I am trying to pull in some of my feeds (flickr, last.fm, youtube, tumblr etc.) for display on my wordpress page. I seem to have the following options to do so:
- Use service specific plugins: This method involves the least bit of effort. All one needs to do is find a plugin which parses the RSS feed of a particular service and gives me a hook to put into the page template. FlickRSS is a good one for Flickr. The trouble is, not all services have well written plugins for their feeds. Which leaves me with options 2 & 3 for the remaining services.
- Use a generic plugin: Use a generic RSS fetching plugin for WordPress (like Feedlist) which can grab any RSS feed. These plugins however display only the URL of the data and do not format the content based on the content type. For example, only URLs to Flickr photos or Youtube videos are displayed instead of photo or video thumbnails. The plugin has to be modified for each feed.
- Use the WordPress function fetch_feed which uses SimplePie for feed retrieval. A custom function has to be written for each feed type. I prefer this to option 2 because if I need to edit PHP I might as well use a WordPress function directly instead of using a plugin.
