Feed Pull ============== This is a simple WordPress plugin that is largely based off of Automattic's Syndication plugin. Easily setup feeds to be syndicated into WordPress. You can map feed attributes to post fields or post meta. Syndicated content can be mapped to any post type you want. The plugin comes with a convenient settings page so you can configure things like when feeds are syndicated. Feed Pull vs. Syndication --------------- Feed Pull takes a lot of concepts from Syndication. Syndication is a more advanced plugin that offers more than just feed pulling. Here are some differences between the two plugins * Feed Pull is a plugin for pulling content out of XML feeds. Syndication has feed pulling as well as content pushing features * Feed Pull has a much friendlier feed management screen. Both Syndication and Feed Pull use the WordPress post edit, screen, however Feed Pull offers a much cleaner experience from the way options are presented to the instructions provided. At the moment Feed Pull does not have all the features of Syndication such as taxonomy and constant field mapping. However, Feed Pull probably has everything you need and is very extensible. * Feed Pull has far superior error logging to Syndication. * Feed Pull allows you to schedule content pulling in the future. * Feed Pull allows you to do manual pulls using AJAX rather than a sometimes frustrating one-time cron job. Setup Instructions -------------- 1. Upload and activate the plugin. 1. A "Feed Pull" settings page has been added as a sub-item of the "Settings" admin menu. 1. Make sure "Pull feeds" is set to yes. Feeds are syndicated using WordPress cron. This means your content will be pulled in the background. By default feed pulls occur once per hour. Configure a Feed -------------- 1. After activating the plugin, you should now see a "Source Feeds" menu item in your admin menu. Add a new source feed. 1. Enter the URL of any XML feed in the feed url input box. 1. Enter an XPath to the posts within your feed. This tells the plugin where each piece of content lives in your feed. For most RSS feeds, channel/item will do just fine. Here is a bland tutorial if you want to learn more about XPath: [http://www.w3schools.com/XPath/](http://www.w3schools.com/XPath/) 1. Setup the new content to your liking. The defaults are good to start with. 1. Finally, we need to map fields in the feed to your new posts. Title and GUID are required. Title is self-explanatory. A GUID is a unique identifier for posts. Items within your feed should have some sort of GUID or permalink that you can map to the post GUID. GUID's allow the plugin to determine if a piece of content has already been syndicated or not. Atom Feeds and Custom Namespaces -------------- Sometimes feeds make use of prefixes on certain elements. This happens for a variety of reasons; one is to avoid conflicts. Prefixes should have a namespace defined somewhere using an "xmlns" attribute. Feed Pull lets you define custom namespaces. This feature is advanced and not needed in most cases. However, certain feeds, like the Atom feeds outputted by WordPress define a document level namespace without a prefix. This is totally fine except it makes XPath queries difficult. Feed Pull should automatically detect if this situation is happening and create a namespace with the prefix "default" and the url "http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom". You should use the prefix in your XPath queries. For example, instead of "//feed/entry", your query should be "//default:feed/default:entry". Instead of "title" in your field map, your query should probably be "default:title". You can learn more about namespaces here: [http://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_namespaces.asp](http://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_namespaces.asp)