I have been working to get the new version of DEV360.com out the door and found myself in need of displaying RSS items from my Wordpress-powered blog on the DEV360 site which is developed in Django.

There were two libraries that I found for parsing RSS; RSS.py by Mark Nottingham which unfortunately didn’t support RSS 2.0, and Mark Pilgrim’s feedparser.py. I settled on the latter since it contains more features, has easier syntax and has better unit-test coverage.

For what I’m doing, a template tag works out best for rendering the RSS items; let’s fast-forward to the code:

foo.html:

{% load rss_feed %}
{% rss_feed %}

[application]/templatetags.py:

import feedparser
from datetime import datetime
from django.template import Library, Node
register = Library()

@register.simple_tag
def rss_feed(itemCount=5):
	channel = feedparser.parse('http://blog.dev360.com/feed/')

	html = []
	html.append('<div id="rss-feed">')
	html.append('	<h1>Latest blog posts</h1>')
	html.append('	<ul>')
	for entry in channel.entries[:itemCount]:
		url = entry.id
		title = entry.title
		date = datetime.strptime(entry.date, "%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S +0000");
		html.append('<li><p><strong><a href="%s">%s</a></strong>' % (url, title));
		html.append('%s</p></li>' % (date.strftime("%B %d, %Y")))

	html.append('	</ul>')
	html.append('</div>')
	return "\n".join(html)