How to Implement an RSS Feed in Bubble.io Without Any Coding - Easy Tutorial

Adding an RSS Feed to Your Bubble App

Here's how you can add an RSS feed right into your Bubble app and control all of the styling and everything and it's surprisingly easy to do. But before I launch into that, if you're learning Bubble, if you're wanting to get involved in the no code community, then click the link down below because by joining Planet No Code you can access hundreds of Bubble tutorial videos and join our no code builders community.

Understanding RSS Feeds

So let's dive right into it. I'm on the BBC site, world famous for their news. Obviously, as a Brit, I'm a bit of a fan of what the BBC does. And we've got a number of these different feeds. And so if I click on one we begin to get a clue of how easy and how we can do this. Which is that RSS is an XML file and it contains all of the data. Like a bit like a JSON record or a JSON list, it basically contains item title description, published date, then we go item title description and so on.

Setting Up the API Connector in Bubble

So I'm going to copy this onto the clipboard and go back into my Bubble app and go into plugins. And go to the API connector if you've not got the API connector installed you have to go through and plugins. You can add it in from the directory. Here are all of the other API collections I've made in the past, lots of AI, calendars, weather etc. Let's add another one and I'm going to say get RSS feed.

Configuring the API Call

Okay, there's no authentication. It's public on the web, and I'm just gonna paste in that feed from the BBC. But it's not type JSON. It's type XML and so I change it to that. Leave as a get request. I shall just say BBC News and then I initialize and here we go. We get the data through and we can see that each item is an RSS channel item list and it's listed here, top one being about the general election in the UK.

Displaying RSS Data in Bubble

So I click Save and that's taught my Bubble up how to go out find the data and then what structure it's going to come back in. So to display it, it's really simple. I'm on a blank page now. I'm not gonna do any amazing design work here. In fact, I'm gonna do it as quick as possible with a fixed layout, of course. If you're serious about building an app in Bubble you get to grips with rows and columns. But this is just going to be quick.

Using Repeating Groups for RSS Content

So I'm going to add in a repeating group. And then the data source, this is a bit tricky. Basically have to find the right one from plugins so BBC news channel item. I think that's the one and then I say get data from external API. Find my get RSS feed from BBC and it's going to be each channel item. Okay, so this has to match the type of content I put up there and just the heads up. This can be tricky. It can be frustrating infuriating even. But it's a mix of what you've labeled it in the API connector. But if you label it with two longer labels, you can find it actually really hard to tell the difference. But basically you want a nice blue rather than a red mismatch going on here.

Adding Text Labels for RSS Content

So now if I just add in a text label, I can start getting data from this individual item in the RSS feed so I'll take title and add in a line space and I can say description. Okay. Now let's preview it. Okay, there we go in the preview. We're getting back items from the RSS so this can be really useful if you're building a like a dashboard app for a niche industry.

Practical Applications of RSS Feeds in Bubble Apps

You could look to see who's publishing in that industry. If you find that they've got a blog you can run it through a quick RSS discovery tool. You can just find those on Google and then you can bring that data straight into your Bubble app for your users. So there you go. That's how you can bring RSS feeds, people's blogs, news articles straight into your Bubble app.