# feedwordpress/2008.1214/ChangeLog.text FeedWordPress, version 2008.1214. 827 lines. - Page: https://pluginprobe.com/plugins/feedwordpress/2008.1214/code/ChangeLog.text - Raw: https://pluginprobe.com/plugins/feedwordpress/2008.1214/raw/ChangeLog.text - Modified: 2008-12-15T00:43:56+00:00 Line numbers below start at 1. Link to a line or a range by appending a fragment to the page URL, for example `https://pluginprobe.com/plugins/feedwordpress/2008.1214/code/ChangeLog.text#L10-L20`. ``` FeedWordPress Change Log ======================== Changes from 2008.1105 to 2008.1214 ----------------------------------- * WORDPRESS 2.7 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress has been tested for compatibility with the newly released WordPress 2.7. WordPress 2.7 has deprecated the Snoopy library for HTTP requests, which caused a fatal error for users who had not installed the MagpieRSS upgrade (or whose installation of the MagpieRSS upgrade was overwritten by a recent update of WordPress). FeedWordPress now handles things gracefully when Snoopy is not immediately available. * INTERFACE SPIFFED UP: Interface elements have been updated so that FeedWordPress's management interface fits in more naturally with the WordPress 2.7 interface (including a new logo and a number of small interface tweaks). * BUG WITH TAGS FOR SYNDICATED ARTICLES FIXED: Several users encountered a bug with the option to add tags to all syndicated posts under Syndication --> Settings -- if you told FeedWordPress to add more than one tag to all syndicated posts, instead of doing so correctly, it would add a *single* tag instead, whose name was composed of the names of all the tags you asked it to add. This bug was the result of nothing more dignified than a typographical error on my part. It has now been fixed. * MORE INFORMATION AVAILABLE WHEN FEEDWORDPRESS CAN'T FIND A FEED: When you enter a URL for a new syndication source, FeedWordPress uses a simple feed-finding algorithm (originally based on Mark Pilgrim's Universal Feed Finder) to try to determine whether the URL is the URL for a feed, or, if the URL points to an ordinary website rather than to a feed, whether there is a feed for that website. All well and good, but if FeedWordPress failed to find a feed, for whatever reason, it would typically return nothing more than a nasty little note to the effect of "no feed found," without any explanation of what went wrong. FeedWordPress now keeps track of error conditions from the HTTP requests that it uses in the course of looking for the feed, and so may be able to give you a bit more information about the nature of the problem if something goes wrong. Changes from 2008.1101 to 2008.1105 ----------------------------------- * INTERFACE RESTRUCTURING AND SYNDICATION --> AUTHORS PAGE: As a first step towards modularizing and better organizing the user interface, a new "Authors" subpage has been created under the Syndication menu, which controls settings for syndicated authors, both at the global default level and at level of individual syndicated feeds. * BUG RELATED TO THE ATTRIBUTION OF POSTS TO THE WRONG AUTHOR FIXED: Some users encountered an issue in which posts by different authors on different blogs -- especially blogs generated by Blogger -- were mistakenly attributed to a single author. The problem was caused by the way in which FeedWordPress matches syndicated authors to user accounts in the WordPress database: normally, if two feeds each list an author with the same e-mail address, they are counted as being the same person. Normally this works well, but it creates an issue in cases where blogging software assigns a single anonymous e-mail address to users who do not want their real e-mail address published. This is, for example, what Blogger does (by giving all users a default e-mail address of if they don't want their own e-mail address listed). FeedWordPress now allows the user to correct for this problem with a couple of new settings under **Syndication --> Authors**, which allow users to turn off e-mail based author matching for particular addresses, or, if desired, to turn it off entirely. By default, e-mail based author matching is still turned on, but disabled for a list of known generic e-mail addresses. Right now, the "list" consists entirely of ; if you know other addresses that should be added, please [contact me](http://radgeek.com/contact) to let me know. Please note that if you have already encountered this issue on your blog, upgrading FeedWordPress will prevent it from re-occurring in the future, but you still need to do two other things to fix the existing problem on your blog. First, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to change the existing author mapping rules to re-map a a syndicated author's name to the proper target account. Go to **Syndication --> Authors**, select the feed you want to change from the drop-down list, and then change the settings under the "Syndicated Authors" section. (You will probably need to select "will be assigned to a new user..." to create a new user account with the appropriate name.) Second, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to re-assign already-syndicated posts that were mis-attributed to the correct author. You can do that from **Syndication --> Authors** by using the author re-assignment feature, described below. * AUTHOR RE-ASSIGNMENT FOR A PARTICULAR FEED: The author settings page for each syndicated feed, under **Syndication --> Authors**, now includes an section titled "Fixing mis-matched authors," which provides an interface for re-assigning or deleting all posts attributed to a particular author on a particular feed. * SUPPORT FOR `` ELEMENT IN SYNDICATED FEEDS: Some feeds (for example, those produced by FeedWordPress) aggregate content from several different sources, and include information about the original source of the post in an `` element. A new setting under **Syndication --> Options** allows you to control what FeedWordPress will report as the source of posts syndicated from aggregator feeds in your templates and feeds: you can have FeedWordPress report that the source of a post is the aggregator feed itself, or you can have it report that the source of a post is the original source that the aggregator originally syndicated the post from. By default, FeedWordPress will report the aggregator, not the original source, as the source of a syndicated item. * LOAD BALANCING AND TIME LIMITING FEATURES FOR UPDATES: Some users have encountered issues due to running up against PHP execution time limits during the process of updating large syndicated feeds, or a very large set of syndicated feeds. FeedWordPress now has a feature that allows you to limit the total amount of time spent updating a feed, through the "Time limit on updates" setting under **Syndication --> Options**. By turning on this setting and adjusting the time limit to a low enough figure to avoid your PHP installation's time-out setting. (PHP execution time limits are usually in the vicinity of 30 seconds, so an update time limit of 25 seconds or so should provide plenty of time for updates while allowing a cushion of time for other, non-update-related functions to do their work.) If feed updates are interrupted by the time limit, FeedWordPress uses some simple load balancing features to make sure that updates to other feeds will not be blocked by the time-hogging feed, and will also make sure that when the interrupted update is resumed, FeedWordPress will skip ahead to resume processing items at the point at which it was interrupted last time, so that posts further down in the feed will eventually get processed, and not get blocked by the amount of time it takes to process the items higher up in the feed. * `guid` INDEX CREATION BUTTON: FeedWordPress frequently issues queries on the `guid` column of the WordPress posts database (since it uses post guid URIs to keep track of which posts it has syndicated). In very large FeedWordPress installations, you can often significantly improve performance by creating a database index on the `guid` column, but normally you would need to poke around with MySQL or a tool like phpMyAdmin to do this. FeedWordPress can now save you the trouble: to create an index on the `guid` column, just go to **Syndication --> Options**, and mash the button at the bottom of the "Back End" section. Changes from 2008.1030 to 2008.1101 ----------------------------------- * INTERFACE BUG THAT PREVENTED ADDING NEW SITES FIXED: The UI reforms in FWP 2008.1030 unintentionally introduced a bug that prevents clean installations of FeedWordPress from providing an input box for adding new feeds to the list of syndicated feeds. This bug has been fixed. Changes from 0.993 to 2008.1030 ------------------------------- * WORDPRESS 2.6 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with WordPress 2.6, and should work more or less seamlessly with the new post revision system. A bug which caused multiple new revisions to be created for posts on certain feeds, regardless of whether or not the item had been updated, has been fixed. * INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: The user interface has been substantially restyled to fit in better with the visual style of WordPress 2.5 and 2.6. * YOUTUBE BUG FIXED: POSTS SYNDICATED THROUGH AN AUTOMATIC UPDATE ARE NO LONGER STRIPPED OF `` TAGS AND CERTAIN OTHER HTML ELEMENTS: Due to the way that some versions of WordPress process posts that are inserted into the database when no user is logged in, many users experienced an issue where YouTube videos and other content using the HTML `` tag would be stripped out of posts that were syndicated during an automatic update. (Posts that were syndicated through manual updates from within the WordPress Dashboard were not affected, because the issue does not arise when an update is executed under a logged-in administrator's credentials.) This bug has now been fixed; YouTube videos and other content using `` tags should now appear properly in syndicated posts, regardless of the way in which the post was syndicated. * AJAX BUGS FIXED: Bugs which blocked the normal operation of WordPress 2.5's AJAX interface elements when FeedWordPress was activated have been fixed. * TAG SUPPORT: A couple of features have been introduced to take advantage of the tagging features in WordPress 2.3.x, 2.5.x, and 2.6.x. Now, when unfamiliar categories are encountered for posts on a feed, you can choose for FeedWordPress (1) to drop the category; (2) to drop the category and to filter out any post that does not match at least one familiar category; (3) to create a new category with that name, or, now, you can also have FeedWordPress (4) create a new *tag* with that name. This option can be set site-wide under Syndication --> Options, or it can be set on a feed-by-feed basis in a feed's Edit screen. In addition, you can now set particular tags to apply to all incoming syndicated posts, under Syndication --> Options, or you can set tags to apply to all incoming syndicated posts from a particular feed in that feed's Edit screen. * FORMATTING FILTERS: There is a new option available under Syndication -> Options which allows users to choose whether or not to expose syndicated posts to being altered by formatting filters. By default, FeedWordPress has always protected syndicated posts (which are already in display-ready HTML when they are syndicated) from being reformatted by formatting filters. However, this approach means that certain plugins which depend on formatting filters (for example, to add "Share This" bars or relevant links to the end of a post) are blocked from working on any syndicated posts. If you want to use one of these plugins together with FeedWordPress, you can now do so by changing the "Formatting Filters" setting from "Protect" to "Expose." * `` ELEMENTS NOW INCLUDED IN ATOM FEED: Atom 1.0 provides a standard method for aggregators to indicate information about the original source of a syndicated post, using the `` element. FeedWordPress now introduces standard `` elements including the title, homepage, and feed URI of the source from which a syndicated post was syndicated. Cf. * MODULARIZATION OF CODE: The code for different elements of FeedWordPress has been broken out into several modules for easier inspection, documentation, and maintenance of the code. * VERSIONING SCHEME CHANGED: FeedWordPress's feature set has proven stable enough that it can now be removed from beta status; a good thing, since I was very quickly running out of version numbers to use. New releases of FeedWordPress will have version numbers based on the date of their release. Changes from 0.992 to 0.993 --------------------------- * WORDPRESS 2.5.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with WordPress 2.5.1. * WORDPRESS 2.5 INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: FeedWordPress's Dashboard interface has undergone several cosmetic changes that should help it integrate better with the WordPress Dashboard interface in WordPress version 2.5.x. * SYNDICATED POSTS CAN BE MARKED AS "PENDING REVIEW": WordPress 2.3 users can now take advantage of WordPress's new "Pending Review" features for incoming syndicated posts. Posts marked as "Pending Review" are not published immediately, but are marked as ready to be reviewed by an Administrator or Editor, who can then choose to publish the post or hold it back. If you want to review syndicated posts from a particular feed, or from all feeds, before they are posted, then use Syndication --> Syndicated Sites --> Edit or Syndication --> Options to change the settings for handling new posts. * AWARE OF NEW URI FOR del.icio.us FEEDS: Previous releases of FeedWordPress already automatically split del.icio.us tags up appropriately appropriately when generating categories. (del.icio.us feeds smoosh all the tags into a single `` element, separated by spaces; FeedWordPress un-smooshes them into multiple categories by separating them at whitespace.) Unfortunately, del.icio.us recently broke the existing behavior by changing host names for their feeds from del.icio.us to feeds.delicious.com. Version 0.993 accounts for the new host name and un-breaks the tag splitting. Changes from 0.991 to 0.992 --------------------------- * AUTHOR RE-MAPPING: FeedWordPress now offers considerable control over how author names on a feed are translated into usernames within the WordPress database. When a post by an unrecognized author comes in, Administrators can now specify any username as the default username to assign the post to by setting the option in Syndication --> Options (formerly FeedWordPress only allowed you to assign such posts to user #1, the site administrator). Administrators can also create re-mapping rules for particular feeds (under Syndication --> Syndicated Sites --> Edit), so that (for example) any posts attributed to "Administrator" on the feed will be assigned to a user named "Roderick T. Long," rather than a user named "Administrator." These settings also allow administrators to filter out posts by particular users, and to control what will happen when FeedWordPress encounters a post by an unrecognized user on that particular feed. * BUG RELATED TO URIS CONTAINING AMPERSAND CHARACTERS FIXED: A bug in WordPress 2.x's handling of URIs in Blogroll links created problems for updating any feeds whose URIs included an ampersand character, such as Google News RSS feeds and other feeds that have multiple parameters passed through HTTP GET. If you experienced this bug, the most likely effect was that FeedWordPress simply would not import new posts from a feed when instructred to do so, returning a "0 new posts" response. In other cases, it might lead to unpredictable results from feed updates, such as importing posts which were not contained in the feed being syndicated, but which did appear elsewhere on the same website. This bug has, hopefully, been resolved, by correcting for the bug in WordPress. Changes from 0.99 to 0.991 -------------------------- * WORDPRESS MU COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with recent releases of WordPress MU. Once FeedWordPress is made available as a plugin, each individual blog can choose to activate FeedWordPress and syndicate content from its own set of contributors. * DISPLAY OF MAGPIE WARNINGS: A number of MagpieRSS warnings or error messages that were displayed when performing an automatic update are no longer displayed, unless debugging parameters have been explicitly enabled. * BUG RELATED TO INTERNATIONAL CHARACTERS IN AUTHOR NAMES FIXED: Due to a subtle incompatability between the way that FeedWordPress generated new user information, and the way that WordPress 2.0 and later added new authors to the database, FeedWordPress might end up creating duplicate authors, or throwing a critical error message, when it encountered authors whose names included international characters. This incompatability has now been fixed; hopefully, authors with international characters in their names should now be handled properly. * `` BUG IN MAGPIERSS FIXED: A bug in MagpieRSS's handling of namespaced elements has been fixed. Among other things, this bug caused items containing a Yahoo MediaRSS `` element (such as many of the feeds produced by wordpress.com) to be represented incorrectly, with only a capital "A" where the content of the post should have been. Feeds containing `` elements should now be syndicated correctly. * update_feedwordpress PARAMETER: You can now use an HTTP GET parameter (`update_feedwordpress=1`) to request that FeedWordPress poll its feeds for updates. When used together with a crontab or other means of scheduling tasks, this means that you can keep your blog automatically updated on a regular schedule, even if you do not choose to use the cron-less automatic updates option. * Some minor interface-related bugs were also fixed. Changes from 0.981 to 0.99 -------------------------- Version 0.99 adds several significant new features, fixes some bugs, and provides compatability with WordPress 2.2.x and 2.3.x. * WORDPRESS 2.2 AND 2.3 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with WordPress version 2.2 and the upcoming WordPress version 2.3. In particular, it has been tested extensively against WordPress 2.2.3 and WordPress 2.3 Release Candidate 1. * AUTOMATIC UPDATES WITHOUT CRON: FeedWordPress now allows you to automatically schedule checks for new posts without using external task scheduling tools such as cron. In order to enable automatic updates, go to **Syndication --> Options** and set "Check for new posts" to "automatically." For details, see "Automatic Feed Updates" in README.text. An important side-effect of the changes to the update system is that if you were previously using the cron job and the `update-feeds.php` script to schedule updates, you need to change your cron set-up. The old `update-feeds.php` script no longer exists. Instead, if you wish to use a cron job to guarantee updates on a particular schedule, you should have the cron job fetch the front page of your blog (for example, by using `curl http://www.zyx.com/blog/ > /dev/null`) instead of activating the `update-feeds.php` script. If automatic updates have been enabled, fetching the front page will automatically trigger the update process. * INTERFACE REORGANIZATION: All FeedWordPress functions are now located under a top-level "Syndication" menu in the WordPress Dashboard. To manage the list of syndicated sites, manually check for new posts on one or more feeds, or syndicate a new site, you should use the main page under **Syndication**. To change global settings for FeedWordPress, you should use **Syndication --> Options**. * FILE STRUCTURE REORGANIZATION: Due to a combination of changing styles for FeedWordPress plugins and lingering bugs in the FeedWordPress admin menu code, the code for FeedWordPress is now contained in two different PHP files, which should be installed together in a subdirectory of your plugins directory named `feedwordpress`. (See README.text for installation and upgrade instructions relating to the change.) * MULTIPLE CATEGORIES SETTING: Some feeds use non-standard methods to indicate multiple categories within a single category element. (The most popular site to do this is del.icio.us, which separates tags with a space.) FeedWordPress now allows you to set an optional setting, for any feed which does this, indicating the character or characters used to divide multiple categories, using a Perl-compatible regular expression. (In the case of del.icio.us feeds, FeedWordPress will automatically use \s for the pattern without your having to do any further configuration.) To turn this setting on, simply use the "Edit" link for the feed that you want to turn it on for. * REGULAR EXPRESSION BUG FIXED: Eliminated a minor bug in the regular expressions for e-mail addresses (used in parsing RSS `author` elements), which could produce unsightly error messages for some users parsing RSS 2.0 feeds. * DATE / UPDATE BUG FIXED: A bug in date handling was eliminated that may have caused problems if any of (1) WordPress, or (2) PHP, or (3) your web server, or (4) your MySQL server, has been set to use a different time zone from the one that any of the others is set to use. If FeedWordPress has not been properly updating updated posts, or has been updating posts when there shouldn't be any changes for the update, this release may solve that problem. * GOOGLE READER BUGS FIXED: A couple of bugs that made it difficult for FeedWordPress to interact with Google Reader public feeds have been fixed. Firstly, if you encountered an error message reading "There was a problem adding the newsfeed. [SQL: ]" when you tried to add the feed, the cause of this error has been fixed. Secondly, if you succeeded in getting FeedWordPress to check a Google Reader feed, only to find that the title of posts had junk squashed on to the end of them, that bug has been fixed too. To fix this bug, you must install the newest version of the optional MagpieRSS upgrade. * FILTER PARAMETERS: Due to an old, old bug in WordPress 1.5.0 (which was what was available back when I first wrote the filter interface), FeedWordPress has traditionally only passed one parameter to syndicated_item and syndicated_post filters functions -- an array containing either the Magpie representation of a syndicated item from the feed, or the database representation of a post about to be inserted into the WordPress database. If you needed information about the feed that the item came from, this was accessible only through a pair of global variables, $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta. Since it's been a pretty long time since WordPress 1.5.0 was in widespread usage, I have gone ahead and added an optional second parameter to the invocation of the syndicated_item and syndicated_post filters. If you have written a filter for FeedWordPress that uses either of these hooks, you can now register that filter to accept 2 parameters. If you do so, the second parameter will be a SyndicatedPost object, which, among other things, allows you to access information about the feed from which an item is syndicated using the $post->feed and the $post->feedmeta elements (where $post is the name of the second parameter). NOTE THAT THE OLD GLOBAL VARIABLES ARE STILL AVAILABLE, for the time being at least, so existing filters will not break with the upgrade. They should be considered deprecated, however, and may be eliminated in the future. * FILTER CHANGE / BUGFIX: the array that is passed as the first argument syndicated_post filters no longer is no longer backslash-escaped for MySQL when filters are called. This was originally a bug, or an oversight; the contents of the array should only be escaped for the database *after* they have gone through all filters. IF YOU HAVE WRITTEN ANY syndicated_post FILTERS THAT PRESUME THE OLD BEHAVIOR OF PASSING IN STRINGS THAT ARE ALREADY BACKSLASH-ESCAPED, UPDATE YOUR FILTERS ACCORDINGLY. * OTHER MINOR BUGFIXES AND INTERNAL CHANGES: The internal architecture of FeedWordPress has been significantly changed to make the code more modular and clean; hopefully this should help reduce the number of compatibility updates that are needed, and make them easier and quicker when they are needed. Changes from 0.98 to 0.981 -------------------------- Version 0.981 is a narrowly targeted bugfix and compatibility release, whose main purpose is to resolve a major outstanding problem: the incompatibility between version 0.98 of WordPress and the recently released WordPress 2.1. * WORDPRESS 2.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress is now compatible with WordPress 2.1, as well as retaining its existing support for WordPress 2.0 and 1.5. Incompatibilities that resulted in database warnings, fatal errors, and which prevented FeedWordPress from syndicating new posts, have been eliminated. * RSS-FUNCTIONS.PHP RENAMED TO RSS.PHP: if you use the upgraded MagpieRSS replacement that's included with FeedWordPress, be sure to note that there are now *two* files to upload from the `OPTIONAL/wp-includes` subdirectory in order to carry out the upgrade: rss-functions.php and rss.php. **It is necessary to upload both files**, due to a change in the file naming scheme in WordPress 2.1, and it is necessary to do so whether you are using WordPress 2.1 or not. If you only upload the `rss-functions.php` file as in previous installations you will not have a working copy of MagpieRSS; the rss.php file contains the actual code. * DATE BUG AFFECTING SOME PHP INSTALLATIONS RESOLVED: due to a subtle bug in parse_w3cdtf(), some installations of PHP encountered problems with FeedWordPress's attempt to date posts, which would cause some new posts on Atom feeds to be dated as if they had apppeared in 1969 or 1970 (thus, effectively, never appearing on front apge at all). This bug in the date handling should now be fixed. * PHP SHORT FORM ELIMINATED: some installations of PHP do not allow the short form for printing PHP values, which was used extensively in the FeedWordPress interface code. Since this could cause fatal errors for users with the wrong installation of PHP, the short form has been replaced with full PHP echo statements, and is no longer used in FeedWordPress. * BETTER USER INTERFACE INTEGRATION WITH WORDPRESS 2.x: Some minor changes have been made to help the FeedWordPress interface pages blend in better with the user interface when running under WordPress 2.x. * GLOBAL CATEGORIES BUG RESOLVED: a bug that prevented some users from setting one or more categories to apply to syndicated posts from all feeds (using the checkbox interface under Options --> Syndication) has been resolved. Changes from 0.97 to 0.98 -------------------------- * WORDPRESS 2.0 COMPATIBILITY: This is a narrowly-targeted release to solve a major outstanding problem. FeedWordPress is now compatible with both WordPress 1.5 and WordPress 2.0. Incompatibilities that caused fatal SQL errors, and a more subtle bug with off-kilter counts of posts under a given category, have been resolved. FeedWordPress tests for database schema using the global $wp_db_version variable (if null, then we presume that we're dealing with WordPress 1.5). NOTE: I have **not** fully tested FeedWordPress with WordPress 2.0. Further testing may reveal more bugs. However, you should now be able to get at least basic FeedWordPress functionality up and running. * AUTHOR MATCHING: FeedWordPress tests several fields to see if it can identify the author of the post as a user already in the WordPress user database. In previous versions, it tested the user login, the nickname, and tested for "aliases" listed in the Profile (see documentation). FWP now also matches authors on the basis of e-mail address (*if* an e-mail address is present). This is particularly helpful for formats such as RSS 2.0, in which authors are primarily identified by e-mail addresses. Changes from 0.96 to 0.97 ------------------------- * INSTALLATION PROCEDURE: Some of the changes between 0.96 and 0.97 require upgrades to the meta-data stored by FeedWordPress to work properly. Thus, if you are upgrading from 0.96 or earlier to 0.97, most FeedWordPress operations (including updates and template functions) WILL BE DISABLED until you run the upgrade procedure. Fortunately, running the upgrade procedure is easy: just go to either Options --> Syndication or Links --> Syndicated in the WordPress Dashboard and press the button. * FEED FORMAT SUPPORT: Support has been added for the Atom 1.0 IETF standard. Several other elements are also newly supported (dcterms:created, dcterms:issued, dcterms:modified, dc:identifier, proper support for the RSS 2.0 guid element, the RSS 2.0 author element, the use of Atom author or Dublin Core dc:creator constructs at the feed level to identify the author of individual items, etc.) N.B.: full support of several Atom 1.0 features, such as categories and enclosures, requires you to install the optional rss-functions.php upgrade in your wp-includes directory. * BUG FIX: Running `update-feeds.php` from command line or crontab returned "I don't syndicate..." errors. It turns out that WordPress sometimes tramples on the internal PHP superglobals that I depended on to determine whether or not the script was being invoked from the command line. This has been fixed (the variables are now checked *before* WordPress can trample them). Note that `update-feeds.php` has been thoroughly overhauled anyway; see below for details. * BUG FIX: Duplicate categories or author names. Fixed two bugs that could create duplicate author and/or category names when the name contained either (a) certain international characters (causing a mismatch between MySQL and PHP's handling of lowercasing text), or (b) characters that have a special meaning in regular expressions (causing MySQL errors when looking for the author or category due to regexp syntax errors). These should now be fixed thanks to careful escaping of names that go into regular expressions and careful matching of lowercasing functions (comparing results from PHP only to other results from PHP, and results from MySQL only to other results from MySQL). * BUG FIX: Items dated Decembr 31, 1969 should appear less often. The function for parsing W3C date-time format dates that ships with MagpieRSS can only correctly parse fully-specified dates with a fully-specified time, but valid W3C date-time format dates may omit the time, the day of the month, or even the month. Some feeds in the wild date their items with coarse-grained dates, so the optional `rss-functions.php` upgrade now includes a more flexible parse_w3cdtf() function that will work with both coarse-grained and fully-specified dates. (If parts of the date or the time are omitted, they are filled in with values based on the current time, so '2005-09-10' will be dated to the current time on that day; '2004' will be dated to this day and time one year ago. N.B.: This fix is only available in the optional `rss-functions.php` upgrade. * BUG FIX: Evil use of HTTP GET has been undone. The WordPress interface is riddled with inappropriate (non-idempotent) uses of HTTP GET queries (ordinary links that make the server do something with significant side-effects, such as deleting a post or a link from the database). FeedWordPress did some of this too, especially in places where it aped the WordPress interface (e.g. the "Delete" links in Links --> Syndicated). That's bad business, though. I've changed the interface so that all the examples of improper side-effects that I can find now require an HTTP POST to take effect. I think I got pretty much everything; if there's anything that I missed, let me know. Further reading: [Sam Ruby 2005-05-06: This Stuff Matters] (http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2005/05/06/This-Stuff-Matters) * BUG FIX: Categories applied by `cats` setting should no longer prevent category-based filtering from working. In FeedWordPress, you can (1) apply certain categories to all syndicated posts, or all posts from a particular feed; and (2) filter out all posts that don't match one of the categories that are already in the WordPress database (allowing for simple category-based filtering; just load up WordPress with the categories you want to accept, and then tell FeedWordPress not to create new ones). However, the way that (1) and (2) were implemented meant that you couldn't effectively use them together; once you applied a known category to all syndicated posts from a particular feed, it meant that they'd have at least one familiar category (the category or categories you were applying), and that would get all posts past the filter no matter what categories they were originally from. Well, no longer. You can still apply categories to all syndicated posts (using either Syndication --> Options, or the feed-level settings under Links --> Syndicated). But these categories are not applied to the post until *after* it has already passed by the "familiar categories" filter. So now, if you want, you can do category filtering and *then* apply as many categories as you please to all and only posts that pass the filter. * BUG FIX: Other minor typos and HTML gaffes were fixed along the way. * PERFORMANCE: get_feed_meta() no longer hits the database for information on every call; it now caches link data in memory, so FeedWordPress only goes to the database once for each syndicated link. This may substantially improve performance if your database server resources are tight and your templates make a lot of use of custom settings from get_feed_meta(). * API CHANGE: Link ID numbers, rather than RSS URIs, are now used to identify the feed from which a post is syndicated when you use template functions such as get_feed_meta(). The practical upshot of this is you can switch feeds, or change the feed address for a particular syndicated site, without breaking your templates for all the posts that were syndicated from the earlier URI. * API CHANGE: if you have plugins or templates that make use of the get_feed_meta() function or the $fwp_feedmeta global, note that the data formerly located under the `uri` and `name` fields is now located under the `link/uri` field and the `link/name` field, respectively. Note also that you can access the link ID number for any given feed under the global $fwp_feedmeta['link/id'] (in plugins) or get_feed_meta('link/id') (in a template in post contexts). * FEATURE: the settings for individual feeds can now be edited using a humane interface (where formerly you had to tweak key-value pairs in the Link Notes section). To edit settings for a feed, pick the feed that you want under Links --> Syndicated and click the Edit link. * FEATURE: The "Unsubscribe" button (formerly "Delete") in Links --> Syndicated now offers three options for unsubscribing from a feed: (1) turning off the subscription without deleting the feed data or affecting posts that were syndicated from the feed (this works by setting the Link for the feed as "invisible"); (2) deleting the feed data and all of the posts that were syndicated from the feed; or (3) deleting the feed data and *keeping* the posts that were syndicated from the feed setting the Link to "Invisible" (meaning that it will not be displayed in lists of the site links on the front page, and it won't be checked for updates; (2) deleting the Link and all of the posts that were syndicated from its feed; or (3) deleting the feed data but keeping the posts that were syndicated (which will henceforward be treated as if they were local rather than syndicated posts). (Note that (1) is usually the best option for aggregator sites, unless you want to clean up the results of an error or a test.) * FEATURE / BUG FIX: If you have been receiving mysterious "I don't syndicate...", or "(local) HTTP status code was not 200", or "(local) transport error - could not open socket", or "parse error - not well formed" errors, then this update may solve your problems, and if it does *not* solve them, it will at least make the reasons for the problems easier to understand. That's because I've overhauled the way that FeedWordPress goes about updating feeds. If you use the command-line PHP scripting method to run scheduled updates, then not much should change for you, except for fewer mysterious errors. If you have done updates by sending periodic HTTP requests to , then the details have changed somewhat; mostly in such a way as to make things easier on you. See the README file or online documentation on Staying Current for the details. * FEATURE: FeedWordPress now features a more sophisticated system for timed updates. Instead of polling *every* subscribed feed for updates *each* time `update-feeds.php` is run, FeedWordPress now keeps track of the last time it polled each feed, and only polls them again after a certain period of time has passed. The amount of time is normally set randomly for each feed, in a period between 30 minutes and 2 hours (so as to stagger updates over time rather than polling all of the feeds at once. However, the length of time between updates can also be set directly by the feed, which brings us to ... * FEATURE: FeedWordPress now respects the settings in the `ttl` and Syndication Module RSS elements. Feeds with these elements set will not be polled any more frequently than they indicate with these feeds unless the user manually forces FeedWordPress to poll the feed (see Links --> Syndicated --> Edit settings). Changes from 0.95 to 0.96 ------------------------- * FEATURE: support has been added for enclosures in RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.6+ newsfeeds. WordPress already supports adding enclosures to an item; FeedWordPress merely gets the information on the enclosure from the feed it is syndicating and plugs that information directly into the WordPress database so that (among other things) that post will have its enclosure listed in your blog's RSS 2 newsfeed. Note that enclosure support requires using the optional MagpieRSS upgrade (i.e., replacing your `wp-includes/rss-functions.php` with `OPTIONAL/wp-includes/rss-functions.php` from the FWP archive) * FEATURE: for completeness's sake, there is now a feed setting, `hardcode url`, that allows you to set the URI for the front page of a contributor's website manually (that is, prevent it from being automatically updated from the feed channel link on each update). To set the URI manually, put a line like this in the Link Notes section of a feed: hardcode url: yes You can also instruct FeedWordPress to use hardcoded URIs by default on all feeds using Options --> Syndication * FEATURE: by default, when FeedWordPress finds new syndicated posts, it (1) publishes them immediately, (2) turns comments off, and (3) turns trackback / pingback pings off. You can now alter all three default behaviors (e.g., to allow pings on syndicated posts, or to send newly-syndicated posts to the draft pile for moderation) using Options --> Syndication Changes from 0.91 to 0.95 ------------------------- * BUG FIX: Fixed an obscure bug in the handling of categories: categories with trailing whitespace could cause categories with duplicate names to be created. This no longer happens. While I was at it I tightened up the operation of FeedWordPress::lookup_categories() a bit in general. * FEATURE DEPRECATED: the feed setting `hardcode categories` is now deprecated in favor of `unknown categories` (see below), which allows you to strip off any syndication categories not already in your database using `unknown categories: default` or `unknown categories: filter`. If you have `hardcode categories: yes` set on a feed, this will be treated as `unknown categories: default` (i.e., no new categories will be added, but if a post doesn't match any of the categories it will be added in the default category--usually "Uncategorized" or "General"). * FEATURE: You can now set global defaults as to whether or not FeedWordPress will update the Link Name and Link Description settings for feeds automatically from the feed title and feed tagline. (By default, it does, as it has in past versions.) Whether this behavior is turned on or off, you can still override the default behavior using feed settings of `hardcode name: yes`, `hardcode name: no`, `hardcode description: yes`, or `hardcode description: no`. * FEATURE: Users can now provide one or several "aliases" for an author, just as they can for a category. For example, to make FeedWordPress treat posts by "Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger" and "Pope Benedict XVI" as by the same author, edit the user profile for Pope Benedict XVI and add a line like this to the "User profile" field: a.k.a.: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger You can add several aliases, each on a line by itself. You can also add any other text you like to the Profile without interfering with the aliases. * FEATURE: Users can now choose how to handle syndicated posts that are in unfamiliar categories or by unfamiliar authors (i.e., categories or authors whose names are not yet in the WordPress database). By default, FeedWordPress will (as before) create a new category (or new author) and use it for the current post and any future posts. This behavior can be changed, either for all feeds or for one or another particular feed. There are now three different options for an unfamiliar author: (1) FeedWordPress can create a new author account and attribute the syndicated post to the new account; (2) FeedWordPress can attribute the post to an author if the author's name is familiar, and to a default author (currently, this means the Site Administrator account) if it is not; (3) FeedWordPress can drop posts by unfamiliar authors and syndicate only posts by authors who are already in the database. There are, similarly, two different options for an unfamiliar category: (1) FeedWordPress can create new categories and place the syndicated post in them; (2) FeedWordPress can drop the unfamiliar categories and place syndicated posts only in categories that it is already familiar with. In addition, FeedWordPress 0.95 lets you choose whether posts that are in *no* familiar categories should be syndicated (and placed in the default category for the blog) or simply dropped. You can set the default behavior for both authors and categories using the settings in Options --> Syndication. You can also set different behavior for specific feeds by adding the `unfamiliar author` and / or `unfamiliar categories` settings to the Link Notes section of a feed: unfamiliar author: (create|default|filter) unfamiliar categories: (create|default|filter) A setting of `unfamiliar author: create` will make FeedWordPress create new authors to match unfamiliar author names *for this feed alone*. A setting of `unfamiliar author: default` will make it assign posts from unfamiliar authors to the default user account. A setting of `unfamiliar author: filter` will cause all posts (from this feed alone) to be dropped unless they are by an author already listed in the database. Similiarly, `unfamiliar categories: create` will make FeedWordPress create new categories to match unfamiliar category names *for this feed alone*; `unfamiliar categories: default` will cause it to drop any unfamiliar category names; and `unfamiliar categories: filter` will cause it to *both* drop any unfamiliar category names *and* to only syndicate posts that are placed in one or more familiar categories. These two new features allow users to do some coarse-grained filtering without having to write a PHP filter. Specifically, they offer an easy way for you to filter feeds by category or by author. Suppose, for example, that you only wanted to syndicate posts that your contributors place in the "Llamas" category. You could do so by setting up your installation of WordPress so that the only category in the database is "Llamas," and then use Options --> Syndication to set "Unfamiliar categories" to "don't create new categories and don't syndicate posts unless they match at least one familiar category". Now, when you update, only posts in the "Llamas" category will be syndicated by FeedWordPress. Similarly, if you wanted to filter one particular feed so that only posts by (for example) the author "Earl J. Llama" were syndicated to your site, you could do so by creating a user account for Earl J. Llama, then adding the following line to the settings for the feed in Link Notes: unfamiliar author: filter This will cause any posts from this feed that are not authored by Earl J. Llama to be discarded, and only the posts by Earl J. Llama will be syndicated. (If the setting is used on one specific feed, it will not affect how posts from other feeds are syndicated.) ```