Display RSS feed with a XML Viewer WebPart in SharePoint Foundation

If you are working with SharePoint foundation and you would like to display an rss feed, for SharePoint Server you would choose to use the rss-viewer WebPart. In SharePoint Foundation there is no RSS-Viewer WebPart so you have to come up with an alternative.

From a customer I received the following request: They wanted newsfeeds from branch organizations all over the world combined into one rss feed and display that one on their corporate marketing portal. For the combine functionality I used “yahoo pipes”. It is an easy interface, with all options you need such as filtering, sorting etc. Once you created a pipe there is also a combined rss feed available that will show you all separate feeds into one.

To display that newly created rss feed, just put a XML-Viewer WebPart on your page in SharePoint 2010, add the url to the combined rss feed at yahoo. If you would hit enter now, the WebPart will display all properties the rss feed outputs. That is unreadable!

To make it readable you need to add some XSL formatting, for example enter the next code at your “XSL Editor”.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output method="html" indent="yes"/>
<xsl:param name="TITLE"/>
<xsl:template match="rss">
  <div style="background:#ffffff; padding:0; font-size:10px;">
      <xsl:for-each select="channel/item">
        <a href="{link}" target="_new"><xsl:value-of select="title"/></a><br/>    
        <xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping="yes" select="description"/><br/>
      </xsl:for-each>
  </div>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="description"><xsl:value-of select="."/><br/></xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Voilà, you have an alternative RSS-Viewer WebPart!