MagpieRSS IS great – I like it a lot, and it almost does exactly what you need to aggregate RSS feeds from PHP. MagpieRSS has one achilles heel in Snoopy. MagpieRSS relies on Snoopy as the HTTP-client (browser-component) that fetches feeds from websites – be it RSS or Atom formatted – It fetches files from a webserver.
The latests Snoopy release was in 2005 (as was the latest MagpieRSS), which could indicate that the development community has abandoned the code. The problem with Snoopy is that it has low tolerance to the use of carriage-return and linefeed characters in the header of HTTP responses from webservers. For some requests that means certain files, though rich in content, appear empty if they are fetched using Snoopy.
At first I tried downloading the latest Snoopy release from Sourceforge. It seemed to do the trick for some feeds, but aparently not all. Arnold Daniels came to my rescue. He has devised a wrapper – on the “outside” it appears to be Snoopy – but on the inside PHP’s Curl library has taken the place of a lot of the original Snoopy code. Give his alternative library a spin if you are using MagpieRSS for anything the should be somewhat resistant to deviations from standards.