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FeedWordPress v0.991
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1 FeedWordPress Change Log
2 ========================
3
4 Changes from 0.99 to 0.991
5 --------------------------
6 * WORDPRESS MU COMPATABILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with
7 recent releases of WordPress MU. Once FeedWordPress is made available
8 as a plugin, each individual blog can choose to activate FeedWordPress
9 and syndicate content from its own set of contributors.
10
11 * DISPLAY OF MAGPIE WARNINGS: A number of MagpieRSS warnings or error
12 messages that were displayed when performing an automatic update are
13 no longer displayed, unless debugging parameters have been explicitly
14 enabled.
15
16 * BUG RELATED TO INTERNATIONAL CHARACTERS IN AUTHOR NAMES FIXED: Due to a
17 subtle incompatability between the way that FeedWordPress generated new
18 user information, and the way that WordPress 2.0 and later added new
19 authors to the database, FeedWordPress might end up creating duplicate
20 authors, or throwing a critical error message, when it encountered
21 authors whose names included international characters. This
22 incompatability has now been fixed; hopefully, authors with
23 international characters in their names should now be handled properly.
24
25 * media:content BUG IN MAGPIERSS FIXED: A bug in MagpieRSS's handling of
26 namespaced elements has been fixed. Among other things, this bug caused
27 items containing a Yahoo MediaRSS `<media:content>` element (such as
28 many of the feeds produced by wordpress.com) to be represented
29 incorrectly, with only a capital "A" where the content of the post
30 should have been. Feeds containing `<media:content>` elements should now
31 be syndicated correctly.
32
33 * update_feedwordpress PARAMETER: You can now use an HTTP GET parameter
34 (`update_feedwordpress=1`) to request that FeedWordPress poll its feeds
35 for updates. When used together with a crontab or other means of
36 scheduling tasks, this means that you can keep your blog automatically
37 updated on a regular schedule, even if you do not choose to use the
38 cron-less automatic updates option.
39
40 * Some minor interface-related bugs were also fixed.
41
42
43 Changes from 0.981 to 0.99
44 --------------------------
45 Version 0.99 adds several significant new features, fixes some bugs, and
46 provides compatability with WordPress 2.2.x and 2.3.x.
47
48 * WORDPRESS 2.2 AND 2.3 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be
49 compatible with WordPress version 2.2 and the upcoming WordPress
50 version 2.3. In particular, it has been tested extensively against
51 WordPress 2.2.3 and WordPress 2.3 Release Candidate 1.
52
53 * AUTOMATIC UPDATES WITHOUT CRON: FeedWordPress now allows you to
54 automatically schedule checks for new posts without using external task
55 scheduling tools such as cron. In order to enable automatic updates, go
56 to **Syndication --> Options** and set "Check for new posts" to
57 "automatically." For details, see "Automatic Feed Updates" in
58 README.text.
59
60 An important side-effect of the changes to the update system is that if
61 you were previously using the cron job and the `update-feeds.php` script
62 to schedule updates, you need to change your cron set-up. The old
63 `update-feeds.php` script no longer exists. Instead, if you wish to use
64 a cron job to guarantee updates on a particular schedule, you should
65 have the cron job fetch the front page of your blog (for example, by
66 using `curl http://www.zyx.com/blog/ > /dev/null`) instead of activating
67 the `update-feeds.php` script. If automatic updates have been enabled,
68 fetching the front page will automatically trigger the update process.
69
70 * INTERFACE REORGANIZATION: All FeedWordPress functions are now located
71 under a top-level "Syndication" menu in the WordPress Dashboard. To
72 manage the list of syndicated sites, manually check for new posts on
73 one or more feeds, or syndicate a new site, you should use the main page
74 under **Syndication**. To change global settings for FeedWordPress,
75 you should use **Syndication --> Options**.
76
77 * FILE STRUCTURE REORGANIZATION: Due to a combination of changing styles
78 for FeedWordPress plugins and lingering bugs in the FeedWordPress admin
79 menu code, the code for FeedWordPress is now contained in two different
80 PHP files, which should be installed together in a subdirectory of your
81 plugins directory named `feedwordpress`. (See README.text for
82 installation and upgrade instructions relating to the change.)
83
84 * MULTIPLE CATEGORIES SETTING: Some feeds use non-standard methods to
85 indicate multiple categories within a single category element. (The most
86 popular site to do this is del.icio.us, which separates tags with a
87 space.) FeedWordPress now allows you to set an optional setting, for any
88 feed which does this, indicating the character or characters used to
89 divide multiple categories, using a Perl-compatible regular expression.
90 (In the case of del.icio.us feeds, FeedWordPress will automatically use
91 \s for the pattern without your having to do any further configuration.)
92 To turn this setting on, simply use the "Edit" link for the feed that
93 you want to turn it on for.
94
95 * REGULAR EXPRESSION BUG FIXED: Eliminated a minor bug in the regular
96 expressions for e-mail addresses (used in parsing RSS `author`
97 elements), which could produce unsightly error messages for some users
98 parsing RSS 2.0 feeds.
99
100 * DATE / UPDATE BUG FIXED: A bug in date handling was eliminated that may
101 have caused problems if any of (1) WordPress, or (2) PHP, or (3) your
102 web server, or (4) your MySQL server, has been set to use a different
103 time zone from the one that any of the others is set to use. If
104 FeedWordPress has not been properly updating updated posts, or has been
105 updating posts when there shouldn't be any changes for the update, this
106 release may solve that problem.
107
108 * GOOGLE READER BUGS FIXED: A couple of bugs that made it difficult for
109 FeedWordPress to interact with Google Reader public feeds have been
110 fixed. Firstly, if you encountered an error message reading "There was a
111 problem adding the newsfeed. [SQL: ]" when you tried to add the feed,
112 the cause of this error has been fixed. Secondly, if you succeeded in
113 getting FeedWordPress to check a Google Reader feed, only to find that
114 the title of posts had junk squashed on to the end of them, that bug
115 has been fixed too. To fix this bug, you must install the newest version
116 of the optional MagpieRSS upgrade.
117
118 * FILTER PARAMETERS: Due to an old, old bug in WordPress 1.5.0 (which was
119 what was available back when I first wrote the filter interface),
120 FeedWordPress has traditionally only passed one parameter to
121 syndicated_item and syndicated_post filters functions -- an array
122 containing either the Magpie representation of a syndicated item from
123 the feed, or the database representation of a post about to be inserted
124 into the WordPress database. If you needed information about the feed
125 that the item came from, this was accessible only through a pair of
126 global variables, $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta.
127
128 Since it's been a pretty long time since WordPress 1.5.0 was in
129 widespread usage, I have gone ahead and added an optional second
130 parameter to the invocation of the syndicated_item and syndicated_post
131 filters. If you have written a filter for FeedWordPress that uses either
132 of these hooks, you can now register that filter to accept 2 parameters.
133 If you do so, the second parameter will be a SyndicatedPost object,
134 which, among other things, allows you to access information about the
135 feed from which an item is syndicated using the $post->feed and the
136 $post->feedmeta elements (where $post is the name of the second
137 parameter).
138
139 NOTE THAT THE OLD GLOBAL VARIABLES ARE STILL AVAILABLE, for the time
140 being at least, so existing filters will not break with the upgrade.
141 They should be considered deprecated, however, and may be eliminated in
142 the future.
143
144 * FILTER CHANGE / BUGFIX: the array that is passed as the first argument
145 syndicated_post filters no longer is no longer backslash-escaped for
146 MySQL when filters are called. This was originally a bug, or an
147 oversight; the contents of the array should only be escaped for the
148 database *after* they have gone through all filters. IF YOU HAVE WRITTEN
149 ANY syndicated_post FILTERS THAT PRESUME THE OLD BEHAVIOR OF PASSING IN
150 STRINGS THAT ARE ALREADY BACKSLASH-ESCAPED, UPDATE YOUR FILTERS
151 ACCORDINGLY.
152
153 * OTHER MINOR BUGFIXES AND INTERNAL CHANGES: The internal architecture of
154 FeedWordPress has been significantly changed to make the code more
155 modular and clean; hopefully this should help reduce the number of
156 compatibility updates that are needed, and make them easier and quicker
157 when they are needed.
158
159 Changes from 0.98 to 0.981
160 --------------------------
161 Version 0.981 is a narrowly targeted bugfix and compatibility release, whose
162 main purpose is to resolve a major outstanding problem: the incompatibility
163 between version 0.98 of WordPress and the recently released WordPress 2.1.
164
165 * WORDPRESS 2.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress is now compatible with
166 WordPress 2.1, as well as retaining its existing support for WordPress
167 2.0 and 1.5. Incompatibilities that resulted in database warnings, fatal
168 errors, and which prevented FeedWordPress from syndicating new posts,
169 have been eliminated.
170
171 * RSS-FUNCTIONS.PHP RENAMED TO RSS.PHP: if you use the upgraded MagpieRSS
172 replacement that's included with FeedWordPress, be sure to note that
173 there are now *two* files to upload from the `OPTIONAL/wp-includes`
174 subdirectory in order to carry out the upgrade: rss-functions.php and
175 rss.php. **It is necessary to upload both files**, due to a change in
176 the file naming scheme in WordPress 2.1, and it is necessary to do so
177 whether you are using WordPress 2.1 or not. If you only upload the
178 `rss-functions.php` file as in previous installations you will not have
179 a working copy of MagpieRSS; the rss.php file contains the actual code.
180
181 * DATE BUG AFFECTING SOME PHP INSTALLATIONS RESOLVED: due to a subtle bug
182 in parse_w3cdtf(), some installations of PHP encountered problems with
183 FeedWordPress's attempt to date posts, which would cause some new posts
184 on Atom feeds to be dated as if they had apppeared in 1969 or 1970
185 (thus, effectively, never appearing on front apge at all). This bug in
186 the date handling should now be fixed.
187
188 * PHP <?=...?> SHORT FORM ELIMINATED: some installations of PHP do not
189 allow the <?=...?> short form for printing PHP values, which was used
190 extensively in the FeedWordPress interface code. Since this could cause
191 fatal errors for users with the wrong installation of PHP, the short
192 form has been replaced with full PHP echo statements, and is no longer
193 used in FeedWordPress.
194
195 * BETTER USER INTERFACE INTEGRATION WITH WORDPRESS 2.x: Some minor changes
196 have been made to help the FeedWordPress interface pages blend in better
197 with the user interface when running under WordPress 2.x.
198
199 * GLOBAL CATEGORIES BUG RESOLVED: a bug that prevented some users from
200 setting one or more categories to apply to syndicated posts from all
201 feeds (using the checkbox interface under Options --> Syndication) has
202 been resolved.
203
204 Changes from 0.97 to 0.98
205 --------------------------
206
207 * WORDPRESS 2.0 COMPATIBILITY: This is a narrowly-targeted release to
208 solve a major outstanding problem. FeedWordPress is now compatible with
209 both WordPress 1.5 and WordPress 2.0. Incompatibilities that caused
210 fatal SQL errors, and a more subtle bug with off-kilter counts of posts
211 under a given category, have been resolved. FeedWordPress tests for
212 database schema using the global $wp_db_version variable (if null, then
213 we presume that we're dealing with WordPress 1.5).
214
215 NOTE: I have **not** fully tested FeedWordPress with WordPress 2.0.
216 Further testing may reveal more bugs. However, you should now be able
217 to get at least basic FeedWordPress functionality up and running.
218
219 * AUTHOR MATCHING: FeedWordPress tests several fields to see if it can
220 identify the author of the post as a user already in the WordPress user
221 database. In previous versions, it tested the user login, the nickname,
222 and tested for "aliases" listed in the Profile (see documentation). FWP
223 now also matches authors on the basis of e-mail address (*if* an e-mail
224 address is present). This is particularly helpful for formats such as
225 RSS 2.0, in which authors are primarily identified by e-mail addresses.
226
227 Changes from 0.96 to 0.97
228 -------------------------
229
230 * INSTALLATION PROCEDURE: Some of the changes between 0.96 and 0.97
231 require upgrades to the meta-data stored by FeedWordPress to work
232 properly. Thus, if you are upgrading from 0.96 or earlier to 0.97, most
233 FeedWordPress operations (including updates and template functions)
234 WILL BE DISABLED until you run the upgrade procedure. Fortunately,
235 running the upgrade procedure is easy: just go to either Options -->
236 Syndication or Links --> Syndicated in the WordPress Dashboard and press
237 the button.
238
239 * FEED FORMAT SUPPORT: Support has been added for the Atom 1.0 IETF
240 standard. Several other elements are also newly supported
241 (dcterms:created, dcterms:issued, dcterms:modified, dc:identifier,
242 proper support for the RSS 2.0 guid element, the RSS 2.0 author element,
243 the use of Atom author or Dublin Core dc:creator constructs at the feed
244 level to identify the author of individual items, etc.)
245
246 N.B.: full support of several Atom 1.0 features, such as categories
247 and enclosures, requires you to install the optional rss-functions.php
248 upgrade in your wp-includes directory.
249
250 * BUG FIX: Running `update-feeds.php` from command line or crontab
251 returned "I don't syndicate..." errors. It turns out that WordPress
252 sometimes tramples on the internal PHP superglobals that I depended on
253 to determine whether or not the script was being invoked from the
254 command line. This has been fixed (the variables are now checked
255 *before* WordPress can trample them). Note that `update-feeds.php` has
256 been thoroughly overhauled anyway; see below for details.
257
258 * BUG FIX: Duplicate categories or author names. Fixed two bugs that could
259 create duplicate author and/or category names when the name contained
260 either (a) certain international characters (causing a mismatch between
261 MySQL and PHP's handling of lowercasing text), or (b) characters that
262 have a special meaning in regular expressions (causing MySQL errors when
263 looking for the author or category due to regexp syntax errors). These
264 should now be fixed thanks to careful escaping of names that go into
265 regular expressions and careful matching of lowercasing functions
266 (comparing results from PHP only to other results from PHP, and results
267 from MySQL only to other results from MySQL).
268
269 * BUG FIX: Items dated Decembr 31, 1969 should appear less often. The
270 function for parsing W3C date-time format dates that ships with
271 MagpieRSS can only correctly parse fully-specified dates with a
272 fully-specified time, but valid W3C date-time format dates may omit the
273 time, the day of the month, or even the month. Some feeds in the wild
274 date their items with coarse-grained dates, so the optional
275 `rss-functions.php` upgrade now includes a more flexible parse_w3cdtf()
276 function that will work with both coarse-grained and fully-specified
277 dates. (If parts of the date or the time are omitted, they are filled in
278 with values based on the current time, so '2005-09-10' will be dated to
279 the current time on that day; '2004' will be dated to this day and time
280 one year ago.
281
282 N.B.: This fix is only available in the optional `rss-functions.php`
283 upgrade.
284
285 * BUG FIX: Evil use of HTTP GET has been undone. The WordPress interface
286 is riddled with inappropriate (non-idempotent) uses of HTTP GET queries
287 (ordinary links that make the server do something with significant
288 side-effects, such as deleting a post or a link from the database).
289 FeedWordPress did some of this too, especially in places where it aped
290 the WordPress interface (e.g. the "Delete" links in Links -->
291 Syndicated). That's bad business, though. I've changed the interface so
292 that all the examples of improper side-effects that I can find now
293 require an HTTP POST to take effect. I think I got pretty much
294 everything; if there's anything that I missed, let me know.
295
296 Further reading: [Sam Ruby 2005-05-06: This Stuff Matters] (http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2005/05/06/This-Stuff-Matters)
297
298 * BUG FIX: Categories applied by `cats` setting should no longer prevent
299 category-based filtering from working. In FeedWordPress, you can (1)
300 apply certain categories to all syndicated posts, or all posts from
301 a particular feed; and (2) filter out all posts that don't match one
302 of the categories that are already in the WordPress database (allowing
303 for simple category-based filtering; just load up WordPress with the
304 categories you want to accept, and then tell FeedWordPress not to create
305 new ones). However, the way that (1) and (2) were implemented meant that
306 you couldn't effectively use them together; once you applied a known
307 category to all syndicated posts from a particular feed, it meant that
308 they'd have at least one familiar category (the category or categories
309 you were applying), and that would get all posts past the filter no
310 matter what categories they were originally from.
311
312 Well, no longer. You can still apply categories to all syndicated posts
313 (using either Syndication --> Options, or the feed-level settings under
314 Links --> Syndicated). But these categories are not applied to the post
315 until *after* it has already passed by the "familiar categories" filter.
316 So now, if you want, you can do category filtering and *then* apply as
317 many categories as you please to all and only posts that pass the filter.
318
319 * BUG FIX: Other minor typos and HTML gaffes were fixed along the way.
320
321 * PERFORMANCE: get_feed_meta() no longer hits the database for information
322 on every call; it now caches link data in memory, so FeedWordPress only
323 goes to the database once for each syndicated link. This may
324 substantially improve performance if your database server resources
325 are tight and your templates make a lot of use of custom settings from
326 get_feed_meta().
327
328 * API CHANGE: Link ID numbers, rather than RSS URIs, are now used to
329 identify the feed from which a post is syndicated when you use template
330 functions such as get_feed_meta(). The practical upshot of this is you
331 can switch feeds, or change the feed address for a particular syndicated
332 site, without breaking your templates for all the posts that were
333 syndicated from the earlier URI.
334
335 * API CHANGE: if you have plugins or templates that make use of the
336 get_feed_meta() function or the $fwp_feedmeta global, note that the
337 data formerly located under the `uri` and `name` fields is now located
338 under the `link/uri` field and the `link/name` field, respectively. Note
339 also that you can access the link ID number for any given feed under the
340 global $fwp_feedmeta['link/id'] (in plugins) or
341 get_feed_meta('link/id') (in a template in post contexts).
342
343 * FEATURE: the settings for individual feeds can now be edited using a
344 humane interface (where formerly you had to tweak key-value pairs in the
345 Link Notes section). To edit settings for a feed, pick the feed that you
346 want under Links --> Syndicated and click the Edit link.
347
348 * FEATURE: The "Unsubscribe" button (formerly "Delete") in Links -->
349 Syndicated now offers three options for unsubscribing from a feed: (1)
350 turning off the subscription without deleting the feed data or affecting
351 posts that were syndicated from the feed (this works by setting the Link
352 for the feed as "invisible"); (2) deleting the feed data and all of the
353 posts that were syndicated from the feed; or (3) deleting the feed data
354 and *keeping* the posts that were syndicated from the feed
355 setting the Link to "Invisible" (meaning that it will not be displayed
356 in lists of the site links on the front page, and it won't be checked
357 for updates; (2) deleting the Link and all of the posts that were
358 syndicated from its feed; or (3) deleting the feed data but keeping the
359 posts that were syndicated (which will henceforward be treated as if
360 they were local rather than syndicated posts). (Note that (1) is usually
361 the best option for aggregator sites, unless you want to clean up the
362 results of an error or a test.)
363
364 * FEATURE / BUG FIX: If you have been receiving mysterious "I don't
365 syndicate...", or "(local) HTTP status code was not 200", or "(local)
366 transport error - could not open socket", or "parse error - not well
367 formed" errors, then this update may solve your problems, and if it does
368 *not* solve them, it will at least make the reasons for the problems
369 easier to understand. That's because I've overhauled the way that
370 FeedWordPress goes about updating feeds.
371
372 If you use the command-line PHP scripting method to run scheduled
373 updates, then not much should change for you, except for fewer
374 mysterious errors. If you have done updates by sending periodic HTTP
375 requests to <http://your-blog.com/path/wp-content/update-feeds.php>,
376 then the details have changed somewhat; mostly in such a way as to make
377 things easier on you. See the README file or online documentation on
378 Staying Current for the details.
379
380 * FEATURE: FeedWordPress now features a more sophisticated system for
381 timed updates. Instead of polling *every* subscribed feed for updates
382 *each* time `update-feeds.php` is run, FeedWordPress now keeps track of
383 the last time it polled each feed, and only polls them again after a
384 certain period of time has passed. The amount of time is normally set
385 randomly for each feed, in a period between 30 minutes and 2 hours (so
386 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
387 directly by the feed, which brings us to ...
388
389 * FEATURE: FeedWordPress now respects the settings in the `ttl` and
390 Syndication Module RSS elements. Feeds with these elements set will not
391 be polled any more frequently than they indicate with these feeds unless
392 the user manually forces FeedWordPress to poll the feed (see Links -->
393 Syndicated --> Edit settings).
394
395 Changes from 0.95 to 0.96
396 -------------------------
397
398 * FEATURE: support has been added for enclosures in RSS 2.0 and Atom
399 0.6+ newsfeeds. WordPress already supports adding enclosures to an
400 item; FeedWordPress merely gets the information on the enclosure
401 from the feed it is syndicating and plugs that information directly
402 into the WordPress database so that (among other things) that post
403 will have its enclosure listed in your blog's RSS 2 newsfeed.
404
405 Note that enclosure support requires using the optional MagpieRSS
406 upgrade (i.e., replacing your `wp-includes/rss-functions.php` with `OPTIONAL/wp-includes/rss-functions.php` from the FWP archive)
407
408 * FEATURE: for completeness's sake, there is now a feed setting,
409 `hardcode url`, that allows you to set the URI for the front page
410 of a contributor's website manually (that is, prevent it from being
411 automatically updated from the feed channel link on each update). To
412 set the URI manually, put a line like this in the Link Notes section
413 of a feed:
414
415 hardcode url: yes
416
417 You can also instruct FeedWordPress to use hardcoded URIs by default
418 on all feeds using Options --> Syndication
419
420 * FEATURE: by default, when FeedWordPress finds new syndicated posts,
421 it (1) publishes them immediately, (2) turns comments off, and (3)
422 turns trackback / pingback pings off. You can now alter all three
423 default behaviors (e.g., to allow pings on syndicated posts, or to
424 send newly-syndicated posts to the draft pile for moderation) using
425 Options --> Syndication
426
427
428 Changes from 0.91 to 0.95
429 -------------------------
430
431 * BUG FIX: Fixed an obscure bug in the handling of categories:
432 categories with trailing whitespace could cause categories with
433 duplicate names to be created. This no longer happens. While I was
434 at it I tightened up the operation of
435 FeedWordPress::lookup_categories() a bit in general.
436
437 * FEATURE DEPRECATED: the feed setting `hardcode categories` is now
438 deprecated in favor of `unknown categories` (see below), which
439 allows you to strip off any syndication categories not already in
440 your database using `unknown categories: default` or `unknown
441 categories: filter`. If you have `hardcode categories: yes` set on a
442 feed, this will be treated as `unknown categories: default` (i.e.,
443 no new categories will be added, but if a post doesn't match any of
444 the categories it will be added in the default category--usually
445 "Uncategorized" or "General").
446
447 * FEATURE: You can now set global defaults as to whether or not
448 FeedWordPress will update the Link Name and Link Description
449 settings for feeds automatically from the feed title and feed
450 tagline. (By default, it does, as it has in past versions.) Whether
451 this behavior is turned on or off, you can still override the
452 default behavior using feed settings of `hardcode name: yes`,
453 `hardcode name: no`, `hardcode description: yes`, or `hardcode
454 description: no`.
455
456 * FEATURE: Users can now provide one or several "aliases" for an
457 author, just as they can for a category. For example, to make
458 FeedWordPress treat posts by "Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger" and "Pope
459 Benedict XVI" as by the same author, edit the user profile for Pope
460 Benedict XVI and add a line like this to the "User profile" field:
461
462 a.k.a.: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
463
464 You can add several aliases, each on a line by itself. You can also
465 add any other text you like to the Profile without interfering with
466 the aliases.
467
468 * FEATURE: Users can now choose how to handle syndicated posts that
469 are in unfamiliar categories or by unfamiliar authors (i.e.,
470 categories or authors whose names are not yet in the WordPress
471 database). By default, FeedWordPress will (as before) create a new
472 category (or new author) and use it for the current post and any
473 future posts. This behavior can be changed, either for all feeds or
474 for one or another particular feed.
475
476 There are now three different options for an unfamiliar author: (1)
477 FeedWordPress can create a new author account and attribute the
478 syndicated post to the new account; (2) FeedWordPress can attribute
479 the post to an author if the author's name is familiar, and to a
480 default author (currently, this means the Site Administrator
481 account) if it is not; (3) FeedWordPress can drop posts by
482 unfamiliar authors and syndicate only posts by authors who are
483 already in the database.
484
485 There are, similarly, two different options for an unfamiliar
486 category: (1) FeedWordPress can create new categories and place the
487 syndicated post in them; (2) FeedWordPress can drop the unfamiliar
488 categories and place syndicated posts only in categories that it is
489 already familiar with. In addition, FeedWordPress 0.95 lets you
490 choose whether posts that are in *no* familiar categories should be
491 syndicated (and placed in the default category for the blog) or
492 simply dropped.
493
494 You can set the default behavior for both authors and categories
495 using the settings in Options --> Syndication. You can also set
496 different behavior for specific feeds by adding the `unfamiliar
497 author` and / or `unfamiliar categories` settings to the Link Notes
498 section of a feed:
499
500 unfamiliar author: (create|default|filter)
501 unfamiliar categories: (create|default|filter)
502
503 A setting of `unfamiliar author: create` will make FeedWordPress
504 create new authors to match unfamiliar author names *for this feed
505 alone*. A setting of `unfamiliar author: default` will make it
506 assign posts from unfamiliar authors to the default user account. A
507 setting of `unfamiliar author: filter` will cause all posts (from
508 this feed alone) to be dropped unless they are by an author already
509 listed in the database. Similiarly, `unfamiliar categories: create`
510 will make FeedWordPress create new categories to match unfamiliar
511 category names *for this feed alone*; `unfamiliar categories:
512 default` will cause it to drop any unfamiliar category names; and
513 `unfamiliar categories: filter` will cause it to *both* drop any
514 unfamiliar category names *and* to only syndicate posts that are
515 placed in one or more familiar categories.
516
517 These two new features allow users to do some coarse-grained
518 filtering without having to write a PHP filter. Specifically, they
519 offer an easy way for you to filter feeds by category or by author.
520 Suppose, for example, that you only wanted to syndicate posts that
521 your contributors place in the "Llamas" category. You could do so by
522 setting up your installation of WordPress so that the only category
523 in the database is "Llamas," and then use Options --> Syndication to
524 set "Unfamiliar categories" to "don't create new categories and
525 don't syndicate posts unless they match at least one familiar
526 category". Now, when you update, only posts in the "Llamas" category
527 will be syndicated by FeedWordPress.
528
529 Similarly, if you wanted to filter one particular feed so that only
530 posts by (for example) the author "Earl J. Llama" were syndicated to
531 your site, you could do so by creating a user account for Earl J.
532 Llama, then adding the following line to the settings for the feed
533 in Link Notes:
534
535 unfamiliar author: filter
536
537 This will cause any posts from this feed that are not authored by
538 Earl J. Llama to be discarded, and only the posts by Earl J. Llama
539 will be syndicated. (If the setting is used on one specific feed, it
540 will not affect how posts from other feeds are syndicated.)
541
542