Some of my previous articles were about extracting XML using regular expressions. This method was useful in PHP 4 as a quick way to grab pieces of data in well-structured XML documents, but it had its limitations.
For web developers using PHP 5, the SimpleXML extension is a quicker, easier way to access content in data-oriented XML documents [see note below], and it's built into PHP 5 by default. This article shows you how to use SimpleXML to extract the latest headlines from an Atom XML feed and display them on your site. It also explains how you can use an extension called Cache_Lite to save the results, to greatly speed up loading times.
Here are the first five headlines from the Atom XML feed from The Register, my preferred source for technology (and assorted) news stories.