FeedTools was designed to be a simple XML feed parser, generator, and translator with a built-in caching system.

Example

require 'feed_tools'

slashdot_feed = FeedTools::Feed.open('http://www.slashdot.org/index.rss')
slashdot_feed.title
=> "Slashdot"
slashdot_feed.description
=> "News for nerds, stuff that matters"
slashdot_feed.link       
=> "http://slashdot.org/"
slashdot_feed.items.first.find_node("slash:hitparade/text()").to_s
=> "43,37,28,23,11,3,1"

Installation

You can install FeedTools as a gem:

gem install feedtools

Or you can install it from the tarball or zip packages on the download page and then extract it to your vendors directory as you would with any other Ruby library.

After installation, you will either need to run in non-caching mode or set up a caching mechanism. The database feed cache system currently included with FeedTools is the most common caching method. To set up the database feed cache, you will first need to create the appropriate database schema. Schema files for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite have been included, but the preferred method of creating the schema within the Rails environment is with a migration file. A migration file has been supplied with FeedTools and can be found in the db directory. Run script/generate migration add_feed_tools_tables and then copy and paste the contents of db/migration.rb into your new migration file.