=== FeedWordPress === Contributors: C. Johnson Donate link: http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/donate/ Tags: syndication, aggregation, feed, atom, rss Requires at least: 4.5 Tested up to: 6.5.2 Stable tag: 2024.0511 License: GPLv2 or later License URI: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html
FeedWordPress syndicates content from feeds you choose into your WordPress weblog.
== Description ==
FeedWordPress is an Atom/RSS aggregator for WordPress. It syndicates content from feeds that you choose into your WordPress weblog, and then the content it syndicates appears as a series of special posts in your WordPress posts database. If you syndicate several feeds then you can use WordPress's posts database and templating engine as the back-end of an aggregation ("planet") website. It was developed, originally, as a utility/hobby project, because I needed a more flexible replacement for Planet for aggregator sites that I administered.
FeedWordPress is designed with flexibility, ease of use, and ease of configuration in mind. You'll need a working installation of WordPress (version 4.5 or later), and it helps to have SFTP or FTP access to your web host. The ability to create cron jobs on your web host is helpful but not required.
== Installation ==
To use FeedWordPress, you will need:
an installed and configured copy of WordPress (version 4.5 or later).
the ability to install new plugins on your site using either WordPress's Plugins Repository, SFTP, FTP or shell access to your web host
= New Installations =
Download the FeedWordPress installation package and extract the files on your computer.
Create a new directory named feedwordpress in the wp-content/plugins directory of your WordPress installation. Use an FTP or SFTP client to upload the contents of your FeedWordPress archive to the new directory that you just created on your web host.
Log in to the WordPress Dashboard and activate the FeedWordPress plugin.
Once the plugin is activated, a new Syndication section should appear in your WordPress admin menu. Click here to add new syndicated feeds, set up configuration options, and determine how FeedWordPress will check for updates. For help, see the FeedWordPress Quick Start page.
= Upgrades =
To upgrade an existing installation of FeedWordPress to the most recent release:
Download the FeedWordPress installation package and extract the files on your computer.
Upload the new PHP files to wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress, overwriting any existing FeedWordPress files that are there.
Log in to your WordPress administrative interface immediately in order to see whether there are any further tasks that you need to perform to complete the upgrade.
Enjoy your newer and hotter installation of FeedWordPress!
== Using and Customizing FeedWordPress ==
FeedWordPress has many options which can be accessed through the WordPress Dashboard, and a lot of functionality accessible programmatically through WordPress templates or plugins. For further documentation of the ins and outs, see the documentation at the FeedWordPress project homepage.
== Screenshots ==
== Changelog ==
= 2024.0511 =
= 2024.0428 =
IMPORTANT SECURITY FIX: This version includes an important fix for a security vulnerability reported to me through Wordfence and WordPress support channels.
Vulnerability CVE-2024-0839 allowed for an insecure Direct Object Reference which could allow contents of Private, Pending, or otherwise non-Published post objects to be accessed by an attacker possessing or generating the internal guid URI of the post object. This vulnerability has been eliminated in the current version; to protect your site's security PLEASE BE SURE TO UPGRADE AS SOON AS POSSIBLE to version 2024.0428 or later, via the WordPress Plugin Repository or via Github.
ADDITIONAL COMPATIBILITY FIXES AND CODE CLEANUP: This version includes numerous fixes to improve compatibility fixes for ongoing new releases of PHP, and does some additional code clean-up to remove some obsolete methods of generating output, and to do a better job of sanitizing input and escaping output in the FeedWordPress administrative dashboard. It features numerous fixes and improvements contributed by user @GwynethLlewelyn and several new hooks allowing for translation of interface elements.
= 2022.0222 =
= 2022.0204 =
= 2022.0123 =
IMPORTANT SECURITY FIX: This version includes an important fix for a security vulnerability reported to me through WPScan and WordPress support channels.
Vulnerability CVE-2021-25055 allowed for an XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) attack using a specially crafted URL for a page within the FeedWordPress admin interface. (To be exploited, an existing user with login credentials that allow them to access the FeedWordPress dashboard would have to follow the malicious URL and log in.) This vulnerability has been corrected in the current version; to protect your site's security PLEASE BE SURE TO UPGRADE AS SOON AS POSSIBLE to version 2022.0123 or later, via the WordPress Plugin Repository or via Github.
BUG FIXES: Fixes a number of small possible bugs when creating new syndicated posts under unusual conditions -- a sanity check is built in to avoid infinite loops in case of certain unexpected error outcomes when creating new users; some more possible sources of PHP 8 "Countable" warnings are eliminated, etc.
= 2021.0713 =
WORDPRESS 5.6, 5.7.x COMPATIBILITY FIXES. This release introduces fixes to annoying or worse warnings resulting from the deprecation of WordPress's built-in WP_Feed_Cache class. This should resolve the problem if you are encountering annoying, worrying, or breaking problems related to the PHP warnings: "Deprecated: class-wp-feed-cache.php is deprecated since version 5.6.0", and/or "Message: ./cache is not writable. Make sure you've set the correct relative or absolute path, and that the location is server-writable."
Fixes PHP warning for "count(): Parameter must be an array or an object that implements Countable in .../wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress/feedwordpress.php on line 1566"
Miscellaneous fixes for other missing variable and global warnings.
Code cleanup and reorganization to allow better modularization of error messages, warning dialogs, and extended text.
= 2020.0818 =
WORDPRESS 5.5 COMPATIBILITY FIXES, RESOLVES WARNING NOTICES OR WP-ADMIN LOCKOUT. WordPress 5.5 incorporated a newer release of SimplePie, version 1.5.5, which is pretty rad, but FeedWordPress classes that relied on SimplePie 1.3.1's method signatures would then produce PHP warning notices. That should be pretty innocuous, but depending on web server configurations, some users could get locked out of their own wp-admin interface by the display of error notices in the browser at inopportune times. In any case, I have added code to switch between backward-compatible modules for SimplePie 1.3.1 or updated modules compatible with SimplePie 1.5.5, based on the version available in your WordPress installation; so these notices and their untoward effects should be eliminated.
PHP 7.4 COMPATIBILITY FIX: Magic quotes were deprecated and then removed back in PHP 5.x, and in PHP 7.4 the vestigial get_magic_quotes_gpc() function has been deprecated. We don't need to worry about it anymore for versions of PHP still supported by WordPress. The reference to the function in the MyPHP utility class caused PHP warnings in more recent versions of PHP; so it has now been removed.
DIVERS BUG FIXES AND PHP WARNING NOTICES RESOLVED, thanks to @oppiansteve's fixes and pull requests. (Thanks!)
JQUERY COMPATIBILITY FIXES, RESOLVES MYSTERIOUS VANISHING FEED SELECTOR IN WP-ADMIN. An upgrade to WordPress's packaged jQuery caused the drop-down box for feed settings (in Syndication > Feeds & Updates, Syndication > Posts & Links, etc.) to vanish shortly after pageload. That was awkward, so I disabled the now-incompatible interface chrome that was causing it to vanish.
= 2020.0118 =
WORDPRESS COMPATIBILITY TESTING. It's been some time since a public release of FeedWordPress; so I have tested the plugin functionality with recent versions of WordPress and incorporated a number of PHP 7-compatibility related tweaks.
FEED PARSING FAULT TOLERANCE. If FeedWordPress fails to parse a feed using normal XML functions, it will attempt to convert any named entities that may be causing a problem, and then try to parse again. Props to @inanimatt for utility functions that help make the code go.
PAUSING UPDATES. In Syndication > Feeds & Updates, you can now instruct FeedWordPress to temporarily pause or resume updating feeds -- whatever update method you are using, you can put new updates on hold for a while so that you can fiddle with setings, run tests, or do whatever you need to do before allowing updates to resume.
CODE MODERNIZATION, PHP 7.x COMPATIBILITY AND CLEANUP AND REORGANIZATION. I have been dusting out nooks and crannies in the code and hiving more functionality off into discrete modules. A number of FeedWordPress users have also offered pull requests to eliminate bothersome PHP notices and warnings related to PHP 7.x compatibility -- in particular removing uses of deprecated each() functions, and avoiding use of count() on null values -- which I have rolled into the main branch release. Props to @manzoorwanijk, @tristanleboss, @martinburchell and @oppiansteve
= 2017.1020 =
ADD BOILERPLATE / CREDITS FEATURE AVAILABLE IN POSTS & LINKS SETTINGS PANEL. I have added a new settings panel to the off-the-shelf features of FeedWordPress, under Syndication > Posts & Links (or under the Posts settings page for any individual feed), which allows you to define boilerplate text that should appear in connection with every syndicated post, or with every post syndicated from a particular feed. So, for example, if you want each syndicated post to include a byline reading "This is a syndicated post, reprinted from (LINK TO ORIGINAL SOURCE WEBSITE).", you could set up this byline from within the FeedWordPress settings interface, by going to the Boilerplate / Credits panel, and adding a line to appear BEFORE the CONTENT of each syndicated post, using the text and shortcode "This is a syndicated post, reprinted from [source]." For those of you who have corresponded with me about this feature before, you may be familiar with it from the long-standing "experimental" add-on, FWP+: Add Attribution; I've decided that it's been enough years, and I've had enough requests, that the Add Attribution feature may as well be included in the main FeedWordPress code.
Back when FeedWordPress was first created, the assumption was that a well-behaved aggregator would include boilerplate text to indicate the source of syndicated posts, but that the best way to do this was to provide a set of syndication-specific template tags so that the administrator setting up the site could edit their Theme template files with constructs like:
<?php if (is_syndicated()) : ?>
<p class="byline">This post by <?php the_author(); ?> originally
appeared at <a href="https://github.com/radgeek/feedwordpress/blob/master/<?php the_syndication_source_link(); ?>"><?php
the_syndication_source(); ?></a>.</p>
<?php else : ?>
<p class="byline">By <?php the_author(); ?>.</p>
<?php endif; ?>You can still do this, of course, and for maximum expressive power and flexibility, it is certainly the best way to do it. Template Tags are documented here: http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/templates/ However, (1) it requires writing PHP code, which not everyone is comfortable doing; and (2) it requires altering template files within your Theme, which is not always possible, especially given the increasing role that prepackaged commercial themes have come to play in the WordPress ecosystem. So, now, you can get some basic features for adding boilerplate text and attribution credits even without touching your template files, and without having to add custom add-ons for FeedWordPress. Enjoy!
MINOR CODE MODERNIZATION, PHP 7.1 COMPATIBILITY AND BUG FIXES. This project is now 12+ years old (good lord), and there are still some places where code was written at a time when PHP was a very different language from what it is now. Props to @david-robinson-practiceweb for pointing out and sending a pull request to fix some instances where obsolete PHP reference notation (&$q on parameters and so on) created a compatibility problem for PHP 7.1. Props to an email correspondent for pointing out a place in SyndicatedPost where excerpts should be generated from post content using encoding-aware mb_substr(), instead of naively running them through substr(). I've begun making some efforts throughout to begin auditing some of the creakiest old code in the project, to update what needs updating and improve documentation throughout.
= 2017.0913 =
PARTIAL FIX FOR 2X DUPLICATE POSTS APPEARING ON DUAL HTTP/HTTPS SITES: Some users reported an issue in which their FeedWordPress sites, which are over both insecure HTTP and over HTTPS, would pick up exactly 2 copies of every post or almost every post from certain feeds, and where the guids for each of the pair of duplicate posts would look exactly alike, except for a difference in the protocol, for example:
http://www.example.com/?guid=c1cd28da39e8d7babcf6499983aca545
https://www.example.com/?guid=c1cd28da39e8d7babcf6499983aca545... where www.example.com is the server that your own copy of FeedWordPress is installed. This release of FeedWordPress normalizes post guid prefixes so as to avoid or limit the scope of this problem.
PHP 7 Compatibility: eliminate remaining sources of PHP 7 compatibility-check failures -- remove the use of depreciated mysql_error() function, and make sure all classes make use of __construct() convention for constructors.
AVOID "PHP Warning: shell_exec() has been disabled for security reasons in [...]/feedwordpress/feeds-page.php on line 197": FeedWordPress uses the PHP shell_exec() function in a very narrowly limited way for information gathering, trying to find the real path to curl or wget on your system, so that it can give as realistic as possible a recommendation for the sample crontab line displayed in Syndication > Feeds & Updates. Some web hosting environments disable shell_exec for security reasons (since it could in theory be used to do a lot more stuff than the very limited information gathering FWP uses it for); in which case, this part of the code in FeedWordPress could spit out a nasty-looking and potentially worrisome-looking error message. So, now this code is fenced with checks to make sure that shell_exec is available, before FWP attempts to make use of it.
= 2016.1213 =
WORDPRESS BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY FOR VERSIONS [4.5, 4.7]: This change fixes a fatal PHP error (on some web server configurations you'd see the message "Fatal error: require_once(): Failed opening required '[...]/wp-includes/class-wp-feed-cache.php'" on others, you might just see an HTTP 500 Internal Server Error or a blank page) when using FeedWordPress with versions of WordPress before 4.7. A change that I introduced to avoid a code module that had been deprecated in version 4.7 ended up relying on code modules that were only introduced as of version 4.7; so now, instead, FeedWordPress attempts to detect which modules the current version of the WordPress core makes available, and load the right modules depending on your WordPress version.
In theory, up to this point, FeedWordPress supported any version of WordPress from version 3.0 onward. In practice, version 3.0 was released over 6 years ago, and I can realistically commit only to testing out new releases of FeedWordPress with a few prior versions of WordPress; so I've updated the "Requires at least" field to version 4.5, the first major release issued in 2016. If you've really got to use FeedWordPress with older versions of WordPress, it will probably still work with any moderately modern release of WordPress, but I won't promise to keep it working with releases of WordPress that are more than about a year old.
= 2016.1211 =
WORDPRESS COMPATIBILITY: Tested with new versions of WordPress up to 4.7.
PHP WARNINGS UNDER WP 4.7: Eliminated cause of a PHP warning under WP 4.7 "Parameter 1 to FeedWordPressHTTPAuthenticator::set_auth_options expected to be reference" Warnings were due to a change in how http_api_curl hook is sometimes called in WP 4.7; so I changed the signature of the event handling method to avoid the notice. Props to @cogdog, @froomkin, @gwynethllewelyn et al. for flagging the issue and @garymarkfuller for suggesting a preliminary fix to the issue that was fairly similar to the solution I ended up adopting.
PHP 7 and PHP Strict Standards compatibility changes: @alexiskulash @daidais and @zoul0813 all sent pull requests through Github to fix some issues from a very old code base that has made its way from PHP 3.x through 5.x to the roll-out of PHP 7. Class methods should now fare better under modern versions of PHP and generate fewer "Deprecated" notices.
IMPROVEMENTS TO SCHEDULED AND AUTOMATIC UPDATES: use wp_loaded hook to check for magic URL parameters and to execute updates, to do pageload-based automatic updates, etc. Ensures that anything plugins or themes need to do in init to set up custom post types, taxonomies, etc. will be done before the update_feedwordpress updates are attempted. If you saw posts not getting put into the correct custom post type or custom taxonomies or similar problems when performing scheduled updates, but the problem seemed to go away when you manually performed updates through the wp-admin interface, then you might be able to solve those problems with this update.
= 2016.0420 =
WORDPRESS COMPATIBILITY: Tested with new versions of WordPress up to 4.5.
FILTERS AND ADD-ONS: Allow filters and add-ons to filter terms and taxonomy (categories, tags, custom taxonomies, etc.) more thoroughly and more fine-grainedly using syndicated_post_terms_match, syndicated_post_termsmatch{taxonomy}, syndicated_post_terms_unfamiliar, syndicated_post_terms_mapping, syndicated_item_feed_terms, and syndicated_item_preset_terms filters.
FILTERS AND ADD-ONS: Globals $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta REMOVED. These global variables, originally introduced to allow filters access to information about the source feed in syndicated_item filters were deprecated 6+ years ago. If you have any filters or add-ons which still depend on these global variables, you've been using obsolete techniques and you should see about fixing them to access data about the source feed using the SyndicatedPost::link element instead. For documentation, see the FeedWordPress documentation wiki at http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedpost and http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedlink.
BUGFIX: Syndication > Diagnostics HTTP diagnostic test widget was broken due to a dumb error on my part. Now fixed.
SMALL CODING CHANGES: Lots of small changes to code organization, incorporation of some PHP 5.x coding conventions, etc.
= 2015.0514 =
IMPORTANT SECURITY UPDATE: This version includes two important fixes for potential security vulnerabilities reported to me through support channels.
The first is a common problem across several plugins due to an ambiguity in the WordPress documentation and a change in the behavior of WordPress's built-in add_query_arg() and remove_query_arg() functions which could, under certain low-probability conditions, allow for potential XSS attack vectors. This fixes issue # 39 reported at https://github.com/radgeek/feedwordpress/issues/39 Thanks to github.com/quassy
The second fixes a security vulnerability that was reported to me privately (thanks to Adrián M. F.) which, under other low-probability conditions, could allow for SQL insertion attacks by a malicious user with access to login credentials, which would compromise data security.
It is IMPORTANT and worth your while to upgrade FeedWordPress as soon as possible in order to eliminate these vulnerabilities. If you have any questions or if there is something blocking you from making the upgrade which you need my help with, don't hesitate to get in touch.
ADMIN UI BUGFIX: "Update Now" button in feeds setting pages should now work once again instead of causing a PHP fatal error. See https://github.com/radgeek/feedwordpress/issues/46
SEVERAL OTHER SMALL BUG FIXES. See https://github.com/radgeek/feedwordpress/issues/32 https://github.com/radgeek/feedwordpress/issues/30 https://github.com/radgeek/feedwordpress/issues/29 etc.
= 2014.0805 =
FILTERS AND ADD-ONS: A number of new hooks for filters and add-ons to further customize the behavior of FWP have been added.
COMPATIBILITY/BUGFIX: Many users saw odd characters, especially "n," appearing in posts in versions of WordPress from 3.6 on, due to a change in when the API expects HTML data for posts to be slashed and when it does not. This has been fixed, so that the junk characters should no longer appear, regardless of your version of WordPress.
BUGFIX: A bug preventing FWP from saving categories assigned under Syndication > Categories & Tags has been fixed.
BUGFIX: Post-editing related metaboxes should now show up when you edit items of any post type, including custom types, not only normal WordPress posts.
BUGFIX: A bug in the admin UI that caused the "Alternative Feeds" / "Find Feeds" box to throw a permissions error has been fixed.
BUGFIX: A bug preventing proper mapping of categories and other terms in 2013.0504 has been fixed.
BUGFIX: A number of small fixes contributed through Github by Flynsarmy should eliminate PHP warnings for many users on several methods that are called as static methods within FeedWordPress.
= 2013.0504 =
BUGFIX: PHP 5.4 compatibility -- includes some more extensive fixes to compatibility issues with PHP 5.4's handling of global variables
DIAGNOSTICS: New diagnostics settings added to help track behavior of terms (categories, post tags, etc.) for syndicated posts.
= 2012.0504 =
= 2012.0503 =
BUGFIX: Works properly again with WordPress installations that use a MySQL table name prefix other than the default wp_ prefix.
BUGFIX: Includes a couple of significant PHP 5.4 compatibility fixes. Now that PHP 5.4 is more widely deployed, Diagnostics will now also show PHP version and some other potentially useful troubleshooting information.
ADMIN UI: Better indicates your options when deleting a syndicated post so as to let you know whether it will be Trashed (and thus not resyndicated) or Erased (and thus potentially resyndicated)
ADMIN UI: Adds an AJAXy Test Expression button to allow live testing of sample results from expressions in Custom Post Settings.
= 2012.1218 =
WORDPRESS VISUAL EDITOR FIXED. There was an unlisted change in the 2012.1212 release which had the effect of disabling the WordPress Visual Editor for all posts syndicated by FeedWordPress. Many users reported this as a bug. It was actually a deliberate decision -- a crappy way to try to deal with a crappy situation. (Many users had previously reported a "bug" in which all the paragraph or line breaks seemed to be stripped out of their syndicated posts; the issue turned out to be that the Visual Editor was stripping out <p> and <br/> tags on the assumption that the resulting post would be sent through standard WordPress formatting filters. But under default settings, posts syndicated by FWP deliberately bypass WordPress formatting filters.) In any case, this version adopts a more flexible compromise. If FeedWordPress is set up to bypass WordPress formatting filters (as it is by default), then the Visual Editor will be disabled for syndicated posts (since using it would produce incorrect results). If on the other hand FeedWordPress is set up to expose syndicated posts to WordPress formatting filters (as it usually is for those using the Visual Editor to manually edit posts), then the Visual Editor tab will be re-enabled for syndicated posts.
BUG FIX: PERMALINKS REWRITTEN FOR CUSTOM POST TYPES AS WELL AS NORMAL WORDPRESS POSTS. If you had WordPress set up to syndicate incoming posts to a custom post type (under Syndication > Posts & Links), and asked FeedWordPress to make "permalinks point to the original site", then previous versions of FeedWordPress would fail to do the rewriting -- permalinks would only be rewritten to point to the original source for normal WordPress posts, not for custom post types. In 2012.1218 this bug has been fixed: all post types will now have permalinks rewritten unless you request for permalinks to point to the local copy on your aggregator site.
BUG FIX: ELIMINATES "PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function setting() on a non-object...." Some changes to the in-memory caching of information about feed subscriptions could result in a fatal PHP error in cases where you have de-activated one of your subscriptions, but posts from that subscription were still in the archive. This would normally show up through half-completed feeds or half-completed pages that suddenly broke off in the middle, and displayed or logged an error message like: "PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function setting() on a non-object in {...}/wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress/feedwordpress.php on line 615". This bug has been eliminated, so affected feeds and pages should now render correctly, and the error message should no longer appear.
BUG FIX: CATEGORY BOXES IN SYNDICATION > CATEGORIES & TAGS. Some minor bugs in the appearance and animation of category checkboxes (for example, the checkbox used to select categories for syndicated posts on the Syndication > Categories & Tags settings page) have been fixed.
= 2012.1212 =
WORDPRESS 3.5 COMPATIBILITY: This release has been tested for compatibility with new releases of WordPress, up to version 3.5, and any documented compatibility issues have been cleared -- in particular, if you were seeing error pages stating that you don't have permission to access the FeedWordPress Syndication page within the WordPress admin interface, then upgrading to this release should fix the problem.
As always, if you encounter any compatibility problems after upgrading your version of WordPress and your version of FeedWordPress to the most recent versions, please contact me with as detailed a description as possible of the issue you are encountering, the circumstances you're encountering it under, what you expect to see happening, and what is happening instead.
PHP 5.4 COMPATIBILITY: This release has been audited to fix potential problems with deprecation notices or fatal errors under recent versions of PHP. In particular, all uses of run-time pass-by-reference have been eliminated from the code; if you were seeing a fatal error reading "Call-time pass-by-reference has been removed ..." then upgrading to this release should fix the problem.
CUSTOMIZATION FRAMEWORK: A great deal of work has been done to make the underlying framework more flexible, so that PHP add-ons can be written to adapt FeedWordPress to handle custom XML vocabularies, expiration of posts under specified conditions, and other custom behavior.
BUGFIX: MANUALLY EDITED POST SLUGS NOT OVERWRITTEN. Thanks to a report by Chris Fritz, I've identified some code that causes post slugs for the posts generated by FWP to be rewritten with every update, even if the user has manually updated the slug from within the WordPress editing interface. This has been fixed: FWP will continue to generate new slugs for syndicated posts, but when syndicated posts are updated, they will retain the slug that they had at the time of the update; any manual changes to the post slug should be preserved.
USER-AGENT STRING: FeedWordPress now sends a distinctive User-Agent string identifying itself, and noting that it is a feed aggregator.
MISCELLANEOUS PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS: A number of changes have been made to try to reduce the intensity and expense in terms of both database performance and web server memory consumption.
DIAGNOSTICS IMPROVEMENTS: A number of new and improved diagnostics have been added which should aid in understanding and troubleshooting issues that may arise.
= 2011.1019 =
BUGFIX: "THERE ARE NO HTTP TRANSPORTS AVAILABLE" ERROR FIXED: The initial support for HTTP Basic and Digest authentication in version 2011.1018 contained a bug that could cause HTTP requests for feeds or for other WordPress resources to break down if you do not have the PHP curl module installed. This bug has been fixed, and these errors should no longer appear.
IMPROVED HTTP AUTHENTICATION SUPPORT: In addition, the HTTP Authentication support in FeedWordPress has been extended, to ensure that Basic authentication is available in many web host configurations, and to allow you to add a username and password for a feed immediately when you subscribe to it.
= 2011.1018 =
HTTP BASIC AND DIGEST AUTHENTICATION SUPPORT: FeedWordPress now offers improved support for syndicating feeds that make use of HTTP Basic or HTTP Digest authentication methods. In order to set up authentication on one of your feeds, just go to its Settings > Feed page, and click on the "Uses Username/Password" link underneath the Feed URL. Enter the username and password for accessing the feed, then select the authentication method. (If you're not sure which method your feed provider uses, try Basic first.) Save Changes, and syndicate away.
NOTE: HTTP Digest support requires the curl module for PHP. If you are not sure whether this module has been installed, contact your web hosting provider to check.
WP 3.3 (BETA) COMPATIBILITY: This version fixes an init-sequence bug that could cause intrusive warning messages or fatal errors in WP 3.3 beta versions.
BUGFIX: FIXES LONG DELAYS IN UPDATES SCHEDULES IN LARGE INSTALLATIONS. A performance feature introduced in version 2011.0721 had some flaws in its implementation, which tended to create serious delays (on the order of several hours) in FeedWordPress's attempts to schedule updates for feeds, when users had a very large number of feeds (several dozen or more) in their FeedWordPress installation. This feature has been reconfigured to adjust dynamically to the number of feeds in Syndicated Sources and the frequency with which they are updated. If you've seen a lot of ready-to-update feeds piling up, several hours after they were supposed to get updated, then this upgrade should better ensure that your feeds get updated in a timely fashion.
BUGFIX: syndicated_item_guid FILTERS FIXED. Previous versions of FeedWordPress theoretically allowed for filters on the syndicated_item_guid hook, which was intended to filter the globally-unique identifier element (rss:guid or atom:id) -- useful if you need to convince FeedWordPress to use different guids, or to recognize two or more incoming posts as versions of the same post rather than as distinct items. However, while the hook affected the guid stored in the WordPress database, it did not affect the guid used to check whether an incoming feed item had already been syndicated or was a new item -- which greatly limited the practical usefulness of the filter. This bug has been fixed: syndicated_item_guid filters should now properly control not only the final database record, but also the initial uniqueness test applied to posts.
= 2011.0721 =
BUGFIX: SERIOUS BUG CAUSING RARE UNEXPECTED DELETION OF PAGES AND OTHER CONTENT. A bug in the guid-checking code for some rare kinds of guids could cause content in the wp_posts table to seemingly disappear at random after FeedWordPress updates.This most frequently but not exclusively affected static pages. What actually happened is that in these rare cases the existing static page was mistaken for an older version of the new incoming syndicated post, which was then stored as a new revision of the original page. The bug that caused these mistaken identities has been fixed.
BUGFIX: UNWANTED AUTOMATIC PAGE-LOAD-BASED UPDATES NO LONGER A NUISANCE. Some users encountered a bug in which FeedWordPress would adopt an automatic page-load-based update method, even if they had requested that it not do so, and that it use a manual or cron job update method instead. The bug causing this has been fixed, and page-load-based updates should no longer trigger unless explicitly turned on.
WP 3.2 USER INTERFACE COMPATIBILITY: POST TAGS BOX NOW WORKS AGAIN. The release of WordPress 3.2 caused a breakage in the tags box which prevented you from adding or removing tags under Syndication --> Categories & Tags. (The breakage was the result of an incompatibility introduced by the new release of jQuery.) This breakage has now been fixed, and the tags box should work correctly again.
FEED UPDATE SCHEDULING IMPROVEMENTS: UI. The Syndicated Sources table now provides considerably more data to understand update scheduling, when specific scheduling decisions are made because of, e.g., requests from the feed producer.
FEED UPDATE SCHEDULING IMPROVEMENTS: ENFORCEABLE "MINIMUM INTERVAL" SETTING TO SPACE OUT UPDATES. Some feeds request specific update schedules, using standard elements such as sy:updateFrequency and rss:ttl. Normally, FeedWordPress respects any scheduling requests that a feed makes -- if it requests a longer gap between polls than what FWP would normally adopt, then FWP slows down to meet the request. If it indicates a shorter gap than what FWP would normally adopt, FWP speeds up and checks that feed for updates more often than it normally would. Now, there should not be any way for user settings to override an explicit slow-down request from the feed producer -- if producers indicate a particular update schedule, then polling the feed more frequently than they request is considered abusive behavior. But there's no reason why users should not be able -- if they so desire -- to override speed-up requests, and poll a feed less frequently than the indicated update schedule, if the FWP user wants to space update checkins over a longer interval of time. Before, they could not do this: FWP always sped up to meet the indicated update schedule. Now, they can do this, by using the new "Minimum Interval" setting in Syndication --> Feeds & Updates..
= 2011.0706 =
WP 3.2 COMPATIBILITY: ELIMINATES FATAL ERROR "Call to undefined method WP_SimplePie_File::WP_SimplePie_File() in [...]/wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress/feedwordpress.php on line 1841." The latest release of WordPress, version 3.2, has shifted the minimum requirements up to PHP 5.2, and in line with the shift to PHP5 they have rewritten a number of code segments that made use of now-obsolete PHP4 idioms. Unfortunately, this caused a fatal error whenever FeedWordPress attempted to make use of the cache, since FWP's caching plugin was written to match the older idiom. FeedWordPress has been updated to follow the new, PHP5 idiom when possible, thus eliminating the fatal error.
PERFORMANCE: The handling of queries to determine whether posts had been previously syndicated produced some very slow queries (usually, but not always, involving a scan over the MD5(post_guid) column of the table). The code that prepares MySQL queries for previously-syndicated checks has been revised to eliminate the MD5(post_guid) scan entirely, and to significantly improve performance by eliminating other unnecessary clauses.
BUGFIX: NO LONGER DESTROYS STICKY POSTS. Previous versions could destroy (or, more precisely, replace the content of) sticky posts due to some queries mashed together in unexpected ways by WordPress. Version 2011.0706 accounts for and eliminates the problem; your sticky posts should be safe once again.
BUGFIX: GUIDS CONTAINING MYSQL-ESCAPED CHARACTERS NO LONGER CAUSE DUPLICATE POSTS TO APPEAR. One remaining source of duplicate post issues in 2011.0602 was guids that contained characters that needed to be escaped for MySQL, such as single quotes and double quotes. The work-around for handling filtered URIs has now been corrected to ensure that these do not cause duplicate posts.
= 2011.0602 =
WP 3.1.3 COMPAT / BUGFIX: WHITESPACE IN GUIDS NO LONGER PRODUCES DUPLICATE POSTS. The work-around for handling filtered URIs in guid elements has now been extended to handle URIs that were filtered because of leading or trailing whitespace, in addition to URIs that were filtered because of unapproved schemes.
WP 3.1.3 COMPAT / BUGFIX: RELATIVE URLS IN GUIDS NO LONGER PRODUCE DUPLICATE POSTS. The work-around for handling filtered URIs in guid elements has now been extended to handle URIs that were altered without being filtered out entirely (most commonly because a scheme was added to a relative URL).
BUGFIX: UPDATES TO POST NO LONGER CAUSE DUPLICATE DRAFT VERSION TO APPEAR. Under certain conditions in 2011.0531, an update to an existing post would not be properly applied to the post itself, but rather would appear as a duplicate post with Draft status. This bug has been eliminated, and updates will now be properly inserted as revisions to the existing post.
= 2011.0531 =
WORDPRESS 3.1.3 COMPATIBILITY: DUPLICATE POSTS ISSUE FIXED. Due to internal changes in the way that WordPress handles post guids in the most recent release (3.1.3), many users experienced problems with many duplicate posts appearing in rapid succession. (Specifically, this would happen with any posts using tag: URL guids -- such as all the posts coming from Blogger feeds or feeds from other Google services.) This compatibility release of FeedWordPress eliminates the issue by working around the new restrictions on tag: URLs.
NEW AND IMPROVED DIAGNOSTICS: Syndication --> Diagnostics now contains some new diagnostics settings useful for debugging problems with duplicate posts (allowing you to easily view the guid of posts in the WordPress posts database and allowing you to track the SQL used to check for existing versions of a syndicated post).
= 2011.0512 =
DIAGNOSTICS IMPROVEMENTS; "THERE MAY BE A BUG IN FEEDWORDPRESS" CRITICAL ERROR NOTICES ELIMINATED: This version includes some major improvements to the Syndication --> Diagnostics section, which should aid in troubleshooting difficulties with items failing to be imported, posts failing to be properly inserted into the database, or updates failing to be recorded. If you have been encountering critical error / bug notices with a white screen and the message "THERE MAY BE A BUG IN FEEDWORDPRESS," followed by an extraordinarily long dump of mostly incomprehensible diagnostic information, you'll be happy to know that the condition causing these notices has been eliminated. In the few cases where errors may still crop up with database insertions, FeedWordPress will now produce a significantly more manageable and more useful diagnostic message.
BUGFIX: NEW POSTS FAILING TO APPEAR IN A CLEANLY-INSTALLED FEEDWORDPRESS SYSTEM. If you encountered a recurring problem with FeedWordPress failing to import new posts, after a clean install of FeedWordPress (i.e., not an upgrade from a previous version), this problem may have been the result of a bug with author-handling which has now been fixed in the 2011.0512 release. (If the problem does not go away with the upgrade, this version also includes significant improvements to the Diagnostics system, which will help track down what is causing it in your particular case.)
PERFORMANCE: New handling of update hashes allows FeedWordPress to avoid a certain kind of infinite loop, caused when two more more different syndicated feeds each carried a version of the same item (for example, because it appeared on two different aggregator feeds that you're syndicating). In previous versions, when this kind of loop cropped up, syndicated posts could pile up an indefinitely large number of revisions -- each revision alternating between the version from each of the two feeds where it appeared -- which would, over time, dramatically inflate the size of the database, and kill the performance of queries on the post table. This issue has been resolved: revisions of the post that have been syndicated once will not be re-syndicated over and over again.
AUTHOR LISTS: Lists of authors presented on the Author settings pages should now be easier to scan through, with author names arranged in alphabetical order.
FEED ITEM DATE PARSING: More tweaks to make date-time handling more resilient when feeds provide broken or weird values for the timestamps on syndicated items. FWP will now attempt to work around unparseable timezone values.
AUTHOR MATCHING: Now attempts to match author names against the WP login name in addition to display_name; when creating user record, also fills in some best-guess values for nickname, firstname and lastname. Also properly picks up Atom 1.0 author/uri data from feed.
COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress has been successfully tested for compatibility with recent releases of WordPress, up to version 3.1.2.
= 2011.0211 =
BUGFIX: DUPLICATE POSTS WHEN GUIDS ARE TOO LONG: When feeds included exceptionally long GUIDs, FeedWordPress could occasionally get into a situation where posts with the long GUIDs would be duplicated over and over again with each update (because FWP failed to store the full GUID, due to length constraints in the relevant database tables). Without the full GUID, FWP would not know that the post had already been syndicated once. This bug has been fixed, and should no longer produce duplicate posts.
HTTP TIMEOUT SETTING: If you are frequently running into timeout problems with one or more of the feeds you syndicate, FWP now allows you to adjust the timeout for HTTP requests using a global or feed-by-feed setting.
HTTP GET PARAMETERS: You can now temporarily or permanently add HTTP GET parameters to a subscription using an interface in Syndication --> Feeds & Updates. This is especially helpful for making quick, short-term changes to a subscription (for example, to pull in all the previous items from a web service, before settling down to pulling in only newly updated items).
DIAGNOSTICS SYSTEM: Added several new diagnostics which are useful in troubleshooting, and established a framework for add-on modules to hook in with their own diagnostic messages.
UI: Adjusted some internal coding, which should allow for settings pages and add-ons to properly display multiple category pickers on a single settings page.
PHP4 COMPATIBILITY TWEAKS: This version makes some tweaks to the handling of object references which should improve compatibility with older versions of PHP. (Although, I should note, web hosts that still force you to run under PHP 4 -- in 2011! -- are bad web hosts.)
IMPROVED PERFORMANCE: This version eliminates a major performance drag that shows up on sites with large numbers of users (due to some poor decisions about where to place a user query, which caused the user table to be scanned frequently when it did not need to be). If you experienced serious problems with CPU load or slow database performance under 2010.0905, which kicked in immediately when FWP was loaded and tended to disappear immediately if FWP was de-activated, it is likely that upgrading away from 2010.0905 to the most recent version will resolve your problem.
= 2010.0905 =
= 2010.0903 =
WORDPRESS 3 REQUIRED: Please note that this release of FeedWordPress requires WordPress 3.0 or later. If you are currently using a 2.x branch of WordPress, you will need to upgrade to WordPress 3 before you can successfully upgrade FeedWordPress.
BUGFIX: NO MORE DISAPPEARING "SYNDICATED SOURCES" PANEL; INTERNET EXPLORER UI GLITCH APPARENTLY FIXED: Several users independently reported a problem with FWP 2010.0623 and various versions of IE. A problem with the HTML markup caused IE (but not Firefox or Chrome) to completely hide the Syndicated Sources administration panel (the main list of currently-syndicated sources, and the main location for adding new sources, under the Syndication menu item) when a user added their first syndicated feed. Maddeningly, the glitch seemed to affect some IE users and not others: I was never able to reproduce the problem for myself on my own machines. However, the markup of Syndicated Sources has undergone significant changes and corrections since 2010.0623, and two independent sources who had been having this problem confirm that they no longer encounter it with the updated version. For the time being, I am going to declare this bug squashed.
BUGFIX: MORE PROTECTION AGAINST FATAL ERRORS FROM PLUGGABLE VERSIONS OF SimplePie: FeedWordPress now takes some precautions that should help to better avoid conflicts for users who have installed pluggable versions of SimplePie for another plugin or theme. (You may not know that you have done this; but if you've been encountering fatal errors indicating that you cannot redeclare class SimplePie, or something along those lines, there is now a better chance that those fatal errors will be eliminated.
PERFORMANCE: SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCED MEMORY CONSUMPTION FOR LARGE UPDATES: FeedWordPress is still a memory-hungry little module, especially when you are dealing with very large feeds. However, users should notice a significant reduction in memory overloads, especially if they update a large number of feeds at once.
USER INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: Nothing is radically different, but there's been a fair amount of extra spit and polish added, including a convenient new Dashboard widget that may save you a trip to the Syndication menu, a lot of effort to make the relationship between global and feed-by-feed settings more obvious to the user and more easily controllable, to make navigation between settings pages easier, to sand off a few rough edges, and to make other improvements on the margins. I hope you'll like how it looks.
ADDING MULTIPLE FEEDS: FeedWordPress now provides a convenient mode for adding multiple feeds at once, using either a copy-and-pasted list, or else an OPML file. Go to Syndication --> Syndicated Sources and check out the two new buttons underneath the New Source input box. When you have to add a number of feeds at once, this can save you considerable time and trouble.
IMPROVED HANDLING OF AUTHORS WITH DUPLICATE E-MAIL ADDRESS AND AUTHORS WITH NAMES WRITTEN IN FOREIGN SCRIPTS: WordPress 3 is increasingly picky about what it will accept for new author accounts, and some of the conditions it imposes can cause error conditions that prevent posts from being properly syndicated, or properly attributed, if authors happen to have identical e-mail addresses, or if users are given usernames that are written in non-Western scripts. FeedWordPress now handles these much better, and systematically works to avoid clashes between syndicated authors' account names or in their e-mail addresses, which should result in significantly better results in mapping author names to WordPress user accounts.
MAPPING CATEGORIES ON SYNDICATED POSTS TO TAGS NOW BETTER SUPPORTED: In previous versions, the only way for the Categories provided by a syndicated feed to be mapped into Post Tags was to instruct FWP to create new tags, rather than new categories, for unfamiliar categories from the feed. This works fine if you want tags to be the default; but if you want only a specific set of tags, there was no way to get them without getting most or all other categories imported as tags. You can now do this by creating a tag (under Posts ==> Post Tags) before importing the post; when the syndicated category matches a pre-existing tag, the incoming post will be tagged with that tag, without creating a local Post Category.
REL-TAG MICROFORMAT SUPPORT FOR INLINE TAGS: Syndicated posts that contain inline tags, marked up using the Rel-Tag microformat http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag, are now tagged with the tags provided by Rel-Tag format links.
MUCH GREATER CONTROL OVER CATEGORY AND TAG MAPPING: This is partly the result of building in support for a potentially endless set of custom taxonomies (see below), but in general there has been a great deal of effort towards giving you more control over how categories and tags provided by the feed are mapped into terms on the local blog. In particular, you can now force FeedWordPress to create only categories from categories and tags provided by the feed; or to create only tags; or to search both categories and tags for a match; or you can simply force it to drop all of the categories provided by the feed and use only categories or tags that you explicitly provide. In addition, you can now also choose whether to override global categories settings with a local, feed-specific setting; or whether to add together both the global categories and the local feed-specific categories -- depending on whatever your use-case may demand.
CUSTOM POST TYPES AND TAXONOMY SUPPORTS: This is mainly for the super-geeky, but if you use other plugins or themes that make significant use of WordPress's support for custom post types and custom taxonomies, you may be pleased to find that FeedWordPress now allows you to feed incoming posts into any custom feed type that you wish, and to map categories and tags from the feed to custom taxonomies as well as to the standard Category and Tag taxonomies.
STORING NAMESPACED CUSTOM FEED ELEMENTS IN POST CUSTOM FIELDS: If you
would like to use FeedWordPress's support for storing custom meta-data
from feed elements in the custom fields for a post (for example, to
store geolocation data or iTunes media meta-data), you'll find that it's
now much easier for you to access these namespaced elements. You always
could access them, but in previous versions you might have to write
something ugly like $(/{http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#}lat)
just to get at the value of a <geo:lat> tag. Now, as long as you use
the same mnemonic codes that the feed producer used, you should always
be able to write a nice, simple expression like $(/geo:lat) to get the
value of a
CUSTOM DIRECTORY STRUCTURE SUPPORT: if you poke at it enough, WordPress is relatively flexible about where it should store admin interface code, uploaded content, plugins, and a number of other things that occupy an important place in the WordPress directory structure. Previous versions of FeedWordPress encountered serious errors or broke entirely when used with directory structures other than the default. This should now be fixed: FWP now supports custom directory structures wherever WordPress allows them to be customized, rather than depending on the default locations. Enjoy your freedom!
MANY NEW FILTERS AND API UTILITY FUNCTIONS FOR ADD-ON PROGRAMMERS: There have been too many improvements to list them all in this ChangeLog, but it means that much more power and ease for folks who are customizing FeedWordPress through PHP filters or add-on modules. Fuller documentation will be put up at the Wiki at feedwordpress.radgeek.org soon.
= 2010.0623 =
WORDPRESS 3.0 COMPATIBILITY / AUTHOR MAPPING INTERFACE ISSUES: I resolved a couple of outstanding issues with the author mapping interface (Syndication --> Authors), which were preventing new users from being created correctly and author mapping rules from being set up correctly. These partly had to do with new restrictions on user account creation introduced in WordPress 3.0; anyway, they should now be fixed.
MORE EFFICIENT SYNDICATED URL LOOKUPS: Several users noticed that the bug fix introduced in 2010.0528 for compatibility with post-listing plugins caused a lot more queries to the database in order to look up numerical post IDs from the URL provided to the filter. This shouldn't cause any major problems, but it is not as efficient as it could be; the code now takes advantage of a more efficient way of doing things, which usually will not require any additional database queries.
SIMPLEPIE FEED UPDATE ISSUES: If you have been having significant problems with getting feeds to update correctly, this may be the result of some bugs in the implementation of SimplePie caching that ships with WordPress (as of version 3.0). (You would most commonly experience this error if you continually saw errors such as "No feed found at <...>" in your updates.) Fortunately, SimplePie allows for a great deal of extensibility and this allows me to work around the problem; these error conditions should now be mostly eliminated when the underlying feed is valid.
UI: SHOW INACTIVE SOURCES: When you use the default unsubscribe option -- which turns off the subscription to a feed while preserving the posts from it and the syndication-related meta-data for the feed -- the unsubscribed feed can now easily be viewed in a special "Inactive" section of the Syndicated Sources page. (As a side benefit, if you've accidentally, or only temporarily, turned off the subscription to a feed, it is now much easier to restore the feed to being active, or to delete it permanently, if you prefer.
UI: FEED FINDER / SWITCH FEED INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: changes to styling and options for the feed finder / switch feed, which should now make it easier, in some cases, to find alternative feeds, and make interface options more clearly visible.
FILTERS: syndicated_item_published and syndicated_item_updated NOW
PROPERLY AFFECT THE DATING OF POSTS. These filters used to affect some
date-related settings, but not others -- and, most importantly, not the
final date that is set for a post's publication or last-modified date
in the WordPress database. Now, they do affect that, as they should.
(Filters should receive, and return, a long integer, representing a Unix
epoch relative timestamp.)
MAGIC URL TO CLEAR THE CACHE: Suppose that you need to clear the feed cache, for whatever reason; suppose, even, that you need to clear it on a regular basis. One way you might do this is by logging into the FeedWordPress administrative interface and going to Syndication --> Performance. Another way you might do it, now, is to simply send an HTTP request to a magic URL provided by FeedWordPress: if your blog is at example.com, the URL would be http://example.com/?clear_cache=1
= 2010.0602 =
CATEGORY BOX INTERFACE ELEMENT FIXED FOR WP 3.0: Stylesheet changes between WordPress 2.9.x and the WordPress 3.0 RC caused the Categories box under Syndication --> Categories & Tags to malfunction. This has been fixed.
LINK CATEGORY SELECTION BOX IN SYNDICATION ==> FEEDS FIXED FOR WP 2.8 AND 2.9: A WP 3.0 compatibility change introduced in 2010.0531 inadvertently broke the Syndicated Link Category selector under Syndication --> Feeds & Updates in WP 2.8 and WP 2.9, causing the post categories to be displayed in the selector rather than the link categories. This should now be fixed so that the selector will work correctly under both the current versions of WordPress and the 3.0 RC.
MORE PERMISSIVE HANDLING OF FEEDS WITH BAD CONTENT-TYPE HEADERS: One of the small advantages that MagpieRSS had over SimplePie is that it was more tolerant about parsing well-formed feeds that the remote web server happened to deliver with weird or incorrect HTTP Content-type headers. In feeds affected by this problem, the new SimplePie parser would simply fail to find a feed, due to its being led astray by the contents of the Content-type header. This version includes an extension to SimplePie's content-type sniffer that offers more permissive handling of the HTTP headers.
MORE FULL-TEXT "EXCERPTS" NOW PROPERLY SHORTENED. Version 2010.0528 introduced code to control for cases in which elements intended for item summaries are (ill-advisedly) used to carry the full text of posts; past versions of FeedWordPress would simply include the full text of the post in the excerpt field, but newer versions now attempt to detect this condition when it arises and to head it off, by blanking out the excerpt field and filling it with an automatically generated short, plain text excerpt from the full content. This release broadens the test conditions that indicate when an excerpt field is treated as identical to the full text of the post, and should therefore improve the handling of some feeds (such as Google Reader feeds) where the full text of each post was still appearing in the excerpt field.
FILTERS: syndicated_item_published AND syndicated_item_updated
FILTERS NOW ALLOW FILTER AUTHORS TO CHANGE POST TIMESTAMPS. You can now
use the syndicated_item_published and syndicated_item_updated filter
hooks to write filters or add-ons which directly change the post date
and most-recently-updated timestamps on incoming syndicated posts. Props
to niska for pointing out where the filters needed to be applied in
order to change WordPress's internal timestamps for incoming posts.
= 2010.0531 =
PERMALINK / CUSTOM FIELDS PROBLEM RESOLVED: An issue in 2010.0528 caused some posts to be imported without the proper syndication-related meta-data being attached (thus causing permalinks to point back to the aggregator website rather than to the source website, among other problems). This problem has been resolved (and a fix has been applied which will resolve the problem for any posts affected by this problem, if the original post is recent enough to still be available on the feed).
UI: The "Back End" section has been split into two separate sections -- "Performance" (dealing with caching, database index, and other performance tweaks), and "Diagnostics" (dealing with debug mode, update logging, and a number of new diagnostic tests which I will be rolling out over the next few releases).
Several minor interface bug fixes and PHP warning notices eliminated.
= 2010.0528 =
SIMPLEPIE IS NOW USED TO PARSE FEEDS; NO MORE MAGPIERSS UPGRADES NEEDED: One of the biggest changes in this release is that FeedWordPress no longer depends on MagpieRSS to parse feeds, and has switched to the much more up-to-date and flexible SimplePie feed parser, which is included as a standard part of WordPress versions 2.8 and later. Using SimplePie will hopefully allow for better handling of feeds going further, and will allow me greater flexibility in determining how exactly the feed parser will operate. It also means that FeedWordPress no longer requires special upgrades to the WordPress core MagpieRSS files, and should eliminate quite a bit of complexity.
MAGPIERSS COMPATIBILITY LAYER FOR EXISTING FILTERS AND ADD-ONS: However, I have also implemented a compatibility layer to ensure that existing filters and add-ons for FeedWordPress which depended on the MagpieRSS data format should not be broken by the switch to SimplePie. Going forward, I recommend that new filters and add-ons be written to take advantage of the SimplePie object representations of items, feeds, etc., rather than the MagpieRSS arrays, but the MagpieRSS arrays will still be available and older filters should continue to work as they have in the past.
COMPATIBILITY WITH WORDPRESS 2.9.x and 3.0: This release has been tested for the existing WordPress 2.9.x branch and with the upcoming release of WordPress 3.0. Changes in the user interface JavaScript between WordPress 2.8.x and WordPress 2.9 caused the tag box interface element to break in the Syndication --> Categories & Tags settings page; changes in the API functions for adding new authors caused fatal errors under certain conditions in WordPress 3.0. These breakages have been fixed.
DROPPED LEGACY SUPPORT FOR WORDPRESS PRIOR TO 2.8: Because SimplePie is not included with versions of WordPress prior to 2.8, I have chosen to drop legacy support for WordPress versions 1.5 through 2.7. If you are using FeedWordPress with a version of WordPress before 2.8, you will have to upgrade your installation of WordPress in order to take advantage of this release.
PHP 5.3 COMPATIBILITY: A couple of compatibility issues, which were causing fatal errors amd ugly warnings for users of PHP 5.3, have been eliminated.
INTERFACE REORGANIZATION: The interface restructuring, began with Version 2009.0612, has been completed. Catch-all settings pages have been eliminated entirely for pages that cover each aspect of handling a feed: Feeds & Updates, Posts & Links, Authors, Categories & Tags, and Back End handling of the database and diagnostic information. Extensive new interface hooks allow add-on modules to significantly change or extend the FeedWordPress admin interface and workflow.
STORING INFORMATION FROM THE FEED IN CUSTOM FIELDS: Many users
have written to request the ability to store information from elements
in the feed in a custom field on each post. (So that, for example, if
post includes a itunes:duration element, you could store the contents
in a Custom Field called duration on the post (for a Theme to access
later). The Custom Post Settings under Syndication --> Posts & Links now
allow you to access any item or feed tag, using a syntax similar to
a much-simplified version of XPath. See Posts & Links settings for
details.
UPDATE-FREEZING ON MANUALLY EDITED POSTS: FeedWordPress now allows you to mark posts that have been manually edited, so that the changes you make will not be overwritten by later updates from the feed. If you make manual edits to a particular post, just check the "Manual editing" checkbox in order to protect your changes from being overwritten. If you want to block all posts from being updated after they are imported for the first time, a new "Updated Posts" setting in Posts & Links allows you to freeze all posts from a particular feed, or all syndicated posts.
SETTING: FEED-BY-FEED SETTINGS FOR WHERE PERMALINKS POINT TO: You've always been able to tell FeedWordPress whether permalinks for posts should point to the original source of the story or the local copy. Now you can choose different policies for different feeds, instead of one global policy for all feeds. (Of course, you can still use a global default if you prefer.)
SETTING: USER CONTROL OVER TIMING BASIS. You can now determine the schedule on which feeds are considered ready to poll for updates -- by default feeds become ready for polling after about 1 hour. You can now increase or decrease the time window under Syndication --> Feeds & Updates. (However, please pay CAREFUL ATTENTION to the recommendations and DO NOT set the scheduling lower than 60 minutes unless you are ABSOLUTELY SURE that you have specific permission from webmaster who provides that specific feed to poll more frequently than that. If you set this too low (and about 60 minutes is the polite minimum if you haven't been given a different figure), most webmasters will consider the frequent hits on their server as rude, or even downright abusive.
OTHER SETTINGS: New settings also include the ability to stop FWP from resolving relative URLs within syndicated content, and the ability to choose whether FeedWordPress should indicate the comment feed from the original source, or the local comment feed, when providing the comment feed URL for a syndicated post.
BETTER DATE HANDLING -- FEWER FLASHBACKS TO 1969 and 1970: FeedWordPress has made some bugfixes and some improvements in the logic for parsing dates. This should allow FeedWordPress to correctly parse more dates in more feeds; and, in the last resort, when FeedWordPress fails to correctly parse a date, to fall back to a more intelligent default. This should hopefully avoid most or all error conditions that have resulted in articles being erroneously dated to the dawn of the Unix epoch (31 December 1969 or 1 January 1970).
FULL-TEXT "EXCERPTS" NOW PROPERLY SHORTENED. Based on a straightforward reading of the existing RSS specs, it's reasonable for the rss:description element to be read as a plaintext summary or excerpt for the item containing the description -- with the full text of the item, if available, in another, better-suited element, such as the de facto standard content:encoded extension element. The problem is that uses of RSS rarely have much to do with anything like a straightforward reading of the specs. As a result, many actual RSS producers in the wild put the full text of the article in a description element. But since FeedWordPress has treated this text as a summary, this produces aggregated posts with lengthy "excerpts" containing the full text of the article. This release of FeedWordPress fixes the problem by doing a little digging before treating rss:description as a summary: if the description element is used properly as a plain text summary, then FeedWordPress will take the summary provided by the feed, rather than recreating its own excerpt from the full text; but if an RSS item has no full-text element other than description, FeedWordPress will treat the description element as the full text of the article, and generate a shortened excerpt automatically from that text.
TEMPLATE API: new template tags get_local_permalink() and
the_local_permalink() allow you to access the permalink for a post on
your aggregator site, even when FeedWordPress is rewriting permalinks to
point to the original source site.
NEW HOOKS FOR ADD-ONS AND FILTERS: I have added a number of new hooks which allow add-on modules to filter more precisely, gather information at more points, and to enhance the FeedWordPress admin interface. For a list of new hooks and documentation, see the FeedWordPress documentation wiki at http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/add-ons-and-filters
FILTER API: A number of new utility methods have been added to the SyndicatedPost class to make it easier for filters and add-ons to
FILTER API: Globals $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta DEPRECATED. These
global variables, originally introduced to allow filters access to
information about the source feed in syndicated_item filters (which
were passed in through global variables rather than as parameters
because of a bug in WP 1.5 which was then fixed in 1.5.1) have been
DEPRECATED. If you have any filters or add-ons which still depend on
these global variables, you should see about fixing them to access data
about the source feed using the SyndicatedPost::link element instead.
For documentation, see the FeedWordPress documentation wiki at
http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedpost and
http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedlink.
DIAGNOSTICS: I've included a number of new diagnostic options and messages, which should allow an experienced user to better investigate any problems that may crop up.
BUGFIX: & IN PERMALINKS NO LONGER CAUSING ATOM OR HTML VALIDATION EFFORTS: Many users reported an issue in which syndicating a feed with special XML characters in the URLs (& was the most common, since it is used to separate HTTP GET parameters) would cause the aggregator's feeds to produce invalid (malformed) XML. This update addresses the issue in Atom feeds. Unfortunately, it has not been technically possible to address the problem in RSS 2.0 feeds, due to limitations on WordPress's internal templates for RSS feeds.
BUGFIX: BROKEN URLS IN "POPULAR POSTS" AND SIMILAR PLUGINS SHOULD NO LONGER BE BROKEN. A number of users noticed an issue where plugins and templates that listed posts in locations outside of the post loop (for example, "Popular Posts"-style plugins that listed posts in the sidebar), often produced the wrong URL for post links. (Typically, all the posts listed would get the same wrong URL.) This should now be fixed. Thanks to Björn for sending in a quick fix!
MINOR BUGFIXES: This release includes a number of fixes to minor bugs and compatibility issues, including: silent failures of the "Syndicate" button, "Illegal Offset Type" error messages from MagpieRSS, and others.
= 2009.0707 =
BUGFIX: WORDPRESS 2.8 AJAX COMPATIBILITY ISSUES RESOLVED (blank or truncated "Syndicated Sites" administration page): Due to changes in the AJAX interface elements between WordPress 2.7 and WordPress 2.8, several FeedWordPress users encountered an issue where the front "Syndication" page in the FeedWordPress administrative interface would come up blank, without the normal "Syndicated Sites" list and "Update" control, or sometimes wth the boxes visible but one or both of them truncated, with only the title bar. This issue should now be resolved: with the new version of FeedWordPress, the compatibility issue that caused the disappearance should be eliminated, and if boxes are shown with only their handle visible, you should once again be able to drop down the rest of the box by clicking once on its title bar.
BUGFIX: TAG SETTING WIDGET FIXED. Due to changes in interface elements between WordPress 2.7 and WordPress 2.8, people using FeedWordPress with WordPress 2.8 found that the widget for setting tags to be applied to all syndicated posts, or all syndicated posts from a particular feed, no longer displayed "Add" and "Remove" buttons for individual tags. This issue has now been fixed, and the tagging widget should once again work more or less exactly like the tagging widget for individual posts in the normal WordPress admin interface.
= 2009.0618 =
BUGFIX: MYSTERY ERRORS WITH WITH WP_Http_Fsockopen HTTP TRANSPORT ELIMINATED: Thanks to a combination of a subtle bug in FeedWordPress, and changes to the HTTP transport code in WordPress, a number of users encountered an error in which any time they attempted to add a new feed through the FeedFinder interface, FeedWordPress would fail and display an HTTP request failure diagnostic message. The subtle bug has been fixed, and with it, most of these errors should now be eliminated.
Be sure to upgrade your MagpieRSS to the most recent MagpieRSS version after you have insalled FeedWordPress 2009.0618, or this bug fix will not take effect.
= 2009.0613 =
INTERFACE/BUGFIX: WORDPRESS 2.8 CATEGORY BOX FIX. Thanks to a subtle change in class names between the WordPress 2.7 and 2.8 stylesheets, category boxes in the FeedWordPress settings interface tended to overflow and have a lot of messy-looking overlapping text under WordPress 2.8. This has now been fixed.
FeedFinder FAILURE DIAGNOSTICS: When FWP's FeedFinder fails to find any feeds at a given URL (for example, when you are trying to add a subscription through the administrative interface and you run into an error message), FeedWordPress now provides more diagnostic information for the reasons behind the failure. If that helps you, great; if not, it should help me respond more intelligently to your support request..
= 2009.0612 =
WORDPRESS 2.8 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress 2009.0612 has been tested for compatibility with the recent version 2.8 release of WordPress.
INTERFACE RESTRUCTURING: In order to avoid settings posts from becoming too crowded, and to modularize and better organize the user interface, new "Posts" and "Categories & Tags" subpages have been created under the "Syndication" menu. "Posts" controls settings for individal syndicated posts (such as publication status, comment and ping status, whether or not to use the original location of the post as the permalink, whether or not to expose posts to formatting filters, and so on). "Categories & Tags" controls settings for assigning new syndicated posts to categories and tags, such as categories or tags to apply to all syndicated posts, and how to handle categories that do not yet exist in the WordPress database. These subpages, like the Authors subpage, handle settings for the global default level and for individual syndicated feeds.
Corresponding to these new subpages, the old Syndication Settings and Feed Settings subpages have been cleaned up and simplified, and now only link to the appropriate subpages for options that can be set in the Posts, Authors, or Categories & Tags subpages.
FEATURE: ADD CUSTOM SETTINGS TO EACH SYNDICATED POST: FeedWordPress has
long had an interface for creating custom settings for each syndicated
feed which could be retrieved in templates using the get_feed_meta()
template function. But it had no feature for adding custom fields to
each individual syndicated post. In response to requests from users, I
have added the ability to apply custom fields to each individual
syndicated post, using the new Syndication --> Posts subpage. You can
set up custom fields to be applied to every syndicated post, or custom
fields to be applied to syndicated posts from a particular feed.
FEATURE: MAGPIERSS VERSION CHECK AND UPGRADE: FeedWordPress will attempt to determine whether or not you are using the upgraded version of MagpieRSS that comes packaged with FeedWordPress. If not, it will throw an error on admin pages, and, if you are a site administrator, it will give you the option to ignore the error message, or to attempt an automatic upgrade (using a native file copy). If the file copy fails, FeedWordPress will offer some guidance on how to perform the upgrade manually.
BLANK POSTS PROBLEM NO LONGER OCCURS WITH OLD & BUSTED MAGPIERSS: Due to the fact that I relied on a content normalization that occurs in my upgraded version of MagpieRSS, but not in the old & busted version of MagpieRSS that ships with WordPress, until this version, if you tried to syndicate an Atom feed without having performed the (strongly recommended) MagpieRSS upgrade, all of the posts would come up with completely blank contents. That's not because MagpieRSS couldn't read the data, but rather because the new Magpie version puts that data in a location where the old version doesn't, and I was only looking in that newer location. Now it checks for both, meaning that posts will continue to display their contents even if you don't upgrade MagpieRSS. (But you really should upgrade it, anyway.)
BUGFIX: RELATIVE URI RESOLUTION FOR POST CONTENT RESTORED. Some time back, I added support for resolving relative URIs against xml:base on feeds that support it to the MagpieRSS upgrade in FeedWordPress. Then I took out code that did the same thing from the main FeedWordPress code. Of course, the problem is that some people, even though it is clearly stupid or evil to do so, still include relative URIs for images or links in posts on feed formats that do not adequately support xml:base (notably, RSS 2.0 feeds). In response to a user request, I have added this functionality back in, so that MagpieRSS will resolve any relative URIs that it knows how to resolve using xml:base, and then FeedWordPress will attempt to resolve any relative URIs that are left over afterwards.
BUGFIX: INTERFACE OPTION FOR SETTING SYNDICATED POST PUBLICATION STATUS ON A FEED-BY-FEED BASIS HAS BEEN RESTORED: Due to a version-checking bug, users of WordPress 2.7.x lost an option from the "Edit a syndicated feed" interface which allowed them to determine whether newly syndicated posts should be published immediately, held as "Pending Review," saved as drafts, or saved as private posts. (The option to change this setting globally remained in place, but users could no longer set it on a feed-by-feed basis.) The version-checking bug has been fixed, and the option has been restored.
BUGFIX: "ARE YOU SURE?" FATAL ERROR ELIMINATED AND SECURITY IMPROVED: Under certain circumstances (for example, when users have configured their browser or proxy not to send HTTP Referer headers, for privacy or other reasons), many features in the FeedWordPress administrative interface (such as adding new feeds or changing settings) would hit a fatal error, displaying only a cryptic message reading "Are you sure?" and a blank page following it. This problem has been eliminated by taking advantage of WordPress's nonce functions, which allow the security check which ran into this error to work properly even without receiving an HTTP Referer header. (N.B.: WordPress's nonce functions were first introduced in WordPress 2.0.3. If you're using FeedWordPress with an older version of WordPress, there's no fix for this problem: you'll just need to turn Referer headers back on. Sorry.)
BUGFIX: MANUALLY-ALTERED POST STATUS, COMMENT STATUS, AND PING STATUS NO LONGER REVERTED BY POST UPDATES: If you manually altered the post status, comment status, or ping status of a syndicated post from what it was set to when first syndicated -- for example, if you had a feed that was set to bring in new posts as "Pending Review," and you then marked some of the pending posts as "Published" and others as "Unpublished" -- then in previous versions of FeedWordPress, these manual changes to the status would be lost -- so that, for example, your Published or Unpublished articles would revert to Pending Review -- if the source feed made any upates to the item. This could make the Pending Review feature both unreliable and also extremely frustrating to work with. The good news is that this bug has since been fixed: if you manually update the status of a post, it will no longer be reverted if or when the post is updated.
BUGFIX: OCCASIONAL FATAL ERROR ON UPDATE ELIMINATED: Under certain limited conditions (specifically, when both the title and the content of a post to be updated are empty), an attempt to update the post would result in a fatal error. This has been fixed.
INTERFACE: "CONFIGURE SETTINGS" CONVENIENCE LINK ADDED TO CONFIRMATION MESSAGE WHEN A NEW FEED IS ADDED: When you add a new subscription to FeedWordPress, the message box that appears to confirm it now includes a handy link to the feed's settings subpage, so that you can quickly set up any special settings you may want to set up for the new feed, without having to hunt through the list of all your other subscriptions to pick out the new one.
INTERFACE: SIMPLIFYING AND CLARIFYING AUTOMATIC UPDATES SETTINGS. I have removed an interval setting for the cronless automatic updates which has confused many FeedWordPress users. In past versions of FWP, when you turned on automatic updates, you would be presented with a time interval setting which controlled how often FeedWordPress would check for feeds ready to be polled for updates. (That is, it DID NOT control how often feeds would be polled; it controlled how often FeedWordPress would check for feeds that had become ready to poll. The schedule on which feeds became ready for polling was still controlled either by requests encoded in elements within the feed itself, or else according to an internal calculation within FeedWordPress, averaging out to about 1 hour, if the feed did not include any scheduling request elements.) Since many users very often (and understandably) confused the purpose of this setting, and since the setting is for a feature that's actually very unlikely to require any manual control by the user, I have removed the setting; FeedWordPress now simply uses the default value of checking for feeds to poll every 10 minutes.
FEEDFINDER PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT: FeedWordPress's FeedFinder class
now uses array_unique() to make sure that it doesn't waste time
repeatedly iterating over and polling the same URI. Props to Camilo
(http://projects.radgeek.com/2008/12/14/feedwordpress-20081214/#comment-20090122160414).
= 2008.1214 =
WORDPRESS 2.7 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress has been tested for compatibility with the newly released WordPress 2.7. WordPress 2.7 has deprecated the Snoopy library for HTTP requests, which caused a fatal error for users who had not installed the MagpieRSS upgrade (or whose installation of the MagpieRSS upgrade was overwritten by a recent update of WordPress). FeedWordPress now handles things gracefully when Snoopy is not immediately available.
INTERFACE SPIFFED UP: Interface elements have been updated so that FeedWordPress's management interface fits in more naturally with the WordPress 2.7 interface (including a new logo and a number of small interface tweaks).
BUG WITH TAGS FOR SYNDICATED ARTICLES FIXED: Several users encountered a bug with the option to add tags to all syndicated posts under Syndication --> Settings -- if you told FeedWordPress to add more than one tag to all syndicated posts, instead of doing so correctly, it would add a single tag instead, whose name was composed of the names of all the tags you asked it to add. This bug was the result of nothing more dignified than a typographical error on my part. It has now been fixed.
MORE INFORMATION AVAILABLE WHEN FEEDWORDPRESS CAN'T FIND A FEED: When you enter a URL for a new syndication source, FeedWordPress uses a simple feed-finding algorithm (originally based on Mark Pilgrim's Universal Feed Finder) to try to determine whether the URL is the URL for a feed, or, if the URL points to an ordinary website rather than to a feed, whether there is a feed for that website. All well and good, but if FeedWordPress failed to find a feed, for whatever reason, it would typically return nothing more than a nasty little note to the effect of "no feed found," without any explanation of what went wrong. FeedWordPress now keeps track of error conditions from the HTTP requests that it uses in the course of looking for the feed, and so may be able to give you a bit more information about the nature of the problem if something goes wrong.
= 2008.1105 =
INTERFACE RESTRUCTURING AND SYNDICATION --> AUTHORS PAGE: As a first step towards modularizing and better organizing the user interface, a new "Authors" subpage has been created under the Syndication menu, which controls settings for syndicated authors, both at the global default level and at level of individual syndicated feeds.
BUG RELATED TO THE ATTRIBUTION OF POSTS TO THE WRONG AUTHOR FIXED: Some users encountered an issue in which posts by different authors on different blogs -- especially blogs generated by Blogger -- were mistakenly attributed to a single author. The problem was caused by the way in which FeedWordPress matches syndicated authors to user accounts in the WordPress database: normally, if two feeds each list an author with the same e-mail address, they are counted as being the same person. Normally this works well, but it creates an issue in cases where blogging software assigns a single anonymous e-mail address to users who do not want their real e-mail address published. This is, for example, what Blogger does (by giving all users a default e-mail address of noreply@blogger.com if they don't want their own e-mail address listed). FeedWordPress now allows the user to correct for this problem with a couple of new settings under Syndication --> Authors, which allow users to turn off e-mail based author matching for particular addresses, or, if desired, to turn it off entirely. By default, e-mail based author matching is still turned on, but disabled for a list of known generic e-mail addresses. Right now, the "list" consists entirely of noreply@blogger.com; if you know other addresses that should be added, please contact me to let me know.
Please note that if you have already encountered this issue on your blog, upgrading FeedWordPress will prevent it from re-occurring in the future, but you still need to do two other things to fix the existing problem on your blog.
First, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to change the existing author mapping rules to re-map a a syndicated author's name to the proper target account. Go to Syndication --> Authors, select the feed you want to change from the drop-down list, and then change the settings under the "Syndicated Authors" section. (You will probably need to select "will be assigned to a new user..." to create a new user account with the appropriate name.)
Second, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to re-assign already-syndicated posts that were mis-attributed to the correct author. You can do that from Syndication --> Authors by using the author re-assignment feature, described below.
AUTHOR RE-ASSIGNMENT FOR A PARTICULAR FEED: The author settings page for each syndicated feed, under Syndication --> Authors, now includes an section titled "Fixing mis-matched authors," which provides an interface for re-assigning or deleting all posts attributed to a particular author on a particular feed.
SUPPORT FOR <atom:source> ELEMENT IN SYNDICATED FEEDS: Some feeds
(for example, those produced by FeedWordPress) aggregate content from
several different sources, and include information about the original
source of the post in an <atom:source> element. A new setting under
Syndication --> Options allows you to control what FeedWordPress
will report as the source of posts syndicated from aggregator feeds in
your templates and feeds: you can have FeedWordPress report that the
source of a post is the aggregator feed itself, or you can have it
report that the source of a post is the original source that the
aggregator originally syndicated the post from.
By default, FeedWordPress will report the aggregator, not the original source, as the source of a syndicated item.
LOAD BALANCING AND TIME LIMITING FEATURES FOR UPDATES: Some users have encountered issues due to running up against PHP execution time limits during the process of updating large syndicated feeds, or a very large set of syndicated feeds. FeedWordPress now has a feature that allows you to limit the total amount of time spent updating a feed, through the "Time limit on updates" setting under Syndication --> Options. By turning on this setting and adjusting the time limit to a low enough figure to avoid your PHP installation's time-out setting. (PHP execution time limits are usually in the vicinity of 30 seconds, so an update time limit of 25 seconds or so should provide plenty of time for updates while allowing a cushion of time for other, non-update-related functions to do their work.)
If feed updates are interrupted by the time limit, FeedWordPress uses some simple load balancing features to make sure that updates to other feeds will not be blocked by the time-hogging feed, and will also make sure that when the interrupted update is resumed, FeedWordPress will skip ahead to resume processing items at the point at which it was interrupted last time, so that posts further down in the feed will eventually get processed, and not get blocked by the amount of time it takes to process the items higher up in the feed.
guid INDEX CREATION BUTTON: FeedWordPress frequently issues queries on
the guid column of the WordPress posts database (since it uses post
guid URIs to keep track of which posts it has syndicated). In very large
FeedWordPress installations, you can often significantly improve
performance by creating a database index on the guid column, but
normally you would need to poke around with MySQL or a tool like
phpMyAdmin to do this. FeedWordPress can now save you the trouble: to
create an index on the guid column, just go to
Syndication --> Options, and mash the button at the bottom of the
"Back End" section.
= 2008.1101 =
= 2008.1030 =
WORDPRESS 2.6 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with WordPress 2.6, and should work more or less seamlessly with the new post revision system. A bug which caused multiple new revisions to be created for posts on certain feeds, regardless of whether or not the item had been updated, has been fixed.
INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: The user interface has been substantially restyled to fit in better with the visual style of WordPress 2.5 and 2.6.
YOUTUBE BUG FIXED: POSTS SYNDICATED THROUGH AN AUTOMATIC UPDATE ARE NO
LONGER STRIPPED OF <OBJECT> TAGS AND CERTAIN OTHER HTML ELEMENTS: Due
to the way that some versions of WordPress process posts that are
inserted into the database when no user is logged in, many users
experienced an issue where YouTube videos and other content using the
HTML <object> tag would be stripped out of posts that were syndicated
during an automatic update. (Posts that were syndicated through manual
updates from within the WordPress Dashboard were not affected, because
the issue does not arise when an update is executed under a logged-in
administrator's credentials.) This bug has now been fixed; YouTube
videos and other content using <object> tags should now appear
properly in syndicated posts, regardless of the way in which the post
was syndicated.
AJAX BUGS FIXED: Bugs which blocked the normal operation of WordPress 2.5's AJAX interface elements when FeedWordPress was activated have been fixed.
TAG SUPPORT: A couple of features have been introduced to take advantage of the tagging features in WordPress 2.3.x, 2.5.x, and 2.6.x. Now, when unfamiliar categories are encountered for posts on a feed, you can choose for FeedWordPress (1) to drop the category; (2) to drop the category and to filter out any post that does not match at least one familiar category; (3) to create a new category with that name, or, now, you can also have FeedWordPress (4) create a new tag with that name. This option can be set site-wide under Syndication --> Options, or it can be set on a feed-by-feed basis in a feed's Edit screen.
In addition, you can now set particular tags to apply to all incoming syndicated posts, under Syndication --> Options, or you can set tags to apply to all incoming syndicated posts from a particular feed in that feed's Edit screen.
FORMATTING FILTERS: There is a new option available under Syndication -> Options which allows users to choose whether or not to expose syndicated posts to being altered by formatting filters. By default, FeedWordPress has always protected syndicated posts (which are already in display-ready HTML when they are syndicated) from being reformatted by formatting filters. However, this approach means that certain plugins which depend on formatting filters (for example, to add "Share This" bars or relevant links to the end of a post) are blocked from working on any syndicated posts. If you want to use one of these plugins together with FeedWordPress, you can now do so by changing the "Formatting Filters" setting from "Protect" to "Expose."
<atom:source> ELEMENTS NOW INCLUDED IN ATOM FEED: Atom 1.0 provides
a standard method for aggregators to indicate information about the original source of
a syndicated post, using the <atom:source> element. FeedWordPress now
introduces standard <atom:source> elements including the title, homepage, and
feed URI of the source from which a syndicated post was syndicated. Cf.
http://www.atomenabled.org/developers/syndication/atom-format-spec.php#element.source
MODULARIZATION OF CODE: The code for different elements of FeedWordPress has been broken out into several modules for easier inspection, documentation, and maintenance of the code.
VERSIONING SCHEME CHANGED: FeedWordPress's feature set has proven stable enough that it can now be removed from beta status; a good thing, since I was very quickly running out of version numbers to use. New releases of FeedWordPress will have version numbers based on the date of their release.
= 0.993 =
WORDPRESS 2.5.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with WordPress 2.5.1.
WORDPRESS 2.5 INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: FeedWordPress's Dashboard interface has undergone several cosmetic changes that should help it integrate better with the WordPress Dashboard interface in WordPress version 2.5.x.
SYNDICATED POSTS CAN BE MARKED AS "PENDING REVIEW": WordPress 2.3 users can now take advantage of WordPress's new "Pending Review" features for incoming syndicated posts. Posts marked as "Pending Review" are not published immediately, but are marked as ready to be reviewed by an Administrator or Editor, who can then choose to publish the post or hold it back. If you want to review syndicated posts from a particular feed, or from all feeds, before they are posted, then use Syndication --> Syndicated Sites --> Edit or Syndication --> Options to change the settings for handling new posts.
AWARE OF NEW URI FOR del.icio.us FEEDS: Previous releases of
FeedWordPress already automatically split del.icio.us tags up
appropriately appropriately when generating categories. (del.icio.us
feeds smoosh all the tags into a single <dc:subject> element,
separated by spaces; FeedWordPress un-smooshes them into multiple
categories by separating them at whitespace.) Unfortunately, del.icio.us
recently broke the existing behavior by changing host names for their
feeds from del.icio.us to feeds.delicious.com. Version 0.993 accounts
for the new host name and un-breaks the tag splitting.
= 0.992 =
AUTHOR RE-MAPPING: FeedWordPress now offers considerable control over how author names on a feed are translated into usernames within the WordPress database. When a post by an unrecognized author comes in, Administrators can now specify any username as the default username to assign the post to by setting the option in Syndication --> Options (formerly FeedWordPress only allowed you to assign such posts to user
rules for particular feeds (under Syndication --> Syndicated Sites --> Edit), so that (for example) any posts attributed to "Administrator" on the feed http://praxeology.net/blog/feed/ will be assigned to a user named "Roderick T. Long," rather than a user named "Administrator." These settings also allow administrators to filter out posts by particular users, and to control what will happen when FeedWordPress encounters a post by an unrecognized user on that particular feed.
BUG RELATED TO URIS CONTAINING AMPERSAND CHARACTERS FIXED: A bug in WordPress 2.x's handling of URIs in Blogroll links created problems for updating any feeds whose URIs included an ampersand character, such as Google News RSS feeds and other feeds that have multiple parameters passed through HTTP GET. If you experienced this bug, the most likely effect was that FeedWordPress simply would not import new posts from a feed when instructred to do so, returning a "0 new posts" response. In other cases, it might lead to unpredictable results from feed updates, such as importing posts which were not contained in the feed being syndicated, but which did appear elsewhere on the same website. This bug has, hopefully, been resolved, by correcting for the bug in WordPress.
= 0.991 =
WORDPRESS MU COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with recent releases of WordPress MU. Once FeedWordPress is made available as a plugin, each individual blog can choose to activate FeedWordPress and syndicate content from its own set of contributors.
DISPLAY OF MAGPIE WARNINGS: A number of MagpieRSS warnings or error messages that were displayed when performing an automatic update are no longer displayed, unless debugging parameters have been explicitly enabled.
BUG RELATED TO INTERNATIONAL CHARACTERS IN AUTHOR NAMES FIXED: Due to a subtle incompatability between the way that FeedWordPress generated new user information, and the way that WordPress 2.0 and later added new authors to the database, FeedWordPress might end up creating duplicate authors, or throwing a critical error message, when it encountered authors whose names included international characters. This incompatability has now been fixed; hopefully, authors with international characters in their names should now be handled properly.
<media:content> BUG IN MAGPIERSS FIXED: A bug in MagpieRSS's handling
of namespaced elements has been fixed. Among other things, this bug
caused items containing a Yahoo MediaRSS <media:content> element (such
as many of the feeds produced by wordpress.com) to be represented
incorrectly, with only a capital "A" where the content of the post
should have been. Feeds containing <media:content> elements should now
be syndicated correctly.
update_feedwordpress PARAMETER: You can now use an HTTP GET parameter
(update_feedwordpress=1) to request that FeedWordPress poll its feeds
for updates. When used together with a crontab or other means of
scheduling tasks, this means that you can keep your blog automatically
updated on a regular schedule, even if you do not choose to use the
cron-less automatic updates option.
Some minor interface-related bugs were also fixed.
= 0.99 =
Version 0.99 adds several significant new features, fixes some bugs, and provides compatability with WordPress 2.2.x and 2.3.x.
WORDPRESS 2.2 AND 2.3 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with WordPress version 2.2 and the upcoming WordPress version 2.3. In particular, it has been tested extensively against WordPress 2.2.3 and WordPress 2.3 Release Candidate 1.
AUTOMATIC UPDATES WITHOUT CRON: FeedWordPress now allows you to automatically schedule checks for new posts without using external task scheduling tools such as cron. In order to enable automatic updates, go to Syndication --> Options and set "Check for new posts" to "automatically." For details, see "Automatic Feed Updates" in README.text.
An important side-effect of the changes to the update system is that if
you were previously using the cron job and the update-feeds.php script
to schedule updates, you need to change your cron set-up. The old
update-feeds.php script no longer exists. Instead, if you wish to use
a cron job to guarantee updates on a particular schedule, you should
have the cron job fetch the front page of your blog (for example, by
using curl http://www.zyx.com/blog/ > /dev/null) instead of activating
the update-feeds.php script. If automatic updates have been enabled,
fetching the front page will automatically trigger the update process.
INTERFACE REORGANIZATION: All FeedWordPress functions are now located under a top-level "Syndication" menu in the WordPress Dashboard. To manage the list of syndicated sites, manually check for new posts on one or more feeds, or syndicate a new site, you should use the main page under Syndication. To change global settings for FeedWordPress, you should use Syndication --> Options.
FILE STRUCTURE REORGANIZATION: Due to a combination of changing styles
for FeedWordPress plugins and lingering bugs in the FeedWordPress admin
menu code, the code for FeedWordPress is now contained in two different
PHP files, which should be installed together in a subdirectory of your
plugins directory named feedwordpress. (See README.text for
installation and upgrade instructions relating to the change.)
MULTIPLE CATEGORIES SETTING: Some feeds use non-standard methods to indicate multiple categories within a single category element. (The most popular site to do this is del.icio.us, which separates tags with a space.) FeedWordPress now allows you to set an optional setting, for any feed which does this, indicating the character or characters used to divide multiple categories, using a Perl-compatible regular expression. (In the case of del.icio.us feeds, FeedWordPress will automatically use \s for the pattern without your having to do any further configuration.) To turn this setting on, simply use the "Edit" link for the feed that you want to turn it on for.
REGULAR EXPRESSION BUG FIXED: Eliminated a minor bug in the regular
expressions for e-mail addresses (used in parsing RSS author
elements), which could produce unsightly error messages for some users
parsing RSS 2.0 feeds.
DATE / UPDATE BUG FIXED: A bug in date handling was eliminated that may have caused problems if any of (1) WordPress, or (2) PHP, or (3) your web server, or (4) your MySQL server, has been set to use a different time zone from the one that any of the others is set to use. If FeedWordPress has not been properly updating updated posts, or has been updating posts when there shouldn't be any changes for the update, this release may solve that problem.
GOOGLE READER BUGS FIXED: A couple of bugs that made it difficult for FeedWordPress to interact with Google Reader public feeds have been fixed. Firstly, if you encountered an error message reading "There was a problem adding the newsfeed. [SQL: ]" when you tried to add the feed, the cause of this error has been fixed. Secondly, if you succeeded in getting FeedWordPress to check a Google Reader feed, only to find that the title of posts had junk squashed on to the end of them, that bug has been fixed too. To fix this bug, you must install the newest version of the optional MagpieRSS upgrade.
FILTER PARAMETERS: Due to an old, old bug in WordPress 1.5.0 (which was what was available back when I first wrote the filter interface), FeedWordPress has traditionally only passed one parameter to syndicated_item and syndicated_post filters functions -- an array containing either the Magpie representation of a syndicated item from the feed, or the database representation of a post about to be inserted into the WordPress database. If you needed information about the feed that the item came from, this was accessible only through a pair of global variables, $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta.
Since it's been a pretty long time since WordPress 1.5.0 was in widespread usage, I have gone ahead and added an optional second parameter to the invocation of the syndicated_item and syndicated_post filters. If you have written a filter for FeedWordPress that uses either of these hooks, you can now register that filter to accept 2 parameters. If you do so, the second parameter will be a SyndicatedPost object, which, among other things, allows you to access information about the feed from which an item is syndicated using the $post->feed and the $post->feedmeta elements (where $post is the name of the second parameter).
NOTE THAT THE OLD GLOBAL VARIABLES ARE STILL AVAILABLE, for the time being at least, so existing filters will not break with the upgrade. They should be considered deprecated, however, and may be eliminated in the future.
FILTER CHANGE / BUGFIX: the array that is passed as the first argument syndicated_post filters no longer is no longer backslash-escaped for MySQL when filters are called. This was originally a bug, or an oversight; the contents of the array should only be escaped for the database after they have gone through all filters. IF YOU HAVE WRITTEN ANY syndicated_post FILTERS THAT PRESUME THE OLD BEHAVIOR OF PASSING IN STRINGS THAT ARE ALREADY BACKSLASH-ESCAPED, UPDATE YOUR FILTERS ACCORDINGLY.
OTHER MINOR BUGFIXES AND INTERNAL CHANGES: The internal architecture of FeedWordPress has been significantly changed to make the code more modular and clean; hopefully this should help reduce the number of compatibility updates that are needed, and make them easier and quicker when they are needed.
= 0.981 =
Version 0.981 is a narrowly targeted bugfix and compatibility release, whose main purpose is to resolve a major outstanding problem: the incompatibility between version 0.98 of WordPress and the recently released WordPress 2.1.
WORDPRESS 2.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress is now compatible with WordPress 2.1, as well as retaining its existing support for WordPress 2.0 and 1.5. Incompatibilities that resulted in database warnings, fatal errors, and which prevented FeedWordPress from syndicating new posts, have been eliminated.
RSS-FUNCTIONS.PHP RENAMED TO RSS.PHP: if you use the upgraded MagpieRSS
replacement that's included with FeedWordPress, be sure to note that
there are now two files to upload from the OPTIONAL/wp-includes
subdirectory in order to carry out the upgrade: rss-functions.php and
rss.php. It is necessary to upload both files, due to a change in
the file naming scheme in WordPress 2.1, and it is necessary to do so
whether you are using WordPress 2.1 or not. If you only upload the
rss-functions.php file as in previous installations you will not have
a working copy of MagpieRSS; the rss.php file contains the actual code.
DATE BUG AFFECTING SOME PHP INSTALLATIONS RESOLVED: due to a subtle bug in parse_w3cdtf(), some installations of PHP encountered problems with FeedWordPress's attempt to date posts, which would cause some new posts on Atom feeds to be dated as if they had apppeared in 1969 or 1970 (thus, effectively, never appearing on front page at all). This bug in the date handling should now be fixed.
PHP <?=...?> SHORT FORM ELIMINATED: some installations of PHP do not allow the <?=...?> short form for printing PHP values, which was used extensively in the FeedWordPress interface code. Since this could cause fatal errors for users with the wrong installation of PHP, the short form has been replaced with full PHP echo statements, and is no longer used in FeedWordPress.
BETTER USER INTERFACE INTEGRATION WITH WORDPRESS 2.x: Some minor changes have been made to help the FeedWordPress interface pages blend in better with the user interface when running under WordPress 2.x.
GLOBAL CATEGORIES BUG RESOLVED: a bug that prevented some users from setting one or more categories to apply to syndicated posts from all feeds (using the checkbox interface under Options --> Syndication) has been resolved.
= 0.98 =
WORDPRESS 2.0 COMPATIBILITY: This is a narrowly-targeted release to solve a major outstanding problem. FeedWordPress is now compatible with both WordPress 1.5 and WordPress 2.0. Incompatibilities that caused fatal SQL errors, and a more subtle bug with off-kilter counts of posts under a given category, have been resolved. FeedWordPress tests for database schema using the global $wp_db_version variable (if null, then we presume that we're dealing with WordPress 1.5).
NOTE: I have not fully tested FeedWordPress with WordPress 2.0. Further testing may reveal more bugs. However, you should now be able to get at least basic FeedWordPress functionality up and running.
AUTHOR MATCHING: FeedWordPress tests several fields to see if it can identify the author of the post as a user already in the WordPress user database. In previous versions, it tested the user login, the nickname, and tested for "aliases" listed in the Profile (see documentation). FWP now also matches authors on the basis of e-mail address (if an e-mail address is present). This is particularly helpful for formats such as RSS 2.0, in which authors are primarily identified by e-mail addresses.
= 0.97 =
INSTALLATION PROCEDURE: Some of the changes between 0.96 and 0.97 require upgrades to the meta-data stored by FeedWordPress to work properly. Thus, if you are upgrading from 0.96 or earlier to 0.97, most FeedWordPress operations (including updates and template functions) WILL BE DISABLED until you run the upgrade procedure. Fortunately, running the upgrade procedure is easy: just go to either Options --> Syndication or Links --> Syndicated in the WordPress Dashboard and press the button.
FEED FORMAT SUPPORT: Support has been added for the Atom 1.0 IETF standard. Several other elements are also newly supported (dcterms:created, dcterms:issued, dcterms:modified, dc:identifier, proper support for the RSS 2.0 guid element, the RSS 2.0 author element, the use of Atom author or Dublin Core dc:creator constructs at the feed level to identify the author of individual items, etc.)
N.B.: full support of several Atom 1.0 features, such as categories and enclosures, requires you to install the optional rss-functions.php upgrade in your wp-includes directory.
BUG FIX: Running update-feeds.php from command line or crontab
returned "I don't syndicate..." errors. It turns out that WordPress
sometimes tramples on the internal PHP superglobals that I depended on
to determine whether or not the script was being invoked from the
command line. This has been fixed (the variables are now checked
before WordPress can trample them). Note that update-feeds.php has
been thoroughly overhauled anyway; see below for details.
BUG FIX: Duplicate categories or author names. Fixed two bugs that could create duplicate author and/or category names when the name contained either (a) certain international characters (causing a mismatch between MySQL and PHP's handling of lowercasing text), or (b) characters that have a special meaning in regular expressions (causing MySQL errors when looking for the author or category due to regexp syntax errors). These should now be fixed thanks to careful escaping of names that go into regular expressions and careful matching of lowercasing functions (comparing results from PHP only to other results from PHP, and results from MySQL only to other results from MySQL).
BUG FIX: Items dated December 31, 1969 should appear less often. The
function for parsing W3C date-time format dates that ships with
MagpieRSS can only correctly parse fully-specified dates with a
fully-specified time, but valid W3C date-time format dates may omit the
time, the day of the month, or even the month. Some feeds in the wild
date their items with coarse-grained dates, so the optional
rss-functions.php upgrade now includes a more flexible parse_w3cdtf()
function that will work with both coarse-grained and fully-specified
dates. (If parts of the date or the time are omitted, they are filled in
with values based on the current time, so '2005-09-10' will be dated to
the current time on that day; '2004' will be dated to this day and time
one year ago.
N.B.: This fix is only available in the optional rss-functions.php
upgrade.
BUG FIX: Evil use of HTTP GET has been undone. The WordPress interface is riddled with inappropriate (non-idempotent) uses of HTTP GET queries (ordinary links that make the server do something with significant side-effects, such as deleting a post or a link from the database). FeedWordPress did some of this too, especially in places where it aped the WordPress interface (e.g. the "Delete" links in Links --> Syndicated). That's bad business, though. I've changed the interface so that all the examples of improper side-effects that I can find now require an HTTP POST to take effect. I think I got pretty much everything; if there's anything that I missed, let me know.
Further reading: Sam Ruby 2005-05-06: This Stuff Matters
BUG FIX: Categories applied by cats setting should no longer prevent
category-based filtering from working. In FeedWordPress, you can (1)
apply certain categories to all syndicated posts, or all posts from
a particular feed; and (2) filter out all posts that don't match one
of the categories that are already in the WordPress database (allowing
for simple category-based filtering; just load up WordPress with the
categories you want to accept, and then tell FeedWordPress not to create
new ones). However, the way that (1) and (2) were implemented meant that
you couldn't effectively use them together; once you applied a known
category to all syndicated posts from a particular feed, it meant that
they'd have at least one familiar category (the category or categories
you were applying), and that would get all posts past the filter no
matter what categories they were originally from.
Well, no longer. You can still apply categories to all syndicated posts (using either Syndication --> Options, or the feed-level settings under Links --> Syndicated). But these categories are not applied to the post until after it has already passed by the "familiar categories" filter. So now, if you want, you can do category filtering and then apply as many categories as you please to all and only posts that pass the filter.
BUG FIX: Other minor typos and HTML gaffes were fixed along the way.
PERFORMANCE: get_feed_meta() no longer hits the database for information on every call; it now caches link data in memory, so FeedWordPress only goes to the database once for each syndicated link. This may substantially improve performance if your database server resources are tight and your templates make a lot of use of custom settings from get_feed_meta().
API CHANGE: Link ID numbers, rather than RSS URIs, are now used to identify the feed from which a post is syndicated when you use template functions such as get_feed_meta(). The practical upshot of this is you can switch feeds, or change the feed address for a particular syndicated site, without breaking your templates for all the posts that were syndicated from the earlier URI.
API CHANGE: if you have plugins or templates that make use of the
get_feed_meta() function or the $fwp_feedmeta global, note that the
data formerly located under the uri and name fields is now located
under the link/uri field and the link/name field, respectively. Note
also that you can access the link ID number for any given feed under the
global $fwp_feedmeta['link/id'] (in plugins) or
get_feed_meta('link/id') (in a template in post contexts).
FEATURE: the settings for individual feeds can now be edited using a humane interface (where formerly you had to tweak key-value pairs in the Link Notes section). To edit settings for a feed, pick the feed that you want under Links --> Syndicated and click the Edit link.
FEATURE: The "Unsubscribe" button (formerly "Delete") in Links --> Syndicated now offers three options for unsubscribing from a feed: (1) turning off the subscription without deleting the feed data or affecting posts that were syndicated from the feed (this works by setting the Link for the feed as "invisible"); (2) deleting the feed data and all of the posts that were syndicated from the feed; or (3) deleting the feed data and keeping the posts that were syndicated from the feed setting the Link to "Invisible" (meaning that it will not be displayed in lists of the site links on the front page, and it won't be checked for updates; (2) deleting the Link and all of the posts that were syndicated from its feed; or (3) deleting the feed data but keeping the posts that were syndicated (which will henceforward be treated as if they were local rather than syndicated posts). (Note that (1) is usually the best option for aggregator sites, unless you want to clean up the results of an error or a test.)
FEATURE / BUG FIX: If you have been receiving mysterious "I don't syndicate...", or "(local) HTTP status code was not 200", or "(local) transport error - could not open socket", or "parse error - not well formed" errors, then this update may solve your problems, and if it does not solve them, it will at least make the reasons for the problems easier to understand. That's because I've overhauled the way that FeedWordPress goes about updating feeds.
If you use the command-line PHP scripting method to run scheduled updates, then not much should change for you, except for fewer mysterious errors. If you have done updates by sending periodic HTTP requests to http://your-blog.com/path/wp-content/update-feeds.php, then the details have changed somewhat; mostly in such a way as to make things easier on you. See the README file or online documentation on Staying Current for the details.
FEATURE: FeedWordPress now features a more sophisticated system for
timed updates. Instead of polling every subscribed feed for updates
each time update-feeds.php is run, FeedWordPress now keeps track of
the last time it polled each feed, and only polls them again after a
certain period of time has passed. The amount of time is normally set
randomly for each feed, in a period between 30 minutes and 2 hours (so
as to stagger updates over time rather than polling all of the feeds at once. However, the length of time between updates can also be set
directly by the feed, which brings us to ...
FEATURE: FeedWordPress now respects the settings in the ttl and
Syndication Module RSS elements. Feeds with these elements set will not
be polled any more frequently than they indicate with these feeds unless
the user manually forces FeedWordPress to poll the feed (see Links -->
Syndicated --> Edit settings).
= 0.96 =
FEATURE: support has been added for enclosures in RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.6+ newsfeeds. WordPress already supports adding enclosures to an item; FeedWordPress merely gets the information on the enclosure from the feed it is syndicating and plugs that information directly into the WordPress database so that (among other things) that post will have its enclosure listed in your blog's RSS 2 newsfeed.
Note that enclosure support requires using the optional MagpieRSS
upgrade (i.e., replacing your wp-includes/rss-functions.php with
OPTIONAL/wp-includes/rss-functions.php from the FWP archive)
FEATURE: for completeness's sake, there is now a feed setting,
hardcode url, that allows you to set the URI for the front page
of a contributor's website manually (that is, prevent it from being
automatically updated from the feed channel link on each update). To
set the URI manually, put a line like this in the Link Notes section
of a feed:
hardcode url: yesYou can also instruct FeedWordPress to use hardcoded URIs by default on all feeds using Options --> Syndication
FEATURE: by default, when FeedWordPress finds new syndicated posts, it (1) publishes them immediately, (2) turns comments off, and (3) turns trackback / pingback pings off. You can now alter all three default behaviors (e.g., to allow pings on syndicated posts, or to send newly-syndicated posts to the draft pile for moderation) using Options --> Syndication
= From 0.91 to 0.95 =
BUG FIX: Fixed an obscure bug in the handling of categories: categories with trailing whitespace could cause categories with duplicate names to be created. This no longer happens. While I was at it I tightened up the operation of FeedWordPress::lookup_categories() a bit in general.
FEATURE DEPRECATED: the feed setting hardcode categories is now deprecated in favor of unknown categories (see below), which allows you to strip off any syndication categories not already in your database using unknown categories: default or unknown categories: filter. If you have hardcode categories: yes set on a feed, this will be treated as unknown categories: default (i.e., no new categories will be added, but if a post doesn't match any of the categories it will be added in the default category--usually "Uncategorized" or "General").
FEATURE: You can now set global defaults as to whether or not FeedWordPress will update the Link Name and Link Description settings for feeds automatically from the feed title and feed tagline. (By default, it does, as it has in past versions.) Whether this behavior is turned on or off, you can still override the default behavior using feed settings of hardcode name: yes, hardcode name: no, hardcode description: yes, or hardcode description: no.
FEATURE: Users can now provide one or several "aliases" for an author, just as they can for a category. For example, to make FeedWordPress treat posts by "Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger" and "Pope Benedict XVI" as by the same author, edit the user profile for Pope Benedict XVI and add a line like this to the "User profile" field:
a.k.a.: Joseph Cardinal RatzingerYou can add several aliases, each on a line by itself. You can also add any other text you like to the Profile without interfering with the aliases.
FEATURE: Users can now choose how to handle syndicated posts that are in unfamiliar categories or by unfamiliar authors (i.e., categories or authors whose names are not yet in the WordPress database). By default, FeedWordPress will (as before) create a new category (or new author) and use it for the current post and any future posts. This behavior can be changed, either for all feeds or for one or another particular feed.
There are now three different options for an unfamiliar author: (1) FeedWordPress can create a new author account and attribute the syndicated post to the new account; (2) FeedWordPress can attribute the post to an author if the author's name is familiar, and to a default author (currently, this means the Site Administrator account) if it is not; (3) FeedWordPress can drop posts by unfamiliar authors and syndicate only posts by authors who are already in the database.
There are, similarly, two different options for an unfamiliar category: (1) FeedWordPress can create new categories and place the syndicated post in them; (2) FeedWordPress can drop the unfamiliar categories and place syndicated posts only in categories that it is already familiar with. In addition, FeedWordPress 0.95 lets you choose whether posts that are in no familiar categories should be syndicated (and placed in the default category for the blog) or simply dropped.
You can set the default behavior for both authors and categories using the settings in Options --> Syndication. You can also set different behavior for specific feeds by adding the unfamiliar author and / or unfamiliar categories settings to the Link Notes section of a feed:
unfamiliar author: (create|default|filter)
unfamiliar categories: (create|default|filter)A setting of unfamiliar author: create will make FeedWordPress create new authors to match unfamiliar author names for this feed alone. A setting of unfamiliar author: default will make it assign posts from unfamiliar authors to the default user account. A setting of unfamiliar author: filter will cause all posts (from this feed alone) to be dropped unless they are by an author already listed in the database. Similiarly, unfamiliar categories: create will make FeedWordPress create new categories to match unfamiliar category names for this feed alone; unfamiliar categories: default will cause it to drop any unfamiliar category names; and unfamiliar categories: filter will cause it to both drop any unfamiliar category names and to only syndicate posts that are placed in one or more familiar categories.
These two new features allow users to do some coarse-grained filtering without having to write a PHP filter. Specifically, they offer an easy way for you to filter feeds by category or by author. Suppose, for example, that you only wanted to syndicate posts that your contributors place in the "Llamas" category. You could do so by setting up your installation of WordPress so that the only category in the database is "Llamas," and then use Options --> Syndication to set "Unfamiliar categories" to "don't create new categories and don't syndicate posts unless they match at least one familiar category". Now, when you update, only posts in the "Llamas" category will be syndicated by FeedWordPress.
Similarly, if you wanted to filter one particular feed so that only posts by (for example) the author "Earl J. Llama" were syndicated to your site, you could do so by creating a user account for Earl J. Llama, then adding the following line to the settings for the feed in Link Notes:
unfamiliar author: filterThis will cause any posts from this feed that are not authored by Earl J. Llama to be discarded, and only the posts by Earl J. Llama will be syndicated. (If the setting is used on one specific feed, it will not affect how posts from other feeds are syndicated.)
== License ==
The FeedWordPress plugin is copyright © 2005-2021 by Charles Johnson. It uses code derived or translated from:
according to the terms of the GNU General Public License.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.