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SimplePIE is an RSS plugin which is relatively easy to use. People are paying $35-200 for Popurls clone themes, but I had just as much difficulty configuring my theme as I did doing it from scratch, so I was *pissed* that I wasted $35 on one that I could not get to work because of a conflict with a plugin I had previously installed while trying to get a free copy of an older theme to work. I spent several hours documenting this process while I went through it, while I also corresponded with that templates author. His template looks great, but in the end, after working on this project for several hours and then stopping it because I thought the theme was all I needed, I could not %$cking get it to #@cking work.

%$ck!

I quit working on this after I got my $35 theme uploaded, but after the widgets didn’t work as advertised, I nearly lost it. I’ve wasted 6 hours on this theme today, and 4 hours on another theme last night. That’s not counting the time I spent searching through hundreds of feeds for 40 worthwhile RSS feeds in my targeted niches and the 8 hours I wasted promoting an affiliate program for a dude who apparently doesn’t pay his affiliates. I’m so ticked about wasting so many hours of my time that I decided to actually launch this blog that I’ve been sitting on forever. What can I say? Sue me, when it comes to certain things, I’m just plain lazy. I’ve been trying to avoid coding and wanted to do this within the framework of wordpress, but it was not flexible enough so this solution is not completely painless or foolproof. The primary issue with this method of cloning popurls is font size. If you can get it to be very small, then you’re in business. So you’re probably going to end up editing CSS. You need to go into Appearance/Themes/Them Editor to edit your themes “style.css” file. Once you are there, you can edit the lines that say “font-size: –px;” and change the number. If you use pixels (”px”) then you might not want to go over 10. If you use % or em values, then you’re going to want to keep everything under 100% or under em1. See http://www.clagnut.com/blog/348/ for an explanation of EM numbers.

The following instructions are both a summary of and an expansion upon what is found on http://simplepie.org/wiki/plugins/wordpress/simplepie_plugin_for_wordpress/usage

#1 Configure Wordpress with your usual %$cking plugins, your #@cking akismet key, a $#cking keyword spam blacklist, and your favorite %@cking cache plugin. You should have a list of website URLs in hand or in mind before gettting to step 4. You do not need actual RSS feed URLS, you only need the URL for each website. The script autodiscovers feed URLs for each URL, but if you already have a valid feed URL, feel free to use it because it will work. I tried this script with the simplr theme thinking that a clean, simple, single column theme would work best, but found out that the text was too large and that’s what sent me off to google to find out how to edit font size in wordpress. The iphone itheme failed (horribly) to correctly render its calendar icons for each feed,  while the Thesis them worked best for me since it allows you to easily edit the text size. The problem is that Thesis does not let you bring all of the text sizes down low enough- for some odd reason the developer thinks they know more about your design needs than you do, so they set limits on how large or small you can make the font sizes. You’re going to have to be very conscious of the size of your posts because thesis only allows you to go down to 11 point text, and that’s still too big. I’m sure you could easily come up with an amazing looking site with other themes besides Thesis, it will just take a lot of testing and possibly tweaking of your style.css file.

#2 Install and activate these 4 free plugins. I’m not looking up all of their URLs for you, sorry. I’m ticked off, remember? I installed the first three by using the new Plugin Browser/Installer function found at the bottom of the Plugins control panel. Copy/paste these plugin names into the search box:
Exec-PHP, SimplePie Core, SimplePie Plugin for WordPress. You will have to download and upload the fourth plugin, Role Manager, manually, and I’m not sure it’s necessary.Exec-PHP allows WP to run PHP in posts. No, you don’t need to know PHP. You will just be copying and pasting PHP code.
SimplePie Core loads the libraries that the SimplePie WP plugin needs, including auto-discovery of feeds. So again, you won’t need feed URL’s to get them - you just need the URL of the site you’re interested in getting a feed from.
SimplePie Plugin for WP creates a configuration menu in the control panel.
Role Manager allows you to assign Capabilities to each user of your blog. You have to upload it manually. See http://www.im-web-gefunden.de/wordpress-plugins/role-manager/ for the current download link.

#3 The original source of the info in this step is the Exec-PHP documentation. I’ve just added a few details to the original text.
Writing code in articles or text widgets may require some further tuning to the blog and user settings. To have the Exec-PHP plugin work properly with PHP code in the content of a users article, do as follows:
•Disable tag balancing ‘WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically’ through the ‘Settings > Writing’ menu in WordPress
•Disable the WYSIWYG editor in the user’s settings through the ‘Users > Your Profile’ menu (Just check the box next to  “Disable the visual editor when writing” and be sure to save the changes to the user profile)
•Assign the ‘unfiltered_html’ capability to the user using the Role Manager plugin, if you want users other than the administrator to have this capability. The plugin is apparently integrated with the “users” section of the control panel. If you are an administrator then you already have this “capability”. I apologize but did not explore how to give other users this capability.
•Assign the ‘exec_php’ capability to the user using the Role Manager plugin, if you want users other than the administrator to have this capability.
If you are an administrator then you already have this “capability”. The plugin is apparently integrated with the “users” section of the control panel. If you are an administrator then you already have this “capability”. I apologize but did not explore how to give other users this capability.

#4 “SimplePie for WP” should now be on the left side of your dashboard. Click on it to create the default settings for each feed. Here are some sample settings. You should be able to figure out the rest yourself…
Layout template: choose Blog Style with Enclosures
Number of items to display:0 (Pulls feeds from all the URLs you’re going to add)
Number of items to display per feed: (I picked 4 because I have so many feeds. Popurls displays 8 lines, for 21 feeds, plus some video and image feeds, as well as around 170 single line feeds on the bottom)

#5 Copy/Paste this code into a post, being sure to post as html and not post using the WYSIWYG visual editor. If you forgot to disable the WYSIWYG editor in step 3, then there will be some warning text above your post and you will not be able to use php in your posts. It *must* be disabled. Now add the url of each website that you want to pull feeds from where I have put the text “URL OF SITE FEED GOES HERE”. In the previous step you already configured the number of feeds that the script will be pulling from each of these sites. You can make this a post or a page, and/or pin it to the front page of your blog using the usual settings on the right hand side of the “Add new post” section.
 <?php echo SimplePieWP(’http://URL OF SITE FEED GOES HERE’); ?>
Repeat that line for every website feed that you want displayed with your default settings.

#6 If you want to copy Popurls method of displaying single line feeds at the bottom of the page, list your default-format feeds first, then switch over to using this code for the single line feeds…
<?php
echo SimplePieWP(’http://URL OF SITE FEED GOES HERE’, array(
 ’items’ => 1,
 ’cache_duration’ => NUMBER OF SECONDS GOES HERE,
 ’date_format’ => ‘j M Y, g:i a’
));
?>

You can obviously change other valuables like cache duration and date format.
Cache duration is in seconds. One hour is 3600. I’ll save you some more time and do the math for you… 4 hours= 14400 seconds 8=28800 12=57600 16=72000 24=86400

#7 Now smile, kick back, and have a cold one.
#8 No I’m not providing support for this.

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