A content management system is supposed to be a simplistic way to organise and manipulate your content. There are a ton of content management systems available on the web today so it’s really tough to make a choice over which one to pick.
The first question you’ve really got to ask yourself is… What do I want my site to do?
Are you going to run a blog? Do you want a complete site where you’re going to have to manage many different sections which all have different functions, requiring different page styles? Or are you looking for something simple that users can use just to get the content they’re really looking for?
PHP RSS Reader is a way to provide your users with the content they really want.
We often hear the question ‘Why should we just syndicate other people’s content onto our website? What’s the benefit of that? Isn’t that against everything that a search engine really wants? Are there not duplicate content issues?
Well – let’s really take a close look at this question as it’s something that comes up on a regular basis. News aggregation is nothing new. But a PHP news aggregation script such as PHP RSS Reader is really quite unique at this moment in time.
Lets look on the wider scale of things at other news aggregation sites on the web…
We’ve got Digg, NewsNow, Google News and the core of Google, it’s whole search interface, the content isn’t really unique. What we’re all really offering here is a way to organise the mass amount of content that’s actually out there on the web today.
Syndicating content using a PHP script is simple, there are a lot of basic scripts that allow you to syndicate content from RSS feeds, but what we’re really interested in here at PHP RSS Reader is how we organise that news so the reader can work through all the clutter to get the news they want.
This is exactly why we added the ‘My Feeds’ section of the script.
You will notice in the siderbar, after you’ve registered for a free account on the demo version, that you will be able to create your own feeds. You basically specify a number of keywords that you would like to use to break down the content you would like to see.
What we’re really doing here is aggregating that content from RSS feeds and then picking those articles from the database based on those keywords. We’ve also taken this a step further and started to show ‘clusters’ of news articles underneath each headline.
This is an easy way to provide users with more related content to keep them engaged, to ensure they spend a longer amount of time on the site and explore more of the syndicated content.
The beauty of installing a php news script such as PHP RSS Reader on your server is the new content comes in automatically. You can provide your users with relevant content without having to produce it all yourself, it doesn’t get much better than that!