With PHP 5.0, SimpleXML makes working with XML extremely easy. Howerver, many hosts currently don’t support PHP 5.0. I don’t offer PHP 5.0 yet because my web control panel, Plesk, dosen’t fully support it. Thus, when I was designing the Photography section of this site I needed an easy way to deal with the XML files. Personally, my object of choice are arrays. This set of functions will take an XML data file you pass it and return an array, regardless of the dimensions, depth, or content. They are a recursive set and work best with small XML files under 1MB.
Give it a whirl: foolishXML