Airwave for Craft CMS

Installation

Requirements

  • Craft CMS 5.3 or later
  • PHP 8.2 or later
  • The simplexml, json, libxml and mbstring extensions — all standard

There is no feed-parsing dependency to install. Airwave reads RSS, Atom and JSON Feed with PHP's own parsers, and purifies markup with the HTML Purifier that ships with Craft.

Install

composer require justinholtweb/craft-airwave
php craft plugin/install airwave

Or find Airwave in the Craft Plugin Store and install it from there.

Nothing happens until you add a feed

Installing Airwave changes nothing about your site. It adds two element types — Feeds and Channels — and neither has anything in it until you say so. No routes are claimed, no templates are overridden, and nothing is written to your sections.

Your first feed

  1. Go to Airwave → Feeds → New feed.
  2. Paste a feed URL. If you only have the site address, paste that instead and press Find the feed — Airwave reads the page and offers whatever it advertises.
  3. Give it a handle. This is what you will type in templates, so craft-news beats feed1.
  4. Save. Airwave fetches it immediately and shows you what it found.

Then put it on a page:

{{ craft.airwave.render('craft-news', { limit: 5 }) }}

See Usage for the rest — layouts, merged streams, the Feed field, and writing your own markup.

Your first channel

  1. Go to Airwave → Channels → New channel.
  2. Choose Your own content, pick a section, and set a URI like blog.rss.
  3. Save, then visit that URI. That is your feed.

Add the discovery tag to your <head> so readers and browsers can find it:

{{ craft.airwave.autoDiscovery() }}

Editions

Lite is free and is not a trial. Pro is a one-off $59 with a $29/year renewal.

LitePro
PriceFree$59, $29/year renewal
Feeds3Unlimited
Published channels1Unlimited
Output formatsRSS 2.0RSS 2.0, Atom, JSON Feed
Display, caching, scheduled refresh✅✅
Reference tags and the Feed field✅✅
Feed discovery, SSRF guard, HTML purification✅✅
Console commands✅✅
Keyword, category, author and date filters—✅
Import items as entries—✅
Full article content—✅
Merged multi-feed streams—✅
Per-feed refresh intervals—✅
Link rewriting — UTM, affiliate—✅
Object templates for published items—✅

What happens if a licence lapses

Nothing breaks and nothing is deleted. Airwave downgrades on the way out and refuses on the way in: the control panel will not let you save an Atom channel on Lite, but a channel already saved as Atom serves RSS rather than returning a 404, because that URL has been in people's subscription lists for a year. Full content serves as summaries; a merged stream serves its first feed.

Stored configuration is untouched, so renewing restores exactly what was there.

Upgrading from a feed plugin

If you have moved a site off WordPress and miss Feedzy's shortcode, Airwave's reference tag does the same job in any rich-text field, with no template changes:

{airwave:craft-news:render}

See Usage.