Shows how to get the latest posts from an external RSS feed into Refinery

blog_controller.rb

class BlogController < ApplicationController
  def index
    begin
      Timeout::timeout(5) {
        @posts = RSSParser.run('http://refinerycms.com/blog.rss')[:items][0..3] # get the first 3 posts
      }
    rescue Timeout::Error => e
      logger.warn("timeout exceeded for downloading blog RSS: #{e}")
      @posts = nil
    end
  end
end

index.html.erb

<h1>Fresh off the blog</h1>
<% @posts.each do |post| %>
  <% unless post.nil? or post[:description].blank? %>
    <% post[:description] = post[:description].gsub(/&#8217;|’/, "'").gsub(/&#8220;|&#8221;/, '"') %>
    <p>
      <strong><%= link_to post[:title], post[:link] %></strong><br/>
      <%= truncate(strip_tags(post[:description]),
            :length => RefinerySetting.find_or_set(:blog_blurb_length, 270).to_i) %>
    </p>
  <% end %>
<% end %>

rss_parser.rb

# http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/68
require 'rexml/document'
require 'net/http'

class RSSParser
  require 'rexml/document'
  def self.run(url)
    xml = REXML::Document.new Net::HTTP.get(URI.parse(url))
    data = {
      :title    => xml.root.elements['channel/title'].text,
      :home_url => xml.root.elements['channel/link'].text,
      :rss_url  => url,
      :items    => []
    }
    xml.elements.each '//item' do |item|
      new_items = {} and item.elements.each do |e| 
        new_items[e.name.gsub(/^dc:(\w)/,"\1").to_sym] = e.text
      end
      data[:items] << new_items
    end
    data
  end
end

Note there will now be a setting in your Refinery backend called "blog_blurb_length" where you can use the UI to adjust the amount each post truncates by.