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FeedWordPress / 2008.1105
FeedWordPress v2008.1105
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1 FeedWordPress Change Log
2 ========================
3
4 Changes from 2008.1101 to 2008.1105
5 -----------------------------------
6
7 * INTERFACE RESTRUCTURING AND SYNDICATION --> AUTHORS PAGE: As a first
8 step towards modularizing and better organizing the user interface, a
9 new "Authors" subpage has been created under the Syndication menu, which
10 controls settings for syndicated authors, both at the global default
11 level and at level of individual syndicated feeds.
12
13 * BUG RELATED TO THE ATTRIBUTION OF POSTS TO THE WRONG AUTHOR FIXED: Some
14 users encountered an issue in which posts by different authors on
15 different blogs -- especially blogs generated by Blogger -- were
16 mistakenly attributed to a single author. The problem was caused by the
17 way in which FeedWordPress matches syndicated authors to user accounts
18 in the WordPress database: normally, if two feeds each list an author
19 with the same e-mail address, they are counted as being the same person.
20 Normally this works well, but it creates an issue in cases where
21 blogging software assigns a single anonymous e-mail address to users who
22 do not want their real e-mail address published. This is, for example,
23 what Blogger does (by giving all users a default e-mail address of
24 <noreply@blogger.com> if they don't want their own e-mail address
25 listed). FeedWordPress now allows the user to correct for this problem
26 with a couple of new settings under **Syndication --> Authors**, which
27 allow users to turn off e-mail based author matching for particular
28 addresses, or, if desired, to turn it off entirely. By default, e-mail
29 based author matching is still turned on, but disabled for a list of
30 known generic e-mail addresses. Right now, the "list" consists entirely
31 of <noreply@blogger.com>; if you know other addresses that should be
32 added, please [contact me](http://radgeek.com/contact) to let me know.
33
34 Please note that if you have already encountered this issue on your
35 blog, upgrading FeedWordPress will prevent it from re-occurring in the
36 future, but you still need to do two other things to fix the existing
37 problem on your blog.
38
39 First, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to
40 change the existing author mapping rules to re-map a a syndicated
41 author's name to the proper target account. Go to **Syndication -->
42 Authors**, select the feed you want to change from the drop-down list,
43 and then change the settings under the "Syndicated Authors" section.
44 (You will probably need to select "will be assigned to a new user..." to
45 create a new user account with the appropriate name.)
46
47 Second, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to
48 re-assign already-syndicated posts that were mis-attributed to the
49 correct author. You can do that from **Syndication --> Authors** by
50 using the author re-assignment feature, described below.
51
52 * AUTHOR RE-ASSIGNMENT FOR A PARTICULAR FEED: The author settings page
53 for each syndicated feed, under **Syndication --> Authors**, now
54 includes an section titled "Fixing mis-matched authors," which provides
55 an interface for re-assigning or deleting all posts attributed to a
56 particular author on a particular feed.
57
58 * SUPPORT FOR `<atom:source>` ELEMENT IN SYNDICATED FEEDS: Some feeds
59 (for example, those produced by FeedWordPress) aggregate content from
60 several different sources, and include information about the original
61 source of the post in an `<atom:source>` element. A new setting under
62 **Syndication --> Options** allows you to control what FeedWordPress
63 will report as the source of posts syndicated from aggregator feeds in
64 your templates and feeds: you can have FeedWordPress report that the
65 source of a post is the aggregator feed itself, or you can have it
66 report that the source of a post is the original source that the
67 aggregator originally syndicated the post from.
68
69 By default, FeedWordPress will report the aggregator, not the original
70 source, as the source of a syndicated item.
71
72 * LOAD BALANCING AND TIME LIMITING FEATURES FOR UPDATES: Some users have
73 encountered issues due to running up against PHP execution time limits
74 during the process of updating large syndicated feeds, or a very large
75 set of syndicated feeds. FeedWordPress now has a feature that allows you
76 to limit the total amount of time spent updating a feed, through the
77 "Time limit on updates" setting under **Syndication --> Options**. By
78 turning on this setting and adjusting the time limit to a low enough
79 figure to avoid your PHP installation's time-out setting. (PHP execution
80 time limits are usually in the vicinity of 30 seconds, so an update
81 time limit of 25 seconds or so should provide plenty of time for updates
82 while allowing a cushion of time for other, non-update-related functions
83 to do their work.)
84
85 If feed updates are interrupted by the time limit, FeedWordPress uses
86 some simple load balancing features to make sure that updates to other
87 feeds will not be blocked by the time-hogging feed, and will also make
88 sure that when the interrupted update is resumed, FeedWordPress will
89 skip ahead to resume processing items at the point at which it was
90 interrupted last time, so that posts further down in the feed will
91 eventually get processed, and not get blocked by the amount of time it
92 takes to process the items higher up in the feed.
93
94 * `guid` INDEX CREATION BUTTON: FeedWordPress frequently issues queries on
95 the `guid` column of the WordPress posts database (since it uses post
96 guid URIs to keep track of which posts it has syndicated). In very large
97 FeedWordPress installations, you can often significantly improve
98 performance by creating a database index on the `guid` column, but
99 normally you would need to poke around with MySQL or a tool like
100 phpMyAdmin to do this. FeedWordPress can now save you the trouble: to
101 create an index on the `guid` column, just go to
102 **Syndication --> Options**, and mash the button at the bottom of the
103 "Back End" section.
104
105 Changes from 2008.1030 to 2008.1101
106 -----------------------------------
107
108 * INTERFACE BUG THAT PREVENTED ADDING NEW SITES FIXED: The UI reforms in
109 FWP 2008.1030 unintentionally introduced a bug that prevents clean
110 installations of FeedWordPress from providing an input box for adding
111 new feeds to the list of syndicated feeds. This bug has been fixed.
112
113 Changes from 0.993 to 2008.1030
114 -------------------------------
115
116 * WORDPRESS 2.6 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with
117 WordPress 2.6, and should work more or less seamlessly with the new post
118 revision system. A bug which caused multiple new revisions to be created
119 for posts on certain feeds, regardless of whether or not the item had
120 been updated, has been fixed.
121
122 * INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: The user interface has been substantially
123 restyled to fit in better with the visual style of WordPress 2.5 and
124 2.6.
125
126 * YOUTUBE BUG FIXED: POSTS SYNDICATED THROUGH AN AUTOMATIC UPDATE ARE NO
127 LONGER STRIPPED OF `<OBJECT>` TAGS AND CERTAIN OTHER HTML ELEMENTS: Due
128 to the way that some versions of WordPress process posts that are
129 inserted into the database when no user is logged in, many users
130 experienced an issue where YouTube videos and other content using the
131 HTML `<object>` tag would be stripped out of posts that were syndicated
132 during an automatic update. (Posts that were syndicated through manual
133 updates from within the WordPress Dashboard were not affected, because
134 the issue does not arise when an update is executed under a logged-in
135 administrator's credentials.) This bug has now been fixed; YouTube
136 videos and other content using `<object>` tags should now appear
137 properly in syndicated posts, regardless of the way in which the post
138 was syndicated.
139
140 * AJAX BUGS FIXED: Bugs which blocked the normal operation of WordPress
141 2.5's AJAX interface elements when FeedWordPress was activated have been
142 fixed.
143
144 * TAG SUPPORT: A couple of features have been introduced to take advantage
145 of the tagging features in WordPress 2.3.x, 2.5.x, and 2.6.x. Now, when
146 unfamiliar categories are encountered for posts on a feed, you can
147 choose for FeedWordPress (1) to drop the category; (2) to drop the
148 category and to filter out any post that does not match at least one
149 familiar category; (3) to create a new category with that name, or,
150 now, you can also have FeedWordPress (4) create a new *tag* with that
151 name. This option can be set site-wide under Syndication --> Options,
152 or it can be set on a feed-by-feed basis in a feed's Edit screen.
153
154 In addition, you can now set particular tags to apply to all incoming
155 syndicated posts, under Syndication --> Options, or you can set tags
156 to apply to all incoming syndicated posts from a particular feed in that
157 feed's Edit screen.
158
159 * FORMATTING FILTERS: There is a new option available under Syndication ->
160 Options which allows users to choose whether or not to expose syndicated
161 posts to being altered by formatting filters. By default, FeedWordPress
162 has always protected syndicated posts (which are already in display-ready
163 HTML when they are syndicated) from being reformatted by formatting
164 filters. However, this approach means that certain plugins which depend
165 on formatting filters (for example, to add "Share This" bars or relevant
166 links to the end of a post) are blocked from working on any syndicated
167 posts. If you want to use one of these plugins together with
168 FeedWordPress, you can now do so by changing the "Formatting Filters"
169 setting from "Protect" to "Expose."
170
171 * `<atom:source>` ELEMENTS NOW INCLUDED IN ATOM FEED: Atom 1.0 provides
172 a standard method for aggregators to indicate information about the original source of
173 a syndicated post, using the `<atom:source>` element. FeedWordPress now
174 introduces standard `<atom:source>` elements including the title, homepage, and
175 feed URI of the source from which a syndicated post was syndicated. Cf.
176 <http://www.atomenabled.org/developers/syndication/atom-format-spec.php#element.source>
177
178 * MODULARIZATION OF CODE: The code for different elements of FeedWordPress
179 has been broken out into several modules for easier inspection,
180 documentation, and maintenance of the code.
181
182 * VERSIONING SCHEME CHANGED: FeedWordPress's feature set has proven stable
183 enough that it can now be removed from beta status; a good thing, since
184 I was very quickly running out of version numbers to use. New releases
185 of FeedWordPress will have version numbers based on the date of their
186 release.
187
188 Changes from 0.992 to 0.993
189 ---------------------------
190
191 * WORDPRESS 2.5.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible
192 with WordPress 2.5.1.
193
194 * WORDPRESS 2.5 INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: FeedWordPress's Dashboard
195 interface has undergone several cosmetic changes that should help it
196 integrate better with the WordPress Dashboard interface in WordPress
197 version 2.5.x.
198
199 * SYNDICATED POSTS CAN BE MARKED AS "PENDING REVIEW": WordPress 2.3 users
200 can now take advantage of WordPress's new "Pending Review" features for
201 incoming syndicated posts. Posts marked as "Pending Review" are not
202 published immediately, but are marked as ready to be reviewed by an
203 Administrator or Editor, who can then choose to publish the post or
204 hold it back. If you want to review syndicated posts from a particular
205 feed, or from all feeds, before they are posted, then use
206 Syndication --> Syndicated Sites --> Edit or Syndication --> Options to
207 change the settings for handling new posts.
208
209 * AWARE OF NEW URI FOR del.icio.us FEEDS: Previous releases of
210 FeedWordPress already automatically split del.icio.us tags up
211 appropriately appropriately when generating categories. (del.icio.us
212 feeds smoosh all the tags into a single `<dc:subject>` element,
213 separated by spaces; FeedWordPress un-smooshes them into multiple
214 categories by separating them at whitespace.) Unfortunately, del.icio.us
215 recently broke the existing behavior by changing host names for their
216 feeds from del.icio.us to feeds.delicious.com. Version 0.993 accounts
217 for the new host name and un-breaks the tag splitting.
218
219 Changes from 0.991 to 0.992
220 ---------------------------
221 * AUTHOR RE-MAPPING: FeedWordPress now offers considerable control over
222 how author names on a feed are translated into usernames within the
223 WordPress database. When a post by an unrecognized author comes in,
224 Administrators can now specify any username as the default username to
225 assign the post to by setting the option in Syndication --> Options
226 (formerly FeedWordPress only allowed you to assign such posts to user
227 #1, the site administrator). Administrators can also create re-mapping
228 rules for particular feeds (under Syndication --> Syndicated Sites -->
229 Edit), so that (for example) any posts attributed to "Administrator"
230 on the feed <http://praxeology.net/blog/feed/> will be assigned to
231 a user named "Roderick T. Long," rather than a user named
232 "Administrator." These settings also allow administrators to filter out
233 posts by particular users, and to control what will happen when
234 FeedWordPress encounters a post by an unrecognized user on that
235 particular feed.
236
237 * BUG RELATED TO URIS CONTAINING AMPERSAND CHARACTERS FIXED: A bug in
238 WordPress 2.x's handling of URIs in Blogroll links created problems for
239 updating any feeds whose URIs included an ampersand character, such as
240 Google News RSS feeds and other feeds that have multiple parameters
241 passed through HTTP GET. If you experienced this bug, the most likely
242 effect was that FeedWordPress simply would not import new posts from a
243 feed when instructred to do so, returning a "0 new posts" response. In
244 other cases, it might lead to unpredictable results from feed updates,
245 such as importing posts which were not contained in the feed being
246 syndicated, but which did appear elsewhere on the same website. This bug
247 has, hopefully, been resolved, by correcting for the bug in WordPress.
248
249 Changes from 0.99 to 0.991
250 --------------------------
251 * WORDPRESS MU COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with
252 recent releases of WordPress MU. Once FeedWordPress is made available
253 as a plugin, each individual blog can choose to activate FeedWordPress
254 and syndicate content from its own set of contributors.
255
256 * DISPLAY OF MAGPIE WARNINGS: A number of MagpieRSS warnings or error
257 messages that were displayed when performing an automatic update are
258 no longer displayed, unless debugging parameters have been explicitly
259 enabled.
260
261 * BUG RELATED TO INTERNATIONAL CHARACTERS IN AUTHOR NAMES FIXED: Due to a
262 subtle incompatability between the way that FeedWordPress generated new
263 user information, and the way that WordPress 2.0 and later added new
264 authors to the database, FeedWordPress might end up creating duplicate
265 authors, or throwing a critical error message, when it encountered
266 authors whose names included international characters. This
267 incompatability has now been fixed; hopefully, authors with
268 international characters in their names should now be handled properly.
269
270 * `<media:content>` BUG IN MAGPIERSS FIXED: A bug in MagpieRSS's handling
271 of namespaced elements has been fixed. Among other things, this bug
272 caused items containing a Yahoo MediaRSS `<media:content>` element (such
273 as many of the feeds produced by wordpress.com) to be represented
274 incorrectly, with only a capital "A" where the content of the post
275 should have been. Feeds containing `<media:content>` elements should now
276 be syndicated correctly.
277
278 * update_feedwordpress PARAMETER: You can now use an HTTP GET parameter
279 (`update_feedwordpress=1`) to request that FeedWordPress poll its feeds
280 for updates. When used together with a crontab or other means of
281 scheduling tasks, this means that you can keep your blog automatically
282 updated on a regular schedule, even if you do not choose to use the
283 cron-less automatic updates option.
284
285 * Some minor interface-related bugs were also fixed.
286
287
288 Changes from 0.981 to 0.99
289 --------------------------
290 Version 0.99 adds several significant new features, fixes some bugs, and
291 provides compatability with WordPress 2.2.x and 2.3.x.
292
293 * WORDPRESS 2.2 AND 2.3 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be
294 compatible with WordPress version 2.2 and the upcoming WordPress
295 version 2.3. In particular, it has been tested extensively against
296 WordPress 2.2.3 and WordPress 2.3 Release Candidate 1.
297
298 * AUTOMATIC UPDATES WITHOUT CRON: FeedWordPress now allows you to
299 automatically schedule checks for new posts without using external task
300 scheduling tools such as cron. In order to enable automatic updates, go
301 to **Syndication --> Options** and set "Check for new posts" to
302 "automatically." For details, see "Automatic Feed Updates" in
303 README.text.
304
305 An important side-effect of the changes to the update system is that if
306 you were previously using the cron job and the `update-feeds.php` script
307 to schedule updates, you need to change your cron set-up. The old
308 `update-feeds.php` script no longer exists. Instead, if you wish to use
309 a cron job to guarantee updates on a particular schedule, you should
310 have the cron job fetch the front page of your blog (for example, by
311 using `curl http://www.zyx.com/blog/ > /dev/null`) instead of activating
312 the `update-feeds.php` script. If automatic updates have been enabled,
313 fetching the front page will automatically trigger the update process.
314
315 * INTERFACE REORGANIZATION: All FeedWordPress functions are now located
316 under a top-level "Syndication" menu in the WordPress Dashboard. To
317 manage the list of syndicated sites, manually check for new posts on
318 one or more feeds, or syndicate a new site, you should use the main page
319 under **Syndication**. To change global settings for FeedWordPress,
320 you should use **Syndication --> Options**.
321
322 * FILE STRUCTURE REORGANIZATION: Due to a combination of changing styles
323 for FeedWordPress plugins and lingering bugs in the FeedWordPress admin
324 menu code, the code for FeedWordPress is now contained in two different
325 PHP files, which should be installed together in a subdirectory of your
326 plugins directory named `feedwordpress`. (See README.text for
327 installation and upgrade instructions relating to the change.)
328
329 * MULTIPLE CATEGORIES SETTING: Some feeds use non-standard methods to
330 indicate multiple categories within a single category element. (The most
331 popular site to do this is del.icio.us, which separates tags with a
332 space.) FeedWordPress now allows you to set an optional setting, for any
333 feed which does this, indicating the character or characters used to
334 divide multiple categories, using a Perl-compatible regular expression.
335 (In the case of del.icio.us feeds, FeedWordPress will automatically use
336 \s for the pattern without your having to do any further configuration.)
337 To turn this setting on, simply use the "Edit" link for the feed that
338 you want to turn it on for.
339
340 * REGULAR EXPRESSION BUG FIXED: Eliminated a minor bug in the regular
341 expressions for e-mail addresses (used in parsing RSS `author`
342 elements), which could produce unsightly error messages for some users
343 parsing RSS 2.0 feeds.
344
345 * DATE / UPDATE BUG FIXED: A bug in date handling was eliminated that may
346 have caused problems if any of (1) WordPress, or (2) PHP, or (3) your
347 web server, or (4) your MySQL server, has been set to use a different
348 time zone from the one that any of the others is set to use. If
349 FeedWordPress has not been properly updating updated posts, or has been
350 updating posts when there shouldn't be any changes for the update, this
351 release may solve that problem.
352
353 * GOOGLE READER BUGS FIXED: A couple of bugs that made it difficult for
354 FeedWordPress to interact with Google Reader public feeds have been
355 fixed. Firstly, if you encountered an error message reading "There was a
356 problem adding the newsfeed. [SQL: ]" when you tried to add the feed,
357 the cause of this error has been fixed. Secondly, if you succeeded in
358 getting FeedWordPress to check a Google Reader feed, only to find that
359 the title of posts had junk squashed on to the end of them, that bug
360 has been fixed too. To fix this bug, you must install the newest version
361 of the optional MagpieRSS upgrade.
362
363 * FILTER PARAMETERS: Due to an old, old bug in WordPress 1.5.0 (which was
364 what was available back when I first wrote the filter interface),
365 FeedWordPress has traditionally only passed one parameter to
366 syndicated_item and syndicated_post filters functions -- an array
367 containing either the Magpie representation of a syndicated item from
368 the feed, or the database representation of a post about to be inserted
369 into the WordPress database. If you needed information about the feed
370 that the item came from, this was accessible only through a pair of
371 global variables, $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta.
372
373 Since it's been a pretty long time since WordPress 1.5.0 was in
374 widespread usage, I have gone ahead and added an optional second
375 parameter to the invocation of the syndicated_item and syndicated_post
376 filters. If you have written a filter for FeedWordPress that uses either
377 of these hooks, you can now register that filter to accept 2 parameters.
378 If you do so, the second parameter will be a SyndicatedPost object,
379 which, among other things, allows you to access information about the
380 feed from which an item is syndicated using the $post->feed and the
381 $post->feedmeta elements (where $post is the name of the second
382 parameter).
383
384 NOTE THAT THE OLD GLOBAL VARIABLES ARE STILL AVAILABLE, for the time
385 being at least, so existing filters will not break with the upgrade.
386 They should be considered deprecated, however, and may be eliminated in
387 the future.
388
389 * FILTER CHANGE / BUGFIX: the array that is passed as the first argument
390 syndicated_post filters no longer is no longer backslash-escaped for
391 MySQL when filters are called. This was originally a bug, or an
392 oversight; the contents of the array should only be escaped for the
393 database *after* they have gone through all filters. IF YOU HAVE WRITTEN
394 ANY syndicated_post FILTERS THAT PRESUME THE OLD BEHAVIOR OF PASSING IN
395 STRINGS THAT ARE ALREADY BACKSLASH-ESCAPED, UPDATE YOUR FILTERS
396 ACCORDINGLY.
397
398 * OTHER MINOR BUGFIXES AND INTERNAL CHANGES: The internal architecture of
399 FeedWordPress has been significantly changed to make the code more
400 modular and clean; hopefully this should help reduce the number of
401 compatibility updates that are needed, and make them easier and quicker
402 when they are needed.
403
404 Changes from 0.98 to 0.981
405 --------------------------
406 Version 0.981 is a narrowly targeted bugfix and compatibility release, whose
407 main purpose is to resolve a major outstanding problem: the incompatibility
408 between version 0.98 of WordPress and the recently released WordPress 2.1.
409
410 * WORDPRESS 2.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress is now compatible with
411 WordPress 2.1, as well as retaining its existing support for WordPress
412 2.0 and 1.5. Incompatibilities that resulted in database warnings, fatal
413 errors, and which prevented FeedWordPress from syndicating new posts,
414 have been eliminated.
415
416 * RSS-FUNCTIONS.PHP RENAMED TO RSS.PHP: if you use the upgraded MagpieRSS
417 replacement that's included with FeedWordPress, be sure to note that
418 there are now *two* files to upload from the `OPTIONAL/wp-includes`
419 subdirectory in order to carry out the upgrade: rss-functions.php and
420 rss.php. **It is necessary to upload both files**, due to a change in
421 the file naming scheme in WordPress 2.1, and it is necessary to do so
422 whether you are using WordPress 2.1 or not. If you only upload the
423 `rss-functions.php` file as in previous installations you will not have
424 a working copy of MagpieRSS; the rss.php file contains the actual code.
425
426 * DATE BUG AFFECTING SOME PHP INSTALLATIONS RESOLVED: due to a subtle bug
427 in parse_w3cdtf(), some installations of PHP encountered problems with
428 FeedWordPress's attempt to date posts, which would cause some new posts
429 on Atom feeds to be dated as if they had apppeared in 1969 or 1970
430 (thus, effectively, never appearing on front apge at all). This bug in
431 the date handling should now be fixed.
432
433 * PHP <?=...?> SHORT FORM ELIMINATED: some installations of PHP do not
434 allow the <?=...?> short form for printing PHP values, which was used
435 extensively in the FeedWordPress interface code. Since this could cause
436 fatal errors for users with the wrong installation of PHP, the short
437 form has been replaced with full PHP echo statements, and is no longer
438 used in FeedWordPress.
439
440 * BETTER USER INTERFACE INTEGRATION WITH WORDPRESS 2.x: Some minor changes
441 have been made to help the FeedWordPress interface pages blend in better
442 with the user interface when running under WordPress 2.x.
443
444 * GLOBAL CATEGORIES BUG RESOLVED: a bug that prevented some users from
445 setting one or more categories to apply to syndicated posts from all
446 feeds (using the checkbox interface under Options --> Syndication) has
447 been resolved.
448
449 Changes from 0.97 to 0.98
450 --------------------------
451
452 * WORDPRESS 2.0 COMPATIBILITY: This is a narrowly-targeted release to
453 solve a major outstanding problem. FeedWordPress is now compatible with
454 both WordPress 1.5 and WordPress 2.0. Incompatibilities that caused
455 fatal SQL errors, and a more subtle bug with off-kilter counts of posts
456 under a given category, have been resolved. FeedWordPress tests for
457 database schema using the global $wp_db_version variable (if null, then
458 we presume that we're dealing with WordPress 1.5).
459
460 NOTE: I have **not** fully tested FeedWordPress with WordPress 2.0.
461 Further testing may reveal more bugs. However, you should now be able
462 to get at least basic FeedWordPress functionality up and running.
463
464 * AUTHOR MATCHING: FeedWordPress tests several fields to see if it can
465 identify the author of the post as a user already in the WordPress user
466 database. In previous versions, it tested the user login, the nickname,
467 and tested for "aliases" listed in the Profile (see documentation). FWP
468 now also matches authors on the basis of e-mail address (*if* an e-mail
469 address is present). This is particularly helpful for formats such as
470 RSS 2.0, in which authors are primarily identified by e-mail addresses.
471
472 Changes from 0.96 to 0.97
473 -------------------------
474
475 * INSTALLATION PROCEDURE: Some of the changes between 0.96 and 0.97
476 require upgrades to the meta-data stored by FeedWordPress to work
477 properly. Thus, if you are upgrading from 0.96 or earlier to 0.97, most
478 FeedWordPress operations (including updates and template functions)
479 WILL BE DISABLED until you run the upgrade procedure. Fortunately,
480 running the upgrade procedure is easy: just go to either Options -->
481 Syndication or Links --> Syndicated in the WordPress Dashboard and press
482 the button.
483
484 * FEED FORMAT SUPPORT: Support has been added for the Atom 1.0 IETF
485 standard. Several other elements are also newly supported
486 (dcterms:created, dcterms:issued, dcterms:modified, dc:identifier,
487 proper support for the RSS 2.0 guid element, the RSS 2.0 author element,
488 the use of Atom author or Dublin Core dc:creator constructs at the feed
489 level to identify the author of individual items, etc.)
490
491 N.B.: full support of several Atom 1.0 features, such as categories
492 and enclosures, requires you to install the optional rss-functions.php
493 upgrade in your wp-includes directory.
494
495 * BUG FIX: Running `update-feeds.php` from command line or crontab
496 returned "I don't syndicate..." errors. It turns out that WordPress
497 sometimes tramples on the internal PHP superglobals that I depended on
498 to determine whether or not the script was being invoked from the
499 command line. This has been fixed (the variables are now checked
500 *before* WordPress can trample them). Note that `update-feeds.php` has
501 been thoroughly overhauled anyway; see below for details.
502
503 * BUG FIX: Duplicate categories or author names. Fixed two bugs that could
504 create duplicate author and/or category names when the name contained
505 either (a) certain international characters (causing a mismatch between
506 MySQL and PHP's handling of lowercasing text), or (b) characters that
507 have a special meaning in regular expressions (causing MySQL errors when
508 looking for the author or category due to regexp syntax errors). These
509 should now be fixed thanks to careful escaping of names that go into
510 regular expressions and careful matching of lowercasing functions
511 (comparing results from PHP only to other results from PHP, and results
512 from MySQL only to other results from MySQL).
513
514 * BUG FIX: Items dated Decembr 31, 1969 should appear less often. The
515 function for parsing W3C date-time format dates that ships with
516 MagpieRSS can only correctly parse fully-specified dates with a
517 fully-specified time, but valid W3C date-time format dates may omit the
518 time, the day of the month, or even the month. Some feeds in the wild
519 date their items with coarse-grained dates, so the optional
520 `rss-functions.php` upgrade now includes a more flexible parse_w3cdtf()
521 function that will work with both coarse-grained and fully-specified
522 dates. (If parts of the date or the time are omitted, they are filled in
523 with values based on the current time, so '2005-09-10' will be dated to
524 the current time on that day; '2004' will be dated to this day and time
525 one year ago.
526
527 N.B.: This fix is only available in the optional `rss-functions.php`
528 upgrade.
529
530 * BUG FIX: Evil use of HTTP GET has been undone. The WordPress interface
531 is riddled with inappropriate (non-idempotent) uses of HTTP GET queries
532 (ordinary links that make the server do something with significant
533 side-effects, such as deleting a post or a link from the database).
534 FeedWordPress did some of this too, especially in places where it aped
535 the WordPress interface (e.g. the "Delete" links in Links -->
536 Syndicated). That's bad business, though. I've changed the interface so
537 that all the examples of improper side-effects that I can find now
538 require an HTTP POST to take effect. I think I got pretty much
539 everything; if there's anything that I missed, let me know.
540
541 Further reading: [Sam Ruby 2005-05-06: This Stuff Matters] (http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2005/05/06/This-Stuff-Matters)
542
543 * BUG FIX: Categories applied by `cats` setting should no longer prevent
544 category-based filtering from working. In FeedWordPress, you can (1)
545 apply certain categories to all syndicated posts, or all posts from
546 a particular feed; and (2) filter out all posts that don't match one
547 of the categories that are already in the WordPress database (allowing
548 for simple category-based filtering; just load up WordPress with the
549 categories you want to accept, and then tell FeedWordPress not to create
550 new ones). However, the way that (1) and (2) were implemented meant that
551 you couldn't effectively use them together; once you applied a known
552 category to all syndicated posts from a particular feed, it meant that
553 they'd have at least one familiar category (the category or categories
554 you were applying), and that would get all posts past the filter no
555 matter what categories they were originally from.
556
557 Well, no longer. You can still apply categories to all syndicated posts
558 (using either Syndication --> Options, or the feed-level settings under
559 Links --> Syndicated). But these categories are not applied to the post
560 until *after* it has already passed by the "familiar categories" filter.
561 So now, if you want, you can do category filtering and *then* apply as
562 many categories as you please to all and only posts that pass the filter.
563
564 * BUG FIX: Other minor typos and HTML gaffes were fixed along the way.
565
566 * PERFORMANCE: get_feed_meta() no longer hits the database for information
567 on every call; it now caches link data in memory, so FeedWordPress only
568 goes to the database once for each syndicated link. This may
569 substantially improve performance if your database server resources
570 are tight and your templates make a lot of use of custom settings from
571 get_feed_meta().
572
573 * API CHANGE: Link ID numbers, rather than RSS URIs, are now used to
574 identify the feed from which a post is syndicated when you use template
575 functions such as get_feed_meta(). The practical upshot of this is you
576 can switch feeds, or change the feed address for a particular syndicated
577 site, without breaking your templates for all the posts that were
578 syndicated from the earlier URI.
579
580 * API CHANGE: if you have plugins or templates that make use of the
581 get_feed_meta() function or the $fwp_feedmeta global, note that the
582 data formerly located under the `uri` and `name` fields is now located
583 under the `link/uri` field and the `link/name` field, respectively. Note
584 also that you can access the link ID number for any given feed under the
585 global $fwp_feedmeta['link/id'] (in plugins) or
586 get_feed_meta('link/id') (in a template in post contexts).
587
588 * FEATURE: the settings for individual feeds can now be edited using a
589 humane interface (where formerly you had to tweak key-value pairs in the
590 Link Notes section). To edit settings for a feed, pick the feed that you
591 want under Links --> Syndicated and click the Edit link.
592
593 * FEATURE: The "Unsubscribe" button (formerly "Delete") in Links -->
594 Syndicated now offers three options for unsubscribing from a feed: (1)
595 turning off the subscription without deleting the feed data or affecting
596 posts that were syndicated from the feed (this works by setting the Link
597 for the feed as "invisible"); (2) deleting the feed data and all of the
598 posts that were syndicated from the feed; or (3) deleting the feed data
599 and *keeping* the posts that were syndicated from the feed
600 setting the Link to "Invisible" (meaning that it will not be displayed
601 in lists of the site links on the front page, and it won't be checked
602 for updates; (2) deleting the Link and all of the posts that were
603 syndicated from its feed; or (3) deleting the feed data but keeping the
604 posts that were syndicated (which will henceforward be treated as if
605 they were local rather than syndicated posts). (Note that (1) is usually
606 the best option for aggregator sites, unless you want to clean up the
607 results of an error or a test.)
608
609 * FEATURE / BUG FIX: If you have been receiving mysterious "I don't
610 syndicate...", or "(local) HTTP status code was not 200", or "(local)
611 transport error - could not open socket", or "parse error - not well
612 formed" errors, then this update may solve your problems, and if it does
613 *not* solve them, it will at least make the reasons for the problems
614 easier to understand. That's because I've overhauled the way that
615 FeedWordPress goes about updating feeds.
616
617 If you use the command-line PHP scripting method to run scheduled
618 updates, then not much should change for you, except for fewer
619 mysterious errors. If you have done updates by sending periodic HTTP
620 requests to <http://your-blog.com/path/wp-content/update-feeds.php>,
621 then the details have changed somewhat; mostly in such a way as to make
622 things easier on you. See the README file or online documentation on
623 Staying Current for the details.
624
625 * FEATURE: FeedWordPress now features a more sophisticated system for
626 timed updates. Instead of polling *every* subscribed feed for updates
627 *each* time `update-feeds.php` is run, FeedWordPress now keeps track of
628 the last time it polled each feed, and only polls them again after a
629 certain period of time has passed. The amount of time is normally set
630 randomly for each feed, in a period between 30 minutes and 2 hours (so
631 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
632 directly by the feed, which brings us to ...
633
634 * FEATURE: FeedWordPress now respects the settings in the `ttl` and
635 Syndication Module RSS elements. Feeds with these elements set will not
636 be polled any more frequently than they indicate with these feeds unless
637 the user manually forces FeedWordPress to poll the feed (see Links -->
638 Syndicated --> Edit settings).
639
640 Changes from 0.95 to 0.96
641 -------------------------
642
643 * FEATURE: support has been added for enclosures in RSS 2.0 and Atom
644 0.6+ newsfeeds. WordPress already supports adding enclosures to an
645 item; FeedWordPress merely gets the information on the enclosure
646 from the feed it is syndicating and plugs that information directly
647 into the WordPress database so that (among other things) that post
648 will have its enclosure listed in your blog's RSS 2 newsfeed.
649
650 Note that enclosure support requires using the optional MagpieRSS
651 upgrade (i.e., replacing your `wp-includes/rss-functions.php` with
652 `OPTIONAL/wp-includes/rss-functions.php` from the FWP archive)
653
654 * FEATURE: for completeness's sake, there is now a feed setting,
655 `hardcode url`, that allows you to set the URI for the front page
656 of a contributor's website manually (that is, prevent it from being
657 automatically updated from the feed channel link on each update). To
658 set the URI manually, put a line like this in the Link Notes section
659 of a feed:
660
661 hardcode url: yes
662
663 You can also instruct FeedWordPress to use hardcoded URIs by default
664 on all feeds using Options --> Syndication
665
666 * FEATURE: by default, when FeedWordPress finds new syndicated posts,
667 it (1) publishes them immediately, (2) turns comments off, and (3)
668 turns trackback / pingback pings off. You can now alter all three
669 default behaviors (e.g., to allow pings on syndicated posts, or to
670 send newly-syndicated posts to the draft pile for moderation) using
671 Options --> Syndication
672
673
674 Changes from 0.91 to 0.95
675 -------------------------
676
677 * BUG FIX: Fixed an obscure bug in the handling of categories:
678 categories with trailing whitespace could cause categories with
679 duplicate names to be created. This no longer happens. While I was
680 at it I tightened up the operation of
681 FeedWordPress::lookup_categories() a bit in general.
682
683 * FEATURE DEPRECATED: the feed setting `hardcode categories` is now
684 deprecated in favor of `unknown categories` (see below), which
685 allows you to strip off any syndication categories not already in
686 your database using `unknown categories: default` or `unknown
687 categories: filter`. If you have `hardcode categories: yes` set on a
688 feed, this will be treated as `unknown categories: default` (i.e.,
689 no new categories will be added, but if a post doesn't match any of
690 the categories it will be added in the default category--usually
691 "Uncategorized" or "General").
692
693 * FEATURE: You can now set global defaults as to whether or not
694 FeedWordPress will update the Link Name and Link Description
695 settings for feeds automatically from the feed title and feed
696 tagline. (By default, it does, as it has in past versions.) Whether
697 this behavior is turned on or off, you can still override the
698 default behavior using feed settings of `hardcode name: yes`,
699 `hardcode name: no`, `hardcode description: yes`, or `hardcode
700 description: no`.
701
702 * FEATURE: Users can now provide one or several "aliases" for an
703 author, just as they can for a category. For example, to make
704 FeedWordPress treat posts by "Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger" and "Pope
705 Benedict XVI" as by the same author, edit the user profile for Pope
706 Benedict XVI and add a line like this to the "User profile" field:
707
708 a.k.a.: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
709
710 You can add several aliases, each on a line by itself. You can also
711 add any other text you like to the Profile without interfering with
712 the aliases.
713
714 * FEATURE: Users can now choose how to handle syndicated posts that
715 are in unfamiliar categories or by unfamiliar authors (i.e.,
716 categories or authors whose names are not yet in the WordPress
717 database). By default, FeedWordPress will (as before) create a new
718 category (or new author) and use it for the current post and any
719 future posts. This behavior can be changed, either for all feeds or
720 for one or another particular feed.
721
722 There are now three different options for an unfamiliar author: (1)
723 FeedWordPress can create a new author account and attribute the
724 syndicated post to the new account; (2) FeedWordPress can attribute
725 the post to an author if the author's name is familiar, and to a
726 default author (currently, this means the Site Administrator
727 account) if it is not; (3) FeedWordPress can drop posts by
728 unfamiliar authors and syndicate only posts by authors who are
729 already in the database.
730
731 There are, similarly, two different options for an unfamiliar
732 category: (1) FeedWordPress can create new categories and place the
733 syndicated post in them; (2) FeedWordPress can drop the unfamiliar
734 categories and place syndicated posts only in categories that it is
735 already familiar with. In addition, FeedWordPress 0.95 lets you
736 choose whether posts that are in *no* familiar categories should be
737 syndicated (and placed in the default category for the blog) or
738 simply dropped.
739
740 You can set the default behavior for both authors and categories
741 using the settings in Options --> Syndication. You can also set
742 different behavior for specific feeds by adding the `unfamiliar
743 author` and / or `unfamiliar categories` settings to the Link Notes
744 section of a feed:
745
746 unfamiliar author: (create|default|filter)
747 unfamiliar categories: (create|default|filter)
748
749 A setting of `unfamiliar author: create` will make FeedWordPress
750 create new authors to match unfamiliar author names *for this feed
751 alone*. A setting of `unfamiliar author: default` will make it
752 assign posts from unfamiliar authors to the default user account. A
753 setting of `unfamiliar author: filter` will cause all posts (from
754 this feed alone) to be dropped unless they are by an author already
755 listed in the database. Similiarly, `unfamiliar categories: create`
756 will make FeedWordPress create new categories to match unfamiliar
757 category names *for this feed alone*; `unfamiliar categories:
758 default` will cause it to drop any unfamiliar category names; and
759 `unfamiliar categories: filter` will cause it to *both* drop any
760 unfamiliar category names *and* to only syndicate posts that are
761 placed in one or more familiar categories.
762
763 These two new features allow users to do some coarse-grained
764 filtering without having to write a PHP filter. Specifically, they
765 offer an easy way for you to filter feeds by category or by author.
766 Suppose, for example, that you only wanted to syndicate posts that
767 your contributors place in the "Llamas" category. You could do so by
768 setting up your installation of WordPress so that the only category
769 in the database is "Llamas," and then use Options --> Syndication to
770 set "Unfamiliar categories" to "don't create new categories and
771 don't syndicate posts unless they match at least one familiar
772 category". Now, when you update, only posts in the "Llamas" category
773 will be syndicated by FeedWordPress.
774
775 Similarly, if you wanted to filter one particular feed so that only
776 posts by (for example) the author "Earl J. Llama" were syndicated to
777 your site, you could do so by creating a user account for Earl J.
778 Llama, then adding the following line to the settings for the feed
779 in Link Notes:
780
781 unfamiliar author: filter
782
783 This will cause any posts from this feed that are not authored by
784 Earl J. Llama to be discarded, and only the posts by Earl J. Llama
785 will be syndicated. (If the setting is used on one specific feed, it
786 will not affect how posts from other feeds are syndicated.)
787
788