How to add a RSS Feed to a Post or Page Using a WordPress Shortcode

Last week I wrote about how the WordPress fetch feed function could be used to display RSS feeds on a website rather than using the RSS plugin.

While I was working on the articles it occured to me that a shortcode that provided this feature would actually be a lot easier and with the shortcode the feed could easily be used in a post or a page.

I was going to make my own and then realized that someone had probably already done so and made it available. And sure enough, the piece of code I needed was in the Mastering WordPress Shortcodes article at Smashing Magazine.

When I tested the code provided by Smashing Magazine, the RSS feed displayed at the top of the post even though the shortcode was at the bottom. This article, which is French, provided a minor change to the code, which corrected the problem.

The following code goes into your Theme functions, function.php, file:

<?php
//This file is needed to be able to use the wp_rss() function.
include_once(ABSPATH.WPINC.'/rss.php');

function readRss($atts) {
    extract(shortcode_atts(array(
	"feed" => 'http://',
      "num" => '1',
    ), $atts));

      ob_start();
    wp_rss($feed, $num);
 
    return ob_get_clean();
}

add_shortcode('rss', 'readRss'); ?>

Once this code is in your functions file, you can easily add a RSS feed to any page or post by adding the following shortcode.

[rss feed="http://feed url here" num="5"]

All you need to do is change the URL to the feed URL that you want to use. You can also change how many feed items are displayed.

Below is an example of using the WordPress shortcode to display my bookmarks tagged with WordPress on delicious.

[rss feed=”http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/kwbridge/wordpress” num=”5″]

photo credit: misocrazy