Blogging to blogger.com via Horde_Feed

With Horde 4 being available as PEAR based components a lot of functionality that was hidden behind the Horde groupware applications have suddenly become available as building blocks for your own PHP based software. There is still a lot documentation that should get written. As one piece of the puzzle I will use my blog to post short tutorials on interesting things you might wish to do with the Horde PEAR packages.

Let's start with blog posts today...

Creating Atom blog posts becomes a rather simple task with the help of the Horde_Feed package. Install it via PEAR first:

pear channel-discover pear.horde.org
pear install horde/Horde_Feed

Start with creating an instance of Horde_Feed_Entry_Atom and populate it with content similar to the example below:

$entry = new Horde_Feed_Entry_Atom();
$entry->{'atom:title'} = 'Entry 1';
$entry->{'atom:title'}['type'] = 'text';
$entry->{'atom:content'} = '1.1';
$entry->{'atom:content'}['type'] = 'text';

The type could also be html or xhtml if the text in the corresponding field is not plain text. See the overview on the Atom format for that.

Now it is sufficient to post the entry with:

try {
    $entry->save($blogUri);
} catch (Horde_Feed_Exception $e) {
    die('An error occurred posting: ' . $e->getMessage() . "\n");
}

In most situations this example will be somewhat too simplistic. Most sites will require you to authenticate before being able to add Atom entries. How such authentication information can be transmitted when posting the entry is detailed in the blogger.com example that comes with the Horde_Feed package. At the time I'm writing this the authentication is not yet available in the released package though - you will have to wait for the next release to hit pear.horde.org.