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FeedWordPress / 0.96
FeedWordPress v0.96
trunk 0.8 0.9 0.91 0.95 0.96 0.97 0.98 0.981 0.99 0.991 0.992 0.993 2008.1030 2008.1101 2008.1105 2008.1214 2009.0612 2009.0613 2009.0618 2009.0707 2009.1111 2009.1112 2010.0127 2010.0528 All 65 releases
← All changes | ChangeLog.text +3 -808 2009.06120.96 View file →
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1 -FeedWordPress Change Log
2 -========================
1 +Change Log
2 +==========
3 3
4 -Changes from 2008.1214 to 2009.0612
5 -* WORDPRESS 2.8 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress 2009.0612 has been tested for
6 - compatibility with the recent version 2.8 release of WordPress.
7 -
8 -* INTERFACE RESTRUCTURING: In order to avoid settings posts from becoming
9 - too crowded, and to modularize and better organize the user interface,
10 - new "Posts" and "Categories & Tags" subpages have been created under the
11 - "Syndication" menu. "Posts" controls settings for individal syndicated
12 - posts (such as publication status, comment and ping status, whether or
13 - not to use the original location of the post as the permalink, whether
14 - or not to expose posts to formatting filters, and so on). "Categories &
15 - Tags" controls settings for assigning new syndicated posts to categories
16 - and tags, such as categories or tags to apply to all syndicated posts,
17 - and how to handle categories that do not yet exist in the WordPress
18 - database. These subpages, like the Authors subpage, handle settings for
19 - the global default level and for individual syndicated feeds.
20 -
21 - Corresponding to these new subpages, the old Syndication Settings and
22 - Feed Settings subpages have been cleaned up and simplified, and now only
23 - link to the appropriate subpages for options that can be set in the
24 - Posts, Authors, or Categories & Tags subpages.
25 -
26 -* FEATURE: ADD CUSTOM SETTINGS TO EACH SYNDICATED POST: FeedWordPress has
27 - long had an interface for creating custom settings for each syndicated
28 - *feed* which could be retrieved in templates using the `get_feed_meta()`
29 - template function. But it had no feature for adding custom fields to
30 - each individual syndicated *post*. In response to requests from users, I
31 - have added the ability to apply custom fields to each individual
32 - syndicated post, using the new Syndication --> Posts subpage. You can
33 - set up custom fields to be applied to every syndicated post, or custom
34 - fields to be applied to syndicated posts from a particular feed.
35 -
36 -* FEATURE: MAGPIERSS VERSION CHECK AND UPGRADE: FeedWordPress will attempt
37 - to determine whether or not you are using the upgraded version of
38 - MagpieRSS that comes packaged with FeedWordPress. If not, it will throw
39 - an error on admin pages, and, if you are a site administrator, it will
40 - give you the option to ignore the error message, or to attempt an
41 - automatic upgrade (using a native file copy). If the file copy fails,
42 - FeedWordPress will offer some guidance on how to perform the upgrade
43 - manually.
44 -
45 -* BLANK POSTS PROBLEM NO LONGER OCCURS WITH OLD & BUSTED MAGPIERSS: Due
46 - to the fact that I relied on a content normalization that occurs in my
47 - upgraded version of MagpieRSS, but not in the old & busted version of
48 - MagpieRSS that ships with WordPress, until this version, if you tried to
49 - syndicate an Atom feed without having performed the (*strongly
50 - recommended*) MagpieRSS upgrade, all of the posts would come up with
51 - completely blank contents. That's not because MagpieRSS couldn't read
52 - the data, but rather because the new Magpie version puts that data in a
53 - location where the old version doesn't, and I was only looking in that
54 - newer location. Now it checks for both, meaning that posts will continue
55 - to display their contents even if you don't upgrade MagpieRSS. (But you
56 - **really should** upgrade it, anyway.)
57 -
58 -* BUGFIX: RELATIVE URI RESOLUTION FOR POST CONTENT RESTORED. Some time
59 - back, I added support for resolving relative URIs against xml:base on
60 - feeds that support it to the MagpieRSS upgrade in FeedWordPress. Then I
61 - took out code that did the same thing from the main FeedWordPress code.
62 - Of course, the problem is that some people, even though it is clearly
63 - stupid or evil to do so, still include relative URIs for images or links
64 - in posts on feed formats that do *not* adequately support xml:base
65 - (notably, RSS 2.0 feeds). In response to a user request, I have added
66 - this functionality back in, so that MagpieRSS will resolve any relative
67 - URIs that it knows how to resolve using xml:base, and then FeedWordPress
68 - will attempt to resolve any relative URIs that are left over afterwards.
69 -
70 -* BUGFIX: INTERFACE OPTION FOR SETTING SYNDICATED POST PUBLICATION STATUS
71 - ON A FEED-BY-FEED BASIS HAS BEEN RESTORED: Due to a version-checking
72 - bug, users of WordPress 2.7.x lost an option from the "Edit a syndicated
73 - feed" interface which allowed them to determine whether newly syndicated
74 - posts should be published immediately, held as "Pending Review," saved
75 - as drafts, or saved as private posts. (The option to change this
76 - setting globally remained in place, but users could no longer set it on
77 - a feed-by-feed basis.) The version-checking bug has been fixed, and the
78 - option has been restored.
79 -
80 -* BUGFIX: "ARE YOU SURE?" FATAL ERROR ELIMINATED AND SECURITY IMPROVED:
81 - Under certain circumstances (for example, when users have configured
82 - their browser or proxy not to send HTTP Referer headers, for privacy or
83 - other reasons), many features in the FeedWordPress administrative
84 - interface (such as adding new feeds or changing settings) would hit a
85 - fatal error, displaying only a cryptic message reading "Are you sure?"
86 - and a blank page following it. This problem has been eliminated by
87 - taking advantage of WordPress's nonce functions, which allow the
88 - security check which ran into this error to work properly even without
89 - receiving an HTTP Referer header. (N.B.: WordPress's nonce functions
90 - were first introduced in WordPress 2.0.3. If you're using FeedWordPress
91 - with an older version of WordPress, there's no fix for this problem:
92 - you'll just need to turn Referer headers back on. Sorry.)
93 -
94 -* BUGFIX: MANUALLY-ALTERED POST STATUS, COMMENT STATUS, AND PING STATUS NO
95 - LONGER REVERTED BY POST UPDATES: If you manually altered the post status,
96 - comment status, or ping status of a syndicated post from what it was set
97 - to when first syndicated -- for example, if you had a feed that was set
98 - to bring in new posts as "Pending Review," and you then marked some of
99 - the pending posts as "Published" and others as "Unpublished" -- then
100 - in previous versions of FeedWordPress, these manual changes to the
101 - status would be lost -- so that, for example, your Published or Unpublished
102 - articles would revert to Pending Review -- if the source feed made any
103 - upates to the item. This could make the Pending Review feature both
104 - unreliable and also extremely frustrating to work with. The good news is
105 - that this bug has since been fixed: if you manually update the status
106 - of a post, it will no longer be reverted if or when the post is updated.
107 -
108 -* BUGFIX: OCCASIONAL FATAL ERROR ON UPDATE ELIMINATED: Under certain
109 - limited conditions (specifically, when both the title and the content of
110 - a post to be updated are empty), an attempt to update the post would
111 - result in a fatal error. This has been fixed.
112 -
113 -* INTERFACE: "CONFIGURE SETTINGS" CONVENIENCE LINK ADDED TO CONFIRMATION
114 - MESSAGE WHEN A NEW FEED IS ADDED: When you add a new subscription to
115 - FeedWordPress, the message box that appears to confirm it now includes a
116 - handy link to the feed's settings subpage, so that you can quickly set
117 - up any special settings you may want to set up for the new feed, without
118 - having to hunt through the list of all your other subscriptions to pick
119 - out the new one.
120 -
121 -* INTERFACE: SIMPLIFYING AND CLARIFYING AUTOMATIC UPDATES SETTINGS. I have
122 - removed an interval setting for the cronless automatic updates which has
123 - confused many FeedWordPress users. In past versions of FWP, when you
124 - turned on automatic updates, you would be presented with a time interval
125 - setting which controlled how often FeedWordPress would check for feeds
126 - ready to be polled for updates. (That is, it DID NOT control how often
127 - feeds *would be polled*; it controlled how often FeedWordPress would
128 - *check* for feeds that *had become ready to poll*. The schedule on which
129 - feeds became ready for polling was still controlled either by requests
130 - encoded in elements within the feed itself, or else according to an
131 - internal calculation within FeedWordPress, averaging out to about 1 hour,
132 - if the feed did not include any scheduling request elements.) Since many
133 - users very often (and understandably) confused the purpose of this
134 - setting, and since the setting is for a feature that's actually very
135 - unlikely to require any manual control by the user, I have removed the
136 - setting; FeedWordPress now simply uses the default value of checking for
137 - feeds to poll every 10 minutes.
138 -
139 -* FEEDFINDER PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT: FeedWordPress's FeedFinder class
140 - now uses `array_unique()` to make sure that it doesn't waste time
141 - repeatedly iterating over and polling the same URI. Props to Camilo
142 - (<http://projects.radgeek.com/2008/12/14/feedwordpress-20081214/#comment-20090122160414>).
143 -
144 -Changes from 2008.1105 to 2008.1214
145 -
146 -* WORDPRESS 2.7 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress has been tested for
147 - compatibility with the newly released WordPress 2.7. WordPress 2.7 has
148 - deprecated the Snoopy library for HTTP requests, which caused a fatal
149 - error for users who had not installed the MagpieRSS upgrade (or whose
150 - installation of the MagpieRSS upgrade was overwritten by a recent update
151 - of WordPress). FeedWordPress now handles things gracefully when Snoopy
152 - is not immediately available.
153 -
154 -* INTERFACE SPIFFED UP: Interface elements have been updated so that
155 - FeedWordPress's management interface fits in more naturally with the
156 - WordPress 2.7 interface (including a new logo and a number of small
157 - interface tweaks).
158 -
159 -* BUG WITH TAGS FOR SYNDICATED ARTICLES FIXED: Several users encountered a
160 - bug with the option to add tags to all syndicated posts under
161 - Syndication --> Settings -- if you told FeedWordPress to add more than
162 - one tag to all syndicated posts, instead of doing so correctly, it would
163 - add a *single* tag instead, whose name was composed of the names of all
164 - the tags you asked it to add. This bug was the result of nothing more
165 - dignified than a typographical error on my part. It has now been fixed.
166 -
167 -* MORE INFORMATION AVAILABLE WHEN FEEDWORDPRESS CAN'T FIND A FEED: When
168 - you enter a URL for a new syndication source, FeedWordPress uses a
169 - simple feed-finding algorithm (originally based on Mark Pilgrim's
170 - Universal Feed Finder) to try to determine whether the URL is the URL
171 - for a feed, or, if the URL points to an ordinary website rather than to
172 - a feed, whether there is a feed for that website. All well and good, but
173 - if FeedWordPress failed to find a feed, for whatever reason, it would
174 - typically return nothing more than a nasty little note to the effect of
175 - "no feed found," without any explanation of what went wrong.
176 - FeedWordPress now keeps track of error conditions from the HTTP
177 - requests that it uses in the course of looking for the feed, and so may
178 - be able to give you a bit more information about the nature of the
179 - problem if something goes wrong.
180 -
181 -
182 -Changes from 2008.1101 to 2008.1105
183 -
184 -* INTERFACE RESTRUCTURING AND SYNDICATION --> AUTHORS PAGE: As a first
185 - step towards modularizing and better organizing the user interface, a
186 - new "Authors" subpage has been created under the Syndication menu, which
187 - controls settings for syndicated authors, both at the global default
188 - level and at level of individual syndicated feeds.
189 -
190 -* BUG RELATED TO THE ATTRIBUTION OF POSTS TO THE WRONG AUTHOR FIXED: Some
191 - users encountered an issue in which posts by different authors on
192 - different blogs -- especially blogs generated by Blogger -- were
193 - mistakenly attributed to a single author. The problem was caused by the
194 - way in which FeedWordPress matches syndicated authors to user accounts
195 - in the WordPress database: normally, if two feeds each list an author
196 - with the same e-mail address, they are counted as being the same person.
197 - Normally this works well, but it creates an issue in cases where
198 - blogging software assigns a single anonymous e-mail address to users who
199 - do not want their real e-mail address published. This is, for example,
200 - what Blogger does (by giving all users a default e-mail address of
201 - <noreply@blogger.com> if they don't want their own e-mail address
202 - listed). FeedWordPress now allows the user to correct for this problem
203 - with a couple of new settings under **Syndication --> Authors**, which
204 - allow users to turn off e-mail based author matching for particular
205 - addresses, or, if desired, to turn it off entirely. By default, e-mail
206 - based author matching is still turned on, but disabled for a list of
207 - known generic e-mail addresses. Right now, the "list" consists entirely
208 - of <noreply@blogger.com>; if you know other addresses that should be
209 - added, please [contact me](http://radgeek.com/contact) to let me know.
210 -
211 - Please note that if you have already encountered this issue on your
212 - blog, upgrading FeedWordPress will prevent it from re-occurring in the
213 - future, but you still need to do two other things to fix the existing
214 - problem on your blog.
215 -
216 - First, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to
217 - change the existing author mapping rules to re-map a a syndicated
218 - author's name to the proper target account. Go to **Syndication -->
219 - Authors**, select the feed you want to change from the drop-down list,
220 - and then change the settings under the "Syndicated Authors" section.
221 - (You will probably need to select "will be assigned to a new user..." to
222 - create a new user account with the appropriate name.)
223 -
224 - Second, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to
225 - re-assign already-syndicated posts that were mis-attributed to the
226 - correct author. You can do that from **Syndication --> Authors** by
227 - using the author re-assignment feature, described below.
228 -
229 -* AUTHOR RE-ASSIGNMENT FOR A PARTICULAR FEED: The author settings page
230 - for each syndicated feed, under **Syndication --> Authors**, now
231 - includes an section titled "Fixing mis-matched authors," which provides
232 - an interface for re-assigning or deleting all posts attributed to a
233 - particular author on a particular feed.
234 -
235 -* SUPPORT FOR `<atom:source>` ELEMENT IN SYNDICATED FEEDS: Some feeds
236 - (for example, those produced by FeedWordPress) aggregate content from
237 - several different sources, and include information about the original
238 - source of the post in an `<atom:source>` element. A new setting under
239 - **Syndication --> Options** allows you to control what FeedWordPress
240 - will report as the source of posts syndicated from aggregator feeds in
241 - your templates and feeds: you can have FeedWordPress report that the
242 - source of a post is the aggregator feed itself, or you can have it
243 - report that the source of a post is the original source that the
244 - aggregator originally syndicated the post from.
245 -
246 - By default, FeedWordPress will report the aggregator, not the original
247 - source, as the source of a syndicated item.
248 -
249 -* LOAD BALANCING AND TIME LIMITING FEATURES FOR UPDATES: Some users have
250 - encountered issues due to running up against PHP execution time limits
251 - during the process of updating large syndicated feeds, or a very large
252 - set of syndicated feeds. FeedWordPress now has a feature that allows you
253 - to limit the total amount of time spent updating a feed, through the
254 - "Time limit on updates" setting under **Syndication --> Options**. By
255 - turning on this setting and adjusting the time limit to a low enough
256 - figure to avoid your PHP installation's time-out setting. (PHP execution
257 - time limits are usually in the vicinity of 30 seconds, so an update
258 - time limit of 25 seconds or so should provide plenty of time for updates
259 - while allowing a cushion of time for other, non-update-related functions
260 - to do their work.)
261 -
262 - If feed updates are interrupted by the time limit, FeedWordPress uses
263 - some simple load balancing features to make sure that updates to other
264 - feeds will not be blocked by the time-hogging feed, and will also make
265 - sure that when the interrupted update is resumed, FeedWordPress will
266 - skip ahead to resume processing items at the point at which it was
267 - interrupted last time, so that posts further down in the feed will
268 - eventually get processed, and not get blocked by the amount of time it
269 - takes to process the items higher up in the feed.
270 -
271 -* `guid` INDEX CREATION BUTTON: FeedWordPress frequently issues queries on
272 - the `guid` column of the WordPress posts database (since it uses post
273 - guid URIs to keep track of which posts it has syndicated). In very large
274 - FeedWordPress installations, you can often significantly improve
275 - performance by creating a database index on the `guid` column, but
276 - normally you would need to poke around with MySQL or a tool like
277 - phpMyAdmin to do this. FeedWordPress can now save you the trouble: to
278 - create an index on the `guid` column, just go to
279 - **Syndication --> Options**, and mash the button at the bottom of the
280 - "Back End" section.
281 -
282 -Changes from 2008.1030 to 2008.1101
283 -
284 -* INTERFACE BUG THAT PREVENTED ADDING NEW SITES FIXED: The UI reforms in
285 - FWP 2008.1030 unintentionally introduced a bug that prevents clean
286 - installations of FeedWordPress from providing an input box for adding
287 - new feeds to the list of syndicated feeds. This bug has been fixed.
288 -
289 -Changes from 0.993 to 2008.1030
290 -
291 -* WORDPRESS 2.6 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with
292 - WordPress 2.6, and should work more or less seamlessly with the new post
293 - revision system. A bug which caused multiple new revisions to be created
294 - for posts on certain feeds, regardless of whether or not the item had
295 - been updated, has been fixed.
296 -
297 -* INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: The user interface has been substantially
298 - restyled to fit in better with the visual style of WordPress 2.5 and
299 - 2.6.
300 -
301 -* YOUTUBE BUG FIXED: POSTS SYNDICATED THROUGH AN AUTOMATIC UPDATE ARE NO
302 - LONGER STRIPPED OF `<OBJECT>` TAGS AND CERTAIN OTHER HTML ELEMENTS: Due
303 - to the way that some versions of WordPress process posts that are
304 - inserted into the database when no user is logged in, many users
305 - experienced an issue where YouTube videos and other content using the
306 - HTML `<object>` tag would be stripped out of posts that were syndicated
307 - during an automatic update. (Posts that were syndicated through manual
308 - updates from within the WordPress Dashboard were not affected, because
309 - the issue does not arise when an update is executed under a logged-in
310 - administrator's credentials.) This bug has now been fixed; YouTube
311 - videos and other content using `<object>` tags should now appear
312 - properly in syndicated posts, regardless of the way in which the post
313 - was syndicated.
314 -
315 -* AJAX BUGS FIXED: Bugs which blocked the normal operation of WordPress
316 - 2.5's AJAX interface elements when FeedWordPress was activated have been
317 - fixed.
318 -
319 -* TAG SUPPORT: A couple of features have been introduced to take advantage
320 - of the tagging features in WordPress 2.3.x, 2.5.x, and 2.6.x. Now, when
321 - unfamiliar categories are encountered for posts on a feed, you can
322 - choose for FeedWordPress (1) to drop the category; (2) to drop the
323 - category and to filter out any post that does not match at least one
324 - familiar category; (3) to create a new category with that name, or,
325 - now, you can also have FeedWordPress (4) create a new *tag* with that
326 - name. This option can be set site-wide under Syndication --> Options,
327 - or it can be set on a feed-by-feed basis in a feed's Edit screen.
328 -
329 - In addition, you can now set particular tags to apply to all incoming
330 - syndicated posts, under Syndication --> Options, or you can set tags
331 - to apply to all incoming syndicated posts from a particular feed in that
332 - feed's Edit screen.
333 -
334 -* FORMATTING FILTERS: There is a new option available under Syndication ->
335 - Options which allows users to choose whether or not to expose syndicated
336 - posts to being altered by formatting filters. By default, FeedWordPress
337 - has always protected syndicated posts (which are already in display-ready
338 - HTML when they are syndicated) from being reformatted by formatting
339 - filters. However, this approach means that certain plugins which depend
340 - on formatting filters (for example, to add "Share This" bars or relevant
341 - links to the end of a post) are blocked from working on any syndicated
342 - posts. If you want to use one of these plugins together with
343 - FeedWordPress, you can now do so by changing the "Formatting Filters"
344 - setting from "Protect" to "Expose."
345 -
346 -* `<atom:source>` ELEMENTS NOW INCLUDED IN ATOM FEED: Atom 1.0 provides
347 - a standard method for aggregators to indicate information about the original source of
348 - a syndicated post, using the `<atom:source>` element. FeedWordPress now
349 - introduces standard `<atom:source>` elements including the title, homepage, and
350 - feed URI of the source from which a syndicated post was syndicated. Cf.
351 - <http://www.atomenabled.org/developers/syndication/atom-format-spec.php#element.source>
352 -
353 -* MODULARIZATION OF CODE: The code for different elements of FeedWordPress
354 - has been broken out into several modules for easier inspection,
355 - documentation, and maintenance of the code.
356 -
357 -* VERSIONING SCHEME CHANGED: FeedWordPress's feature set has proven stable
358 - enough that it can now be removed from beta status; a good thing, since
359 - I was very quickly running out of version numbers to use. New releases
360 - of FeedWordPress will have version numbers based on the date of their
361 - release.
362 -
363 -Changes from 0.992 to 0.993
364 -
365 -* WORDPRESS 2.5.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible
366 - with WordPress 2.5.1.
367 -
368 -* WORDPRESS 2.5 INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: FeedWordPress's Dashboard
369 - interface has undergone several cosmetic changes that should help it
370 - integrate better with the WordPress Dashboard interface in WordPress
371 - version 2.5.x.
372 -
373 -* SYNDICATED POSTS CAN BE MARKED AS "PENDING REVIEW": WordPress 2.3 users
374 - can now take advantage of WordPress's new "Pending Review" features for
375 - incoming syndicated posts. Posts marked as "Pending Review" are not
376 - published immediately, but are marked as ready to be reviewed by an
377 - Administrator or Editor, who can then choose to publish the post or
378 - hold it back. If you want to review syndicated posts from a particular
379 - feed, or from all feeds, before they are posted, then use
380 - Syndication --> Syndicated Sites --> Edit or Syndication --> Options to
381 - change the settings for handling new posts.
382 -
383 -* AWARE OF NEW URI FOR del.icio.us FEEDS: Previous releases of
384 - FeedWordPress already automatically split del.icio.us tags up
385 - appropriately appropriately when generating categories. (del.icio.us
386 - feeds smoosh all the tags into a single `<dc:subject>` element,
387 - separated by spaces; FeedWordPress un-smooshes them into multiple
388 - categories by separating them at whitespace.) Unfortunately, del.icio.us
389 - recently broke the existing behavior by changing host names for their
390 - feeds from del.icio.us to feeds.delicious.com. Version 0.993 accounts
391 - for the new host name and un-breaks the tag splitting.
392 -
393 -Changes from 0.991 to 0.992
394 -* AUTHOR RE-MAPPING: FeedWordPress now offers considerable control over
395 - how author names on a feed are translated into usernames within the
396 - WordPress database. When a post by an unrecognized author comes in,
397 - Administrators can now specify any username as the default username to
398 - assign the post to by setting the option in Syndication --> Options
399 - (formerly FeedWordPress only allowed you to assign such posts to user
400 - #1, the site administrator). Administrators can also create re-mapping
401 - rules for particular feeds (under Syndication --> Syndicated Sites -->
402 - Edit), so that (for example) any posts attributed to "Administrator"
403 - on the feed <http://praxeology.net/blog/feed/> will be assigned to
404 - a user named "Roderick T. Long," rather than a user named
405 - "Administrator." These settings also allow administrators to filter out
406 - posts by particular users, and to control what will happen when
407 - FeedWordPress encounters a post by an unrecognized user on that
408 - particular feed.
409 -
410 -* BUG RELATED TO URIS CONTAINING AMPERSAND CHARACTERS FIXED: A bug in
411 - WordPress 2.x's handling of URIs in Blogroll links created problems for
412 - updating any feeds whose URIs included an ampersand character, such as
413 - Google News RSS feeds and other feeds that have multiple parameters
414 - passed through HTTP GET. If you experienced this bug, the most likely
415 - effect was that FeedWordPress simply would not import new posts from a
416 - feed when instructred to do so, returning a "0 new posts" response. In
417 - other cases, it might lead to unpredictable results from feed updates,
418 - such as importing posts which were not contained in the feed being
419 - syndicated, but which did appear elsewhere on the same website. This bug
420 - has, hopefully, been resolved, by correcting for the bug in WordPress.
421 -
422 -Changes from 0.99 to 0.991
423 -* WORDPRESS MU COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with
424 - recent releases of WordPress MU. Once FeedWordPress is made available
425 - as a plugin, each individual blog can choose to activate FeedWordPress
426 - and syndicate content from its own set of contributors.
427 -
428 -* DISPLAY OF MAGPIE WARNINGS: A number of MagpieRSS warnings or error
429 - messages that were displayed when performing an automatic update are
430 - no longer displayed, unless debugging parameters have been explicitly
431 - enabled.
432 -
433 -* BUG RELATED TO INTERNATIONAL CHARACTERS IN AUTHOR NAMES FIXED: Due to a
434 - subtle incompatability between the way that FeedWordPress generated new
435 - user information, and the way that WordPress 2.0 and later added new
436 - authors to the database, FeedWordPress might end up creating duplicate
437 - authors, or throwing a critical error message, when it encountered
438 - authors whose names included international characters. This
439 - incompatability has now been fixed; hopefully, authors with
440 - international characters in their names should now be handled properly.
441 -
442 -* `<media:content>` BUG IN MAGPIERSS FIXED: A bug in MagpieRSS's handling
443 - of namespaced elements has been fixed. Among other things, this bug
444 - caused items containing a Yahoo MediaRSS `<media:content>` element (such
445 - as many of the feeds produced by wordpress.com) to be represented
446 - incorrectly, with only a capital "A" where the content of the post
447 - should have been. Feeds containing `<media:content>` elements should now
448 - be syndicated correctly.
449 -
450 -* update_feedwordpress PARAMETER: You can now use an HTTP GET parameter
451 - (`update_feedwordpress=1`) to request that FeedWordPress poll its feeds
452 - for updates. When used together with a crontab or other means of
453 - scheduling tasks, this means that you can keep your blog automatically
454 - updated on a regular schedule, even if you do not choose to use the
455 - cron-less automatic updates option.
456 -
457 -* Some minor interface-related bugs were also fixed.
458 -
459 -
460 -Changes from 0.981 to 0.99
461 -Version 0.99 adds several significant new features, fixes some bugs, and
462 -provides compatability with WordPress 2.2.x and 2.3.x.
463 -
464 -* WORDPRESS 2.2 AND 2.3 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be
465 - compatible with WordPress version 2.2 and the upcoming WordPress
466 - version 2.3. In particular, it has been tested extensively against
467 - WordPress 2.2.3 and WordPress 2.3 Release Candidate 1.
468 -
469 -* AUTOMATIC UPDATES WITHOUT CRON: FeedWordPress now allows you to
470 - automatically schedule checks for new posts without using external task
471 - scheduling tools such as cron. In order to enable automatic updates, go
472 - to **Syndication --> Options** and set "Check for new posts" to
473 - "automatically." For details, see "Automatic Feed Updates" in
474 - README.text.
475 -
476 - An important side-effect of the changes to the update system is that if
477 - you were previously using the cron job and the `update-feeds.php` script
478 - to schedule updates, you need to change your cron set-up. The old
479 - `update-feeds.php` script no longer exists. Instead, if you wish to use
480 - a cron job to guarantee updates on a particular schedule, you should
481 - have the cron job fetch the front page of your blog (for example, by
482 - using `curl http://www.zyx.com/blog/ > /dev/null`) instead of activating
483 - the `update-feeds.php` script. If automatic updates have been enabled,
484 - fetching the front page will automatically trigger the update process.
485 -
486 -* INTERFACE REORGANIZATION: All FeedWordPress functions are now located
487 - under a top-level "Syndication" menu in the WordPress Dashboard. To
488 - manage the list of syndicated sites, manually check for new posts on
489 - one or more feeds, or syndicate a new site, you should use the main page
490 - under **Syndication**. To change global settings for FeedWordPress,
491 - you should use **Syndication --> Options**.
492 -
493 -* FILE STRUCTURE REORGANIZATION: Due to a combination of changing styles
494 - for FeedWordPress plugins and lingering bugs in the FeedWordPress admin
495 - menu code, the code for FeedWordPress is now contained in two different
496 - PHP files, which should be installed together in a subdirectory of your
497 - plugins directory named `feedwordpress`. (See README.text for
498 - installation and upgrade instructions relating to the change.)
499 -
500 -* MULTIPLE CATEGORIES SETTING: Some feeds use non-standard methods to
501 - indicate multiple categories within a single category element. (The most
502 - popular site to do this is del.icio.us, which separates tags with a
503 - space.) FeedWordPress now allows you to set an optional setting, for any
504 - feed which does this, indicating the character or characters used to
505 - divide multiple categories, using a Perl-compatible regular expression.
506 - (In the case of del.icio.us feeds, FeedWordPress will automatically use
507 - \s for the pattern without your having to do any further configuration.)
508 - To turn this setting on, simply use the "Edit" link for the feed that
509 - you want to turn it on for.
510 -
511 -* REGULAR EXPRESSION BUG FIXED: Eliminated a minor bug in the regular
512 - expressions for e-mail addresses (used in parsing RSS `author`
513 - elements), which could produce unsightly error messages for some users
514 - parsing RSS 2.0 feeds.
515 -
516 -* DATE / UPDATE BUG FIXED: A bug in date handling was eliminated that may
517 - have caused problems if any of (1) WordPress, or (2) PHP, or (3) your
518 - web server, or (4) your MySQL server, has been set to use a different
519 - time zone from the one that any of the others is set to use. If
520 - FeedWordPress has not been properly updating updated posts, or has been
521 - updating posts when there shouldn't be any changes for the update, this
522 - release may solve that problem.
523 -
524 -* GOOGLE READER BUGS FIXED: A couple of bugs that made it difficult for
525 - FeedWordPress to interact with Google Reader public feeds have been
526 - fixed. Firstly, if you encountered an error message reading "There was a
527 - problem adding the newsfeed. [SQL: ]" when you tried to add the feed,
528 - the cause of this error has been fixed. Secondly, if you succeeded in
529 - getting FeedWordPress to check a Google Reader feed, only to find that
530 - the title of posts had junk squashed on to the end of them, that bug
531 - has been fixed too. To fix this bug, you must install the newest version
532 - of the optional MagpieRSS upgrade.
533 -
534 -* FILTER PARAMETERS: Due to an old, old bug in WordPress 1.5.0 (which was
535 - what was available back when I first wrote the filter interface),
536 - FeedWordPress has traditionally only passed one parameter to
537 - syndicated_item and syndicated_post filters functions -- an array
538 - containing either the Magpie representation of a syndicated item from
539 - the feed, or the database representation of a post about to be inserted
540 - into the WordPress database. If you needed information about the feed
541 - that the item came from, this was accessible only through a pair of
542 - global variables, $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta.
543 -
544 - Since it's been a pretty long time since WordPress 1.5.0 was in
545 - widespread usage, I have gone ahead and added an optional second
546 - parameter to the invocation of the syndicated_item and syndicated_post
547 - filters. If you have written a filter for FeedWordPress that uses either
548 - of these hooks, you can now register that filter to accept 2 parameters.
549 - If you do so, the second parameter will be a SyndicatedPost object,
550 - which, among other things, allows you to access information about the
551 - feed from which an item is syndicated using the $post->feed and the
552 - $post->feedmeta elements (where $post is the name of the second
553 - parameter).
554 -
555 - NOTE THAT THE OLD GLOBAL VARIABLES ARE STILL AVAILABLE, for the time
556 - being at least, so existing filters will not break with the upgrade.
557 - They should be considered deprecated, however, and may be eliminated in
558 - the future.
559 -
560 -* FILTER CHANGE / BUGFIX: the array that is passed as the first argument
561 - syndicated_post filters no longer is no longer backslash-escaped for
562 - MySQL when filters are called. This was originally a bug, or an
563 - oversight; the contents of the array should only be escaped for the
564 - database *after* they have gone through all filters. IF YOU HAVE WRITTEN
565 - ANY syndicated_post FILTERS THAT PRESUME THE OLD BEHAVIOR OF PASSING IN
566 - STRINGS THAT ARE ALREADY BACKSLASH-ESCAPED, UPDATE YOUR FILTERS
567 - ACCORDINGLY.
568 -
569 -* OTHER MINOR BUGFIXES AND INTERNAL CHANGES: The internal architecture of
570 - FeedWordPress has been significantly changed to make the code more
571 - modular and clean; hopefully this should help reduce the number of
572 - compatibility updates that are needed, and make them easier and quicker
573 - when they are needed.
574 -
575 -Changes from 0.98 to 0.981
576 -Version 0.981 is a narrowly targeted bugfix and compatibility release, whose
577 -main purpose is to resolve a major outstanding problem: the incompatibility
578 -between version 0.98 of WordPress and the recently released WordPress 2.1.
579 -
580 -* WORDPRESS 2.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress is now compatible with
581 - WordPress 2.1, as well as retaining its existing support for WordPress
582 - 2.0 and 1.5. Incompatibilities that resulted in database warnings, fatal
583 - errors, and which prevented FeedWordPress from syndicating new posts,
584 - have been eliminated.
585 -
586 -* RSS-FUNCTIONS.PHP RENAMED TO RSS.PHP: if you use the upgraded MagpieRSS
587 - replacement that's included with FeedWordPress, be sure to note that
588 - there are now *two* files to upload from the `OPTIONAL/wp-includes`
589 - subdirectory in order to carry out the upgrade: rss-functions.php and
590 - rss.php. **It is necessary to upload both files**, due to a change in
591 - the file naming scheme in WordPress 2.1, and it is necessary to do so
592 - whether you are using WordPress 2.1 or not. If you only upload the
593 - `rss-functions.php` file as in previous installations you will not have
594 - a working copy of MagpieRSS; the rss.php file contains the actual code.
595 -
596 -* DATE BUG AFFECTING SOME PHP INSTALLATIONS RESOLVED: due to a subtle bug
597 - in parse_w3cdtf(), some installations of PHP encountered problems with
598 - FeedWordPress's attempt to date posts, which would cause some new posts
599 - on Atom feeds to be dated as if they had apppeared in 1969 or 1970
600 - (thus, effectively, never appearing on front page at all). This bug in
601 - the date handling should now be fixed.
602 -
603 -* PHP <?=...?> SHORT FORM ELIMINATED: some installations of PHP do not
604 - allow the <?=...?> short form for printing PHP values, which was used
605 - extensively in the FeedWordPress interface code. Since this could cause
606 - fatal errors for users with the wrong installation of PHP, the short
607 - form has been replaced with full PHP echo statements, and is no longer
608 - used in FeedWordPress.
609 -
610 -* BETTER USER INTERFACE INTEGRATION WITH WORDPRESS 2.x: Some minor changes
611 - have been made to help the FeedWordPress interface pages blend in better
612 - with the user interface when running under WordPress 2.x.
613 -
614 -* GLOBAL CATEGORIES BUG RESOLVED: a bug that prevented some users from
615 - setting one or more categories to apply to syndicated posts from all
616 - feeds (using the checkbox interface under Options --> Syndication) has
617 - been resolved.
618 -
619 -Changes from 0.97 to 0.98
620 -
621 -* WORDPRESS 2.0 COMPATIBILITY: This is a narrowly-targeted release to
622 - solve a major outstanding problem. FeedWordPress is now compatible with
623 - both WordPress 1.5 and WordPress 2.0. Incompatibilities that caused
624 - fatal SQL errors, and a more subtle bug with off-kilter counts of posts
625 - under a given category, have been resolved. FeedWordPress tests for
626 - database schema using the global $wp_db_version variable (if null, then
627 - we presume that we're dealing with WordPress 1.5).
628 -
629 - NOTE: I have **not** fully tested FeedWordPress with WordPress 2.0.
630 - Further testing may reveal more bugs. However, you should now be able
631 - to get at least basic FeedWordPress functionality up and running.
632 -
633 -* AUTHOR MATCHING: FeedWordPress tests several fields to see if it can
634 - identify the author of the post as a user already in the WordPress user
635 - database. In previous versions, it tested the user login, the nickname,
636 - and tested for "aliases" listed in the Profile (see documentation). FWP
637 - now also matches authors on the basis of e-mail address (*if* an e-mail
638 - address is present). This is particularly helpful for formats such as
639 - RSS 2.0, in which authors are primarily identified by e-mail addresses.
640 -
641 -Changes from 0.96 to 0.97
642 -
643 -* INSTALLATION PROCEDURE: Some of the changes between 0.96 and 0.97
644 - require upgrades to the meta-data stored by FeedWordPress to work
645 - properly. Thus, if you are upgrading from 0.96 or earlier to 0.97, most
646 - FeedWordPress operations (including updates and template functions)
647 - WILL BE DISABLED until you run the upgrade procedure. Fortunately,
648 - running the upgrade procedure is easy: just go to either Options -->
649 - Syndication or Links --> Syndicated in the WordPress Dashboard and press
650 - the button.
651 -
652 -* FEED FORMAT SUPPORT: Support has been added for the Atom 1.0 IETF
653 - standard. Several other elements are also newly supported
654 - (dcterms:created, dcterms:issued, dcterms:modified, dc:identifier,
655 - proper support for the RSS 2.0 guid element, the RSS 2.0 author element,
656 - the use of Atom author or Dublin Core dc:creator constructs at the feed
657 - level to identify the author of individual items, etc.)
658 -
659 - N.B.: full support of several Atom 1.0 features, such as categories
660 - and enclosures, requires you to install the optional rss-functions.php
661 - upgrade in your wp-includes directory.
662 -
663 -* BUG FIX: Running `update-feeds.php` from command line or crontab
664 - returned "I don't syndicate..." errors. It turns out that WordPress
665 - sometimes tramples on the internal PHP superglobals that I depended on
666 - to determine whether or not the script was being invoked from the
667 - command line. This has been fixed (the variables are now checked
668 - *before* WordPress can trample them). Note that `update-feeds.php` has
669 - been thoroughly overhauled anyway; see below for details.
670 -
671 -* BUG FIX: Duplicate categories or author names. Fixed two bugs that could
672 - create duplicate author and/or category names when the name contained
673 - either (a) certain international characters (causing a mismatch between
674 - MySQL and PHP's handling of lowercasing text), or (b) characters that
675 - have a special meaning in regular expressions (causing MySQL errors when
676 - looking for the author or category due to regexp syntax errors). These
677 - should now be fixed thanks to careful escaping of names that go into
678 - regular expressions and careful matching of lowercasing functions
679 - (comparing results from PHP only to other results from PHP, and results
680 - from MySQL only to other results from MySQL).
681 -
682 -* BUG FIX: Items dated December 31, 1969 should appear less often. The
683 - function for parsing W3C date-time format dates that ships with
684 - MagpieRSS can only correctly parse fully-specified dates with a
685 - fully-specified time, but valid W3C date-time format dates may omit the
686 - time, the day of the month, or even the month. Some feeds in the wild
687 - date their items with coarse-grained dates, so the optional
688 - `rss-functions.php` upgrade now includes a more flexible parse_w3cdtf()
689 - function that will work with both coarse-grained and fully-specified
690 - dates. (If parts of the date or the time are omitted, they are filled in
691 - with values based on the current time, so '2005-09-10' will be dated to
692 - the current time on that day; '2004' will be dated to this day and time
693 - one year ago.
694 -
695 - N.B.: This fix is only available in the optional `rss-functions.php`
696 - upgrade.
697 -
698 -* BUG FIX: Evil use of HTTP GET has been undone. The WordPress interface
699 - is riddled with inappropriate (non-idempotent) uses of HTTP GET queries
700 - (ordinary links that make the server do something with significant
701 - side-effects, such as deleting a post or a link from the database).
702 - FeedWordPress did some of this too, especially in places where it aped
703 - the WordPress interface (e.g. the "Delete" links in Links -->
704 - Syndicated). That's bad business, though. I've changed the interface so
705 - that all the examples of improper side-effects that I can find now
706 - require an HTTP POST to take effect. I think I got pretty much
707 - everything; if there's anything that I missed, let me know.
708 -
709 - Further reading: [Sam Ruby 2005-05-06: This Stuff Matters](http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2005/05/06/This-Stuff-Matters)
710 -
711 -* BUG FIX: Categories applied by `cats` setting should no longer prevent
712 - category-based filtering from working. In FeedWordPress, you can (1)
713 - apply certain categories to all syndicated posts, or all posts from
714 - a particular feed; and (2) filter out all posts that don't match one
715 - of the categories that are already in the WordPress database (allowing
716 - for simple category-based filtering; just load up WordPress with the
717 - categories you want to accept, and then tell FeedWordPress not to create
718 - new ones). However, the way that (1) and (2) were implemented meant that
719 - you couldn't effectively use them together; once you applied a known
720 - category to all syndicated posts from a particular feed, it meant that
721 - they'd have at least one familiar category (the category or categories
722 - you were applying), and that would get all posts past the filter no
723 - matter what categories they were originally from.
724 -
725 - Well, no longer. You can still apply categories to all syndicated posts
726 - (using either Syndication --> Options, or the feed-level settings under
727 - Links --> Syndicated). But these categories are not applied to the post
728 - until *after* it has already passed by the "familiar categories" filter.
729 - So now, if you want, you can do category filtering and *then* apply as
730 - many categories as you please to all and only posts that pass the filter.
731 -
732 -* BUG FIX: Other minor typos and HTML gaffes were fixed along the way.
733 -
734 -* PERFORMANCE: get_feed_meta() no longer hits the database for information
735 - on every call; it now caches link data in memory, so FeedWordPress only
736 - goes to the database once for each syndicated link. This may
737 - substantially improve performance if your database server resources
738 - are tight and your templates make a lot of use of custom settings from
739 - get_feed_meta().
740 -
741 -* API CHANGE: Link ID numbers, rather than RSS URIs, are now used to
742 - identify the feed from which a post is syndicated when you use template
743 - functions such as get_feed_meta(). The practical upshot of this is you
744 - can switch feeds, or change the feed address for a particular syndicated
745 - site, without breaking your templates for all the posts that were
746 - syndicated from the earlier URI.
747 -
748 -* API CHANGE: if you have plugins or templates that make use of the
749 - get_feed_meta() function or the $fwp_feedmeta global, note that the
750 - data formerly located under the `uri` and `name` fields is now located
751 - under the `link/uri` field and the `link/name` field, respectively. Note
752 - also that you can access the link ID number for any given feed under the
753 - global $fwp_feedmeta['link/id'] (in plugins) or
754 - get_feed_meta('link/id') (in a template in post contexts).
755 -
756 -* FEATURE: the settings for individual feeds can now be edited using a
757 - humane interface (where formerly you had to tweak key-value pairs in the
758 - Link Notes section). To edit settings for a feed, pick the feed that you
759 - want under Links --> Syndicated and click the Edit link.
760 -
761 -* FEATURE: The "Unsubscribe" button (formerly "Delete") in Links -->
762 - Syndicated now offers three options for unsubscribing from a feed: (1)
763 - turning off the subscription without deleting the feed data or affecting
764 - posts that were syndicated from the feed (this works by setting the Link
765 - for the feed as "invisible"); (2) deleting the feed data and all of the
766 - posts that were syndicated from the feed; or (3) deleting the feed data
767 - and *keeping* the posts that were syndicated from the feed
768 - setting the Link to "Invisible" (meaning that it will not be displayed
769 - in lists of the site links on the front page, and it won't be checked
770 - for updates; (2) deleting the Link and all of the posts that were
771 - syndicated from its feed; or (3) deleting the feed data but keeping the
772 - posts that were syndicated (which will henceforward be treated as if
773 - they were local rather than syndicated posts). (Note that (1) is usually
774 - the best option for aggregator sites, unless you want to clean up the
775 - results of an error or a test.)
776 -
777 -* FEATURE / BUG FIX: If you have been receiving mysterious "I don't
778 - syndicate...", or "(local) HTTP status code was not 200", or "(local)
779 - transport error - could not open socket", or "parse error - not well
780 - formed" errors, then this update may solve your problems, and if it does
781 - *not* solve them, it will at least make the reasons for the problems
782 - easier to understand. That's because I've overhauled the way that
783 - FeedWordPress goes about updating feeds.
784 -
785 - If you use the command-line PHP scripting method to run scheduled
786 - updates, then not much should change for you, except for fewer
787 - mysterious errors. If you have done updates by sending periodic HTTP
788 - requests to <http://your-blog.com/path/wp-content/update-feeds.php>,
789 - then the details have changed somewhat; mostly in such a way as to make
790 - things easier on you. See the README file or online documentation on
791 - Staying Current for the details.
792 -
793 -* FEATURE: FeedWordPress now features a more sophisticated system for
794 - timed updates. Instead of polling *every* subscribed feed for updates
795 - *each* time `update-feeds.php` is run, FeedWordPress now keeps track of
796 - the last time it polled each feed, and only polls them again after a
797 - certain period of time has passed. The amount of time is normally set
798 - randomly for each feed, in a period between 30 minutes and 2 hours (so
799 - 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
800 - directly by the feed, which brings us to ...
801 -
802 -* FEATURE: FeedWordPress now respects the settings in the `ttl` and
803 - Syndication Module RSS elements. Feeds with these elements set will not
804 - be polled any more frequently than they indicate with these feeds unless
805 - the user manually forces FeedWordPress to poll the feed (see Links -->
806 - Syndicated --> Edit settings).
807 -
808 4 Changes from 0.95 to 0.96
809 5 -------------------------
810 6
811 7 * FEATURE: support has been added for enclosures in RSS 2.0 and Atom
@@ -827,10 +11,9 @@
827 11 into the WordPress database so that (among other things) that post
828 12 will have its enclosure listed in your blog's RSS 2 newsfeed.
829 13
830 14 Note that enclosure support requires using the optional MagpieRSS
831 - upgrade (i.e., replacing your `wp-includes/rss-functions.php` with
832 - `OPTIONAL/wp-includes/rss-functions.php` from the FWP archive)
15 + upgrade (i.e., replacing your `wp-includes/rss-functions.php` with `OPTIONAL/wp-includes/rss-functions.php` from the FWP archive)
833 16
834 17 * FEATURE: for completeness's sake, there is now a feed setting,
835 18 `hardcode url`, that allows you to set the URI for the front page
836 19 of a contributor's website manually (that is, prevent it from being