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FeedWordPress / 2008.1214
FeedWordPress v2008.1214
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1 FeedWordPress Change Log
2 ========================
3
4 Changes from 2008.1105 to 2008.1214
5 -----------------------------------
6
7 * WORDPRESS 2.7 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress has been tested for
8 compatibility with the newly released WordPress 2.7. WordPress 2.7 has
9 deprecated the Snoopy library for HTTP requests, which caused a fatal
10 error for users who had not installed the MagpieRSS upgrade (or whose
11 installation of the MagpieRSS upgrade was overwritten by a recent update
12 of WordPress). FeedWordPress now handles things gracefully when Snoopy
13 is not immediately available.
14
15 * INTERFACE SPIFFED UP: Interface elements have been updated so that
16 FeedWordPress's management interface fits in more naturally with the
17 WordPress 2.7 interface (including a new logo and a number of small
18 interface tweaks).
19
20 * BUG WITH TAGS FOR SYNDICATED ARTICLES FIXED: Several users encountered a
21 bug with the option to add tags to all syndicated posts under
22 Syndication --> Settings -- if you told FeedWordPress to add more than
23 one tag to all syndicated posts, instead of doing so correctly, it would
24 add a *single* tag instead, whose name was composed of the names of all
25 the tags you asked it to add. This bug was the result of nothing more
26 dignified than a typographical error on my part. It has now been fixed.
27
28 * MORE INFORMATION AVAILABLE WHEN FEEDWORDPRESS CAN'T FIND A FEED: When
29 you enter a URL for a new syndication source, FeedWordPress uses a
30 simple feed-finding algorithm (originally based on Mark Pilgrim's
31 Universal Feed Finder) to try to determine whether the URL is the URL
32 for a feed, or, if the URL points to an ordinary website rather than to
33 a feed, whether there is a feed for that website. All well and good, but
34 if FeedWordPress failed to find a feed, for whatever reason, it would
35 typically return nothing more than a nasty little note to the effect of
36 "no feed found," without any explanation of what went wrong.
37 FeedWordPress now keeps track of error conditions from the HTTP
38 requests that it uses in the course of looking for the feed, and so may
39 be able to give you a bit more information about the nature of the
40 problem if something goes wrong.
41
42
43 Changes from 2008.1101 to 2008.1105
44 -----------------------------------
45
46 * INTERFACE RESTRUCTURING AND SYNDICATION --> AUTHORS PAGE: As a first
47 step towards modularizing and better organizing the user interface, a
48 new "Authors" subpage has been created under the Syndication menu, which
49 controls settings for syndicated authors, both at the global default
50 level and at level of individual syndicated feeds.
51
52 * BUG RELATED TO THE ATTRIBUTION OF POSTS TO THE WRONG AUTHOR FIXED: Some
53 users encountered an issue in which posts by different authors on
54 different blogs -- especially blogs generated by Blogger -- were
55 mistakenly attributed to a single author. The problem was caused by the
56 way in which FeedWordPress matches syndicated authors to user accounts
57 in the WordPress database: normally, if two feeds each list an author
58 with the same e-mail address, they are counted as being the same person.
59 Normally this works well, but it creates an issue in cases where
60 blogging software assigns a single anonymous e-mail address to users who
61 do not want their real e-mail address published. This is, for example,
62 what Blogger does (by giving all users a default e-mail address of
63 <noreply@blogger.com> if they don't want their own e-mail address
64 listed). FeedWordPress now allows the user to correct for this problem
65 with a couple of new settings under **Syndication --> Authors**, which
66 allow users to turn off e-mail based author matching for particular
67 addresses, or, if desired, to turn it off entirely. By default, e-mail
68 based author matching is still turned on, but disabled for a list of
69 known generic e-mail addresses. Right now, the "list" consists entirely
70 of <noreply@blogger.com>; if you know other addresses that should be
71 added, please [contact me](http://radgeek.com/contact) to let me know.
72
73 Please note that if you have already encountered this issue on your
74 blog, upgrading FeedWordPress will prevent it from re-occurring in the
75 future, but you still need to do two other things to fix the existing
76 problem on your blog.
77
78 First, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to
79 change the existing author mapping rules to re-map a a syndicated
80 author's name to the proper target account. Go to **Syndication -->
81 Authors**, select the feed you want to change from the drop-down list,
82 and then change the settings under the "Syndicated Authors" section.
83 (You will probably need to select "will be assigned to a new user..." to
84 create a new user account with the appropriate name.)
85
86 Second, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to
87 re-assign already-syndicated posts that were mis-attributed to the
88 correct author. You can do that from **Syndication --> Authors** by
89 using the author re-assignment feature, described below.
90
91 * AUTHOR RE-ASSIGNMENT FOR A PARTICULAR FEED: The author settings page
92 for each syndicated feed, under **Syndication --> Authors**, now
93 includes an section titled "Fixing mis-matched authors," which provides
94 an interface for re-assigning or deleting all posts attributed to a
95 particular author on a particular feed.
96
97 * SUPPORT FOR `<atom:source>` ELEMENT IN SYNDICATED FEEDS: Some feeds
98 (for example, those produced by FeedWordPress) aggregate content from
99 several different sources, and include information about the original
100 source of the post in an `<atom:source>` element. A new setting under
101 **Syndication --> Options** allows you to control what FeedWordPress
102 will report as the source of posts syndicated from aggregator feeds in
103 your templates and feeds: you can have FeedWordPress report that the
104 source of a post is the aggregator feed itself, or you can have it
105 report that the source of a post is the original source that the
106 aggregator originally syndicated the post from.
107
108 By default, FeedWordPress will report the aggregator, not the original
109 source, as the source of a syndicated item.
110
111 * LOAD BALANCING AND TIME LIMITING FEATURES FOR UPDATES: Some users have
112 encountered issues due to running up against PHP execution time limits
113 during the process of updating large syndicated feeds, or a very large
114 set of syndicated feeds. FeedWordPress now has a feature that allows you
115 to limit the total amount of time spent updating a feed, through the
116 "Time limit on updates" setting under **Syndication --> Options**. By
117 turning on this setting and adjusting the time limit to a low enough
118 figure to avoid your PHP installation's time-out setting. (PHP execution
119 time limits are usually in the vicinity of 30 seconds, so an update
120 time limit of 25 seconds or so should provide plenty of time for updates
121 while allowing a cushion of time for other, non-update-related functions
122 to do their work.)
123
124 If feed updates are interrupted by the time limit, FeedWordPress uses
125 some simple load balancing features to make sure that updates to other
126 feeds will not be blocked by the time-hogging feed, and will also make
127 sure that when the interrupted update is resumed, FeedWordPress will
128 skip ahead to resume processing items at the point at which it was
129 interrupted last time, so that posts further down in the feed will
130 eventually get processed, and not get blocked by the amount of time it
131 takes to process the items higher up in the feed.
132
133 * `guid` INDEX CREATION BUTTON: FeedWordPress frequently issues queries on
134 the `guid` column of the WordPress posts database (since it uses post
135 guid URIs to keep track of which posts it has syndicated). In very large
136 FeedWordPress installations, you can often significantly improve
137 performance by creating a database index on the `guid` column, but
138 normally you would need to poke around with MySQL or a tool like
139 phpMyAdmin to do this. FeedWordPress can now save you the trouble: to
140 create an index on the `guid` column, just go to
141 **Syndication --> Options**, and mash the button at the bottom of the
142 "Back End" section.
143
144 Changes from 2008.1030 to 2008.1101
145 -----------------------------------
146
147 * INTERFACE BUG THAT PREVENTED ADDING NEW SITES FIXED: The UI reforms in
148 FWP 2008.1030 unintentionally introduced a bug that prevents clean
149 installations of FeedWordPress from providing an input box for adding
150 new feeds to the list of syndicated feeds. This bug has been fixed.
151
152 Changes from 0.993 to 2008.1030
153 -------------------------------
154
155 * WORDPRESS 2.6 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with
156 WordPress 2.6, and should work more or less seamlessly with the new post
157 revision system. A bug which caused multiple new revisions to be created
158 for posts on certain feeds, regardless of whether or not the item had
159 been updated, has been fixed.
160
161 * INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: The user interface has been substantially
162 restyled to fit in better with the visual style of WordPress 2.5 and
163 2.6.
164
165 * YOUTUBE BUG FIXED: POSTS SYNDICATED THROUGH AN AUTOMATIC UPDATE ARE NO
166 LONGER STRIPPED OF `<OBJECT>` TAGS AND CERTAIN OTHER HTML ELEMENTS: Due
167 to the way that some versions of WordPress process posts that are
168 inserted into the database when no user is logged in, many users
169 experienced an issue where YouTube videos and other content using the
170 HTML `<object>` tag would be stripped out of posts that were syndicated
171 during an automatic update. (Posts that were syndicated through manual
172 updates from within the WordPress Dashboard were not affected, because
173 the issue does not arise when an update is executed under a logged-in
174 administrator's credentials.) This bug has now been fixed; YouTube
175 videos and other content using `<object>` tags should now appear
176 properly in syndicated posts, regardless of the way in which the post
177 was syndicated.
178
179 * AJAX BUGS FIXED: Bugs which blocked the normal operation of WordPress
180 2.5's AJAX interface elements when FeedWordPress was activated have been
181 fixed.
182
183 * TAG SUPPORT: A couple of features have been introduced to take advantage
184 of the tagging features in WordPress 2.3.x, 2.5.x, and 2.6.x. Now, when
185 unfamiliar categories are encountered for posts on a feed, you can
186 choose for FeedWordPress (1) to drop the category; (2) to drop the
187 category and to filter out any post that does not match at least one
188 familiar category; (3) to create a new category with that name, or,
189 now, you can also have FeedWordPress (4) create a new *tag* with that
190 name. This option can be set site-wide under Syndication --> Options,
191 or it can be set on a feed-by-feed basis in a feed's Edit screen.
192
193 In addition, you can now set particular tags to apply to all incoming
194 syndicated posts, under Syndication --> Options, or you can set tags
195 to apply to all incoming syndicated posts from a particular feed in that
196 feed's Edit screen.
197
198 * FORMATTING FILTERS: There is a new option available under Syndication ->
199 Options which allows users to choose whether or not to expose syndicated
200 posts to being altered by formatting filters. By default, FeedWordPress
201 has always protected syndicated posts (which are already in display-ready
202 HTML when they are syndicated) from being reformatted by formatting
203 filters. However, this approach means that certain plugins which depend
204 on formatting filters (for example, to add "Share This" bars or relevant
205 links to the end of a post) are blocked from working on any syndicated
206 posts. If you want to use one of these plugins together with
207 FeedWordPress, you can now do so by changing the "Formatting Filters"
208 setting from "Protect" to "Expose."
209
210 * `<atom:source>` ELEMENTS NOW INCLUDED IN ATOM FEED: Atom 1.0 provides
211 a standard method for aggregators to indicate information about the original source of
212 a syndicated post, using the `<atom:source>` element. FeedWordPress now
213 introduces standard `<atom:source>` elements including the title, homepage, and
214 feed URI of the source from which a syndicated post was syndicated. Cf.
215 <http://www.atomenabled.org/developers/syndication/atom-format-spec.php#element.source>
216
217 * MODULARIZATION OF CODE: The code for different elements of FeedWordPress
218 has been broken out into several modules for easier inspection,
219 documentation, and maintenance of the code.
220
221 * VERSIONING SCHEME CHANGED: FeedWordPress's feature set has proven stable
222 enough that it can now be removed from beta status; a good thing, since
223 I was very quickly running out of version numbers to use. New releases
224 of FeedWordPress will have version numbers based on the date of their
225 release.
226
227 Changes from 0.992 to 0.993
228 ---------------------------
229
230 * WORDPRESS 2.5.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible
231 with WordPress 2.5.1.
232
233 * WORDPRESS 2.5 INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: FeedWordPress's Dashboard
234 interface has undergone several cosmetic changes that should help it
235 integrate better with the WordPress Dashboard interface in WordPress
236 version 2.5.x.
237
238 * SYNDICATED POSTS CAN BE MARKED AS "PENDING REVIEW": WordPress 2.3 users
239 can now take advantage of WordPress's new "Pending Review" features for
240 incoming syndicated posts. Posts marked as "Pending Review" are not
241 published immediately, but are marked as ready to be reviewed by an
242 Administrator or Editor, who can then choose to publish the post or
243 hold it back. If you want to review syndicated posts from a particular
244 feed, or from all feeds, before they are posted, then use
245 Syndication --> Syndicated Sites --> Edit or Syndication --> Options to
246 change the settings for handling new posts.
247
248 * AWARE OF NEW URI FOR del.icio.us FEEDS: Previous releases of
249 FeedWordPress already automatically split del.icio.us tags up
250 appropriately appropriately when generating categories. (del.icio.us
251 feeds smoosh all the tags into a single `<dc:subject>` element,
252 separated by spaces; FeedWordPress un-smooshes them into multiple
253 categories by separating them at whitespace.) Unfortunately, del.icio.us
254 recently broke the existing behavior by changing host names for their
255 feeds from del.icio.us to feeds.delicious.com. Version 0.993 accounts
256 for the new host name and un-breaks the tag splitting.
257
258 Changes from 0.991 to 0.992
259 ---------------------------
260 * AUTHOR RE-MAPPING: FeedWordPress now offers considerable control over
261 how author names on a feed are translated into usernames within the
262 WordPress database. When a post by an unrecognized author comes in,
263 Administrators can now specify any username as the default username to
264 assign the post to by setting the option in Syndication --> Options
265 (formerly FeedWordPress only allowed you to assign such posts to user
266 #1, the site administrator). Administrators can also create re-mapping
267 rules for particular feeds (under Syndication --> Syndicated Sites -->
268 Edit), so that (for example) any posts attributed to "Administrator"
269 on the feed <http://praxeology.net/blog/feed/> will be assigned to
270 a user named "Roderick T. Long," rather than a user named
271 "Administrator." These settings also allow administrators to filter out
272 posts by particular users, and to control what will happen when
273 FeedWordPress encounters a post by an unrecognized user on that
274 particular feed.
275
276 * BUG RELATED TO URIS CONTAINING AMPERSAND CHARACTERS FIXED: A bug in
277 WordPress 2.x's handling of URIs in Blogroll links created problems for
278 updating any feeds whose URIs included an ampersand character, such as
279 Google News RSS feeds and other feeds that have multiple parameters
280 passed through HTTP GET. If you experienced this bug, the most likely
281 effect was that FeedWordPress simply would not import new posts from a
282 feed when instructred to do so, returning a "0 new posts" response. In
283 other cases, it might lead to unpredictable results from feed updates,
284 such as importing posts which were not contained in the feed being
285 syndicated, but which did appear elsewhere on the same website. This bug
286 has, hopefully, been resolved, by correcting for the bug in WordPress.
287
288 Changes from 0.99 to 0.991
289 --------------------------
290 * WORDPRESS MU COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with
291 recent releases of WordPress MU. Once FeedWordPress is made available
292 as a plugin, each individual blog can choose to activate FeedWordPress
293 and syndicate content from its own set of contributors.
294
295 * DISPLAY OF MAGPIE WARNINGS: A number of MagpieRSS warnings or error
296 messages that were displayed when performing an automatic update are
297 no longer displayed, unless debugging parameters have been explicitly
298 enabled.
299
300 * BUG RELATED TO INTERNATIONAL CHARACTERS IN AUTHOR NAMES FIXED: Due to a
301 subtle incompatability between the way that FeedWordPress generated new
302 user information, and the way that WordPress 2.0 and later added new
303 authors to the database, FeedWordPress might end up creating duplicate
304 authors, or throwing a critical error message, when it encountered
305 authors whose names included international characters. This
306 incompatability has now been fixed; hopefully, authors with
307 international characters in their names should now be handled properly.
308
309 * `<media:content>` BUG IN MAGPIERSS FIXED: A bug in MagpieRSS's handling
310 of namespaced elements has been fixed. Among other things, this bug
311 caused items containing a Yahoo MediaRSS `<media:content>` element (such
312 as many of the feeds produced by wordpress.com) to be represented
313 incorrectly, with only a capital "A" where the content of the post
314 should have been. Feeds containing `<media:content>` elements should now
315 be syndicated correctly.
316
317 * update_feedwordpress PARAMETER: You can now use an HTTP GET parameter
318 (`update_feedwordpress=1`) to request that FeedWordPress poll its feeds
319 for updates. When used together with a crontab or other means of
320 scheduling tasks, this means that you can keep your blog automatically
321 updated on a regular schedule, even if you do not choose to use the
322 cron-less automatic updates option.
323
324 * Some minor interface-related bugs were also fixed.
325
326
327 Changes from 0.981 to 0.99
328 --------------------------
329 Version 0.99 adds several significant new features, fixes some bugs, and
330 provides compatability with WordPress 2.2.x and 2.3.x.
331
332 * WORDPRESS 2.2 AND 2.3 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be
333 compatible with WordPress version 2.2 and the upcoming WordPress
334 version 2.3. In particular, it has been tested extensively against
335 WordPress 2.2.3 and WordPress 2.3 Release Candidate 1.
336
337 * AUTOMATIC UPDATES WITHOUT CRON: FeedWordPress now allows you to
338 automatically schedule checks for new posts without using external task
339 scheduling tools such as cron. In order to enable automatic updates, go
340 to **Syndication --> Options** and set "Check for new posts" to
341 "automatically." For details, see "Automatic Feed Updates" in
342 README.text.
343
344 An important side-effect of the changes to the update system is that if
345 you were previously using the cron job and the `update-feeds.php` script
346 to schedule updates, you need to change your cron set-up. The old
347 `update-feeds.php` script no longer exists. Instead, if you wish to use
348 a cron job to guarantee updates on a particular schedule, you should
349 have the cron job fetch the front page of your blog (for example, by
350 using `curl http://www.zyx.com/blog/ > /dev/null`) instead of activating
351 the `update-feeds.php` script. If automatic updates have been enabled,
352 fetching the front page will automatically trigger the update process.
353
354 * INTERFACE REORGANIZATION: All FeedWordPress functions are now located
355 under a top-level "Syndication" menu in the WordPress Dashboard. To
356 manage the list of syndicated sites, manually check for new posts on
357 one or more feeds, or syndicate a new site, you should use the main page
358 under **Syndication**. To change global settings for FeedWordPress,
359 you should use **Syndication --> Options**.
360
361 * FILE STRUCTURE REORGANIZATION: Due to a combination of changing styles
362 for FeedWordPress plugins and lingering bugs in the FeedWordPress admin
363 menu code, the code for FeedWordPress is now contained in two different
364 PHP files, which should be installed together in a subdirectory of your
365 plugins directory named `feedwordpress`. (See README.text for
366 installation and upgrade instructions relating to the change.)
367
368 * MULTIPLE CATEGORIES SETTING: Some feeds use non-standard methods to
369 indicate multiple categories within a single category element. (The most
370 popular site to do this is del.icio.us, which separates tags with a
371 space.) FeedWordPress now allows you to set an optional setting, for any
372 feed which does this, indicating the character or characters used to
373 divide multiple categories, using a Perl-compatible regular expression.
374 (In the case of del.icio.us feeds, FeedWordPress will automatically use
375 \s for the pattern without your having to do any further configuration.)
376 To turn this setting on, simply use the "Edit" link for the feed that
377 you want to turn it on for.
378
379 * REGULAR EXPRESSION BUG FIXED: Eliminated a minor bug in the regular
380 expressions for e-mail addresses (used in parsing RSS `author`
381 elements), which could produce unsightly error messages for some users
382 parsing RSS 2.0 feeds.
383
384 * DATE / UPDATE BUG FIXED: A bug in date handling was eliminated that may
385 have caused problems if any of (1) WordPress, or (2) PHP, or (3) your
386 web server, or (4) your MySQL server, has been set to use a different
387 time zone from the one that any of the others is set to use. If
388 FeedWordPress has not been properly updating updated posts, or has been
389 updating posts when there shouldn't be any changes for the update, this
390 release may solve that problem.
391
392 * GOOGLE READER BUGS FIXED: A couple of bugs that made it difficult for
393 FeedWordPress to interact with Google Reader public feeds have been
394 fixed. Firstly, if you encountered an error message reading "There was a
395 problem adding the newsfeed. [SQL: ]" when you tried to add the feed,
396 the cause of this error has been fixed. Secondly, if you succeeded in
397 getting FeedWordPress to check a Google Reader feed, only to find that
398 the title of posts had junk squashed on to the end of them, that bug
399 has been fixed too. To fix this bug, you must install the newest version
400 of the optional MagpieRSS upgrade.
401
402 * FILTER PARAMETERS: Due to an old, old bug in WordPress 1.5.0 (which was
403 what was available back when I first wrote the filter interface),
404 FeedWordPress has traditionally only passed one parameter to
405 syndicated_item and syndicated_post filters functions -- an array
406 containing either the Magpie representation of a syndicated item from
407 the feed, or the database representation of a post about to be inserted
408 into the WordPress database. If you needed information about the feed
409 that the item came from, this was accessible only through a pair of
410 global variables, $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta.
411
412 Since it's been a pretty long time since WordPress 1.5.0 was in
413 widespread usage, I have gone ahead and added an optional second
414 parameter to the invocation of the syndicated_item and syndicated_post
415 filters. If you have written a filter for FeedWordPress that uses either
416 of these hooks, you can now register that filter to accept 2 parameters.
417 If you do so, the second parameter will be a SyndicatedPost object,
418 which, among other things, allows you to access information about the
419 feed from which an item is syndicated using the $post->feed and the
420 $post->feedmeta elements (where $post is the name of the second
421 parameter).
422
423 NOTE THAT THE OLD GLOBAL VARIABLES ARE STILL AVAILABLE, for the time
424 being at least, so existing filters will not break with the upgrade.
425 They should be considered deprecated, however, and may be eliminated in
426 the future.
427
428 * FILTER CHANGE / BUGFIX: the array that is passed as the first argument
429 syndicated_post filters no longer is no longer backslash-escaped for
430 MySQL when filters are called. This was originally a bug, or an
431 oversight; the contents of the array should only be escaped for the
432 database *after* they have gone through all filters. IF YOU HAVE WRITTEN
433 ANY syndicated_post FILTERS THAT PRESUME THE OLD BEHAVIOR OF PASSING IN
434 STRINGS THAT ARE ALREADY BACKSLASH-ESCAPED, UPDATE YOUR FILTERS
435 ACCORDINGLY.
436
437 * OTHER MINOR BUGFIXES AND INTERNAL CHANGES: The internal architecture of
438 FeedWordPress has been significantly changed to make the code more
439 modular and clean; hopefully this should help reduce the number of
440 compatibility updates that are needed, and make them easier and quicker
441 when they are needed.
442
443 Changes from 0.98 to 0.981
444 --------------------------
445 Version 0.981 is a narrowly targeted bugfix and compatibility release, whose
446 main purpose is to resolve a major outstanding problem: the incompatibility
447 between version 0.98 of WordPress and the recently released WordPress 2.1.
448
449 * WORDPRESS 2.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress is now compatible with
450 WordPress 2.1, as well as retaining its existing support for WordPress
451 2.0 and 1.5. Incompatibilities that resulted in database warnings, fatal
452 errors, and which prevented FeedWordPress from syndicating new posts,
453 have been eliminated.
454
455 * RSS-FUNCTIONS.PHP RENAMED TO RSS.PHP: if you use the upgraded MagpieRSS
456 replacement that's included with FeedWordPress, be sure to note that
457 there are now *two* files to upload from the `OPTIONAL/wp-includes`
458 subdirectory in order to carry out the upgrade: rss-functions.php and
459 rss.php. **It is necessary to upload both files**, due to a change in
460 the file naming scheme in WordPress 2.1, and it is necessary to do so
461 whether you are using WordPress 2.1 or not. If you only upload the
462 `rss-functions.php` file as in previous installations you will not have
463 a working copy of MagpieRSS; the rss.php file contains the actual code.
464
465 * DATE BUG AFFECTING SOME PHP INSTALLATIONS RESOLVED: due to a subtle bug
466 in parse_w3cdtf(), some installations of PHP encountered problems with
467 FeedWordPress's attempt to date posts, which would cause some new posts
468 on Atom feeds to be dated as if they had apppeared in 1969 or 1970
469 (thus, effectively, never appearing on front apge at all). This bug in
470 the date handling should now be fixed.
471
472 * PHP <?=...?> SHORT FORM ELIMINATED: some installations of PHP do not
473 allow the <?=...?> short form for printing PHP values, which was used
474 extensively in the FeedWordPress interface code. Since this could cause
475 fatal errors for users with the wrong installation of PHP, the short
476 form has been replaced with full PHP echo statements, and is no longer
477 used in FeedWordPress.
478
479 * BETTER USER INTERFACE INTEGRATION WITH WORDPRESS 2.x: Some minor changes
480 have been made to help the FeedWordPress interface pages blend in better
481 with the user interface when running under WordPress 2.x.
482
483 * GLOBAL CATEGORIES BUG RESOLVED: a bug that prevented some users from
484 setting one or more categories to apply to syndicated posts from all
485 feeds (using the checkbox interface under Options --> Syndication) has
486 been resolved.
487
488 Changes from 0.97 to 0.98
489 --------------------------
490
491 * WORDPRESS 2.0 COMPATIBILITY: This is a narrowly-targeted release to
492 solve a major outstanding problem. FeedWordPress is now compatible with
493 both WordPress 1.5 and WordPress 2.0. Incompatibilities that caused
494 fatal SQL errors, and a more subtle bug with off-kilter counts of posts
495 under a given category, have been resolved. FeedWordPress tests for
496 database schema using the global $wp_db_version variable (if null, then
497 we presume that we're dealing with WordPress 1.5).
498
499 NOTE: I have **not** fully tested FeedWordPress with WordPress 2.0.
500 Further testing may reveal more bugs. However, you should now be able
501 to get at least basic FeedWordPress functionality up and running.
502
503 * AUTHOR MATCHING: FeedWordPress tests several fields to see if it can
504 identify the author of the post as a user already in the WordPress user
505 database. In previous versions, it tested the user login, the nickname,
506 and tested for "aliases" listed in the Profile (see documentation). FWP
507 now also matches authors on the basis of e-mail address (*if* an e-mail
508 address is present). This is particularly helpful for formats such as
509 RSS 2.0, in which authors are primarily identified by e-mail addresses.
510
511 Changes from 0.96 to 0.97
512 -------------------------
513
514 * INSTALLATION PROCEDURE: Some of the changes between 0.96 and 0.97
515 require upgrades to the meta-data stored by FeedWordPress to work
516 properly. Thus, if you are upgrading from 0.96 or earlier to 0.97, most
517 FeedWordPress operations (including updates and template functions)
518 WILL BE DISABLED until you run the upgrade procedure. Fortunately,
519 running the upgrade procedure is easy: just go to either Options -->
520 Syndication or Links --> Syndicated in the WordPress Dashboard and press
521 the button.
522
523 * FEED FORMAT SUPPORT: Support has been added for the Atom 1.0 IETF
524 standard. Several other elements are also newly supported
525 (dcterms:created, dcterms:issued, dcterms:modified, dc:identifier,
526 proper support for the RSS 2.0 guid element, the RSS 2.0 author element,
527 the use of Atom author or Dublin Core dc:creator constructs at the feed
528 level to identify the author of individual items, etc.)
529
530 N.B.: full support of several Atom 1.0 features, such as categories
531 and enclosures, requires you to install the optional rss-functions.php
532 upgrade in your wp-includes directory.
533
534 * BUG FIX: Running `update-feeds.php` from command line or crontab
535 returned "I don't syndicate..." errors. It turns out that WordPress
536 sometimes tramples on the internal PHP superglobals that I depended on
537 to determine whether or not the script was being invoked from the
538 command line. This has been fixed (the variables are now checked
539 *before* WordPress can trample them). Note that `update-feeds.php` has
540 been thoroughly overhauled anyway; see below for details.
541
542 * BUG FIX: Duplicate categories or author names. Fixed two bugs that could
543 create duplicate author and/or category names when the name contained
544 either (a) certain international characters (causing a mismatch between
545 MySQL and PHP's handling of lowercasing text), or (b) characters that
546 have a special meaning in regular expressions (causing MySQL errors when
547 looking for the author or category due to regexp syntax errors). These
548 should now be fixed thanks to careful escaping of names that go into
549 regular expressions and careful matching of lowercasing functions
550 (comparing results from PHP only to other results from PHP, and results
551 from MySQL only to other results from MySQL).
552
553 * BUG FIX: Items dated Decembr 31, 1969 should appear less often. The
554 function for parsing W3C date-time format dates that ships with
555 MagpieRSS can only correctly parse fully-specified dates with a
556 fully-specified time, but valid W3C date-time format dates may omit the
557 time, the day of the month, or even the month. Some feeds in the wild
558 date their items with coarse-grained dates, so the optional
559 `rss-functions.php` upgrade now includes a more flexible parse_w3cdtf()
560 function that will work with both coarse-grained and fully-specified
561 dates. (If parts of the date or the time are omitted, they are filled in
562 with values based on the current time, so '2005-09-10' will be dated to
563 the current time on that day; '2004' will be dated to this day and time
564 one year ago.
565
566 N.B.: This fix is only available in the optional `rss-functions.php`
567 upgrade.
568
569 * BUG FIX: Evil use of HTTP GET has been undone. The WordPress interface
570 is riddled with inappropriate (non-idempotent) uses of HTTP GET queries
571 (ordinary links that make the server do something with significant
572 side-effects, such as deleting a post or a link from the database).
573 FeedWordPress did some of this too, especially in places where it aped
574 the WordPress interface (e.g. the "Delete" links in Links -->
575 Syndicated). That's bad business, though. I've changed the interface so
576 that all the examples of improper side-effects that I can find now
577 require an HTTP POST to take effect. I think I got pretty much
578 everything; if there's anything that I missed, let me know.
579
580 Further reading: [Sam Ruby 2005-05-06: This Stuff Matters] (http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2005/05/06/This-Stuff-Matters)
581
582 * BUG FIX: Categories applied by `cats` setting should no longer prevent
583 category-based filtering from working. In FeedWordPress, you can (1)
584 apply certain categories to all syndicated posts, or all posts from
585 a particular feed; and (2) filter out all posts that don't match one
586 of the categories that are already in the WordPress database (allowing
587 for simple category-based filtering; just load up WordPress with the
588 categories you want to accept, and then tell FeedWordPress not to create
589 new ones). However, the way that (1) and (2) were implemented meant that
590 you couldn't effectively use them together; once you applied a known
591 category to all syndicated posts from a particular feed, it meant that
592 they'd have at least one familiar category (the category or categories
593 you were applying), and that would get all posts past the filter no
594 matter what categories they were originally from.
595
596 Well, no longer. You can still apply categories to all syndicated posts
597 (using either Syndication --> Options, or the feed-level settings under
598 Links --> Syndicated). But these categories are not applied to the post
599 until *after* it has already passed by the "familiar categories" filter.
600 So now, if you want, you can do category filtering and *then* apply as
601 many categories as you please to all and only posts that pass the filter.
602
603 * BUG FIX: Other minor typos and HTML gaffes were fixed along the way.
604
605 * PERFORMANCE: get_feed_meta() no longer hits the database for information
606 on every call; it now caches link data in memory, so FeedWordPress only
607 goes to the database once for each syndicated link. This may
608 substantially improve performance if your database server resources
609 are tight and your templates make a lot of use of custom settings from
610 get_feed_meta().
611
612 * API CHANGE: Link ID numbers, rather than RSS URIs, are now used to
613 identify the feed from which a post is syndicated when you use template
614 functions such as get_feed_meta(). The practical upshot of this is you
615 can switch feeds, or change the feed address for a particular syndicated
616 site, without breaking your templates for all the posts that were
617 syndicated from the earlier URI.
618
619 * API CHANGE: if you have plugins or templates that make use of the
620 get_feed_meta() function or the $fwp_feedmeta global, note that the
621 data formerly located under the `uri` and `name` fields is now located
622 under the `link/uri` field and the `link/name` field, respectively. Note
623 also that you can access the link ID number for any given feed under the
624 global $fwp_feedmeta['link/id'] (in plugins) or
625 get_feed_meta('link/id') (in a template in post contexts).
626
627 * FEATURE: the settings for individual feeds can now be edited using a
628 humane interface (where formerly you had to tweak key-value pairs in the
629 Link Notes section). To edit settings for a feed, pick the feed that you
630 want under Links --> Syndicated and click the Edit link.
631
632 * FEATURE: The "Unsubscribe" button (formerly "Delete") in Links -->
633 Syndicated now offers three options for unsubscribing from a feed: (1)
634 turning off the subscription without deleting the feed data or affecting
635 posts that were syndicated from the feed (this works by setting the Link
636 for the feed as "invisible"); (2) deleting the feed data and all of the
637 posts that were syndicated from the feed; or (3) deleting the feed data
638 and *keeping* the posts that were syndicated from the feed
639 setting the Link to "Invisible" (meaning that it will not be displayed
640 in lists of the site links on the front page, and it won't be checked
641 for updates; (2) deleting the Link and all of the posts that were
642 syndicated from its feed; or (3) deleting the feed data but keeping the
643 posts that were syndicated (which will henceforward be treated as if
644 they were local rather than syndicated posts). (Note that (1) is usually
645 the best option for aggregator sites, unless you want to clean up the
646 results of an error or a test.)
647
648 * FEATURE / BUG FIX: If you have been receiving mysterious "I don't
649 syndicate...", or "(local) HTTP status code was not 200", or "(local)
650 transport error - could not open socket", or "parse error - not well
651 formed" errors, then this update may solve your problems, and if it does
652 *not* solve them, it will at least make the reasons for the problems
653 easier to understand. That's because I've overhauled the way that
654 FeedWordPress goes about updating feeds.
655
656 If you use the command-line PHP scripting method to run scheduled
657 updates, then not much should change for you, except for fewer
658 mysterious errors. If you have done updates by sending periodic HTTP
659 requests to <http://your-blog.com/path/wp-content/update-feeds.php>,
660 then the details have changed somewhat; mostly in such a way as to make
661 things easier on you. See the README file or online documentation on
662 Staying Current for the details.
663
664 * FEATURE: FeedWordPress now features a more sophisticated system for
665 timed updates. Instead of polling *every* subscribed feed for updates
666 *each* time `update-feeds.php` is run, FeedWordPress now keeps track of
667 the last time it polled each feed, and only polls them again after a
668 certain period of time has passed. The amount of time is normally set
669 randomly for each feed, in a period between 30 minutes and 2 hours (so
670 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
671 directly by the feed, which brings us to ...
672
673 * FEATURE: FeedWordPress now respects the settings in the `ttl` and
674 Syndication Module RSS elements. Feeds with these elements set will not
675 be polled any more frequently than they indicate with these feeds unless
676 the user manually forces FeedWordPress to poll the feed (see Links -->
677 Syndicated --> Edit settings).
678
679 Changes from 0.95 to 0.96
680 -------------------------
681
682 * FEATURE: support has been added for enclosures in RSS 2.0 and Atom
683 0.6+ newsfeeds. WordPress already supports adding enclosures to an
684 item; FeedWordPress merely gets the information on the enclosure
685 from the feed it is syndicating and plugs that information directly
686 into the WordPress database so that (among other things) that post
687 will have its enclosure listed in your blog's RSS 2 newsfeed.
688
689 Note that enclosure support requires using the optional MagpieRSS
690 upgrade (i.e., replacing your `wp-includes/rss-functions.php` with
691 `OPTIONAL/wp-includes/rss-functions.php` from the FWP archive)
692
693 * FEATURE: for completeness's sake, there is now a feed setting,
694 `hardcode url`, that allows you to set the URI for the front page
695 of a contributor's website manually (that is, prevent it from being
696 automatically updated from the feed channel link on each update). To
697 set the URI manually, put a line like this in the Link Notes section
698 of a feed:
699
700 hardcode url: yes
701
702 You can also instruct FeedWordPress to use hardcoded URIs by default
703 on all feeds using Options --> Syndication
704
705 * FEATURE: by default, when FeedWordPress finds new syndicated posts,
706 it (1) publishes them immediately, (2) turns comments off, and (3)
707 turns trackback / pingback pings off. You can now alter all three
708 default behaviors (e.g., to allow pings on syndicated posts, or to
709 send newly-syndicated posts to the draft pile for moderation) using
710 Options --> Syndication
711
712
713 Changes from 0.91 to 0.95
714 -------------------------
715
716 * BUG FIX: Fixed an obscure bug in the handling of categories:
717 categories with trailing whitespace could cause categories with
718 duplicate names to be created. This no longer happens. While I was
719 at it I tightened up the operation of
720 FeedWordPress::lookup_categories() a bit in general.
721
722 * FEATURE DEPRECATED: the feed setting `hardcode categories` is now
723 deprecated in favor of `unknown categories` (see below), which
724 allows you to strip off any syndication categories not already in
725 your database using `unknown categories: default` or `unknown
726 categories: filter`. If you have `hardcode categories: yes` set on a
727 feed, this will be treated as `unknown categories: default` (i.e.,
728 no new categories will be added, but if a post doesn't match any of
729 the categories it will be added in the default category--usually
730 "Uncategorized" or "General").
731
732 * FEATURE: You can now set global defaults as to whether or not
733 FeedWordPress will update the Link Name and Link Description
734 settings for feeds automatically from the feed title and feed
735 tagline. (By default, it does, as it has in past versions.) Whether
736 this behavior is turned on or off, you can still override the
737 default behavior using feed settings of `hardcode name: yes`,
738 `hardcode name: no`, `hardcode description: yes`, or `hardcode
739 description: no`.
740
741 * FEATURE: Users can now provide one or several "aliases" for an
742 author, just as they can for a category. For example, to make
743 FeedWordPress treat posts by "Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger" and "Pope
744 Benedict XVI" as by the same author, edit the user profile for Pope
745 Benedict XVI and add a line like this to the "User profile" field:
746
747 a.k.a.: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
748
749 You can add several aliases, each on a line by itself. You can also
750 add any other text you like to the Profile without interfering with
751 the aliases.
752
753 * FEATURE: Users can now choose how to handle syndicated posts that
754 are in unfamiliar categories or by unfamiliar authors (i.e.,
755 categories or authors whose names are not yet in the WordPress
756 database). By default, FeedWordPress will (as before) create a new
757 category (or new author) and use it for the current post and any
758 future posts. This behavior can be changed, either for all feeds or
759 for one or another particular feed.
760
761 There are now three different options for an unfamiliar author: (1)
762 FeedWordPress can create a new author account and attribute the
763 syndicated post to the new account; (2) FeedWordPress can attribute
764 the post to an author if the author's name is familiar, and to a
765 default author (currently, this means the Site Administrator
766 account) if it is not; (3) FeedWordPress can drop posts by
767 unfamiliar authors and syndicate only posts by authors who are
768 already in the database.
769
770 There are, similarly, two different options for an unfamiliar
771 category: (1) FeedWordPress can create new categories and place the
772 syndicated post in them; (2) FeedWordPress can drop the unfamiliar
773 categories and place syndicated posts only in categories that it is
774 already familiar with. In addition, FeedWordPress 0.95 lets you
775 choose whether posts that are in *no* familiar categories should be
776 syndicated (and placed in the default category for the blog) or
777 simply dropped.
778
779 You can set the default behavior for both authors and categories
780 using the settings in Options --> Syndication. You can also set
781 different behavior for specific feeds by adding the `unfamiliar
782 author` and / or `unfamiliar categories` settings to the Link Notes
783 section of a feed:
784
785 unfamiliar author: (create|default|filter)
786 unfamiliar categories: (create|default|filter)
787
788 A setting of `unfamiliar author: create` will make FeedWordPress
789 create new authors to match unfamiliar author names *for this feed
790 alone*. A setting of `unfamiliar author: default` will make it
791 assign posts from unfamiliar authors to the default user account. A
792 setting of `unfamiliar author: filter` will cause all posts (from
793 this feed alone) to be dropped unless they are by an author already
794 listed in the database. Similiarly, `unfamiliar categories: create`
795 will make FeedWordPress create new categories to match unfamiliar
796 category names *for this feed alone*; `unfamiliar categories:
797 default` will cause it to drop any unfamiliar category names; and
798 `unfamiliar categories: filter` will cause it to *both* drop any
799 unfamiliar category names *and* to only syndicate posts that are
800 placed in one or more familiar categories.
801
802 These two new features allow users to do some coarse-grained
803 filtering without having to write a PHP filter. Specifically, they
804 offer an easy way for you to filter feeds by category or by author.
805 Suppose, for example, that you only wanted to syndicate posts that
806 your contributors place in the "Llamas" category. You could do so by
807 setting up your installation of WordPress so that the only category
808 in the database is "Llamas," and then use Options --> Syndication to
809 set "Unfamiliar categories" to "don't create new categories and
810 don't syndicate posts unless they match at least one familiar
811 category". Now, when you update, only posts in the "Llamas" category
812 will be syndicated by FeedWordPress.
813
814 Similarly, if you wanted to filter one particular feed so that only
815 posts by (for example) the author "Earl J. Llama" were syndicated to
816 your site, you could do so by creating a user account for Earl J.
817 Llama, then adding the following line to the settings for the feed
818 in Link Notes:
819
820 unfamiliar author: filter
821
822 This will cause any posts from this feed that are not authored by
823 Earl J. Llama to be discarded, and only the posts by Earl J. Llama
824 will be syndicated. (If the setting is used on one specific feed, it
825 will not affect how posts from other feeds are syndicated.)
826
827