())); ?></em>


<?php echo $item->description(); ?>

        
        </div>


  
     <?php } ?>
        
</div>



<?php } display_feed(); ?>   

To see a simple live version, have a look at http://www.jonesandcane.co.uk/ homepage, which now has a news feed at the bottom of the page.

Do let me know if this was helpful for you.