APAD: Feeder

Plugin Name
Feeder

Plugin Page
http://xubz.com/weblog/2007/03/feeder-wordpress-plugin

Description
Feeder is a RSS Feed aggregator which parses the feed and displays them in <li> tag.

Features
– User can control how many links and characters to show.
– Can cache the given feed on your server

My Review
Feeder is a simple to use plugin. The installation process is just like any other plugins. However, you do not get a management interface which would have been ideal for beginners.

You will need to edit your template files (e.g. sidebar.php) and add the necessary code. This is where you will pass an RSS2 feed url to the function. You can also pass several other parameters like number of items to display, XHTML tags to use etc.

The system to pass the url is good as you will need to pass different feed urls, however, it would have been better to have a management interface in WP-Admin to set defaults for the other parameters.

One good feature supported by Feeder is the ability to cache the feeds on your server. This can greatly speed up the site loading as well as reduce load from the server the feed is hosted on.

Talking about this plugin I got one complaint, and that is not related to the plugin, but the plugin page infact.

The plugin page gives you zero information about the plugin except for a basic description and that it caches.

A good plugin page should have description, features, installation / removal instructions, customization (if needed) etc.

Anyway, this a good plugin to display headlines of feeds. However, do take permission from the owners of the feeds before you start displaying them on your blog.