PluginProbe
FeedWordPress / 2010.0903
FeedWordPress v2010.0903
trunk 0.8 0.9 0.91 0.95 0.96 0.97 0.98 0.981 0.99 0.991 0.992 0.993 2008.1030 2008.1101 2008.1105 2008.1214 2009.0612 2009.0613 2009.0618 2009.0707 2009.1111 2009.1112 2010.0127 2010.0528 All 65 releases
feedwordpress / readme.txt

readme.txt in FeedWordPress 2010.0903, at readme.txt

1,571 lines 85.7 KB
No matching file
Up and down to move Enter to open Esc to close
Raw Download Zip
1 === FeedWordPress ===
2 Contributors: Charles Johnson
3 Donate link: http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/
4 Tags: syndication, aggregation, feed, atom, rss
5 Requires at least: 3.0
6 Tested up to: 3.0.1
7 Stable tag: 2010.0903
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 [3.0] 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 [3.0]: http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.0
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 3.0 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 = 2010.0903 =
97
98 * WORDPRESS 3 REQUIRED: Please note that this release of FeedWordPress
99 *requires* WordPress 3.0 or later. If you are currently using a 2.x
100 branch of WordPress, you will need to upgrade to WordPress 3 before you
101 can successfully upgrade FeedWordPress.
102
103 * BUGFIX: NO MORE DISAPPEARING "SYNDICATED SOURCES" PANEL; INTERNET
104 EXPLORER UI GLITCH APPARENTLY FIXED: Several users independently
105 reported a problem with FWP 2010.0623 and various versions of IE. A
106 problem with the HTML markup caused IE (but not Firefox or
107 Chrome) to completely hide the Syndicated Sources administration panel
108 (the main list of currently-syndicated sources, and the main location
109 for adding new sources, under the Syndication menu item) when a user
110 added their first syndicated feed. Maddeningly, the glitch seemed to
111 affect some IE users and not others: I was never able to reproduce the
112 problem for myself on my own machines. However, the markup of Syndicated
113 Sources has undergone significant changes and corrections since
114 2010.0623, and two independent sources who had been having this problem
115 confirm that they no longer encounter it with the updated version. For
116 the time being, I am going to declare this bug squashed.
117
118 * BUGFIX: MORE PROTECTION AGAINST FATAL ERRORS FROM PLUGGABLE VERSIONS OF
119 SimplePie: FeedWordPress now takes some precautions that should help to
120 better avoid conflicts for users who have installed pluggable versions
121 of SimplePie for another plugin or theme. (You may not know that you have
122 done this; but if you've been encountering fatal errors indicating that
123 you cannot redeclare class SimplePie, or something along those lines,
124 there is now a better chance that those fatal errors will be eliminated.
125
126 * PERFORMANCE: SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCED MEMORY CONSUMPTION FOR LARGE UPDATES:
127 FeedWordPress is still a memory-hungry little module, especially when
128 you are dealing with very large feeds. However, users should notice a
129 significant reduction in memory overloads, especially if they update a
130 large number of feeds at once.
131
132 * USER INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: Nothing is radically different, but there's
133 been a fair amount of extra spit and polish added, including a convenient
134 new Dashboard widget that may save you a trip to the Syndication menu,
135 a lot of effort to make the relationship between global and feed-by-feed
136 settings more obvious to the user and more easily controllable, to make
137 navigation between settings pages easier, to sand off a few rough edges,
138 and to make other improvements on the margins. I hope you'll like how
139 it looks.
140
141 * ADDING MULTIPLE FEEDS: FeedWordPress now provides a convenient mode for
142 adding multiple feeds at once, using either a copy-and-pasted list, or
143 else an OPML file. Go to Syndication --> Syndicated Sources and check
144 out the two new buttons underneath the New Source input box. When you
145 have to add a number of feeds at once, this can save you considerable
146 time and trouble.
147
148 * IMPROVED HANDLING OF AUTHORS WITH DUPLICATE E-MAIL ADDRESS AND AUTHORS
149 WITH NAMES WRITTEN IN FOREIGN SCRIPTS: WordPress 3 is increasingly picky
150 about what it will accept for new author accounts, and some of the
151 conditions it imposes can cause error conditions that prevent posts from
152 being properly syndicated, or properly attributed, if authors happen to
153 have identical e-mail addresses, or if users are given usernames that are
154 written in non-Western scripts. FeedWordPress now handles these much
155 better, and systematically works to avoid clashes between syndicated
156 authors' account names or in their e-mail addresses, which should result
157 in significantly better results in mapping author names to WordPress
158 user accounts.
159
160 * MAPPING CATEGORIES ON SYNDICATED POSTS TO TAGS NOW BETTER SUPPORTED:
161 In previous versions, the only way for the Categories provided by a
162 syndicated feed to be mapped into Post Tags was to instruct FWP to
163 create new tags, rather than new categories, for unfamiliar categories
164 from the feed. This works fine if you want tags to be the default; but
165 if you want only a *specific* set of tags, there was no way to get them
166 without getting most or all other categories imported as tags. You can
167 now do this by creating a tag (under Posts ==> Post Tags) before
168 importing the post; when the syndicated category matches a pre-existing
169 tag, the incoming post will be tagged with that tag, without creating
170 a local Post Category.
171
172 * REL-TAG MICROFORMAT SUPPORT FOR INLINE TAGS: Syndicated posts that
173 contain inline tags, marked up using the Rel-Tag microformat
174 <http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag>, are now tagged with the tags
175 provided by Rel-Tag format links.
176
177 * MUCH GREATER CONTROL OVER CATEGORY AND TAG MAPPING: This is partly the
178 result of building in support for a potentially endless set of custom
179 taxonomies (see below), but in general there has been a great deal of
180 effort towards giving you more control over how categories and tags
181 provided by the feed are mapped into terms on the local blog. In
182 particular, you can now force FeedWordPress to create only categories
183 from categories and tags provided by the feed; or to create only tags;
184 or to search both categories and tags for a match; or you can simply
185 force it to drop all of the categories provided by the feed and use
186 only categories or tags that you explicitly provide. In addition, you
187 can now also choose whether to override global categories settings with
188 a local, feed-specific setting; or whether to *add together* *both* the
189 global categories and the local feed-specific categories -- depending
190 on whatever your use-case may demand.
191
192 * CUSTOM POST TYPES AND TAXONOMY SUPPORTS: This is mainly for the
193 super-geeky, but if you use other plugins or themes that make
194 significant use of WordPress's support for custom post types and custom
195 taxonomies, you may be pleased to find that FeedWordPress now allows you
196 to feed incoming posts into any custom feed type that you wish, and to
197 map categories and tags from the feed to custom taxonomies as well as
198 to the standard Category and Tag taxonomies.
199
200 * STORING NAMESPACED CUSTOM FEED ELEMENTS IN POST CUSTOM FIELDS: If you
201 would like to use FeedWordPress's support for storing custom meta-data
202 from feed elements in the custom fields for a post (for example, to
203 store geolocation data or iTunes media meta-data), you'll find that it's
204 now much easier for you to access these namespaced elements. You always
205 could access them, but in previous versions you might have to write
206 something ugly like $(/{http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#}lat)
207 just to get at the value of a `<geo:lat>` tag. Now, as long as you use
208 the same mnemonic codes that the feed producer used, you should always
209 be able to write a nice, simple expression like $(/geo:lat) to get the
210 value of a <geo:lat> tag.
211
212 * CUSTOM DIRECTORY STRUCTURE SUPPORT: if you poke at it enough, WordPress
213 is relatively flexible about where it should store admin interface code,
214 uploaded content, plugins, and a number of other things that occupy an
215 important place in the WordPress directory structure. Previous versions
216 of FeedWordPress encountered serious errors or broke entirely when used
217 with directory structures other than the default. This should now be
218 fixed: FWP now supports custom directory structures wherever WordPress
219 allows them to be customized, rather than depending on the default
220 locations. Enjoy your freedom!
221
222 * MANY NEW FILTERS AND API UTILITY FUNCTIONS FOR ADD-ON PROGRAMMERS: There
223 have been too many improvements to list them all in this ChangeLog, but
224 it means that much more power and ease for folks who are customizing
225 FeedWordPress through PHP filters or add-on modules. Fuller
226 documentation will be put up at the Wiki at feedwordpress.radgeek.org
227 soon.
228
229 = 2010.0623 =
230
231 * WORDPRESS 3.0 COMPATIBILITY / AUTHOR MAPPING INTERFACE ISSUES: I
232 resolved a couple of outstanding issues with the author mapping
233 interface (Syndication --> Authors), which were preventing new users
234 from being created correctly and author mapping rules from being set up
235 correctly. These partly had to do with new restrictions on user account
236 creation introduced in WordPress 3.0; anyway, they should now be fixed.
237
238 * MORE EFFICIENT SYNDICATED URL LOOKUPS: Several users noticed that the
239 bug fix introduced in 2010.0528 for compatibility with post-listing
240 plugins caused a lot more queries to the database in order to look up
241 numerical post IDs from the URL provided to the filter. This shouldn't
242 cause any major problems, but it is not as efficient as it could be; the
243 code now takes advantage of a more efficient way of doing things,
244 which usually will not require any additional database queries.
245
246 * SIMPLEPIE FEED UPDATE ISSUES: If you have been having significant
247 problems with getting feeds to update correctly, this may be the result
248 of some bugs in the implementation of SimplePie caching that ships with
249 WordPress (as of version 3.0). (You would most commonly experience this
250 error if you continually saw errors such as "No feed found at <...>" in
251 your updates.) Fortunately, SimplePie allows for a great deal of
252 extensibility and this allows me to work around the problem; these
253 error conditions should now be mostly eliminated when the underlying
254 feed is valid.
255
256 * UI: SHOW INACTIVE SOURCES: When you use the default unsubscribe option
257 -- which turns off the subscription to a feed while preserving the posts
258 from it and the syndication-related meta-data for the feed -- the
259 unsubscribed feed can now easily be viewed in a special "Inactive"
260 section of the Syndicated Sources page. (As a side benefit, if you've
261 accidentally, or only temporarily, turned off the subscription to a
262 feed, it is now much easier to restore the feed to being active, or to
263 delete it permanently, if you prefer.
264
265 * UI: FEED FINDER / SWITCH FEED INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: changes to styling
266 and options for the feed finder / switch feed, which should now make it
267 easier, in some cases, to find alternative feeds, and make interface
268 options more clearly visible.
269
270 * FILTERS: `syndicated_item_published` and `syndicated_item_updated` NOW
271 PROPERLY AFFECT THE DATING OF POSTS. These filters used to affect some
272 date-related settings, but not others -- and, most importantly, not the
273 final date that is set for a post's publication or last-modified date
274 in the WordPress database. Now, they do affect that, as they should.
275 (Filters should receive, and return, a long integer, representing a Unix
276 epoch relative timestamp.)
277
278 * MAGIC URL TO CLEAR THE CACHE: Suppose that you need to clear the feed
279 cache, for whatever reason; suppose, even, that you need to clear it on
280 a regular basis. One way you might do this is by logging into the
281 FeedWordPress administrative interface and going to Syndication -->
282 Performance. Another way you might do it, now, is to simply send an
283 HTTP request to a magic URL provided by FeedWordPress: if your blog is
284 at example.com, the URL would be <http://example.com/?clear_cache=1>
285
286 = 2010.0602 =
287
288 * CATEGORY BOX INTERFACE ELEMENT FIXED FOR WP 3.0: Stylesheet changes
289 between WordPress 2.9.x and the WordPress 3.0 RC caused the Categories
290 box under **Syndication --> Categories & Tags** to malfunction. This
291 has been fixed.
292
293 * LINK CATEGORY SELECTION BOX IN SYNDICATION ==> FEEDS FIXED FOR WP 2.8
294 AND 2.9: A WP 3.0 compatibility change introduced in 2010.0531
295 inadvertently broke the Syndicated Link Category selector under
296 Syndication --> Feeds & Updates in WP 2.8 and WP 2.9, causing the post
297 categories to be displayed in the selector rather than the link
298 categories. This should now be fixed so that the selector will work
299 correctly under both the current versions of WordPress and the 3.0 RC.
300
301 * MORE PERMISSIVE HANDLING OF FEEDS WITH BAD CONTENT-TYPE HEADERS: One of
302 the small advantages that MagpieRSS had over SimplePie is that it was
303 more tolerant about parsing well-formed feeds that the remote web server
304 happened to deliver with weird or incorrect HTTP Content-type headers.
305 In feeds affected by this problem, the new SimplePie parser would simply
306 fail to find a feed, due to its being led astray by the contents of the
307 Content-type header. This version includes an extension to SimplePie's
308 content-type sniffer that offers more permissive handling of the HTTP
309 headers.
310
311 * MORE FULL-TEXT "EXCERPTS" NOW PROPERLY SHORTENED. Version 2010.0528
312 introduced code to control for cases in which elements intended for
313 item summaries are (ill-advisedly) used to carry the full text of posts;
314 past versions of FeedWordPress would simply include the full text of the
315 post in the excerpt field, but newer versions now attempt to detect
316 this condition when it arises and to head it off, by blanking out the
317 excerpt field and filling it with an automatically generated short,
318 plain text excerpt from the full content. This release broadens the
319 test conditions that indicate when an excerpt field is treated as
320 identical to the full text of the post, and should therefore improve
321 the handling of some feeds (such as Google Reader feeds) where the full
322 text of each post was still appearing in the excerpt field.
323
324 * FILTERS: `syndicated_item_published` AND `syndicated_item_updated`
325 FILTERS NOW ALLOW FILTER AUTHORS TO CHANGE POST TIMESTAMPS. You can now
326 use the `syndicated_item_published` and `syndicated_item_updated` filter
327 hooks to write filters or add-ons which directly change the post date
328 and most-recently-updated timestamps on incoming syndicated posts. Props
329 to niska for pointing out where the filters needed to be applied in
330 order to change WordPress's internal timestamps for incoming posts.
331
332 = 2010.0531 =
333
334 * PERMALINK / CUSTOM FIELDS PROBLEM RESOLVED: An issue in 2010.0528 caused
335 some posts to be imported without the proper syndication-related
336 meta-data being attached (thus causing permalinks to point back to the
337 aggregator website rather than to the source website, among other
338 problems). This problem has been resolved (and a fix has been applied
339 which will resolve the problem for any posts affected by this problem,
340 if the original post is recent enough to still be available on the feed).
341
342 * UI: The "Back End" section has been split into two separate sections --
343 "Performance" (dealing with caching, database index, and other
344 performance tweaks), and "Diagnostics" (dealing with debug mode,
345 update logging, and a number of new diagnostic tests which I will be
346 rolling out over the next few releases).
347
348 * Several minor interface bug fixes and PHP warning notices eliminated.
349
350 = 2010.0528 =
351
352 #### Compatibility ####
353
354 * SIMPLEPIE IS NOW USED TO PARSE FEEDS; NO MORE MAGPIERSS UPGRADES NEEDED:
355 One of the biggest changes in this release is that FeedWordPress no
356 longer depends on MagpieRSS to parse feeds, and has switched to the much
357 more up-to-date and flexible SimplePie feed parser, which is included as
358 a standard part of WordPress versions 2.8 and later. Using SimplePie will
359 hopefully allow for better handling of feeds going further, and will
360 allow me greater flexibility in determining how exactly the feed parser
361 will operate. It also means that FeedWordPress no longer requires
362 special upgrades to the WordPress core MagpieRSS files, and should
363 eliminate quite a bit of complexity.
364
365 * MAGPIERSS COMPATIBILITY LAYER FOR EXISTING FILTERS AND ADD-ONS: However,
366 I have also implemented a compatibility layer to ensure that existing
367 filters and add-ons for FeedWordPress which depended on the MagpieRSS
368 data format *should not be broken* by the switch to SimplePie. Going
369 forward, I recommend that new filters and add-ons be written to take
370 advantage of the SimplePie object representations of items, feeds, etc.,
371 rather than the MagpieRSS arrays, but the MagpieRSS arrays will still
372 be available and older filters should continue to work as they have in
373 the past.
374
375 * COMPATIBILITY WITH WORDPRESS 2.9.x and 3.0: This release has been tested
376 for the existing WordPress 2.9.x branch and with the upcoming release of
377 WordPress 3.0. Changes in the user interface JavaScript between WordPress
378 2.8.x and WordPress 2.9 caused the tag box interface element to break in
379 the Syndication --> Categories & Tags settings page; changes in the API
380 functions for adding new authors caused fatal errors under certain
381 conditions in WordPress 3.0. These breakages have been fixed.
382
383 * DROPPED LEGACY SUPPORT FOR WORDPRESS PRIOR TO 2.8: Because SimplePie is
384 not included with versions of WordPress prior to 2.8, I have chosen to
385 drop legacy support for WordPress versions 1.5 through 2.7. If you are
386 using FeedWordPress with a version of WordPress before 2.8, you will
387 have to upgrade your installation of WordPress in order to take
388 advantage of this release.
389
390 * PHP 5.3 COMPATIBILITY: A couple of compatibility issues, which were
391 causing fatal errors amd ugly warnings for users of PHP 5.3,
392 have been eliminated.
393
394 #### Features and Processing ####
395
396 * INTERFACE REORGANIZATION: The interface restructuring, began with
397 Version 2009.0612, has been completed. Catch-all settings pages have
398 been eliminated entirely for pages that cover each aspect of handling
399 a feed: Feeds & Updates, Posts & Links, Authors, Categories & Tags,
400 and Back End handling of the database and diagnostic information.
401 Extensive new interface hooks allow add-on modules to significantly
402 change or extend the FeedWordPress admin interface and workflow.
403
404 * STORING INFORMATION FROM THE FEED IN CUSTOM FIELDS: Many users
405 have written to request the ability to store information from elements
406 in the feed in a custom field on each post. (So that, for example, if
407 post includes a `itunes:duration` element, you could store the contents
408 in a Custom Field called `duration` on the post (for a Theme to access
409 later). The Custom Post Settings under Syndication --> Posts & Links now
410 allow you to access any item or feed tag, using a syntax similar to
411 a much-simplified version of XPath. See Posts & Links settings for
412 details.
413
414 * UPDATE-FREEZING ON MANUALLY EDITED POSTS: FeedWordPress now allows you
415 to mark posts that have been manually edited, so that the changes you
416 make will not be overwritten by later updates from the feed. If you make
417 manual edits to a particular post, just check the "Manual editing"
418 checkbox in order to protect your changes from being overwritten. If you
419 want to block *all* posts from being updated after they are imported
420 for the first time, a new "Updated Posts" setting in Posts & Links
421 allows you to freeze all posts from a particular feed, or all syndicated
422 posts.
423
424 * SETTING: FEED-BY-FEED SETTINGS FOR WHERE PERMALINKS POINT TO: You've
425 always been able to tell FeedWordPress whether permalinks for posts
426 should point to the original source of the story or the local copy. Now
427 you can choose different policies for different feeds, instead of one
428 global policy for all feeds. (Of course, you can still use a global
429 default if you prefer.)
430
431 * SETTING: USER CONTROL OVER TIMING BASIS. You can now determine the
432 schedule on which feeds are considered ready to poll for updates --
433 by default feeds become ready for polling after about 1 hour. You can
434 now increase or decrease the time window under Syndication --> Feeds &
435 Updates. (However, please pay *CAREFUL ATTENTION* to the recommendations
436 and DO NOT set the scheduling lower than 60 minutes unless you are
437 ABSOLUTELY SURE that you have specific permission from webmaster who
438 provides that specific feed to poll more frequently than that. If you
439 set this too low (and about 60 minutes is the polite minimum if you
440 haven't been given a different figure), most webmasters will consider
441 the frequent hits on their server as rude, or even downright abusive.
442
443 * OTHER SETTINGS: New settings also include the ability to stop FWP from
444 resolving relative URLs within syndicated content, and the ability to
445 choose whether FeedWordPress should indicate the comment feed from the
446 original source, or the local comment feed, when providing the comment
447 feed URL for a syndicated post.
448
449 #### Parsing ####
450
451 * BETTER DATE HANDLING -- FEWER FLASHBACKS TO 1969 and 1970: FeedWordPress
452 has made some bugfixes and some improvements in the logic for parsing
453 dates. This should allow FeedWordPress to correctly parse more dates in
454 more feeds; and, in the last resort, when FeedWordPress fails to
455 correctly parse a date, to fall back to a more intelligent default. This
456 should hopefully avoid most or all error conditions that have resulted
457 in articles being erroneously dated to the dawn of the Unix epoch
458 (31 December 1969 or 1 January 1970).
459
460 * FULL-TEXT "EXCERPTS" NOW PROPERLY SHORTENED. Based on a straightforward
461 reading of the existing RSS specs, it's reasonable for the
462 rss:description element to be read as a plaintext summary or excerpt for
463 the item containing the description -- with the full text of the item,
464 if available, in another, better-suited element, such as the de facto
465 standard content:encoded extension element. The problem is that uses of
466 RSS rarely have much to do with anything like a straightforward reading
467 of the specs. As a result, many actual RSS producers in the wild put the
468 full text of the article in a description element. But since
469 FeedWordPress has treated this text as a summary, this produces
470 aggregated posts with lengthy "excerpts" containing the full text of the
471 article. This release of FeedWordPress fixes the problem by doing a
472 little digging before treating rss:description as a summary: if the
473 description element is used properly as a plain text summary, then
474 FeedWordPress will take the summary provided by the feed, rather than
475 recreating its own excerpt from the full text; but if an RSS item has no
476 full-text element other than description, FeedWordPress will treat the
477 description element as the full text of the article, and generate a
478 shortened excerpt automatically from that text.
479
480 #### API ####
481
482 * TEMPLATE API: new template tags `get_local_permalink()` and
483 `the_local_permalink()` allow you to access the permalink for a post on
484 your aggregator site, even when FeedWordPress is rewriting permalinks to
485 point to the original source site.
486
487 * NEW HOOKS FOR ADD-ONS AND FILTERS: I have added a number of new hooks
488 which allow add-on modules to filter more precisely, gather information
489 at more points, and to enhance the FeedWordPress admin interface. For
490 a list of new hooks and documentation, see the FeedWordPress
491 documentation wiki at
492 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/add-ons-and-filters>
493
494 * FILTER API: A number of new utility methods have been added to the
495 SyndicatedPost class to make it easier for filters and add-ons to
496
497 * FILTER API: Globals $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta DEPRECATED. These
498 global variables, originally introduced to allow filters access to
499 information about the source feed in `syndicated_item` filters (which
500 were passed in through global variables rather than as parameters
501 because of a bug in WP 1.5 which was then fixed in 1.5.1) have been
502 DEPRECATED. If you have any filters or add-ons which still depend on
503 these global variables, you should see about fixing them to access data
504 about the source feed using the SyndicatedPost::link element instead.
505 For documentation, see the FeedWordPress documentation wiki at
506 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedpost> and
507 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedlink>.
508
509 * DIAGNOSTICS: I've included a number of new diagnostic options and
510 messages, which should allow an experienced user to better investigate
511 any problems that may crop up.
512
513 #### Bug Fixes ####
514
515 * BUGFIX: & IN PERMALINKS NO LONGER CAUSING ATOM OR HTML VALIDATION
516 EFFORTS: Many users reported an issue in which syndicating a feed with
517 special XML characters in the URLs (& was the most common, since it is
518 used to separate HTTP GET parameters) would cause the aggregator's
519 feeds to produce invalid (malformed) XML. This update addresses the
520 issue in Atom feeds. Unfortunately, it has not been technically possible
521 to address the problem in RSS 2.0 feeds, due to limitations on
522 WordPress's internal templates for RSS feeds.
523
524 * BUGFIX: BROKEN URLS IN "POPULAR POSTS" AND SIMILAR PLUGINS SHOULD NO
525 LONGER BE BROKEN. A number of users noticed an issue where plugins and
526 templates that listed posts in locations outside of the post loop
527 (for example, "Popular Posts"-style plugins that listed posts in the
528 sidebar), often produced the wrong URL for post links. (Typically, all
529 the posts listed would get the same wrong URL.) This should now be
530 fixed. Thanks to Björn for sending in a quick fix!
531
532 * MINOR BUGFIXES: This release includes a number of fixes to minor bugs
533 and compatibility issues, including: silent failures of the "Syndicate"
534 button, "Illegal Offset Type" error messages from MagpieRSS, and others.
535
536 = 2009.0707 =
537
538 * BUGFIX: WORDPRESS 2.8 AJAX COMPATIBILITY ISSUES RESOLVED (blank or
539 truncated "Syndicated Sites" administration page): Due to changes in the
540 AJAX interface elements between WordPress 2.7 and WordPress 2.8, several
541 FeedWordPress users encountered an issue where the front "Syndication"
542 page in the FeedWordPress administrative interface would come up blank,
543 without the normal "Syndicated Sites" list and "Update" control, or
544 sometimes wth the boxes visible but one or both of them truncated, with
545 only the title bar. This issue should now be resolved: with the new
546 version of FeedWordPress, the compatibility issue that caused the
547 disappearance should be eliminated, and if boxes are shown with only
548 their handle visible, you should once again be able to drop down the
549 rest of the box by clicking once on its title bar.
550
551 * BUGFIX: TAG SETTING WIDGET FIXED. Due to changes in interface elements
552 between WordPress 2.7 and WordPress 2.8, people using FeedWordPress with
553 WordPress 2.8 found that the widget for setting tags to be applied to
554 all syndicated posts, or all syndicated posts from a particular feed,
555 no longer displayed "Add" and "Remove" buttons for individual tags. This
556 issue has now been fixed, and the tagging widget should once again work
557 more or less exactly like the tagging widget for individual posts in the
558 normal WordPress admin interface.
559
560 = 2009.0618 =
561
562 * BUGFIX: MYSTERY ERRORS WITH WITH WP_Http_Fsockopen HTTP TRANSPORT
563 ELIMINATED: Thanks to a combination of a subtle bug in FeedWordPress,
564 and changes to the HTTP transport code in WordPress, a number of users
565 encountered an error in which any time they attempted to add a new feed
566 through the FeedFinder interface, FeedWordPress would fail and display
567 an HTTP request failure diagnostic message. The subtle bug has been
568 fixed, and with it, most of these errors should now be eliminated.
569
570 Be sure to upgrade your MagpieRSS to the most recent MagpieRSS version
571 after you have insalled FeedWordPress 2009.0618, or this bug fix will
572 not take effect.
573
574 = 2009.0613 =
575
576 * INTERFACE/BUGFIX: WORDPRESS 2.8 CATEGORY BOX FIX. Thanks to a subtle
577 change in class names between the WordPress 2.7 and 2.8 stylesheets,
578 category boxes in the FeedWordPress settings interface tended to overflow
579 and have a lot of messy-looking overlapping text under WordPress 2.8.
580 This has now been fixed.
581
582 * FeedFinder FAILURE DIAGNOSTICS: When FWP's FeedFinder fails to find any
583 feeds at a given URL (for example, when you are trying to add a
584 subscription through the administrative interface and you run into an
585 error message), FeedWordPress now provides more diagnostic information
586 for the reasons behind the failure. If that helps you, great; if not,
587 it should help me respond more intelligently to your support request..
588
589 = 2009.0612 =
590
591 * WORDPRESS 2.8 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress 2009.0612 has been tested for
592 compatibility with the recent version 2.8 release of WordPress.
593
594 * INTERFACE RESTRUCTURING: In order to avoid settings posts from becoming
595 too crowded, and to modularize and better organize the user interface,
596 new "Posts" and "Categories & Tags" subpages have been created under the
597 "Syndication" menu. "Posts" controls settings for individal syndicated
598 posts (such as publication status, comment and ping status, whether or
599 not to use the original location of the post as the permalink, whether
600 or not to expose posts to formatting filters, and so on). "Categories &
601 Tags" controls settings for assigning new syndicated posts to categories
602 and tags, such as categories or tags to apply to all syndicated posts,
603 and how to handle categories that do not yet exist in the WordPress
604 database. These subpages, like the Authors subpage, handle settings for
605 the global default level and for individual syndicated feeds.
606
607 Corresponding to these new subpages, the old Syndication Settings and
608 Feed Settings subpages have been cleaned up and simplified, and now only
609 link to the appropriate subpages for options that can be set in the
610 Posts, Authors, or Categories & Tags subpages.
611
612 * FEATURE: ADD CUSTOM SETTINGS TO EACH SYNDICATED POST: FeedWordPress has
613 long had an interface for creating custom settings for each syndicated
614 *feed* which could be retrieved in templates using the `get_feed_meta()`
615 template function. But it had no feature for adding custom fields to
616 each individual syndicated *post*. In response to requests from users, I
617 have added the ability to apply custom fields to each individual
618 syndicated post, using the new Syndication --> Posts subpage. You can
619 set up custom fields to be applied to every syndicated post, or custom
620 fields to be applied to syndicated posts from a particular feed.
621
622 * FEATURE: MAGPIERSS VERSION CHECK AND UPGRADE: FeedWordPress will attempt
623 to determine whether or not you are using the upgraded version of
624 MagpieRSS that comes packaged with FeedWordPress. If not, it will throw
625 an error on admin pages, and, if you are a site administrator, it will
626 give you the option to ignore the error message, or to attempt an
627 automatic upgrade (using a native file copy). If the file copy fails,
628 FeedWordPress will offer some guidance on how to perform the upgrade
629 manually.
630
631 * BLANK POSTS PROBLEM NO LONGER OCCURS WITH OLD & BUSTED MAGPIERSS: Due
632 to the fact that I relied on a content normalization that occurs in my
633 upgraded version of MagpieRSS, but not in the old & busted version of
634 MagpieRSS that ships with WordPress, until this version, if you tried to
635 syndicate an Atom feed without having performed the (*strongly
636 recommended*) MagpieRSS upgrade, all of the posts would come up with
637 completely blank contents. That's not because MagpieRSS couldn't read
638 the data, but rather because the new Magpie version puts that data in a
639 location where the old version doesn't, and I was only looking in that
640 newer location. Now it checks for both, meaning that posts will continue
641 to display their contents even if you don't upgrade MagpieRSS. (But you
642 **really should** upgrade it, anyway.)
643
644 * BUGFIX: RELATIVE URI RESOLUTION FOR POST CONTENT RESTORED. Some time
645 back, I added support for resolving relative URIs against xml:base on
646 feeds that support it to the MagpieRSS upgrade in FeedWordPress. Then I
647 took out code that did the same thing from the main FeedWordPress code.
648 Of course, the problem is that some people, even though it is clearly
649 stupid or evil to do so, still include relative URIs for images or links
650 in posts on feed formats that do *not* adequately support xml:base
651 (notably, RSS 2.0 feeds). In response to a user request, I have added
652 this functionality back in, so that MagpieRSS will resolve any relative
653 URIs that it knows how to resolve using xml:base, and then FeedWordPress
654 will attempt to resolve any relative URIs that are left over afterwards.
655
656 * BUGFIX: INTERFACE OPTION FOR SETTING SYNDICATED POST PUBLICATION STATUS
657 ON A FEED-BY-FEED BASIS HAS BEEN RESTORED: Due to a version-checking
658 bug, users of WordPress 2.7.x lost an option from the "Edit a syndicated
659 feed" interface which allowed them to determine whether newly syndicated
660 posts should be published immediately, held as "Pending Review," saved
661 as drafts, or saved as private posts. (The option to change this
662 setting globally remained in place, but users could no longer set it on
663 a feed-by-feed basis.) The version-checking bug has been fixed, and the
664 option has been restored.
665
666 * BUGFIX: "ARE YOU SURE?" FATAL ERROR ELIMINATED AND SECURITY IMPROVED:
667 Under certain circumstances (for example, when users have configured
668 their browser or proxy not to send HTTP Referer headers, for privacy or
669 other reasons), many features in the FeedWordPress administrative
670 interface (such as adding new feeds or changing settings) would hit a
671 fatal error, displaying only a cryptic message reading "Are you sure?"
672 and a blank page following it. This problem has been eliminated by
673 taking advantage of WordPress's nonce functions, which allow the
674 security check which ran into this error to work properly even without
675 receiving an HTTP Referer header. (N.B.: WordPress's nonce functions
676 were first introduced in WordPress 2.0.3. If you're using FeedWordPress
677 with an older version of WordPress, there's no fix for this problem:
678 you'll just need to turn Referer headers back on. Sorry.)
679
680 * BUGFIX: MANUALLY-ALTERED POST STATUS, COMMENT STATUS, AND PING STATUS NO
681 LONGER REVERTED BY POST UPDATES: If you manually altered the post status,
682 comment status, or ping status of a syndicated post from what it was set
683 to when first syndicated -- for example, if you had a feed that was set
684 to bring in new posts as "Pending Review," and you then marked some of
685 the pending posts as "Published" and others as "Unpublished" -- then
686 in previous versions of FeedWordPress, these manual changes to the
687 status would be lost -- so that, for example, your Published or Unpublished
688 articles would revert to Pending Review -- if the source feed made any
689 upates to the item. This could make the Pending Review feature both
690 unreliable and also extremely frustrating to work with. The good news is
691 that this bug has since been fixed: if you manually update the status
692 of a post, it will no longer be reverted if or when the post is updated.
693
694 * BUGFIX: OCCASIONAL FATAL ERROR ON UPDATE ELIMINATED: Under certain
695 limited conditions (specifically, when both the title and the content of
696 a post to be updated are empty), an attempt to update the post would
697 result in a fatal error. This has been fixed.
698
699 * INTERFACE: "CONFIGURE SETTINGS" CONVENIENCE LINK ADDED TO CONFIRMATION
700 MESSAGE WHEN A NEW FEED IS ADDED: When you add a new subscription to
701 FeedWordPress, the message box that appears to confirm it now includes a
702 handy link to the feed's settings subpage, so that you can quickly set
703 up any special settings you may want to set up for the new feed, without
704 having to hunt through the list of all your other subscriptions to pick
705 out the new one.
706
707 * INTERFACE: SIMPLIFYING AND CLARIFYING AUTOMATIC UPDATES SETTINGS. I have
708 removed an interval setting for the cronless automatic updates which has
709 confused many FeedWordPress users. In past versions of FWP, when you
710 turned on automatic updates, you would be presented with a time interval
711 setting which controlled how often FeedWordPress would check for feeds
712 ready to be polled for updates. (That is, it DID NOT control how often
713 feeds *would be polled*; it controlled how often FeedWordPress would
714 *check* for feeds that *had become ready to poll*. The schedule on which
715 feeds became ready for polling was still controlled either by requests
716 encoded in elements within the feed itself, or else according to an
717 internal calculation within FeedWordPress, averaging out to about 1 hour,
718 if the feed did not include any scheduling request elements.) Since many
719 users very often (and understandably) confused the purpose of this
720 setting, and since the setting is for a feature that's actually very
721 unlikely to require any manual control by the user, I have removed the
722 setting; FeedWordPress now simply uses the default value of checking for
723 feeds to poll every 10 minutes.
724
725 * FEEDFINDER PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT: FeedWordPress's FeedFinder class
726 now uses `array_unique()` to make sure that it doesn't waste time
727 repeatedly iterating over and polling the same URI. Props to Camilo
728 (<http://projects.radgeek.com/2008/12/14/feedwordpress-20081214/#comment-20090122160414>).
729
730 = 2008.1214 =
731
732 * WORDPRESS 2.7 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress has been tested for
733 compatibility with the newly released WordPress 2.7. WordPress 2.7 has
734 deprecated the Snoopy library for HTTP requests, which caused a fatal
735 error for users who had not installed the MagpieRSS upgrade (or whose
736 installation of the MagpieRSS upgrade was overwritten by a recent update
737 of WordPress). FeedWordPress now handles things gracefully when Snoopy
738 is not immediately available.
739
740 * INTERFACE SPIFFED UP: Interface elements have been updated so that
741 FeedWordPress's management interface fits in more naturally with the
742 WordPress 2.7 interface (including a new logo and a number of small
743 interface tweaks).
744
745 * BUG WITH TAGS FOR SYNDICATED ARTICLES FIXED: Several users encountered a
746 bug with the option to add tags to all syndicated posts under
747 Syndication --> Settings -- if you told FeedWordPress to add more than
748 one tag to all syndicated posts, instead of doing so correctly, it would
749 add a *single* tag instead, whose name was composed of the names of all
750 the tags you asked it to add. This bug was the result of nothing more
751 dignified than a typographical error on my part. It has now been fixed.
752
753 * MORE INFORMATION AVAILABLE WHEN FEEDWORDPRESS CAN'T FIND A FEED: When
754 you enter a URL for a new syndication source, FeedWordPress uses a
755 simple feed-finding algorithm (originally based on Mark Pilgrim's
756 Universal Feed Finder) to try to determine whether the URL is the URL
757 for a feed, or, if the URL points to an ordinary website rather than to
758 a feed, whether there is a feed for that website. All well and good, but
759 if FeedWordPress failed to find a feed, for whatever reason, it would
760 typically return nothing more than a nasty little note to the effect of
761 "no feed found," without any explanation of what went wrong.
762 FeedWordPress now keeps track of error conditions from the HTTP
763 requests that it uses in the course of looking for the feed, and so may
764 be able to give you a bit more information about the nature of the
765 problem if something goes wrong.
766
767
768 = 2008.1105 =
769
770 * INTERFACE RESTRUCTURING AND SYNDICATION --> AUTHORS PAGE: As a first
771 step towards modularizing and better organizing the user interface, a
772 new "Authors" subpage has been created under the Syndication menu, which
773 controls settings for syndicated authors, both at the global default
774 level and at level of individual syndicated feeds.
775
776 * BUG RELATED TO THE ATTRIBUTION OF POSTS TO THE WRONG AUTHOR FIXED: Some
777 users encountered an issue in which posts by different authors on
778 different blogs -- especially blogs generated by Blogger -- were
779 mistakenly attributed to a single author. The problem was caused by the
780 way in which FeedWordPress matches syndicated authors to user accounts
781 in the WordPress database: normally, if two feeds each list an author
782 with the same e-mail address, they are counted as being the same person.
783 Normally this works well, but it creates an issue in cases where
784 blogging software assigns a single anonymous e-mail address to users who
785 do not want their real e-mail address published. This is, for example,
786 what Blogger does (by giving all users a default e-mail address of
787 <noreply@blogger.com> if they don't want their own e-mail address
788 listed). FeedWordPress now allows the user to correct for this problem
789 with a couple of new settings under **Syndication --> Authors**, which
790 allow users to turn off e-mail based author matching for particular
791 addresses, or, if desired, to turn it off entirely. By default, e-mail
792 based author matching is still turned on, but disabled for a list of
793 known generic e-mail addresses. Right now, the "list" consists entirely
794 of <noreply@blogger.com>; if you know other addresses that should be
795 added, please [contact me](http://radgeek.com/contact) to let me know.
796
797 Please note that if you have already encountered this issue on your
798 blog, upgrading FeedWordPress will prevent it from re-occurring in the
799 future, but you still need to do two other things to fix the existing
800 problem on your blog.
801
802 First, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to
803 change the existing author mapping rules to re-map a a syndicated
804 author's name to the proper target account. Go to **Syndication -->
805 Authors**, select the feed you want to change from the drop-down list,
806 and then change the settings under the "Syndicated Authors" section.
807 (You will probably need to select "will be assigned to a new user..." to
808 create a new user account with the appropriate name.)
809
810 Second, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to
811 re-assign already-syndicated posts that were mis-attributed to the
812 correct author. You can do that from **Syndication --> Authors** by
813 using the author re-assignment feature, described below.
814
815 * AUTHOR RE-ASSIGNMENT FOR A PARTICULAR FEED: The author settings page
816 for each syndicated feed, under **Syndication --> Authors**, now
817 includes an section titled "Fixing mis-matched authors," which provides
818 an interface for re-assigning or deleting all posts attributed to a
819 particular author on a particular feed.
820
821 * SUPPORT FOR `<atom:source>` ELEMENT IN SYNDICATED FEEDS: Some feeds
822 (for example, those produced by FeedWordPress) aggregate content from
823 several different sources, and include information about the original
824 source of the post in an `<atom:source>` element. A new setting under
825 **Syndication --> Options** allows you to control what FeedWordPress
826 will report as the source of posts syndicated from aggregator feeds in
827 your templates and feeds: you can have FeedWordPress report that the
828 source of a post is the aggregator feed itself, or you can have it
829 report that the source of a post is the original source that the
830 aggregator originally syndicated the post from.
831
832 By default, FeedWordPress will report the aggregator, not the original
833 source, as the source of a syndicated item.
834
835 * LOAD BALANCING AND TIME LIMITING FEATURES FOR UPDATES: Some users have
836 encountered issues due to running up against PHP execution time limits
837 during the process of updating large syndicated feeds, or a very large
838 set of syndicated feeds. FeedWordPress now has a feature that allows you
839 to limit the total amount of time spent updating a feed, through the
840 "Time limit on updates" setting under **Syndication --> Options**. By
841 turning on this setting and adjusting the time limit to a low enough
842 figure to avoid your PHP installation's time-out setting. (PHP execution
843 time limits are usually in the vicinity of 30 seconds, so an update
844 time limit of 25 seconds or so should provide plenty of time for updates
845 while allowing a cushion of time for other, non-update-related functions
846 to do their work.)
847
848 If feed updates are interrupted by the time limit, FeedWordPress uses
849 some simple load balancing features to make sure that updates to other
850 feeds will not be blocked by the time-hogging feed, and will also make
851 sure that when the interrupted update is resumed, FeedWordPress will
852 skip ahead to resume processing items at the point at which it was
853 interrupted last time, so that posts further down in the feed will
854 eventually get processed, and not get blocked by the amount of time it
855 takes to process the items higher up in the feed.
856
857 * `guid` INDEX CREATION BUTTON: FeedWordPress frequently issues queries on
858 the `guid` column of the WordPress posts database (since it uses post
859 guid URIs to keep track of which posts it has syndicated). In very large
860 FeedWordPress installations, you can often significantly improve
861 performance by creating a database index on the `guid` column, but
862 normally you would need to poke around with MySQL or a tool like
863 phpMyAdmin to do this. FeedWordPress can now save you the trouble: to
864 create an index on the `guid` column, just go to
865 **Syndication --> Options**, and mash the button at the bottom of the
866 "Back End" section.
867
868 = 2008.1101 =
869
870 * INTERFACE BUG THAT PREVENTED ADDING NEW SITES FIXED: The UI reforms in
871 FWP 2008.1030 unintentionally introduced a bug that prevents clean
872 installations of FeedWordPress from providing an input box for adding
873 new feeds to the list of syndicated feeds. This bug has been fixed.
874
875 = 2008.1030 =
876
877 * WORDPRESS 2.6 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with
878 WordPress 2.6, and should work more or less seamlessly with the new post
879 revision system. A bug which caused multiple new revisions to be created
880 for posts on certain feeds, regardless of whether or not the item had
881 been updated, has been fixed.
882
883 * INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: The user interface has been substantially
884 restyled to fit in better with the visual style of WordPress 2.5 and
885 2.6.
886
887 * YOUTUBE BUG FIXED: POSTS SYNDICATED THROUGH AN AUTOMATIC UPDATE ARE NO
888 LONGER STRIPPED OF `<OBJECT>` TAGS AND CERTAIN OTHER HTML ELEMENTS: Due
889 to the way that some versions of WordPress process posts that are
890 inserted into the database when no user is logged in, many users
891 experienced an issue where YouTube videos and other content using the
892 HTML `<object>` tag would be stripped out of posts that were syndicated
893 during an automatic update. (Posts that were syndicated through manual
894 updates from within the WordPress Dashboard were not affected, because
895 the issue does not arise when an update is executed under a logged-in
896 administrator's credentials.) This bug has now been fixed; YouTube
897 videos and other content using `<object>` tags should now appear
898 properly in syndicated posts, regardless of the way in which the post
899 was syndicated.
900
901 * AJAX BUGS FIXED: Bugs which blocked the normal operation of WordPress
902 2.5's AJAX interface elements when FeedWordPress was activated have been
903 fixed.
904
905 * TAG SUPPORT: A couple of features have been introduced to take advantage
906 of the tagging features in WordPress 2.3.x, 2.5.x, and 2.6.x. Now, when
907 unfamiliar categories are encountered for posts on a feed, you can
908 choose for FeedWordPress (1) to drop the category; (2) to drop the
909 category and to filter out any post that does not match at least one
910 familiar category; (3) to create a new category with that name, or,
911 now, you can also have FeedWordPress (4) create a new *tag* with that
912 name. This option can be set site-wide under Syndication --> Options,
913 or it can be set on a feed-by-feed basis in a feed's Edit screen.
914
915 In addition, you can now set particular tags to apply to all incoming
916 syndicated posts, under Syndication --> Options, or you can set tags
917 to apply to all incoming syndicated posts from a particular feed in that
918 feed's Edit screen.
919
920 * FORMATTING FILTERS: There is a new option available under Syndication ->
921 Options which allows users to choose whether or not to expose syndicated
922 posts to being altered by formatting filters. By default, FeedWordPress
923 has always protected syndicated posts (which are already in display-ready
924 HTML when they are syndicated) from being reformatted by formatting
925 filters. However, this approach means that certain plugins which depend
926 on formatting filters (for example, to add "Share This" bars or relevant
927 links to the end of a post) are blocked from working on any syndicated
928 posts. If you want to use one of these plugins together with
929 FeedWordPress, you can now do so by changing the "Formatting Filters"
930 setting from "Protect" to "Expose."
931
932 * `<atom:source>` ELEMENTS NOW INCLUDED IN ATOM FEED: Atom 1.0 provides
933 a standard method for aggregators to indicate information about the original source of
934 a syndicated post, using the `<atom:source>` element. FeedWordPress now
935 introduces standard `<atom:source>` elements including the title, homepage, and
936 feed URI of the source from which a syndicated post was syndicated. Cf.
937 <http://www.atomenabled.org/developers/syndication/atom-format-spec.php#element.source>
938
939 * MODULARIZATION OF CODE: The code for different elements of FeedWordPress
940 has been broken out into several modules for easier inspection,
941 documentation, and maintenance of the code.
942
943 * VERSIONING SCHEME CHANGED: FeedWordPress's feature set has proven stable
944 enough that it can now be removed from beta status; a good thing, since
945 I was very quickly running out of version numbers to use. New releases
946 of FeedWordPress will have version numbers based on the date of their
947 release.
948
949 = 0.993 =
950
951 * WORDPRESS 2.5.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible
952 with WordPress 2.5.1.
953
954 * WORDPRESS 2.5 INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: FeedWordPress's Dashboard
955 interface has undergone several cosmetic changes that should help it
956 integrate better with the WordPress Dashboard interface in WordPress
957 version 2.5.x.
958
959 * SYNDICATED POSTS CAN BE MARKED AS "PENDING REVIEW": WordPress 2.3 users
960 can now take advantage of WordPress's new "Pending Review" features for
961 incoming syndicated posts. Posts marked as "Pending Review" are not
962 published immediately, but are marked as ready to be reviewed by an
963 Administrator or Editor, who can then choose to publish the post or
964 hold it back. If you want to review syndicated posts from a particular
965 feed, or from all feeds, before they are posted, then use
966 Syndication --> Syndicated Sites --> Edit or Syndication --> Options to
967 change the settings for handling new posts.
968
969 * AWARE OF NEW URI FOR del.icio.us FEEDS: Previous releases of
970 FeedWordPress already automatically split del.icio.us tags up
971 appropriately appropriately when generating categories. (del.icio.us
972 feeds smoosh all the tags into a single `<dc:subject>` element,
973 separated by spaces; FeedWordPress un-smooshes them into multiple
974 categories by separating them at whitespace.) Unfortunately, del.icio.us
975 recently broke the existing behavior by changing host names for their
976 feeds from del.icio.us to feeds.delicious.com. Version 0.993 accounts
977 for the new host name and un-breaks the tag splitting.
978
979 = 0.992 =
980
981 * AUTHOR RE-MAPPING: FeedWordPress now offers considerable control over
982 how author names on a feed are translated into usernames within the
983 WordPress database. When a post by an unrecognized author comes in,
984 Administrators can now specify any username as the default username to
985 assign the post to by setting the option in Syndication --> Options
986 (formerly FeedWordPress only allowed you to assign such posts to user
987 #1, the site administrator). Administrators can also create re-mapping
988 rules for particular feeds (under Syndication --> Syndicated Sites -->
989 Edit), so that (for example) any posts attributed to "Administrator"
990 on the feed <http://praxeology.net/blog/feed/> will be assigned to
991 a user named "Roderick T. Long," rather than a user named
992 "Administrator." These settings also allow administrators to filter out
993 posts by particular users, and to control what will happen when
994 FeedWordPress encounters a post by an unrecognized user on that
995 particular feed.
996
997 * BUG RELATED TO URIS CONTAINING AMPERSAND CHARACTERS FIXED: A bug in
998 WordPress 2.x's handling of URIs in Blogroll links created problems for
999 updating any feeds whose URIs included an ampersand character, such as
1000 Google News RSS feeds and other feeds that have multiple parameters
1001 passed through HTTP GET. If you experienced this bug, the most likely
1002 effect was that FeedWordPress simply would not import new posts from a
1003 feed when instructred to do so, returning a "0 new posts" response. In
1004 other cases, it might lead to unpredictable results from feed updates,
1005 such as importing posts which were not contained in the feed being
1006 syndicated, but which did appear elsewhere on the same website. This bug
1007 has, hopefully, been resolved, by correcting for the bug in WordPress.
1008
1009 = 0.991 =
1010
1011 * WORDPRESS MU COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with
1012 recent releases of WordPress MU. Once FeedWordPress is made available
1013 as a plugin, each individual blog can choose to activate FeedWordPress
1014 and syndicate content from its own set of contributors.
1015
1016 * DISPLAY OF MAGPIE WARNINGS: A number of MagpieRSS warnings or error
1017 messages that were displayed when performing an automatic update are
1018 no longer displayed, unless debugging parameters have been explicitly
1019 enabled.
1020
1021 * BUG RELATED TO INTERNATIONAL CHARACTERS IN AUTHOR NAMES FIXED: Due to a
1022 subtle incompatability between the way that FeedWordPress generated new
1023 user information, and the way that WordPress 2.0 and later added new
1024 authors to the database, FeedWordPress might end up creating duplicate
1025 authors, or throwing a critical error message, when it encountered
1026 authors whose names included international characters. This
1027 incompatability has now been fixed; hopefully, authors with
1028 international characters in their names should now be handled properly.
1029
1030 * `<media:content>` BUG IN MAGPIERSS FIXED: A bug in MagpieRSS's handling
1031 of namespaced elements has been fixed. Among other things, this bug
1032 caused items containing a Yahoo MediaRSS `<media:content>` element (such
1033 as many of the feeds produced by wordpress.com) to be represented
1034 incorrectly, with only a capital "A" where the content of the post
1035 should have been. Feeds containing `<media:content>` elements should now
1036 be syndicated correctly.
1037
1038 * update_feedwordpress PARAMETER: You can now use an HTTP GET parameter
1039 (`update_feedwordpress=1`) to request that FeedWordPress poll its feeds
1040 for updates. When used together with a crontab or other means of
1041 scheduling tasks, this means that you can keep your blog automatically
1042 updated on a regular schedule, even if you do not choose to use the
1043 cron-less automatic updates option.
1044
1045 * Some minor interface-related bugs were also fixed.
1046
1047
1048 = 0.99 =
1049
1050 Version 0.99 adds several significant new features, fixes some bugs, and
1051 provides compatability with WordPress 2.2.x and 2.3.x.
1052
1053 * WORDPRESS 2.2 AND 2.3 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be
1054 compatible with WordPress version 2.2 and the upcoming WordPress
1055 version 2.3. In particular, it has been tested extensively against
1056 WordPress 2.2.3 and WordPress 2.3 Release Candidate 1.
1057
1058 * AUTOMATIC UPDATES WITHOUT CRON: FeedWordPress now allows you to
1059 automatically schedule checks for new posts without using external task
1060 scheduling tools such as cron. In order to enable automatic updates, go
1061 to **Syndication --> Options** and set "Check for new posts" to
1062 "automatically." For details, see "Automatic Feed Updates" in
1063 README.text.
1064
1065 An important side-effect of the changes to the update system is that if
1066 you were previously using the cron job and the `update-feeds.php` script
1067 to schedule updates, you need to change your cron set-up. The old
1068 `update-feeds.php` script no longer exists. Instead, if you wish to use
1069 a cron job to guarantee updates on a particular schedule, you should
1070 have the cron job fetch the front page of your blog (for example, by
1071 using `curl http://www.zyx.com/blog/ > /dev/null`) instead of activating
1072 the `update-feeds.php` script. If automatic updates have been enabled,
1073 fetching the front page will automatically trigger the update process.
1074
1075 * INTERFACE REORGANIZATION: All FeedWordPress functions are now located
1076 under a top-level "Syndication" menu in the WordPress Dashboard. To
1077 manage the list of syndicated sites, manually check for new posts on
1078 one or more feeds, or syndicate a new site, you should use the main page
1079 under **Syndication**. To change global settings for FeedWordPress,
1080 you should use **Syndication --> Options**.
1081
1082 * FILE STRUCTURE REORGANIZATION: Due to a combination of changing styles
1083 for FeedWordPress plugins and lingering bugs in the FeedWordPress admin
1084 menu code, the code for FeedWordPress is now contained in two different
1085 PHP files, which should be installed together in a subdirectory of your
1086 plugins directory named `feedwordpress`. (See README.text for
1087 installation and upgrade instructions relating to the change.)
1088
1089 * MULTIPLE CATEGORIES SETTING: Some feeds use non-standard methods to
1090 indicate multiple categories within a single category element. (The most
1091 popular site to do this is del.icio.us, which separates tags with a
1092 space.) FeedWordPress now allows you to set an optional setting, for any
1093 feed which does this, indicating the character or characters used to
1094 divide multiple categories, using a Perl-compatible regular expression.
1095 (In the case of del.icio.us feeds, FeedWordPress will automatically use
1096 \s for the pattern without your having to do any further configuration.)
1097 To turn this setting on, simply use the "Edit" link for the feed that
1098 you want to turn it on for.
1099
1100 * REGULAR EXPRESSION BUG FIXED: Eliminated a minor bug in the regular
1101 expressions for e-mail addresses (used in parsing RSS `author`
1102 elements), which could produce unsightly error messages for some users
1103 parsing RSS 2.0 feeds.
1104
1105 * DATE / UPDATE BUG FIXED: A bug in date handling was eliminated that may
1106 have caused problems if any of (1) WordPress, or (2) PHP, or (3) your
1107 web server, or (4) your MySQL server, has been set to use a different
1108 time zone from the one that any of the others is set to use. If
1109 FeedWordPress has not been properly updating updated posts, or has been
1110 updating posts when there shouldn't be any changes for the update, this
1111 release may solve that problem.
1112
1113 * GOOGLE READER BUGS FIXED: A couple of bugs that made it difficult for
1114 FeedWordPress to interact with Google Reader public feeds have been
1115 fixed. Firstly, if you encountered an error message reading "There was a
1116 problem adding the newsfeed. [SQL: ]" when you tried to add the feed,
1117 the cause of this error has been fixed. Secondly, if you succeeded in
1118 getting FeedWordPress to check a Google Reader feed, only to find that
1119 the title of posts had junk squashed on to the end of them, that bug
1120 has been fixed too. To fix this bug, you must install the newest version
1121 of the optional MagpieRSS upgrade.
1122
1123 * FILTER PARAMETERS: Due to an old, old bug in WordPress 1.5.0 (which was
1124 what was available back when I first wrote the filter interface),
1125 FeedWordPress has traditionally only passed one parameter to
1126 syndicated_item and syndicated_post filters functions -- an array
1127 containing either the Magpie representation of a syndicated item from
1128 the feed, or the database representation of a post about to be inserted
1129 into the WordPress database. If you needed information about the feed
1130 that the item came from, this was accessible only through a pair of
1131 global variables, $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta.
1132
1133 Since it's been a pretty long time since WordPress 1.5.0 was in
1134 widespread usage, I have gone ahead and added an optional second
1135 parameter to the invocation of the syndicated_item and syndicated_post
1136 filters. If you have written a filter for FeedWordPress that uses either
1137 of these hooks, you can now register that filter to accept 2 parameters.
1138 If you do so, the second parameter will be a SyndicatedPost object,
1139 which, among other things, allows you to access information about the
1140 feed from which an item is syndicated using the $post->feed and the
1141 $post->feedmeta elements (where $post is the name of the second
1142 parameter).
1143
1144 NOTE THAT THE OLD GLOBAL VARIABLES ARE STILL AVAILABLE, for the time
1145 being at least, so existing filters will not break with the upgrade.
1146 They should be considered deprecated, however, and may be eliminated in
1147 the future.
1148
1149 * FILTER CHANGE / BUGFIX: the array that is passed as the first argument
1150 syndicated_post filters no longer is no longer backslash-escaped for
1151 MySQL when filters are called. This was originally a bug, or an
1152 oversight; the contents of the array should only be escaped for the
1153 database *after* they have gone through all filters. IF YOU HAVE WRITTEN
1154 ANY syndicated_post FILTERS THAT PRESUME THE OLD BEHAVIOR OF PASSING IN
1155 STRINGS THAT ARE ALREADY BACKSLASH-ESCAPED, UPDATE YOUR FILTERS
1156 ACCORDINGLY.
1157
1158 * OTHER MINOR BUGFIXES AND INTERNAL CHANGES: The internal architecture of
1159 FeedWordPress has been significantly changed to make the code more
1160 modular and clean; hopefully this should help reduce the number of
1161 compatibility updates that are needed, and make them easier and quicker
1162 when they are needed.
1163
1164 = 0.981 =
1165
1166 Version 0.981 is a narrowly targeted bugfix and compatibility release, whose
1167 main purpose is to resolve a major outstanding problem: the incompatibility
1168 between version 0.98 of WordPress and the recently released WordPress 2.1.
1169
1170 * WORDPRESS 2.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress is now compatible with
1171 WordPress 2.1, as well as retaining its existing support for WordPress
1172 2.0 and 1.5. Incompatibilities that resulted in database warnings, fatal
1173 errors, and which prevented FeedWordPress from syndicating new posts,
1174 have been eliminated.
1175
1176 * RSS-FUNCTIONS.PHP RENAMED TO RSS.PHP: if you use the upgraded MagpieRSS
1177 replacement that's included with FeedWordPress, be sure to note that
1178 there are now *two* files to upload from the `OPTIONAL/wp-includes`
1179 subdirectory in order to carry out the upgrade: rss-functions.php and
1180 rss.php. **It is necessary to upload both files**, due to a change in
1181 the file naming scheme in WordPress 2.1, and it is necessary to do so
1182 whether you are using WordPress 2.1 or not. If you only upload the
1183 `rss-functions.php` file as in previous installations you will not have
1184 a working copy of MagpieRSS; the rss.php file contains the actual code.
1185
1186 * DATE BUG AFFECTING SOME PHP INSTALLATIONS RESOLVED: due to a subtle bug
1187 in parse_w3cdtf(), some installations of PHP encountered problems with
1188 FeedWordPress's attempt to date posts, which would cause some new posts
1189 on Atom feeds to be dated as if they had apppeared in 1969 or 1970
1190 (thus, effectively, never appearing on front page at all). This bug in
1191 the date handling should now be fixed.
1192
1193 * PHP <?=...?> SHORT FORM ELIMINATED: some installations of PHP do not
1194 allow the <?=...?> short form for printing PHP values, which was used
1195 extensively in the FeedWordPress interface code. Since this could cause
1196 fatal errors for users with the wrong installation of PHP, the short
1197 form has been replaced with full PHP echo statements, and is no longer
1198 used in FeedWordPress.
1199
1200 * BETTER USER INTERFACE INTEGRATION WITH WORDPRESS 2.x: Some minor changes
1201 have been made to help the FeedWordPress interface pages blend in better
1202 with the user interface when running under WordPress 2.x.
1203
1204 * GLOBAL CATEGORIES BUG RESOLVED: a bug that prevented some users from
1205 setting one or more categories to apply to syndicated posts from all
1206 feeds (using the checkbox interface under Options --> Syndication) has
1207 been resolved.
1208
1209 = 0.98 =
1210
1211 * WORDPRESS 2.0 COMPATIBILITY: This is a narrowly-targeted release to
1212 solve a major outstanding problem. FeedWordPress is now compatible with
1213 both WordPress 1.5 and WordPress 2.0. Incompatibilities that caused
1214 fatal SQL errors, and a more subtle bug with off-kilter counts of posts
1215 under a given category, have been resolved. FeedWordPress tests for
1216 database schema using the global $wp_db_version variable (if null, then
1217 we presume that we're dealing with WordPress 1.5).
1218
1219 NOTE: I have **not** fully tested FeedWordPress with WordPress 2.0.
1220 Further testing may reveal more bugs. However, you should now be able
1221 to get at least basic FeedWordPress functionality up and running.
1222
1223 * AUTHOR MATCHING: FeedWordPress tests several fields to see if it can
1224 identify the author of the post as a user already in the WordPress user
1225 database. In previous versions, it tested the user login, the nickname,
1226 and tested for "aliases" listed in the Profile (see documentation). FWP
1227 now also matches authors on the basis of e-mail address (*if* an e-mail
1228 address is present). This is particularly helpful for formats such as
1229 RSS 2.0, in which authors are primarily identified by e-mail addresses.
1230
1231 = 0.97 =
1232
1233 * INSTALLATION PROCEDURE: Some of the changes between 0.96 and 0.97
1234 require upgrades to the meta-data stored by FeedWordPress to work
1235 properly. Thus, if you are upgrading from 0.96 or earlier to 0.97, most
1236 FeedWordPress operations (including updates and template functions)
1237 WILL BE DISABLED until you run the upgrade procedure. Fortunately,
1238 running the upgrade procedure is easy: just go to either Options -->
1239 Syndication or Links --> Syndicated in the WordPress Dashboard and press
1240 the button.
1241
1242 * FEED FORMAT SUPPORT: Support has been added for the Atom 1.0 IETF
1243 standard. Several other elements are also newly supported
1244 (dcterms:created, dcterms:issued, dcterms:modified, dc:identifier,
1245 proper support for the RSS 2.0 guid element, the RSS 2.0 author element,
1246 the use of Atom author or Dublin Core dc:creator constructs at the feed
1247 level to identify the author of individual items, etc.)
1248
1249 N.B.: full support of several Atom 1.0 features, such as categories
1250 and enclosures, requires you to install the optional rss-functions.php
1251 upgrade in your wp-includes directory.
1252
1253 * BUG FIX: Running `update-feeds.php` from command line or crontab
1254 returned "I don't syndicate..." errors. It turns out that WordPress
1255 sometimes tramples on the internal PHP superglobals that I depended on
1256 to determine whether or not the script was being invoked from the
1257 command line. This has been fixed (the variables are now checked
1258 *before* WordPress can trample them). Note that `update-feeds.php` has
1259 been thoroughly overhauled anyway; see below for details.
1260
1261 * BUG FIX: Duplicate categories or author names. Fixed two bugs that could
1262 create duplicate author and/or category names when the name contained
1263 either (a) certain international characters (causing a mismatch between
1264 MySQL and PHP's handling of lowercasing text), or (b) characters that
1265 have a special meaning in regular expressions (causing MySQL errors when
1266 looking for the author or category due to regexp syntax errors). These
1267 should now be fixed thanks to careful escaping of names that go into
1268 regular expressions and careful matching of lowercasing functions
1269 (comparing results from PHP only to other results from PHP, and results
1270 from MySQL only to other results from MySQL).
1271
1272 * BUG FIX: Items dated December 31, 1969 should appear less often. The
1273 function for parsing W3C date-time format dates that ships with
1274 MagpieRSS can only correctly parse fully-specified dates with a
1275 fully-specified time, but valid W3C date-time format dates may omit the
1276 time, the day of the month, or even the month. Some feeds in the wild
1277 date their items with coarse-grained dates, so the optional
1278 `rss-functions.php` upgrade now includes a more flexible parse_w3cdtf()
1279 function that will work with both coarse-grained and fully-specified
1280 dates. (If parts of the date or the time are omitted, they are filled in
1281 with values based on the current time, so '2005-09-10' will be dated to
1282 the current time on that day; '2004' will be dated to this day and time
1283 one year ago.
1284
1285 N.B.: This fix is only available in the optional `rss-functions.php`
1286 upgrade.
1287
1288 * BUG FIX: Evil use of HTTP GET has been undone. The WordPress interface
1289 is riddled with inappropriate (non-idempotent) uses of HTTP GET queries
1290 (ordinary links that make the server do something with significant
1291 side-effects, such as deleting a post or a link from the database).
1292 FeedWordPress did some of this too, especially in places where it aped
1293 the WordPress interface (e.g. the "Delete" links in Links -->
1294 Syndicated). That's bad business, though. I've changed the interface so
1295 that all the examples of improper side-effects that I can find now
1296 require an HTTP POST to take effect. I think I got pretty much
1297 everything; if there's anything that I missed, let me know.
1298
1299 Further reading: [Sam Ruby 2005-05-06: This Stuff Matters](http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2005/05/06/This-Stuff-Matters)
1300
1301 * BUG FIX: Categories applied by `cats` setting should no longer prevent
1302 category-based filtering from working. In FeedWordPress, you can (1)
1303 apply certain categories to all syndicated posts, or all posts from
1304 a particular feed; and (2) filter out all posts that don't match one
1305 of the categories that are already in the WordPress database (allowing
1306 for simple category-based filtering; just load up WordPress with the
1307 categories you want to accept, and then tell FeedWordPress not to create
1308 new ones). However, the way that (1) and (2) were implemented meant that
1309 you couldn't effectively use them together; once you applied a known
1310 category to all syndicated posts from a particular feed, it meant that
1311 they'd have at least one familiar category (the category or categories
1312 you were applying), and that would get all posts past the filter no
1313 matter what categories they were originally from.
1314
1315 Well, no longer. You can still apply categories to all syndicated posts
1316 (using either Syndication --> Options, or the feed-level settings under
1317 Links --> Syndicated). But these categories are not applied to the post
1318 until *after* it has already passed by the "familiar categories" filter.
1319 So now, if you want, you can do category filtering and *then* apply as
1320 many categories as you please to all and only posts that pass the filter.
1321
1322 * BUG FIX: Other minor typos and HTML gaffes were fixed along the way.
1323
1324 * PERFORMANCE: get_feed_meta() no longer hits the database for information
1325 on every call; it now caches link data in memory, so FeedWordPress only
1326 goes to the database once for each syndicated link. This may
1327 substantially improve performance if your database server resources
1328 are tight and your templates make a lot of use of custom settings from
1329 get_feed_meta().
1330
1331 * API CHANGE: Link ID numbers, rather than RSS URIs, are now used to
1332 identify the feed from which a post is syndicated when you use template
1333 functions such as get_feed_meta(). The practical upshot of this is you
1334 can switch feeds, or change the feed address for a particular syndicated
1335 site, without breaking your templates for all the posts that were
1336 syndicated from the earlier URI.
1337
1338 * API CHANGE: if you have plugins or templates that make use of the
1339 get_feed_meta() function or the $fwp_feedmeta global, note that the
1340 data formerly located under the `uri` and `name` fields is now located
1341 under the `link/uri` field and the `link/name` field, respectively. Note
1342 also that you can access the link ID number for any given feed under the
1343 global $fwp_feedmeta['link/id'] (in plugins) or
1344 get_feed_meta('link/id') (in a template in post contexts).
1345
1346 * FEATURE: the settings for individual feeds can now be edited using a
1347 humane interface (where formerly you had to tweak key-value pairs in the
1348 Link Notes section). To edit settings for a feed, pick the feed that you
1349 want under Links --> Syndicated and click the Edit link.
1350
1351 * FEATURE: The "Unsubscribe" button (formerly "Delete") in Links -->
1352 Syndicated now offers three options for unsubscribing from a feed: (1)
1353 turning off the subscription without deleting the feed data or affecting
1354 posts that were syndicated from the feed (this works by setting the Link
1355 for the feed as "invisible"); (2) deleting the feed data and all of the
1356 posts that were syndicated from the feed; or (3) deleting the feed data
1357 and *keeping* the posts that were syndicated from the feed
1358 setting the Link to "Invisible" (meaning that it will not be displayed
1359 in lists of the site links on the front page, and it won't be checked
1360 for updates; (2) deleting the Link and all of the posts that were
1361 syndicated from its feed; or (3) deleting the feed data but keeping the
1362 posts that were syndicated (which will henceforward be treated as if
1363 they were local rather than syndicated posts). (Note that (1) is usually
1364 the best option for aggregator sites, unless you want to clean up the
1365 results of an error or a test.)
1366
1367 * FEATURE / BUG FIX: If you have been receiving mysterious "I don't
1368 syndicate...", or "(local) HTTP status code was not 200", or "(local)
1369 transport error - could not open socket", or "parse error - not well
1370 formed" errors, then this update may solve your problems, and if it does
1371 *not* solve them, it will at least make the reasons for the problems
1372 easier to understand. That's because I've overhauled the way that
1373 FeedWordPress goes about updating feeds.
1374
1375 If you use the command-line PHP scripting method to run scheduled
1376 updates, then not much should change for you, except for fewer
1377 mysterious errors. If you have done updates by sending periodic HTTP
1378 requests to <http://your-blog.com/path/wp-content/update-feeds.php>,
1379 then the details have changed somewhat; mostly in such a way as to make
1380 things easier on you. See the README file or online documentation on
1381 Staying Current for the details.
1382
1383 * FEATURE: FeedWordPress now features a more sophisticated system for
1384 timed updates. Instead of polling *every* subscribed feed for updates
1385 *each* time `update-feeds.php` is run, FeedWordPress now keeps track of
1386 the last time it polled each feed, and only polls them again after a
1387 certain period of time has passed. The amount of time is normally set
1388 randomly for each feed, in a period between 30 minutes and 2 hours (so
1389 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
1390 directly by the feed, which brings us to ...
1391
1392 * FEATURE: FeedWordPress now respects the settings in the `ttl` and
1393 Syndication Module RSS elements. Feeds with these elements set will not
1394 be polled any more frequently than they indicate with these feeds unless
1395 the user manually forces FeedWordPress to poll the feed (see Links -->
1396 Syndicated --> Edit settings).
1397
1398 = 0.96 =
1399
1400 * FEATURE: support has been added for enclosures in RSS 2.0 and Atom
1401 0.6+ newsfeeds. WordPress already supports adding enclosures to an
1402 item; FeedWordPress merely gets the information on the enclosure
1403 from the feed it is syndicating and plugs that information directly
1404 into the WordPress database so that (among other things) that post
1405 will have its enclosure listed in your blog's RSS 2 newsfeed.
1406
1407 Note that enclosure support requires using the optional MagpieRSS
1408 upgrade (i.e., replacing your `wp-includes/rss-functions.php` with
1409 `OPTIONAL/wp-includes/rss-functions.php` from the FWP archive)
1410
1411 * FEATURE: for completeness's sake, there is now a feed setting,
1412 `hardcode url`, that allows you to set the URI for the front page
1413 of a contributor's website manually (that is, prevent it from being
1414 automatically updated from the feed channel link on each update). To
1415 set the URI manually, put a line like this in the Link Notes section
1416 of a feed:
1417
1418 hardcode url: yes
1419
1420 You can also instruct FeedWordPress to use hardcoded URIs by default
1421 on all feeds using Options --> Syndication
1422
1423 * FEATURE: by default, when FeedWordPress finds new syndicated posts,
1424 it (1) publishes them immediately, (2) turns comments off, and (3)
1425 turns trackback / pingback pings off. You can now alter all three
1426 default behaviors (e.g., to allow pings on syndicated posts, or to
1427 send newly-syndicated posts to the draft pile for moderation) using
1428 Options --> Syndication
1429
1430
1431 = From 0.91 to 0.95 =
1432
1433 * BUG FIX: Fixed an obscure bug in the handling of categories:
1434 categories with trailing whitespace could cause categories with
1435 duplicate names to be created. This no longer happens. While I was
1436 at it I tightened up the operation of
1437 FeedWordPress::lookup_categories() a bit in general.
1438
1439 * FEATURE DEPRECATED: the feed setting `hardcode categories` is now
1440 deprecated in favor of `unknown categories` (see below), which
1441 allows you to strip off any syndication categories not already in
1442 your database using `unknown categories: default` or `unknown
1443 categories: filter`. If you have `hardcode categories: yes` set on a
1444 feed, this will be treated as `unknown categories: default` (i.e.,
1445 no new categories will be added, but if a post doesn't match any of
1446 the categories it will be added in the default category--usually
1447 "Uncategorized" or "General").
1448
1449 * FEATURE: You can now set global defaults as to whether or not
1450 FeedWordPress will update the Link Name and Link Description
1451 settings for feeds automatically from the feed title and feed
1452 tagline. (By default, it does, as it has in past versions.) Whether
1453 this behavior is turned on or off, you can still override the
1454 default behavior using feed settings of `hardcode name: yes`,
1455 `hardcode name: no`, `hardcode description: yes`, or `hardcode
1456 description: no`.
1457
1458 * FEATURE: Users can now provide one or several "aliases" for an
1459 author, just as they can for a category. For example, to make
1460 FeedWordPress treat posts by "Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger" and "Pope
1461 Benedict XVI" as by the same author, edit the user profile for Pope
1462 Benedict XVI and add a line like this to the "User profile" field:
1463
1464 a.k.a.: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
1465
1466 You can add several aliases, each on a line by itself. You can also
1467 add any other text you like to the Profile without interfering with
1468 the aliases.
1469
1470 * FEATURE: Users can now choose how to handle syndicated posts that
1471 are in unfamiliar categories or by unfamiliar authors (i.e.,
1472 categories or authors whose names are not yet in the WordPress
1473 database). By default, FeedWordPress will (as before) create a new
1474 category (or new author) and use it for the current post and any
1475 future posts. This behavior can be changed, either for all feeds or
1476 for one or another particular feed.
1477
1478 There are now three different options for an unfamiliar author: (1)
1479 FeedWordPress can create a new author account and attribute the
1480 syndicated post to the new account; (2) FeedWordPress can attribute
1481 the post to an author if the author's name is familiar, and to a
1482 default author (currently, this means the Site Administrator
1483 account) if it is not; (3) FeedWordPress can drop posts by
1484 unfamiliar authors and syndicate only posts by authors who are
1485 already in the database.
1486
1487 There are, similarly, two different options for an unfamiliar
1488 category: (1) FeedWordPress can create new categories and place the
1489 syndicated post in them; (2) FeedWordPress can drop the unfamiliar
1490 categories and place syndicated posts only in categories that it is
1491 already familiar with. In addition, FeedWordPress 0.95 lets you
1492 choose whether posts that are in *no* familiar categories should be
1493 syndicated (and placed in the default category for the blog) or
1494 simply dropped.
1495
1496 You can set the default behavior for both authors and categories
1497 using the settings in Options --> Syndication. You can also set
1498 different behavior for specific feeds by adding the `unfamiliar
1499 author` and / or `unfamiliar categories` settings to the Link Notes
1500 section of a feed:
1501
1502 unfamiliar author: (create|default|filter)
1503 unfamiliar categories: (create|default|filter)
1504
1505 A setting of `unfamiliar author: create` will make FeedWordPress
1506 create new authors to match unfamiliar author names *for this feed
1507 alone*. A setting of `unfamiliar author: default` will make it
1508 assign posts from unfamiliar authors to the default user account. A
1509 setting of `unfamiliar author: filter` will cause all posts (from
1510 this feed alone) to be dropped unless they are by an author already
1511 listed in the database. Similiarly, `unfamiliar categories: create`
1512 will make FeedWordPress create new categories to match unfamiliar
1513 category names *for this feed alone*; `unfamiliar categories:
1514 default` will cause it to drop any unfamiliar category names; and
1515 `unfamiliar categories: filter` will cause it to *both* drop any
1516 unfamiliar category names *and* to only syndicate posts that are
1517 placed in one or more familiar categories.
1518
1519 These two new features allow users to do some coarse-grained
1520 filtering without having to write a PHP filter. Specifically, they
1521 offer an easy way for you to filter feeds by category or by author.
1522 Suppose, for example, that you only wanted to syndicate posts that
1523 your contributors place in the "Llamas" category. You could do so by
1524 setting up your installation of WordPress so that the only category
1525 in the database is "Llamas," and then use Options --> Syndication to
1526 set "Unfamiliar categories" to "don't create new categories and
1527 don't syndicate posts unless they match at least one familiar
1528 category". Now, when you update, only posts in the "Llamas" category
1529 will be syndicated by FeedWordPress.
1530
1531 Similarly, if you wanted to filter one particular feed so that only
1532 posts by (for example) the author "Earl J. Llama" were syndicated to
1533 your site, you could do so by creating a user account for Earl J.
1534 Llama, then adding the following line to the settings for the feed
1535 in Link Notes:
1536
1537 unfamiliar author: filter
1538
1539 This will cause any posts from this feed that are not authored by
1540 Earl J. Llama to be discarded, and only the posts by Earl J. Llama
1541 will be syndicated. (If the setting is used on one specific feed, it
1542 will not affect how posts from other feeds are syndicated.)
1543
1544 == License ==
1545
1546 The FeedWordPress plugin is copyright © 2005-2010 by Charles Johnson. It uses
1547 code derived or translated from:
1548
1549 - [wp-rss-aggregate.php][] by [Kellan Elliot-McCrea](kellan@protest.net)
1550 - [MagpieRSS][] by [Kellan Elliot-McCrea](kellan@protest.net)
1551 - [Ultra-Liberal Feed Finder][] by [Mark Pilgrim](mark@diveintomark.org)
1552 - [WordPress Blog Tool and Publishing Platform](http://wordpress.org/)
1553
1554 according to the terms of the [GNU General Public License][].
1555
1556 This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
1557 the terms of the [GNU General Public License][] as published by the Free
1558 Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any
1559 later version.
1560
1561 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
1562 WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
1563 PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
1564
1565 [wp-rss-aggregate.php]: http://laughingmeme.org/archives/002203.html
1566 [MagpieRSS]: http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/
1567 [HTTP Navigator 2]: http://www.keyvan.net/2004/11/16/http-navigator/
1568 [Ultra-Liberal Feed Finder]: http://diveintomark.org/projects/feed_finder/
1569 [GNU General Public License]: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
1570
1571