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FeedWordPress / 2010.0531
FeedWordPress v2010.0531
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1 === FeedWordPress ===
2 Contributors: Charles Johnson
3 Donate link: http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/
4 Tags: syndication, aggregation, feed, atom, rss
5 Requires at least: 2.8
6 Tested up to: 3.0
7 Stable tag: 2010.0531
8
9 FeedWordPress syndicates content from feeds you choose into your WordPress weblog.
10
11 == Description ==
12
13 * Author: [Charles Johnson](http://radgeek.com/contact)
14 * Project URI: <http://projects.radgeek.com/feedwordpress>
15 * License: GPL 2. See License below for copyright jots and tittles.
16
17 FeedWordPress is an Atom/RSS aggregator for WordPress. It syndicates content
18 from feeds that you choose into your WordPress weblog; if you syndicate several
19 feeds then you can use WordPress's posts database and templating engine as the
20 back-end of an aggregation ("planet") website. It was developed, originally,
21 because I needed a more flexible replacement for [Planet][]
22 to use at [Feminist Blogs][].
23
24 [Planet]: http://www.planetplanet.org/
25 [Feminist Blogs]: http://feministblogs.org/
26
27 FeedWordPress is designed with flexibility, ease of use, and ease of
28 configuration in mind. You'll need a working installation of WordPress or
29 WordPress MU (version [2.8] or later), and also FTP or SFTP access to your web
30 host. The ability to create cron jobs on your web host is helpful but not
31 required. You *don't* need to tweak any plain-text configuration files and you
32 *don't* need shell access to your web host to make it work. (Although, I should
33 point out, web hosts that *don't* offer shell access are *bad web hosts*.)
34
35 [WordPress]: http://wordpress.org/
36 [WordPress MU]: http://mu.wordpress.org/
37 [2.8]: http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_2.8
38
39 == Installation ==
40
41 To use FeedWordPress, you will need:
42
43 * an installed and configured copy of [WordPress][] or [WordPress MU][]
44 (version 2.8 or later).
45
46 * FTP, SFTP or shell access to your web host
47
48 = New Installations =
49
50 1. Download the FeedWordPress installation package and extract the files on
51 your computer.
52
53 2. Create a new directory named `feedwordpress` in the `wp-content/plugins`
54 directory of your WordPress installation. Use an FTP or SFTP client to
55 upload the contents of your FeedWordPress archive to the new directory
56 that you just created on your web host.
57
58 3. Log in to the WordPress Dashboard and activate the FeedWordPress plugin.
59
60 4. Once the plugin is activated, a new **Syndication** section should
61 appear in your WordPress admin menu. Click here to add new syndicated
62 feeds, set up configuration options, and determine how FeedWordPress
63 will check for updates. For help, see the [FeedWordPress Quick Start][]
64 page.
65
66 [FeedWordPress Quick Start]: http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/quick-start
67
68 = Upgrades =
69
70 To *upgrade* an existing installation of FeedWordPress to the most recent
71 release:
72
73 1. Download the FeedWordPress installation package and extract the files on
74 your computer.
75
76 2. Upload the new PHP files to `wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress`,
77 overwriting any existing FeedWordPress files that are there.
78
79 3. Log in to your WordPress administrative interface immediately in order
80 to see whether there are any further tasks that you need to perform
81 to complete the upgrade.
82
83 4. Enjoy your newer and hotter installation of FeedWordPress
84
85 == Using and Customizing FeedWordPress ==
86
87 FeedWordPress has many options which can be accessed through the WordPress
88 Dashboard, and a lot of functionality accessible programmatically through
89 WordPress templates or plugins. For further documentation of the ins and
90 outs, see the documentation at the [FeedWordPress project homepage][].
91
92 [FeedWordPress project homepage]: http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/
93
94 == Changelog ==
95
96 = 2010.0531 =
97
98 * PERMALINK / CUSTOM FIELDS PROBLEM RESOLVED: An issue in 2010.0528 caused
99 some posts to be imported without the proper syndication-related
100 meta-data being attached (thus causing permalinks to point back to the
101 aggregator website rather than to the source website, among other
102 problems). This problem has been resolved (and a fix has been applied
103 which will resolve the problem for any posts affected by this problem,
104 if the original post is recent enough to still be available on the feed).
105
106 * UI: The "Back End" section has been split into two separate sections --
107 "Performance" (dealing with caching, database index, and other
108 performance tweaks), and "Diagnostics" (dealing with debug mode,
109 update logging, and a number of new diagnostic tests which I will be
110 rolling out over the next few releases).
111
112 * Several minor interface bug fixes and PHP warning notices eliminated.
113
114 = 2010.0528 =
115
116 #### Compatibility ####
117
118 * SIMPLEPIE IS NOW USED TO PARSE FEEDS; NO MORE MAGPIERSS UPGRADES NEEDED:
119 One of the biggest changes in this release is that FeedWordPress no
120 longer depends on MagpieRSS to parse feeds, and has switched to the much
121 more up-to-date and flexible SimplePie feed parser, which is included as
122 a standard part of WordPress versions 2.8 and later. Using SimplePie will
123 hopefully allow for better handling of feeds going further, and will
124 allow me greater flexibility in determining how exactly the feed parser
125 will operate. It also means that FeedWordPress no longer requires
126 special upgrades to the WordPress core MagpieRSS files, and should
127 eliminate quite a bit of complexity.
128
129 * MAGPIERSS COMPATIBILITY LAYER FOR EXISTING FILTERS AND ADD-ONS: However,
130 I have also implemented a compatibility layer to ensure that existing
131 filters and add-ons for FeedWordPress which depended on the MagpieRSS
132 data format *should not be broken* by the switch to SimplePie. Going
133 forward, I recommend that new filters and add-ons be written to take
134 advantage of the SimplePie object representations of items, feeds, etc.,
135 rather than the MagpieRSS arrays, but the MagpieRSS arrays will still
136 be available and older filters should continue to work as they have in
137 the past.
138
139 * COMPATIBILITY WITH WORDPRESS 2.9.x and 3.0: This release has been tested
140 for the existing WordPress 2.9.x branch and with the upcoming release of
141 WordPress 3.0. Changes in the user interface JavaScript between WordPress
142 2.8.x and WordPress 2.9 caused the tag box interface element to break in
143 the Syndication --> Categories & Tags settings page; changes in the API
144 functions for adding new authors caused fatal errors under certain
145 conditions in WordPress 3.0. These breakages have been fixed.
146
147 * DROPPED LEGACY SUPPORT FOR WORDPRESS PRIOR TO 2.8: Because SimplePie is
148 not included with versions of WordPress prior to 2.8, I have chosen to
149 drop legacy support for WordPress versions 1.5 through 2.7. If you are
150 using FeedWordPress with a version of WordPress before 2.8, you will
151 have to upgrade your installation of WordPress in order to take
152 advantage of this release.
153
154 * PHP 5.3 COMPATIBILITY: A couple of compatibility issues, which were
155 causing fatal errors amd ugly warnings for users of PHP 5.3,
156 have been eliminated.
157
158 #### Features and Processing ####
159
160 * INTERFACE REORGANIZATION: The interface restructuring, began with
161 Version 2009.0612, has been completed. Catch-all settings pages have
162 been eliminated entirely for pages that cover each aspect of handling
163 a feed: Feeds & Updates, Posts & Links, Authors, Categories & Tags,
164 and Back End handling of the database and diagnostic information.
165 Extensive new interface hooks allow add-on modules to significantly
166 change or extend the FeedWordPress admin interface and workflow.
167
168 * STORING INFORMATION FROM THE FEED IN CUSTOM FIELDS: Many users
169 have written to request the ability to store information from elements
170 in the feed in a custom field on each post. (So that, for example, if
171 post includes a `itunes:duration` element, you could store the contents
172 in a Custom Field called `duration` on the post (for a Theme to access
173 later). The Custom Post Settings under Syndication --> Posts & Links now
174 allow you to access any item or feed tag, using a syntax similar to
175 a much-simplified version of XPath. See Posts & Links settings for
176 details.
177
178 * UPDATE-FREEZING ON MANUALLY EDITED POSTS: FeedWordPress now allows you
179 to mark posts that have been manually edited, so that the changes you
180 make will not be overwritten by later updates from the feed. If you make
181 manual edits to a particular post, just check the "Manual editing"
182 checkbox in order to protect your changes from being overwritten. If you
183 want to block *all* posts from being updated after they are imported
184 for the first time, a new "Updated Posts" setting in Posts & Links
185 allows you to freeze all posts from a particular feed, or all syndicated
186 posts.
187
188 * SETTING: FEED-BY-FEED SETTINGS FOR WHERE PERMALINKS POINT TO: You've
189 always been able to tell FeedWordPress whether permalinks for posts
190 should point to the original source of the story or the local copy. Now
191 you can choose different policies for different feeds, instead of one
192 global policy for all feeds. (Of course, you can still use a global
193 default if you prefer.)
194
195 * SETTING: USER CONTROL OVER TIMING BASIS. You can now determine the
196 schedule on which feeds are considered ready to poll for updates --
197 by default feeds become ready for polling after about 1 hour. You can
198 now increase or decrease the time window under Syndication --> Feeds &
199 Updates. (However, please pay *CAREFUL ATTENTION* to the recommendations
200 and DO NOT set the scheduling lower than 60 minutes unless you are
201 ABSOLUTELY SURE that you have specific permission from webmaster who
202 provides that specific feed to poll more frequently than that. If you
203 set this too low (and about 60 minutes is the polite minimum if you
204 haven't been given a different figure), most webmasters will consider
205 the frequent hits on their server as rude, or even downright abusive.
206
207 * OTHER SETTINGS: New settings also include the ability to stop FWP from
208 resolving relative URLs within syndicated content, and the ability to
209 choose whether FeedWordPress should indicate the comment feed from the
210 original source, or the local comment feed, when providing the comment
211 feed URL for a syndicated post.
212
213 #### PARSING ####
214
215 * BETTER DATE HANDLING -- FEWER FLASHBACKS TO 1969 and 1970: FeedWordPress
216 has made some bugfixes and some improvements in the logic for parsing
217 dates. This should allow FeedWordPress to correctly parse more dates in
218 more feeds; and, in the last resort, when FeedWordPress fails to
219 correctly parse a date, to fall back to a more intelligent default. This
220 should hopefully avoid most or all error conditions that have resulted
221 in articles being erroneously dated to the dawn of the Unix epoch
222 (31 December 1969 or 1 January 1970).
223
224 * FULL-TEXT "EXCERPTS" NOW PROPERLY SHORTENED. Based on a straightforward
225 reading of the existing RSS specs, it's reasonable for the
226 rss:description element to be read as a plaintext summary or excerpt for
227 the item containing the description -- with the full text of the item,
228 if available, in another, better-suited element, such as the de facto
229 standard content:encoded extension element. The problem is that uses of
230 RSS rarely have much to do with anything like a straightforward reading
231 of the specs. As a result, many actual RSS producers in the wild put the
232 full text of the article in a description element. But since
233 FeedWordPress has treated this text as a summary, this produces
234 aggregated posts with lengthy "excerpts" containing the full text of the
235 article. This release of FeedWordPress fixes the problem by doing a
236 little digging before treating rss:description as a summary: if the
237 description element is used properly as a plain text summary, then
238 FeedWordPress will take the summary provided by the feed, rather than
239 recreating its own excerpt from the full text; but if an RSS item has no
240 full-text element other than description, FeedWordPress will treat the
241 description element as the full text of the article, and generate a
242 shortened excerpt automatically from that text.
243
244 #### API ####
245
246 * TEMPLATE API: new template tags `get_local_permalink()` and
247 `the_local_permalink()` allow you to access the permalink for a post on
248 your aggregator site, even when FeedWordPress is rewriting permalinks to
249 point to the original source site.
250
251 * NEW HOOKS FOR ADD-ONS AND FILTERS: I have added a number of new hooks
252 which allow add-on modules to filter more precisely, gather information
253 at more points, and to enhance the FeedWordPress admin interface. For
254 a list of new hooks and documentation, see the FeedWordPress
255 documentation wiki at
256 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/add-ons-and-filters>
257
258 * FILTER API: A number of new utility methods have been added to the
259 SyndicatedPost class to make it easier for filters and add-ons to
260
261 * FILTER API: Globals $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta DEPRECATED. These
262 global variables, originally introduced to allow filters access to
263 information about the source feed in `syndicated_item` filters (which
264 were passed in through global variables rather than as parameters
265 because of a bug in WP 1.5 which was then fixed in 1.5.1) have been
266 DEPRECATED. If you have any filters or add-ons which still depend on
267 these global variables, you should see about fixing them to access data
268 about the source feed using the SyndicatedPost::link element instead.
269 For documentation, see the FeedWordPress documentation wiki at
270 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedpost> and
271 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedlink>.
272
273 * DIAGNOSTICS: I've included a number of new diagnostic options and
274 messages, which should allow an experienced user to better investigate
275 any problems that may crop up.
276
277 #### Bug Fixes ####
278
279 * BUGFIX: & IN PERMALINKS NO LONGER CAUSING ATOM OR HTML VALIDATION
280 EFFORTS: Many users reported an issue in which syndicating a feed with
281 special XML characters in the URLs (& was the most common, since it is
282 used to separate HTTP GET parameters) would cause the aggregator's
283 feeds to produce invalid (malformed) XML. This update addresses the
284 issue in Atom feeds. Unfortunately, it has not been technically possible
285 to address the problem in RSS 2.0 feeds, due to limitations on
286 WordPress's internal templates for RSS feeds.
287
288 * BUGFIX: BROKEN URLS IN "POPULAR POSTS" AND SIMILAR PLUGINS SHOULD NO
289 LONGER BE BROKEN. A number of users noticed an issue where plugins and
290 templates that listed posts in locations outside of the post loop
291 (for example, "Popular Posts"-style plugins that listed posts in the
292 sidebar), often produced the wrong URL for post links. (Typically, all
293 the posts listed would get the same wrong URL.) This should now be
294 fixed. Thanks to Björn for sending in a quick fix!
295
296 * MINOR BUGFIXES: This release includes a number of fixes to minor bugs
297 and compatibility issues, including: silent failures of the "Syndicate"
298 button, "Illegal Offset Type" error messages from MagpieRSS, and others.
299
300 = 2009.0707 =
301
302 * BUGFIX: WORDPRESS 2.8 AJAX COMPATIBILITY ISSUES RESOLVED (blank or
303 truncated "Syndicated Sites" administration page): Due to changes in the
304 AJAX interface elements between WordPress 2.7 and WordPress 2.8, several
305 FeedWordPress users encountered an issue where the front "Syndication"
306 page in the FeedWordPress administrative interface would come up blank,
307 without the normal "Syndicated Sites" list and "Update" control, or
308 sometimes wth the boxes visible but one or both of them truncated, with
309 only the title bar. This issue should now be resolved: with the new
310 version of FeedWordPress, the compatibility issue that caused the
311 disappearance should be eliminated, and if boxes are shown with only
312 their handle visible, you should once again be able to drop down the
313 rest of the box by clicking once on its title bar.
314
315 * BUGFIX: TAG SETTING WIDGET FIXED. Due to changes in interface elements
316 between WordPress 2.7 and WordPress 2.8, people using FeedWordPress with
317 WordPress 2.8 found that the widget for setting tags to be applied to
318 all syndicated posts, or all syndicated posts from a particular feed,
319 no longer displayed "Add" and "Remove" buttons for individual tags. This
320 issue has now been fixed, and the tagging widget should once again work
321 more or less exactly like the tagging widget for individual posts in the
322 normal WordPress admin interface.
323
324 = 2009.0618 =
325
326 * BUGFIX: MYSTERY ERRORS WITH WITH WP_Http_Fsockopen HTTP TRANSPORT
327 ELIMINATED: Thanks to a combination of a subtle bug in FeedWordPress,
328 and changes to the HTTP transport code in WordPress, a number of users
329 encountered an error in which any time they attempted to add a new feed
330 through the FeedFinder interface, FeedWordPress would fail and display
331 an HTTP request failure diagnostic message. The subtle bug has been
332 fixed, and with it, most of these errors should now be eliminated.
333
334 Be sure to upgrade your MagpieRSS to the most recent MagpieRSS version
335 after you have insalled FeedWordPress 2009.0618, or this bug fix will
336 not take effect.
337
338 = 2009.0613 =
339
340 * INTERFACE/BUGFIX: WORDPRESS 2.8 CATEGORY BOX FIX. Thanks to a subtle
341 change in class names between the WordPress 2.7 and 2.8 stylesheets,
342 category boxes in the FeedWordPress settings interface tended to overflow
343 and have a lot of messy-looking overlapping text under WordPress 2.8.
344 This has now been fixed.
345
346 * FeedFinder FAILURE DIAGNOSTICS: When FWP's FeedFinder fails to find any
347 feeds at a given URL (for example, when you are trying to add a
348 subscription through the administrative interface and you run into an
349 error message), FeedWordPress now provides more diagnostic information
350 for the reasons behind the failure. If that helps you, great; if not,
351 it should help me respond more intelligently to your support request..
352
353 = 2009.0612 =
354
355 * WORDPRESS 2.8 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress 2009.0612 has been tested for
356 compatibility with the recent version 2.8 release of WordPress.
357
358 * INTERFACE RESTRUCTURING: In order to avoid settings posts from becoming
359 too crowded, and to modularize and better organize the user interface,
360 new "Posts" and "Categories & Tags" subpages have been created under the
361 "Syndication" menu. "Posts" controls settings for individal syndicated
362 posts (such as publication status, comment and ping status, whether or
363 not to use the original location of the post as the permalink, whether
364 or not to expose posts to formatting filters, and so on). "Categories &
365 Tags" controls settings for assigning new syndicated posts to categories
366 and tags, such as categories or tags to apply to all syndicated posts,
367 and how to handle categories that do not yet exist in the WordPress
368 database. These subpages, like the Authors subpage, handle settings for
369 the global default level and for individual syndicated feeds.
370
371 Corresponding to these new subpages, the old Syndication Settings and
372 Feed Settings subpages have been cleaned up and simplified, and now only
373 link to the appropriate subpages for options that can be set in the
374 Posts, Authors, or Categories & Tags subpages.
375
376 * FEATURE: ADD CUSTOM SETTINGS TO EACH SYNDICATED POST: FeedWordPress has
377 long had an interface for creating custom settings for each syndicated
378 *feed* which could be retrieved in templates using the `get_feed_meta()`
379 template function. But it had no feature for adding custom fields to
380 each individual syndicated *post*. In response to requests from users, I
381 have added the ability to apply custom fields to each individual
382 syndicated post, using the new Syndication --> Posts subpage. You can
383 set up custom fields to be applied to every syndicated post, or custom
384 fields to be applied to syndicated posts from a particular feed.
385
386 * FEATURE: MAGPIERSS VERSION CHECK AND UPGRADE: FeedWordPress will attempt
387 to determine whether or not you are using the upgraded version of
388 MagpieRSS that comes packaged with FeedWordPress. If not, it will throw
389 an error on admin pages, and, if you are a site administrator, it will
390 give you the option to ignore the error message, or to attempt an
391 automatic upgrade (using a native file copy). If the file copy fails,
392 FeedWordPress will offer some guidance on how to perform the upgrade
393 manually.
394
395 * BLANK POSTS PROBLEM NO LONGER OCCURS WITH OLD & BUSTED MAGPIERSS: Due
396 to the fact that I relied on a content normalization that occurs in my
397 upgraded version of MagpieRSS, but not in the old & busted version of
398 MagpieRSS that ships with WordPress, until this version, if you tried to
399 syndicate an Atom feed without having performed the (*strongly
400 recommended*) MagpieRSS upgrade, all of the posts would come up with
401 completely blank contents. That's not because MagpieRSS couldn't read
402 the data, but rather because the new Magpie version puts that data in a
403 location where the old version doesn't, and I was only looking in that
404 newer location. Now it checks for both, meaning that posts will continue
405 to display their contents even if you don't upgrade MagpieRSS. (But you
406 **really should** upgrade it, anyway.)
407
408 * BUGFIX: RELATIVE URI RESOLUTION FOR POST CONTENT RESTORED. Some time
409 back, I added support for resolving relative URIs against xml:base on
410 feeds that support it to the MagpieRSS upgrade in FeedWordPress. Then I
411 took out code that did the same thing from the main FeedWordPress code.
412 Of course, the problem is that some people, even though it is clearly
413 stupid or evil to do so, still include relative URIs for images or links
414 in posts on feed formats that do *not* adequately support xml:base
415 (notably, RSS 2.0 feeds). In response to a user request, I have added
416 this functionality back in, so that MagpieRSS will resolve any relative
417 URIs that it knows how to resolve using xml:base, and then FeedWordPress
418 will attempt to resolve any relative URIs that are left over afterwards.
419
420 * BUGFIX: INTERFACE OPTION FOR SETTING SYNDICATED POST PUBLICATION STATUS
421 ON A FEED-BY-FEED BASIS HAS BEEN RESTORED: Due to a version-checking
422 bug, users of WordPress 2.7.x lost an option from the "Edit a syndicated
423 feed" interface which allowed them to determine whether newly syndicated
424 posts should be published immediately, held as "Pending Review," saved
425 as drafts, or saved as private posts. (The option to change this
426 setting globally remained in place, but users could no longer set it on
427 a feed-by-feed basis.) The version-checking bug has been fixed, and the
428 option has been restored.
429
430 * BUGFIX: "ARE YOU SURE?" FATAL ERROR ELIMINATED AND SECURITY IMPROVED:
431 Under certain circumstances (for example, when users have configured
432 their browser or proxy not to send HTTP Referer headers, for privacy or
433 other reasons), many features in the FeedWordPress administrative
434 interface (such as adding new feeds or changing settings) would hit a
435 fatal error, displaying only a cryptic message reading "Are you sure?"
436 and a blank page following it. This problem has been eliminated by
437 taking advantage of WordPress's nonce functions, which allow the
438 security check which ran into this error to work properly even without
439 receiving an HTTP Referer header. (N.B.: WordPress's nonce functions
440 were first introduced in WordPress 2.0.3. If you're using FeedWordPress
441 with an older version of WordPress, there's no fix for this problem:
442 you'll just need to turn Referer headers back on. Sorry.)
443
444 * BUGFIX: MANUALLY-ALTERED POST STATUS, COMMENT STATUS, AND PING STATUS NO
445 LONGER REVERTED BY POST UPDATES: If you manually altered the post status,
446 comment status, or ping status of a syndicated post from what it was set
447 to when first syndicated -- for example, if you had a feed that was set
448 to bring in new posts as "Pending Review," and you then marked some of
449 the pending posts as "Published" and others as "Unpublished" -- then
450 in previous versions of FeedWordPress, these manual changes to the
451 status would be lost -- so that, for example, your Published or Unpublished
452 articles would revert to Pending Review -- if the source feed made any
453 upates to the item. This could make the Pending Review feature both
454 unreliable and also extremely frustrating to work with. The good news is
455 that this bug has since been fixed: if you manually update the status
456 of a post, it will no longer be reverted if or when the post is updated.
457
458 * BUGFIX: OCCASIONAL FATAL ERROR ON UPDATE ELIMINATED: Under certain
459 limited conditions (specifically, when both the title and the content of
460 a post to be updated are empty), an attempt to update the post would
461 result in a fatal error. This has been fixed.
462
463 * INTERFACE: "CONFIGURE SETTINGS" CONVENIENCE LINK ADDED TO CONFIRMATION
464 MESSAGE WHEN A NEW FEED IS ADDED: When you add a new subscription to
465 FeedWordPress, the message box that appears to confirm it now includes a
466 handy link to the feed's settings subpage, so that you can quickly set
467 up any special settings you may want to set up for the new feed, without
468 having to hunt through the list of all your other subscriptions to pick
469 out the new one.
470
471 * INTERFACE: SIMPLIFYING AND CLARIFYING AUTOMATIC UPDATES SETTINGS. I have
472 removed an interval setting for the cronless automatic updates which has
473 confused many FeedWordPress users. In past versions of FWP, when you
474 turned on automatic updates, you would be presented with a time interval
475 setting which controlled how often FeedWordPress would check for feeds
476 ready to be polled for updates. (That is, it DID NOT control how often
477 feeds *would be polled*; it controlled how often FeedWordPress would
478 *check* for feeds that *had become ready to poll*. The schedule on which
479 feeds became ready for polling was still controlled either by requests
480 encoded in elements within the feed itself, or else according to an
481 internal calculation within FeedWordPress, averaging out to about 1 hour,
482 if the feed did not include any scheduling request elements.) Since many
483 users very often (and understandably) confused the purpose of this
484 setting, and since the setting is for a feature that's actually very
485 unlikely to require any manual control by the user, I have removed the
486 setting; FeedWordPress now simply uses the default value of checking for
487 feeds to poll every 10 minutes.
488
489 * FEEDFINDER PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT: FeedWordPress's FeedFinder class
490 now uses `array_unique()` to make sure that it doesn't waste time
491 repeatedly iterating over and polling the same URI. Props to Camilo
492 (<http://projects.radgeek.com/2008/12/14/feedwordpress-20081214/#comment-20090122160414>).
493
494 = 2008.1214 =
495
496 * WORDPRESS 2.7 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress has been tested for
497 compatibility with the newly released WordPress 2.7. WordPress 2.7 has
498 deprecated the Snoopy library for HTTP requests, which caused a fatal
499 error for users who had not installed the MagpieRSS upgrade (or whose
500 installation of the MagpieRSS upgrade was overwritten by a recent update
501 of WordPress). FeedWordPress now handles things gracefully when Snoopy
502 is not immediately available.
503
504 * INTERFACE SPIFFED UP: Interface elements have been updated so that
505 FeedWordPress's management interface fits in more naturally with the
506 WordPress 2.7 interface (including a new logo and a number of small
507 interface tweaks).
508
509 * BUG WITH TAGS FOR SYNDICATED ARTICLES FIXED: Several users encountered a
510 bug with the option to add tags to all syndicated posts under
511 Syndication --> Settings -- if you told FeedWordPress to add more than
512 one tag to all syndicated posts, instead of doing so correctly, it would
513 add a *single* tag instead, whose name was composed of the names of all
514 the tags you asked it to add. This bug was the result of nothing more
515 dignified than a typographical error on my part. It has now been fixed.
516
517 * MORE INFORMATION AVAILABLE WHEN FEEDWORDPRESS CAN'T FIND A FEED: When
518 you enter a URL for a new syndication source, FeedWordPress uses a
519 simple feed-finding algorithm (originally based on Mark Pilgrim's
520 Universal Feed Finder) to try to determine whether the URL is the URL
521 for a feed, or, if the URL points to an ordinary website rather than to
522 a feed, whether there is a feed for that website. All well and good, but
523 if FeedWordPress failed to find a feed, for whatever reason, it would
524 typically return nothing more than a nasty little note to the effect of
525 "no feed found," without any explanation of what went wrong.
526 FeedWordPress now keeps track of error conditions from the HTTP
527 requests that it uses in the course of looking for the feed, and so may
528 be able to give you a bit more information about the nature of the
529 problem if something goes wrong.
530
531
532 = 2008.1105 =
533
534 * INTERFACE RESTRUCTURING AND SYNDICATION --> AUTHORS PAGE: As a first
535 step towards modularizing and better organizing the user interface, a
536 new "Authors" subpage has been created under the Syndication menu, which
537 controls settings for syndicated authors, both at the global default
538 level and at level of individual syndicated feeds.
539
540 * BUG RELATED TO THE ATTRIBUTION OF POSTS TO THE WRONG AUTHOR FIXED: Some
541 users encountered an issue in which posts by different authors on
542 different blogs -- especially blogs generated by Blogger -- were
543 mistakenly attributed to a single author. The problem was caused by the
544 way in which FeedWordPress matches syndicated authors to user accounts
545 in the WordPress database: normally, if two feeds each list an author
546 with the same e-mail address, they are counted as being the same person.
547 Normally this works well, but it creates an issue in cases where
548 blogging software assigns a single anonymous e-mail address to users who
549 do not want their real e-mail address published. This is, for example,
550 what Blogger does (by giving all users a default e-mail address of
551 <noreply@blogger.com> if they don't want their own e-mail address
552 listed). FeedWordPress now allows the user to correct for this problem
553 with a couple of new settings under **Syndication --> Authors**, which
554 allow users to turn off e-mail based author matching for particular
555 addresses, or, if desired, to turn it off entirely. By default, e-mail
556 based author matching is still turned on, but disabled for a list of
557 known generic e-mail addresses. Right now, the "list" consists entirely
558 of <noreply@blogger.com>; if you know other addresses that should be
559 added, please [contact me](http://radgeek.com/contact) to let me know.
560
561 Please note that if you have already encountered this issue on your
562 blog, upgrading FeedWordPress will prevent it from re-occurring in the
563 future, but you still need to do two other things to fix the existing
564 problem on your blog.
565
566 First, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to
567 change the existing author mapping rules to re-map a a syndicated
568 author's name to the proper target account. Go to **Syndication -->
569 Authors**, select the feed you want to change from the drop-down list,
570 and then change the settings under the "Syndicated Authors" section.
571 (You will probably need to select "will be assigned to a new user..." to
572 create a new user account with the appropriate name.)
573
574 Second, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to
575 re-assign already-syndicated posts that were mis-attributed to the
576 correct author. You can do that from **Syndication --> Authors** by
577 using the author re-assignment feature, described below.
578
579 * AUTHOR RE-ASSIGNMENT FOR A PARTICULAR FEED: The author settings page
580 for each syndicated feed, under **Syndication --> Authors**, now
581 includes an section titled "Fixing mis-matched authors," which provides
582 an interface for re-assigning or deleting all posts attributed to a
583 particular author on a particular feed.
584
585 * SUPPORT FOR `<atom:source>` ELEMENT IN SYNDICATED FEEDS: Some feeds
586 (for example, those produced by FeedWordPress) aggregate content from
587 several different sources, and include information about the original
588 source of the post in an `<atom:source>` element. A new setting under
589 **Syndication --> Options** allows you to control what FeedWordPress
590 will report as the source of posts syndicated from aggregator feeds in
591 your templates and feeds: you can have FeedWordPress report that the
592 source of a post is the aggregator feed itself, or you can have it
593 report that the source of a post is the original source that the
594 aggregator originally syndicated the post from.
595
596 By default, FeedWordPress will report the aggregator, not the original
597 source, as the source of a syndicated item.
598
599 * LOAD BALANCING AND TIME LIMITING FEATURES FOR UPDATES: Some users have
600 encountered issues due to running up against PHP execution time limits
601 during the process of updating large syndicated feeds, or a very large
602 set of syndicated feeds. FeedWordPress now has a feature that allows you
603 to limit the total amount of time spent updating a feed, through the
604 "Time limit on updates" setting under **Syndication --> Options**. By
605 turning on this setting and adjusting the time limit to a low enough
606 figure to avoid your PHP installation's time-out setting. (PHP execution
607 time limits are usually in the vicinity of 30 seconds, so an update
608 time limit of 25 seconds or so should provide plenty of time for updates
609 while allowing a cushion of time for other, non-update-related functions
610 to do their work.)
611
612 If feed updates are interrupted by the time limit, FeedWordPress uses
613 some simple load balancing features to make sure that updates to other
614 feeds will not be blocked by the time-hogging feed, and will also make
615 sure that when the interrupted update is resumed, FeedWordPress will
616 skip ahead to resume processing items at the point at which it was
617 interrupted last time, so that posts further down in the feed will
618 eventually get processed, and not get blocked by the amount of time it
619 takes to process the items higher up in the feed.
620
621 * `guid` INDEX CREATION BUTTON: FeedWordPress frequently issues queries on
622 the `guid` column of the WordPress posts database (since it uses post
623 guid URIs to keep track of which posts it has syndicated). In very large
624 FeedWordPress installations, you can often significantly improve
625 performance by creating a database index on the `guid` column, but
626 normally you would need to poke around with MySQL or a tool like
627 phpMyAdmin to do this. FeedWordPress can now save you the trouble: to
628 create an index on the `guid` column, just go to
629 **Syndication --> Options**, and mash the button at the bottom of the
630 "Back End" section.
631
632 = 2008.1101 =
633
634 * INTERFACE BUG THAT PREVENTED ADDING NEW SITES FIXED: The UI reforms in
635 FWP 2008.1030 unintentionally introduced a bug that prevents clean
636 installations of FeedWordPress from providing an input box for adding
637 new feeds to the list of syndicated feeds. This bug has been fixed.
638
639 = 2008.1030 =
640
641 * WORDPRESS 2.6 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with
642 WordPress 2.6, and should work more or less seamlessly with the new post
643 revision system. A bug which caused multiple new revisions to be created
644 for posts on certain feeds, regardless of whether or not the item had
645 been updated, has been fixed.
646
647 * INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: The user interface has been substantially
648 restyled to fit in better with the visual style of WordPress 2.5 and
649 2.6.
650
651 * YOUTUBE BUG FIXED: POSTS SYNDICATED THROUGH AN AUTOMATIC UPDATE ARE NO
652 LONGER STRIPPED OF `<OBJECT>` TAGS AND CERTAIN OTHER HTML ELEMENTS: Due
653 to the way that some versions of WordPress process posts that are
654 inserted into the database when no user is logged in, many users
655 experienced an issue where YouTube videos and other content using the
656 HTML `<object>` tag would be stripped out of posts that were syndicated
657 during an automatic update. (Posts that were syndicated through manual
658 updates from within the WordPress Dashboard were not affected, because
659 the issue does not arise when an update is executed under a logged-in
660 administrator's credentials.) This bug has now been fixed; YouTube
661 videos and other content using `<object>` tags should now appear
662 properly in syndicated posts, regardless of the way in which the post
663 was syndicated.
664
665 * AJAX BUGS FIXED: Bugs which blocked the normal operation of WordPress
666 2.5's AJAX interface elements when FeedWordPress was activated have been
667 fixed.
668
669 * TAG SUPPORT: A couple of features have been introduced to take advantage
670 of the tagging features in WordPress 2.3.x, 2.5.x, and 2.6.x. Now, when
671 unfamiliar categories are encountered for posts on a feed, you can
672 choose for FeedWordPress (1) to drop the category; (2) to drop the
673 category and to filter out any post that does not match at least one
674 familiar category; (3) to create a new category with that name, or,
675 now, you can also have FeedWordPress (4) create a new *tag* with that
676 name. This option can be set site-wide under Syndication --> Options,
677 or it can be set on a feed-by-feed basis in a feed's Edit screen.
678
679 In addition, you can now set particular tags to apply to all incoming
680 syndicated posts, under Syndication --> Options, or you can set tags
681 to apply to all incoming syndicated posts from a particular feed in that
682 feed's Edit screen.
683
684 * FORMATTING FILTERS: There is a new option available under Syndication ->
685 Options which allows users to choose whether or not to expose syndicated
686 posts to being altered by formatting filters. By default, FeedWordPress
687 has always protected syndicated posts (which are already in display-ready
688 HTML when they are syndicated) from being reformatted by formatting
689 filters. However, this approach means that certain plugins which depend
690 on formatting filters (for example, to add "Share This" bars or relevant
691 links to the end of a post) are blocked from working on any syndicated
692 posts. If you want to use one of these plugins together with
693 FeedWordPress, you can now do so by changing the "Formatting Filters"
694 setting from "Protect" to "Expose."
695
696 * `<atom:source>` ELEMENTS NOW INCLUDED IN ATOM FEED: Atom 1.0 provides
697 a standard method for aggregators to indicate information about the original source of
698 a syndicated post, using the `<atom:source>` element. FeedWordPress now
699 introduces standard `<atom:source>` elements including the title, homepage, and
700 feed URI of the source from which a syndicated post was syndicated. Cf.
701 <http://www.atomenabled.org/developers/syndication/atom-format-spec.php#element.source>
702
703 * MODULARIZATION OF CODE: The code for different elements of FeedWordPress
704 has been broken out into several modules for easier inspection,
705 documentation, and maintenance of the code.
706
707 * VERSIONING SCHEME CHANGED: FeedWordPress's feature set has proven stable
708 enough that it can now be removed from beta status; a good thing, since
709 I was very quickly running out of version numbers to use. New releases
710 of FeedWordPress will have version numbers based on the date of their
711 release.
712
713 = 0.993 =
714
715 * WORDPRESS 2.5.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible
716 with WordPress 2.5.1.
717
718 * WORDPRESS 2.5 INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: FeedWordPress's Dashboard
719 interface has undergone several cosmetic changes that should help it
720 integrate better with the WordPress Dashboard interface in WordPress
721 version 2.5.x.
722
723 * SYNDICATED POSTS CAN BE MARKED AS "PENDING REVIEW": WordPress 2.3 users
724 can now take advantage of WordPress's new "Pending Review" features for
725 incoming syndicated posts. Posts marked as "Pending Review" are not
726 published immediately, but are marked as ready to be reviewed by an
727 Administrator or Editor, who can then choose to publish the post or
728 hold it back. If you want to review syndicated posts from a particular
729 feed, or from all feeds, before they are posted, then use
730 Syndication --> Syndicated Sites --> Edit or Syndication --> Options to
731 change the settings for handling new posts.
732
733 * AWARE OF NEW URI FOR del.icio.us FEEDS: Previous releases of
734 FeedWordPress already automatically split del.icio.us tags up
735 appropriately appropriately when generating categories. (del.icio.us
736 feeds smoosh all the tags into a single `<dc:subject>` element,
737 separated by spaces; FeedWordPress un-smooshes them into multiple
738 categories by separating them at whitespace.) Unfortunately, del.icio.us
739 recently broke the existing behavior by changing host names for their
740 feeds from del.icio.us to feeds.delicious.com. Version 0.993 accounts
741 for the new host name and un-breaks the tag splitting.
742
743 = 0.992 =
744
745 * AUTHOR RE-MAPPING: FeedWordPress now offers considerable control over
746 how author names on a feed are translated into usernames within the
747 WordPress database. When a post by an unrecognized author comes in,
748 Administrators can now specify any username as the default username to
749 assign the post to by setting the option in Syndication --> Options
750 (formerly FeedWordPress only allowed you to assign such posts to user
751 #1, the site administrator). Administrators can also create re-mapping
752 rules for particular feeds (under Syndication --> Syndicated Sites -->
753 Edit), so that (for example) any posts attributed to "Administrator"
754 on the feed <http://praxeology.net/blog/feed/> will be assigned to
755 a user named "Roderick T. Long," rather than a user named
756 "Administrator." These settings also allow administrators to filter out
757 posts by particular users, and to control what will happen when
758 FeedWordPress encounters a post by an unrecognized user on that
759 particular feed.
760
761 * BUG RELATED TO URIS CONTAINING AMPERSAND CHARACTERS FIXED: A bug in
762 WordPress 2.x's handling of URIs in Blogroll links created problems for
763 updating any feeds whose URIs included an ampersand character, such as
764 Google News RSS feeds and other feeds that have multiple parameters
765 passed through HTTP GET. If you experienced this bug, the most likely
766 effect was that FeedWordPress simply would not import new posts from a
767 feed when instructred to do so, returning a "0 new posts" response. In
768 other cases, it might lead to unpredictable results from feed updates,
769 such as importing posts which were not contained in the feed being
770 syndicated, but which did appear elsewhere on the same website. This bug
771 has, hopefully, been resolved, by correcting for the bug in WordPress.
772
773 = 0.991 =
774
775 * WORDPRESS MU COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with
776 recent releases of WordPress MU. Once FeedWordPress is made available
777 as a plugin, each individual blog can choose to activate FeedWordPress
778 and syndicate content from its own set of contributors.
779
780 * DISPLAY OF MAGPIE WARNINGS: A number of MagpieRSS warnings or error
781 messages that were displayed when performing an automatic update are
782 no longer displayed, unless debugging parameters have been explicitly
783 enabled.
784
785 * BUG RELATED TO INTERNATIONAL CHARACTERS IN AUTHOR NAMES FIXED: Due to a
786 subtle incompatability between the way that FeedWordPress generated new
787 user information, and the way that WordPress 2.0 and later added new
788 authors to the database, FeedWordPress might end up creating duplicate
789 authors, or throwing a critical error message, when it encountered
790 authors whose names included international characters. This
791 incompatability has now been fixed; hopefully, authors with
792 international characters in their names should now be handled properly.
793
794 * `<media:content>` BUG IN MAGPIERSS FIXED: A bug in MagpieRSS's handling
795 of namespaced elements has been fixed. Among other things, this bug
796 caused items containing a Yahoo MediaRSS `<media:content>` element (such
797 as many of the feeds produced by wordpress.com) to be represented
798 incorrectly, with only a capital "A" where the content of the post
799 should have been. Feeds containing `<media:content>` elements should now
800 be syndicated correctly.
801
802 * update_feedwordpress PARAMETER: You can now use an HTTP GET parameter
803 (`update_feedwordpress=1`) to request that FeedWordPress poll its feeds
804 for updates. When used together with a crontab or other means of
805 scheduling tasks, this means that you can keep your blog automatically
806 updated on a regular schedule, even if you do not choose to use the
807 cron-less automatic updates option.
808
809 * Some minor interface-related bugs were also fixed.
810
811
812 = 0.99 =
813
814 Version 0.99 adds several significant new features, fixes some bugs, and
815 provides compatability with WordPress 2.2.x and 2.3.x.
816
817 * WORDPRESS 2.2 AND 2.3 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be
818 compatible with WordPress version 2.2 and the upcoming WordPress
819 version 2.3. In particular, it has been tested extensively against
820 WordPress 2.2.3 and WordPress 2.3 Release Candidate 1.
821
822 * AUTOMATIC UPDATES WITHOUT CRON: FeedWordPress now allows you to
823 automatically schedule checks for new posts without using external task
824 scheduling tools such as cron. In order to enable automatic updates, go
825 to **Syndication --> Options** and set "Check for new posts" to
826 "automatically." For details, see "Automatic Feed Updates" in
827 README.text.
828
829 An important side-effect of the changes to the update system is that if
830 you were previously using the cron job and the `update-feeds.php` script
831 to schedule updates, you need to change your cron set-up. The old
832 `update-feeds.php` script no longer exists. Instead, if you wish to use
833 a cron job to guarantee updates on a particular schedule, you should
834 have the cron job fetch the front page of your blog (for example, by
835 using `curl http://www.zyx.com/blog/ > /dev/null`) instead of activating
836 the `update-feeds.php` script. If automatic updates have been enabled,
837 fetching the front page will automatically trigger the update process.
838
839 * INTERFACE REORGANIZATION: All FeedWordPress functions are now located
840 under a top-level "Syndication" menu in the WordPress Dashboard. To
841 manage the list of syndicated sites, manually check for new posts on
842 one or more feeds, or syndicate a new site, you should use the main page
843 under **Syndication**. To change global settings for FeedWordPress,
844 you should use **Syndication --> Options**.
845
846 * FILE STRUCTURE REORGANIZATION: Due to a combination of changing styles
847 for FeedWordPress plugins and lingering bugs in the FeedWordPress admin
848 menu code, the code for FeedWordPress is now contained in two different
849 PHP files, which should be installed together in a subdirectory of your
850 plugins directory named `feedwordpress`. (See README.text for
851 installation and upgrade instructions relating to the change.)
852
853 * MULTIPLE CATEGORIES SETTING: Some feeds use non-standard methods to
854 indicate multiple categories within a single category element. (The most
855 popular site to do this is del.icio.us, which separates tags with a
856 space.) FeedWordPress now allows you to set an optional setting, for any
857 feed which does this, indicating the character or characters used to
858 divide multiple categories, using a Perl-compatible regular expression.
859 (In the case of del.icio.us feeds, FeedWordPress will automatically use
860 \s for the pattern without your having to do any further configuration.)
861 To turn this setting on, simply use the "Edit" link for the feed that
862 you want to turn it on for.
863
864 * REGULAR EXPRESSION BUG FIXED: Eliminated a minor bug in the regular
865 expressions for e-mail addresses (used in parsing RSS `author`
866 elements), which could produce unsightly error messages for some users
867 parsing RSS 2.0 feeds.
868
869 * DATE / UPDATE BUG FIXED: A bug in date handling was eliminated that may
870 have caused problems if any of (1) WordPress, or (2) PHP, or (3) your
871 web server, or (4) your MySQL server, has been set to use a different
872 time zone from the one that any of the others is set to use. If
873 FeedWordPress has not been properly updating updated posts, or has been
874 updating posts when there shouldn't be any changes for the update, this
875 release may solve that problem.
876
877 * GOOGLE READER BUGS FIXED: A couple of bugs that made it difficult for
878 FeedWordPress to interact with Google Reader public feeds have been
879 fixed. Firstly, if you encountered an error message reading "There was a
880 problem adding the newsfeed. [SQL: ]" when you tried to add the feed,
881 the cause of this error has been fixed. Secondly, if you succeeded in
882 getting FeedWordPress to check a Google Reader feed, only to find that
883 the title of posts had junk squashed on to the end of them, that bug
884 has been fixed too. To fix this bug, you must install the newest version
885 of the optional MagpieRSS upgrade.
886
887 * FILTER PARAMETERS: Due to an old, old bug in WordPress 1.5.0 (which was
888 what was available back when I first wrote the filter interface),
889 FeedWordPress has traditionally only passed one parameter to
890 syndicated_item and syndicated_post filters functions -- an array
891 containing either the Magpie representation of a syndicated item from
892 the feed, or the database representation of a post about to be inserted
893 into the WordPress database. If you needed information about the feed
894 that the item came from, this was accessible only through a pair of
895 global variables, $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta.
896
897 Since it's been a pretty long time since WordPress 1.5.0 was in
898 widespread usage, I have gone ahead and added an optional second
899 parameter to the invocation of the syndicated_item and syndicated_post
900 filters. If you have written a filter for FeedWordPress that uses either
901 of these hooks, you can now register that filter to accept 2 parameters.
902 If you do so, the second parameter will be a SyndicatedPost object,
903 which, among other things, allows you to access information about the
904 feed from which an item is syndicated using the $post->feed and the
905 $post->feedmeta elements (where $post is the name of the second
906 parameter).
907
908 NOTE THAT THE OLD GLOBAL VARIABLES ARE STILL AVAILABLE, for the time
909 being at least, so existing filters will not break with the upgrade.
910 They should be considered deprecated, however, and may be eliminated in
911 the future.
912
913 * FILTER CHANGE / BUGFIX: the array that is passed as the first argument
914 syndicated_post filters no longer is no longer backslash-escaped for
915 MySQL when filters are called. This was originally a bug, or an
916 oversight; the contents of the array should only be escaped for the
917 database *after* they have gone through all filters. IF YOU HAVE WRITTEN
918 ANY syndicated_post FILTERS THAT PRESUME THE OLD BEHAVIOR OF PASSING IN
919 STRINGS THAT ARE ALREADY BACKSLASH-ESCAPED, UPDATE YOUR FILTERS
920 ACCORDINGLY.
921
922 * OTHER MINOR BUGFIXES AND INTERNAL CHANGES: The internal architecture of
923 FeedWordPress has been significantly changed to make the code more
924 modular and clean; hopefully this should help reduce the number of
925 compatibility updates that are needed, and make them easier and quicker
926 when they are needed.
927
928 = 0.981 =
929
930 Version 0.981 is a narrowly targeted bugfix and compatibility release, whose
931 main purpose is to resolve a major outstanding problem: the incompatibility
932 between version 0.98 of WordPress and the recently released WordPress 2.1.
933
934 * WORDPRESS 2.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress is now compatible with
935 WordPress 2.1, as well as retaining its existing support for WordPress
936 2.0 and 1.5. Incompatibilities that resulted in database warnings, fatal
937 errors, and which prevented FeedWordPress from syndicating new posts,
938 have been eliminated.
939
940 * RSS-FUNCTIONS.PHP RENAMED TO RSS.PHP: if you use the upgraded MagpieRSS
941 replacement that's included with FeedWordPress, be sure to note that
942 there are now *two* files to upload from the `OPTIONAL/wp-includes`
943 subdirectory in order to carry out the upgrade: rss-functions.php and
944 rss.php. **It is necessary to upload both files**, due to a change in
945 the file naming scheme in WordPress 2.1, and it is necessary to do so
946 whether you are using WordPress 2.1 or not. If you only upload the
947 `rss-functions.php` file as in previous installations you will not have
948 a working copy of MagpieRSS; the rss.php file contains the actual code.
949
950 * DATE BUG AFFECTING SOME PHP INSTALLATIONS RESOLVED: due to a subtle bug
951 in parse_w3cdtf(), some installations of PHP encountered problems with
952 FeedWordPress's attempt to date posts, which would cause some new posts
953 on Atom feeds to be dated as if they had apppeared in 1969 or 1970
954 (thus, effectively, never appearing on front page at all). This bug in
955 the date handling should now be fixed.
956
957 * PHP <?=...?> SHORT FORM ELIMINATED: some installations of PHP do not
958 allow the <?=...?> short form for printing PHP values, which was used
959 extensively in the FeedWordPress interface code. Since this could cause
960 fatal errors for users with the wrong installation of PHP, the short
961 form has been replaced with full PHP echo statements, and is no longer
962 used in FeedWordPress.
963
964 * BETTER USER INTERFACE INTEGRATION WITH WORDPRESS 2.x: Some minor changes
965 have been made to help the FeedWordPress interface pages blend in better
966 with the user interface when running under WordPress 2.x.
967
968 * GLOBAL CATEGORIES BUG RESOLVED: a bug that prevented some users from
969 setting one or more categories to apply to syndicated posts from all
970 feeds (using the checkbox interface under Options --> Syndication) has
971 been resolved.
972
973 = 0.98 =
974
975 * WORDPRESS 2.0 COMPATIBILITY: This is a narrowly-targeted release to
976 solve a major outstanding problem. FeedWordPress is now compatible with
977 both WordPress 1.5 and WordPress 2.0. Incompatibilities that caused
978 fatal SQL errors, and a more subtle bug with off-kilter counts of posts
979 under a given category, have been resolved. FeedWordPress tests for
980 database schema using the global $wp_db_version variable (if null, then
981 we presume that we're dealing with WordPress 1.5).
982
983 NOTE: I have **not** fully tested FeedWordPress with WordPress 2.0.
984 Further testing may reveal more bugs. However, you should now be able
985 to get at least basic FeedWordPress functionality up and running.
986
987 * AUTHOR MATCHING: FeedWordPress tests several fields to see if it can
988 identify the author of the post as a user already in the WordPress user
989 database. In previous versions, it tested the user login, the nickname,
990 and tested for "aliases" listed in the Profile (see documentation). FWP
991 now also matches authors on the basis of e-mail address (*if* an e-mail
992 address is present). This is particularly helpful for formats such as
993 RSS 2.0, in which authors are primarily identified by e-mail addresses.
994
995 = 0.97 =
996
997 * INSTALLATION PROCEDURE: Some of the changes between 0.96 and 0.97
998 require upgrades to the meta-data stored by FeedWordPress to work
999 properly. Thus, if you are upgrading from 0.96 or earlier to 0.97, most
1000 FeedWordPress operations (including updates and template functions)
1001 WILL BE DISABLED until you run the upgrade procedure. Fortunately,
1002 running the upgrade procedure is easy: just go to either Options -->
1003 Syndication or Links --> Syndicated in the WordPress Dashboard and press
1004 the button.
1005
1006 * FEED FORMAT SUPPORT: Support has been added for the Atom 1.0 IETF
1007 standard. Several other elements are also newly supported
1008 (dcterms:created, dcterms:issued, dcterms:modified, dc:identifier,
1009 proper support for the RSS 2.0 guid element, the RSS 2.0 author element,
1010 the use of Atom author or Dublin Core dc:creator constructs at the feed
1011 level to identify the author of individual items, etc.)
1012
1013 N.B.: full support of several Atom 1.0 features, such as categories
1014 and enclosures, requires you to install the optional rss-functions.php
1015 upgrade in your wp-includes directory.
1016
1017 * BUG FIX: Running `update-feeds.php` from command line or crontab
1018 returned "I don't syndicate..." errors. It turns out that WordPress
1019 sometimes tramples on the internal PHP superglobals that I depended on
1020 to determine whether or not the script was being invoked from the
1021 command line. This has been fixed (the variables are now checked
1022 *before* WordPress can trample them). Note that `update-feeds.php` has
1023 been thoroughly overhauled anyway; see below for details.
1024
1025 * BUG FIX: Duplicate categories or author names. Fixed two bugs that could
1026 create duplicate author and/or category names when the name contained
1027 either (a) certain international characters (causing a mismatch between
1028 MySQL and PHP's handling of lowercasing text), or (b) characters that
1029 have a special meaning in regular expressions (causing MySQL errors when
1030 looking for the author or category due to regexp syntax errors). These
1031 should now be fixed thanks to careful escaping of names that go into
1032 regular expressions and careful matching of lowercasing functions
1033 (comparing results from PHP only to other results from PHP, and results
1034 from MySQL only to other results from MySQL).
1035
1036 * BUG FIX: Items dated December 31, 1969 should appear less often. The
1037 function for parsing W3C date-time format dates that ships with
1038 MagpieRSS can only correctly parse fully-specified dates with a
1039 fully-specified time, but valid W3C date-time format dates may omit the
1040 time, the day of the month, or even the month. Some feeds in the wild
1041 date their items with coarse-grained dates, so the optional
1042 `rss-functions.php` upgrade now includes a more flexible parse_w3cdtf()
1043 function that will work with both coarse-grained and fully-specified
1044 dates. (If parts of the date or the time are omitted, they are filled in
1045 with values based on the current time, so '2005-09-10' will be dated to
1046 the current time on that day; '2004' will be dated to this day and time
1047 one year ago.
1048
1049 N.B.: This fix is only available in the optional `rss-functions.php`
1050 upgrade.
1051
1052 * BUG FIX: Evil use of HTTP GET has been undone. The WordPress interface
1053 is riddled with inappropriate (non-idempotent) uses of HTTP GET queries
1054 (ordinary links that make the server do something with significant
1055 side-effects, such as deleting a post or a link from the database).
1056 FeedWordPress did some of this too, especially in places where it aped
1057 the WordPress interface (e.g. the "Delete" links in Links -->
1058 Syndicated). That's bad business, though. I've changed the interface so
1059 that all the examples of improper side-effects that I can find now
1060 require an HTTP POST to take effect. I think I got pretty much
1061 everything; if there's anything that I missed, let me know.
1062
1063 Further reading: [Sam Ruby 2005-05-06: This Stuff Matters](http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2005/05/06/This-Stuff-Matters)
1064
1065 * BUG FIX: Categories applied by `cats` setting should no longer prevent
1066 category-based filtering from working. In FeedWordPress, you can (1)
1067 apply certain categories to all syndicated posts, or all posts from
1068 a particular feed; and (2) filter out all posts that don't match one
1069 of the categories that are already in the WordPress database (allowing
1070 for simple category-based filtering; just load up WordPress with the
1071 categories you want to accept, and then tell FeedWordPress not to create
1072 new ones). However, the way that (1) and (2) were implemented meant that
1073 you couldn't effectively use them together; once you applied a known
1074 category to all syndicated posts from a particular feed, it meant that
1075 they'd have at least one familiar category (the category or categories
1076 you were applying), and that would get all posts past the filter no
1077 matter what categories they were originally from.
1078
1079 Well, no longer. You can still apply categories to all syndicated posts
1080 (using either Syndication --> Options, or the feed-level settings under
1081 Links --> Syndicated). But these categories are not applied to the post
1082 until *after* it has already passed by the "familiar categories" filter.
1083 So now, if you want, you can do category filtering and *then* apply as
1084 many categories as you please to all and only posts that pass the filter.
1085
1086 * BUG FIX: Other minor typos and HTML gaffes were fixed along the way.
1087
1088 * PERFORMANCE: get_feed_meta() no longer hits the database for information
1089 on every call; it now caches link data in memory, so FeedWordPress only
1090 goes to the database once for each syndicated link. This may
1091 substantially improve performance if your database server resources
1092 are tight and your templates make a lot of use of custom settings from
1093 get_feed_meta().
1094
1095 * API CHANGE: Link ID numbers, rather than RSS URIs, are now used to
1096 identify the feed from which a post is syndicated when you use template
1097 functions such as get_feed_meta(). The practical upshot of this is you
1098 can switch feeds, or change the feed address for a particular syndicated
1099 site, without breaking your templates for all the posts that were
1100 syndicated from the earlier URI.
1101
1102 * API CHANGE: if you have plugins or templates that make use of the
1103 get_feed_meta() function or the $fwp_feedmeta global, note that the
1104 data formerly located under the `uri` and `name` fields is now located
1105 under the `link/uri` field and the `link/name` field, respectively. Note
1106 also that you can access the link ID number for any given feed under the
1107 global $fwp_feedmeta['link/id'] (in plugins) or
1108 get_feed_meta('link/id') (in a template in post contexts).
1109
1110 * FEATURE: the settings for individual feeds can now be edited using a
1111 humane interface (where formerly you had to tweak key-value pairs in the
1112 Link Notes section). To edit settings for a feed, pick the feed that you
1113 want under Links --> Syndicated and click the Edit link.
1114
1115 * FEATURE: The "Unsubscribe" button (formerly "Delete") in Links -->
1116 Syndicated now offers three options for unsubscribing from a feed: (1)
1117 turning off the subscription without deleting the feed data or affecting
1118 posts that were syndicated from the feed (this works by setting the Link
1119 for the feed as "invisible"); (2) deleting the feed data and all of the
1120 posts that were syndicated from the feed; or (3) deleting the feed data
1121 and *keeping* the posts that were syndicated from the feed
1122 setting the Link to "Invisible" (meaning that it will not be displayed
1123 in lists of the site links on the front page, and it won't be checked
1124 for updates; (2) deleting the Link and all of the posts that were
1125 syndicated from its feed; or (3) deleting the feed data but keeping the
1126 posts that were syndicated (which will henceforward be treated as if
1127 they were local rather than syndicated posts). (Note that (1) is usually
1128 the best option for aggregator sites, unless you want to clean up the
1129 results of an error or a test.)
1130
1131 * FEATURE / BUG FIX: If you have been receiving mysterious "I don't
1132 syndicate...", or "(local) HTTP status code was not 200", or "(local)
1133 transport error - could not open socket", or "parse error - not well
1134 formed" errors, then this update may solve your problems, and if it does
1135 *not* solve them, it will at least make the reasons for the problems
1136 easier to understand. That's because I've overhauled the way that
1137 FeedWordPress goes about updating feeds.
1138
1139 If you use the command-line PHP scripting method to run scheduled
1140 updates, then not much should change for you, except for fewer
1141 mysterious errors. If you have done updates by sending periodic HTTP
1142 requests to <http://your-blog.com/path/wp-content/update-feeds.php>,
1143 then the details have changed somewhat; mostly in such a way as to make
1144 things easier on you. See the README file or online documentation on
1145 Staying Current for the details.
1146
1147 * FEATURE: FeedWordPress now features a more sophisticated system for
1148 timed updates. Instead of polling *every* subscribed feed for updates
1149 *each* time `update-feeds.php` is run, FeedWordPress now keeps track of
1150 the last time it polled each feed, and only polls them again after a
1151 certain period of time has passed. The amount of time is normally set
1152 randomly for each feed, in a period between 30 minutes and 2 hours (so
1153 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
1154 directly by the feed, which brings us to ...
1155
1156 * FEATURE: FeedWordPress now respects the settings in the `ttl` and
1157 Syndication Module RSS elements. Feeds with these elements set will not
1158 be polled any more frequently than they indicate with these feeds unless
1159 the user manually forces FeedWordPress to poll the feed (see Links -->
1160 Syndicated --> Edit settings).
1161
1162 = 0.96 =
1163
1164 * FEATURE: support has been added for enclosures in RSS 2.0 and Atom
1165 0.6+ newsfeeds. WordPress already supports adding enclosures to an
1166 item; FeedWordPress merely gets the information on the enclosure
1167 from the feed it is syndicating and plugs that information directly
1168 into the WordPress database so that (among other things) that post
1169 will have its enclosure listed in your blog's RSS 2 newsfeed.
1170
1171 Note that enclosure support requires using the optional MagpieRSS
1172 upgrade (i.e., replacing your `wp-includes/rss-functions.php` with
1173 `OPTIONAL/wp-includes/rss-functions.php` from the FWP archive)
1174
1175 * FEATURE: for completeness's sake, there is now a feed setting,
1176 `hardcode url`, that allows you to set the URI for the front page
1177 of a contributor's website manually (that is, prevent it from being
1178 automatically updated from the feed channel link on each update). To
1179 set the URI manually, put a line like this in the Link Notes section
1180 of a feed:
1181
1182 hardcode url: yes
1183
1184 You can also instruct FeedWordPress to use hardcoded URIs by default
1185 on all feeds using Options --> Syndication
1186
1187 * FEATURE: by default, when FeedWordPress finds new syndicated posts,
1188 it (1) publishes them immediately, (2) turns comments off, and (3)
1189 turns trackback / pingback pings off. You can now alter all three
1190 default behaviors (e.g., to allow pings on syndicated posts, or to
1191 send newly-syndicated posts to the draft pile for moderation) using
1192 Options --> Syndication
1193
1194
1195 = From 0.91 to 0.95 =
1196
1197 * BUG FIX: Fixed an obscure bug in the handling of categories:
1198 categories with trailing whitespace could cause categories with
1199 duplicate names to be created. This no longer happens. While I was
1200 at it I tightened up the operation of
1201 FeedWordPress::lookup_categories() a bit in general.
1202
1203 * FEATURE DEPRECATED: the feed setting `hardcode categories` is now
1204 deprecated in favor of `unknown categories` (see below), which
1205 allows you to strip off any syndication categories not already in
1206 your database using `unknown categories: default` or `unknown
1207 categories: filter`. If you have `hardcode categories: yes` set on a
1208 feed, this will be treated as `unknown categories: default` (i.e.,
1209 no new categories will be added, but if a post doesn't match any of
1210 the categories it will be added in the default category--usually
1211 "Uncategorized" or "General").
1212
1213 * FEATURE: You can now set global defaults as to whether or not
1214 FeedWordPress will update the Link Name and Link Description
1215 settings for feeds automatically from the feed title and feed
1216 tagline. (By default, it does, as it has in past versions.) Whether
1217 this behavior is turned on or off, you can still override the
1218 default behavior using feed settings of `hardcode name: yes`,
1219 `hardcode name: no`, `hardcode description: yes`, or `hardcode
1220 description: no`.
1221
1222 * FEATURE: Users can now provide one or several "aliases" for an
1223 author, just as they can for a category. For example, to make
1224 FeedWordPress treat posts by "Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger" and "Pope
1225 Benedict XVI" as by the same author, edit the user profile for Pope
1226 Benedict XVI and add a line like this to the "User profile" field:
1227
1228 a.k.a.: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
1229
1230 You can add several aliases, each on a line by itself. You can also
1231 add any other text you like to the Profile without interfering with
1232 the aliases.
1233
1234 * FEATURE: Users can now choose how to handle syndicated posts that
1235 are in unfamiliar categories or by unfamiliar authors (i.e.,
1236 categories or authors whose names are not yet in the WordPress
1237 database). By default, FeedWordPress will (as before) create a new
1238 category (or new author) and use it for the current post and any
1239 future posts. This behavior can be changed, either for all feeds or
1240 for one or another particular feed.
1241
1242 There are now three different options for an unfamiliar author: (1)
1243 FeedWordPress can create a new author account and attribute the
1244 syndicated post to the new account; (2) FeedWordPress can attribute
1245 the post to an author if the author's name is familiar, and to a
1246 default author (currently, this means the Site Administrator
1247 account) if it is not; (3) FeedWordPress can drop posts by
1248 unfamiliar authors and syndicate only posts by authors who are
1249 already in the database.
1250
1251 There are, similarly, two different options for an unfamiliar
1252 category: (1) FeedWordPress can create new categories and place the
1253 syndicated post in them; (2) FeedWordPress can drop the unfamiliar
1254 categories and place syndicated posts only in categories that it is
1255 already familiar with. In addition, FeedWordPress 0.95 lets you
1256 choose whether posts that are in *no* familiar categories should be
1257 syndicated (and placed in the default category for the blog) or
1258 simply dropped.
1259
1260 You can set the default behavior for both authors and categories
1261 using the settings in Options --> Syndication. You can also set
1262 different behavior for specific feeds by adding the `unfamiliar
1263 author` and / or `unfamiliar categories` settings to the Link Notes
1264 section of a feed:
1265
1266 unfamiliar author: (create|default|filter)
1267 unfamiliar categories: (create|default|filter)
1268
1269 A setting of `unfamiliar author: create` will make FeedWordPress
1270 create new authors to match unfamiliar author names *for this feed
1271 alone*. A setting of `unfamiliar author: default` will make it
1272 assign posts from unfamiliar authors to the default user account. A
1273 setting of `unfamiliar author: filter` will cause all posts (from
1274 this feed alone) to be dropped unless they are by an author already
1275 listed in the database. Similiarly, `unfamiliar categories: create`
1276 will make FeedWordPress create new categories to match unfamiliar
1277 category names *for this feed alone*; `unfamiliar categories:
1278 default` will cause it to drop any unfamiliar category names; and
1279 `unfamiliar categories: filter` will cause it to *both* drop any
1280 unfamiliar category names *and* to only syndicate posts that are
1281 placed in one or more familiar categories.
1282
1283 These two new features allow users to do some coarse-grained
1284 filtering without having to write a PHP filter. Specifically, they
1285 offer an easy way for you to filter feeds by category or by author.
1286 Suppose, for example, that you only wanted to syndicate posts that
1287 your contributors place in the "Llamas" category. You could do so by
1288 setting up your installation of WordPress so that the only category
1289 in the database is "Llamas," and then use Options --> Syndication to
1290 set "Unfamiliar categories" to "don't create new categories and
1291 don't syndicate posts unless they match at least one familiar
1292 category". Now, when you update, only posts in the "Llamas" category
1293 will be syndicated by FeedWordPress.
1294
1295 Similarly, if you wanted to filter one particular feed so that only
1296 posts by (for example) the author "Earl J. Llama" were syndicated to
1297 your site, you could do so by creating a user account for Earl J.
1298 Llama, then adding the following line to the settings for the feed
1299 in Link Notes:
1300
1301 unfamiliar author: filter
1302
1303 This will cause any posts from this feed that are not authored by
1304 Earl J. Llama to be discarded, and only the posts by Earl J. Llama
1305 will be syndicated. (If the setting is used on one specific feed, it
1306 will not affect how posts from other feeds are syndicated.)
1307
1308 == License ==
1309
1310 The FeedWordPress plugin is copyright © 2005-2010 by Charles Johnson. It uses
1311 code derived or translated from:
1312
1313 - [wp-rss-aggregate.php][] by [Kellan Elliot-McCrea](kellan@protest.net)
1314 - [MagpieRSS][] by [Kellan Elliot-McCrea](kellan@protest.net)
1315 - [HTTP Navigator 2][] by [Keyvan Minoukadeh](keyvan@k1m.com)
1316 - [Ultra-Liberal Feed Finder][] by [Mark Pilgrim](mark@diveintomark.org)
1317
1318 according to the terms of the [GNU General Public License][].
1319
1320 This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
1321 the terms of the [GNU General Public License][] as published by the Free
1322 Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any
1323 later version.
1324
1325 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
1326 WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
1327 PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
1328
1329 [wp-rss-aggregate.php]: http://laughingmeme.org/archives/002203.html
1330 [MagpieRSS]: http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/
1331 [HTTP Navigator 2]: http://www.keyvan.net/2004/11/16/http-navigator/
1332 [Ultra-Liberal Feed Finder]: http://diveintomark.org/projects/feed_finder/
1333 [GNU General Public License]: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
1334
1335