RSS Feeds

Moved to the Develop server-side applications in Dreamweaver forum.

In order to aggregate RSS feeds, you need to have a reasonable understanding of programming or scripting. Dreamweaver CS6 has an XSL Transformations server behavior that uses PHP to parse an XML document, such as an RSS feed, and display it in a web page. It can't handle multiple sources, so you would need to aggregate the various feeds into a single document yourself. Alternatively, you could use the server behavior multiple times on the same page to display the results from each feed separately.

The other option in Dreamweaver CS6 is to use Spry Data Sets. These rely on JavaScript being enabled in the browser, and have the same limitation as the XSL Transformations server behavior in that they're not capable of dealing with multiple sources. You would either need to aggregate the feeds into a single document yourself, or to present them as separate data sets.

The problem with both approaches is that server behaviors and Spry Data Sets are being removed from the next version of Dreamweaver, so you will have difficulty maintaining your page if you upgrade to the next version. Nor is it easy to describe how to use either method in a forum post. I devoted two whole chapters (more than 80 pages) to these subjects in my Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS4.

The first question to answer is whether you have any experience with PHP or JavaScript. If you're familiar with the basics of PHP, it's not too difficult to hand-code a script to display the results of an RSS feed using SimpleXML. If you've never used PHP, you face an uphill task.