7.5. Consuming an Atom Feed
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## 7.5. Consuming an Atom Feed

`Zend_Feed_Atom` is used in much the same way as `Zend_Feed_Rss`. It provides the same access to feed-level properties and iteration over entries in the feed. The main difference is in the structure of the Atom protocol itself. Atom is a successor to RSS; it is more generalized protocol and it is designed to deal more easily with feeds that provide their full content inside the feed, splitting RSS' `description` tag into two elements, `summary` and `content`, for that purpose.

Example 7.2. Basic Use of an Atom Feed

Read an Atom feed and print the `title` and `summary` of each entry:

    <?php

    $feed = new Zend_Feed_Atom('http://atom.example.com/feed/');
    echo 'The feed contains ' . $feed->count() . ' entries.' . "\n\n";
    foreach ($feed as $entry) {
        echo 'Title: ' . $entry->title() . "\n";
        echo 'Summary: ' . $entry->summary() . "\n\n";
    }

    ?>

In an Atom feed you can expect to find the following feed properties:

- `title` - The feed's title, same as RSS's channel title

- `id` - Every feed and entry in Atom has a unique identifier

- `link` - Feeds can have multiple links, which are distinguished by a `type` attribute

  The equivalent to RSS's channel link would be `type="text/html"`. If the link is to an alternate version of the same content that's in the feed, it would have a `rel="alternate"` attribute.

- `subtitle` - The feed's description, equivalent to RSS' channel description

  `author->name()` - The feed author's name

  `author->email()` - The feed author's email address

Atom entries commonly have the following properties:

- `id` - The entry's unique identifier

- `title` - The entry's title, same as RSS item titles

- `link` - A link to another format or an alternate view of this entry

- `summary` - A summary of this entry's content

- `content` - The full content of the entry; can be skipped if the feed just contains summaries

- `author` - with `name` and `email` sub-tags like feeds have

- `published` - the date the entry was published, in RFC 3339 format

- `updated` - the date the entry was last updated, in RFC 3339 format

For more information on Atom and plenty of resources, see http://www.atomenabled.org/.

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