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FeedWordPress / 2011.0211.2
FeedWordPress v2011.0211.2
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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: 3.0
6 Tested up to: 3.0.5
7 Stable tag: 2011.0211.2
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 = 2010.0905 =
97
98 * BUGFIX: CATEGORIES AND TAGS CORRECTLY ASSIGNED IN AUTOMATIC UPDATES.
99 Version 2010.0903 switched over to a new way of assigning categories and
100 tags as part of its support for handling custom taxonomies.
101 Unfortunately, the method that it uses is subjected to some checks of
102 the current user's capabilities, which creates problems for posts that
103 are being inserted into the WordPress database when there *is* no
104 current user logged in (as, for example, when an update is being carried
105 out from a cron job or automatic update). The result was that posts
106 from cron jobs and automatic updates ended up with no Categories and no
107 Tags being assigned. This bug has now been fixed: in 2010.0905, Tags and
108 Categories should be correctly assigned to all posts, regardless of
109 whether they were added from manual updates, cron jobs, or automatic
110 updates.
111
112 = 2010.0903 =
113
114 * WORDPRESS 3 REQUIRED: Please note that this release of FeedWordPress
115 *requires* WordPress 3.0 or later. If you are currently using a 2.x
116 branch of WordPress, you will need to upgrade to WordPress 3 before you
117 can successfully upgrade FeedWordPress.
118
119 * BUGFIX: NO MORE DISAPPEARING "SYNDICATED SOURCES" PANEL; INTERNET
120 EXPLORER UI GLITCH APPARENTLY FIXED: Several users independently
121 reported a problem with FWP 2010.0623 and various versions of IE. A
122 problem with the HTML markup caused IE (but not Firefox or
123 Chrome) to completely hide the Syndicated Sources administration panel
124 (the main list of currently-syndicated sources, and the main location
125 for adding new sources, under the Syndication menu item) when a user
126 added their first syndicated feed. Maddeningly, the glitch seemed to
127 affect some IE users and not others: I was never able to reproduce the
128 problem for myself on my own machines. However, the markup of Syndicated
129 Sources has undergone significant changes and corrections since
130 2010.0623, and two independent sources who had been having this problem
131 confirm that they no longer encounter it with the updated version. For
132 the time being, I am going to declare this bug squashed.
133
134 * BUGFIX: MORE PROTECTION AGAINST FATAL ERRORS FROM PLUGGABLE VERSIONS OF
135 SimplePie: FeedWordPress now takes some precautions that should help to
136 better avoid conflicts for users who have installed pluggable versions
137 of SimplePie for another plugin or theme. (You may not know that you have
138 done this; but if you've been encountering fatal errors indicating that
139 you cannot redeclare class SimplePie, or something along those lines,
140 there is now a better chance that those fatal errors will be eliminated.
141
142 * PERFORMANCE: SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCED MEMORY CONSUMPTION FOR LARGE UPDATES:
143 FeedWordPress is still a memory-hungry little module, especially when
144 you are dealing with very large feeds. However, users should notice a
145 significant reduction in memory overloads, especially if they update a
146 large number of feeds at once.
147
148 * USER INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: Nothing is radically different, but there's
149 been a fair amount of extra spit and polish added, including a convenient
150 new Dashboard widget that may save you a trip to the Syndication menu,
151 a lot of effort to make the relationship between global and feed-by-feed
152 settings more obvious to the user and more easily controllable, to make
153 navigation between settings pages easier, to sand off a few rough edges,
154 and to make other improvements on the margins. I hope you'll like how
155 it looks.
156
157 * ADDING MULTIPLE FEEDS: FeedWordPress now provides a convenient mode for
158 adding multiple feeds at once, using either a copy-and-pasted list, or
159 else an OPML file. Go to Syndication --> Syndicated Sources and check
160 out the two new buttons underneath the New Source input box. When you
161 have to add a number of feeds at once, this can save you considerable
162 time and trouble.
163
164 * IMPROVED HANDLING OF AUTHORS WITH DUPLICATE E-MAIL ADDRESS AND AUTHORS
165 WITH NAMES WRITTEN IN FOREIGN SCRIPTS: WordPress 3 is increasingly picky
166 about what it will accept for new author accounts, and some of the
167 conditions it imposes can cause error conditions that prevent posts from
168 being properly syndicated, or properly attributed, if authors happen to
169 have identical e-mail addresses, or if users are given usernames that are
170 written in non-Western scripts. FeedWordPress now handles these much
171 better, and systematically works to avoid clashes between syndicated
172 authors' account names or in their e-mail addresses, which should result
173 in significantly better results in mapping author names to WordPress
174 user accounts.
175
176 * MAPPING CATEGORIES ON SYNDICATED POSTS TO TAGS NOW BETTER SUPPORTED:
177 In previous versions, the only way for the Categories provided by a
178 syndicated feed to be mapped into Post Tags was to instruct FWP to
179 create new tags, rather than new categories, for unfamiliar categories
180 from the feed. This works fine if you want tags to be the default; but
181 if you want only a *specific* set of tags, there was no way to get them
182 without getting most or all other categories imported as tags. You can
183 now do this by creating a tag (under Posts ==> Post Tags) before
184 importing the post; when the syndicated category matches a pre-existing
185 tag, the incoming post will be tagged with that tag, without creating
186 a local Post Category.
187
188 * REL-TAG MICROFORMAT SUPPORT FOR INLINE TAGS: Syndicated posts that
189 contain inline tags, marked up using the Rel-Tag microformat
190 <http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag>, are now tagged with the tags
191 provided by Rel-Tag format links.
192
193 * MUCH GREATER CONTROL OVER CATEGORY AND TAG MAPPING: This is partly the
194 result of building in support for a potentially endless set of custom
195 taxonomies (see below), but in general there has been a great deal of
196 effort towards giving you more control over how categories and tags
197 provided by the feed are mapped into terms on the local blog. In
198 particular, you can now force FeedWordPress to create only categories
199 from categories and tags provided by the feed; or to create only tags;
200 or to search both categories and tags for a match; or you can simply
201 force it to drop all of the categories provided by the feed and use
202 only categories or tags that you explicitly provide. In addition, you
203 can now also choose whether to override global categories settings with
204 a local, feed-specific setting; or whether to *add together* *both* the
205 global categories and the local feed-specific categories -- depending
206 on whatever your use-case may demand.
207
208 * CUSTOM POST TYPES AND TAXONOMY SUPPORTS: This is mainly for the
209 super-geeky, but if you use other plugins or themes that make
210 significant use of WordPress's support for custom post types and custom
211 taxonomies, you may be pleased to find that FeedWordPress now allows you
212 to feed incoming posts into any custom feed type that you wish, and to
213 map categories and tags from the feed to custom taxonomies as well as
214 to the standard Category and Tag taxonomies.
215
216 * STORING NAMESPACED CUSTOM FEED ELEMENTS IN POST CUSTOM FIELDS: If you
217 would like to use FeedWordPress's support for storing custom meta-data
218 from feed elements in the custom fields for a post (for example, to
219 store geolocation data or iTunes media meta-data), you'll find that it's
220 now much easier for you to access these namespaced elements. You always
221 could access them, but in previous versions you might have to write
222 something ugly like $(/{http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#}lat)
223 just to get at the value of a `<geo:lat>` tag. Now, as long as you use
224 the same mnemonic codes that the feed producer used, you should always
225 be able to write a nice, simple expression like $(/geo:lat) to get the
226 value of a <geo:lat> tag.
227
228 * CUSTOM DIRECTORY STRUCTURE SUPPORT: if you poke at it enough, WordPress
229 is relatively flexible about where it should store admin interface code,
230 uploaded content, plugins, and a number of other things that occupy an
231 important place in the WordPress directory structure. Previous versions
232 of FeedWordPress encountered serious errors or broke entirely when used
233 with directory structures other than the default. This should now be
234 fixed: FWP now supports custom directory structures wherever WordPress
235 allows them to be customized, rather than depending on the default
236 locations. Enjoy your freedom!
237
238 * MANY NEW FILTERS AND API UTILITY FUNCTIONS FOR ADD-ON PROGRAMMERS: There
239 have been too many improvements to list them all in this ChangeLog, but
240 it means that much more power and ease for folks who are customizing
241 FeedWordPress through PHP filters or add-on modules. Fuller
242 documentation will be put up at the Wiki at feedwordpress.radgeek.org
243 soon.
244
245 = 2010.0623 =
246
247 * WORDPRESS 3.0 COMPATIBILITY / AUTHOR MAPPING INTERFACE ISSUES: I
248 resolved a couple of outstanding issues with the author mapping
249 interface (Syndication --> Authors), which were preventing new users
250 from being created correctly and author mapping rules from being set up
251 correctly. These partly had to do with new restrictions on user account
252 creation introduced in WordPress 3.0; anyway, they should now be fixed.
253
254 * MORE EFFICIENT SYNDICATED URL LOOKUPS: Several users noticed that the
255 bug fix introduced in 2010.0528 for compatibility with post-listing
256 plugins caused a lot more queries to the database in order to look up
257 numerical post IDs from the URL provided to the filter. This shouldn't
258 cause any major problems, but it is not as efficient as it could be; the
259 code now takes advantage of a more efficient way of doing things,
260 which usually will not require any additional database queries.
261
262 * SIMPLEPIE FEED UPDATE ISSUES: If you have been having significant
263 problems with getting feeds to update correctly, this may be the result
264 of some bugs in the implementation of SimplePie caching that ships with
265 WordPress (as of version 3.0). (You would most commonly experience this
266 error if you continually saw errors such as "No feed found at <...>" in
267 your updates.) Fortunately, SimplePie allows for a great deal of
268 extensibility and this allows me to work around the problem; these
269 error conditions should now be mostly eliminated when the underlying
270 feed is valid.
271
272 * UI: SHOW INACTIVE SOURCES: When you use the default unsubscribe option
273 -- which turns off the subscription to a feed while preserving the posts
274 from it and the syndication-related meta-data for the feed -- the
275 unsubscribed feed can now easily be viewed in a special "Inactive"
276 section of the Syndicated Sources page. (As a side benefit, if you've
277 accidentally, or only temporarily, turned off the subscription to a
278 feed, it is now much easier to restore the feed to being active, or to
279 delete it permanently, if you prefer.
280
281 * UI: FEED FINDER / SWITCH FEED INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: changes to styling
282 and options for the feed finder / switch feed, which should now make it
283 easier, in some cases, to find alternative feeds, and make interface
284 options more clearly visible.
285
286 * FILTERS: `syndicated_item_published` and `syndicated_item_updated` NOW
287 PROPERLY AFFECT THE DATING OF POSTS. These filters used to affect some
288 date-related settings, but not others -- and, most importantly, not the
289 final date that is set for a post's publication or last-modified date
290 in the WordPress database. Now, they do affect that, as they should.
291 (Filters should receive, and return, a long integer, representing a Unix
292 epoch relative timestamp.)
293
294 * MAGIC URL TO CLEAR THE CACHE: Suppose that you need to clear the feed
295 cache, for whatever reason; suppose, even, that you need to clear it on
296 a regular basis. One way you might do this is by logging into the
297 FeedWordPress administrative interface and going to Syndication -->
298 Performance. Another way you might do it, now, is to simply send an
299 HTTP request to a magic URL provided by FeedWordPress: if your blog is
300 at example.com, the URL would be <http://example.com/?clear_cache=1>
301
302 = 2010.0602 =
303
304 * CATEGORY BOX INTERFACE ELEMENT FIXED FOR WP 3.0: Stylesheet changes
305 between WordPress 2.9.x and the WordPress 3.0 RC caused the Categories
306 box under **Syndication --> Categories & Tags** to malfunction. This
307 has been fixed.
308
309 * LINK CATEGORY SELECTION BOX IN SYNDICATION ==> FEEDS FIXED FOR WP 2.8
310 AND 2.9: A WP 3.0 compatibility change introduced in 2010.0531
311 inadvertently broke the Syndicated Link Category selector under
312 Syndication --> Feeds & Updates in WP 2.8 and WP 2.9, causing the post
313 categories to be displayed in the selector rather than the link
314 categories. This should now be fixed so that the selector will work
315 correctly under both the current versions of WordPress and the 3.0 RC.
316
317 * MORE PERMISSIVE HANDLING OF FEEDS WITH BAD CONTENT-TYPE HEADERS: One of
318 the small advantages that MagpieRSS had over SimplePie is that it was
319 more tolerant about parsing well-formed feeds that the remote web server
320 happened to deliver with weird or incorrect HTTP Content-type headers.
321 In feeds affected by this problem, the new SimplePie parser would simply
322 fail to find a feed, due to its being led astray by the contents of the
323 Content-type header. This version includes an extension to SimplePie's
324 content-type sniffer that offers more permissive handling of the HTTP
325 headers.
326
327 * MORE FULL-TEXT "EXCERPTS" NOW PROPERLY SHORTENED. Version 2010.0528
328 introduced code to control for cases in which elements intended for
329 item summaries are (ill-advisedly) used to carry the full text of posts;
330 past versions of FeedWordPress would simply include the full text of the
331 post in the excerpt field, but newer versions now attempt to detect
332 this condition when it arises and to head it off, by blanking out the
333 excerpt field and filling it with an automatically generated short,
334 plain text excerpt from the full content. This release broadens the
335 test conditions that indicate when an excerpt field is treated as
336 identical to the full text of the post, and should therefore improve
337 the handling of some feeds (such as Google Reader feeds) where the full
338 text of each post was still appearing in the excerpt field.
339
340 * FILTERS: `syndicated_item_published` AND `syndicated_item_updated`
341 FILTERS NOW ALLOW FILTER AUTHORS TO CHANGE POST TIMESTAMPS. You can now
342 use the `syndicated_item_published` and `syndicated_item_updated` filter
343 hooks to write filters or add-ons which directly change the post date
344 and most-recently-updated timestamps on incoming syndicated posts. Props
345 to niska for pointing out where the filters needed to be applied in
346 order to change WordPress's internal timestamps for incoming posts.
347
348 = 2010.0531 =
349
350 * PERMALINK / CUSTOM FIELDS PROBLEM RESOLVED: An issue in 2010.0528 caused
351 some posts to be imported without the proper syndication-related
352 meta-data being attached (thus causing permalinks to point back to the
353 aggregator website rather than to the source website, among other
354 problems). This problem has been resolved (and a fix has been applied
355 which will resolve the problem for any posts affected by this problem,
356 if the original post is recent enough to still be available on the feed).
357
358 * UI: The "Back End" section has been split into two separate sections --
359 "Performance" (dealing with caching, database index, and other
360 performance tweaks), and "Diagnostics" (dealing with debug mode,
361 update logging, and a number of new diagnostic tests which I will be
362 rolling out over the next few releases).
363
364 * Several minor interface bug fixes and PHP warning notices eliminated.
365
366 = 2010.0528 =
367
368 #### Compatibility ####
369
370 * SIMPLEPIE IS NOW USED TO PARSE FEEDS; NO MORE MAGPIERSS UPGRADES NEEDED:
371 One of the biggest changes in this release is that FeedWordPress no
372 longer depends on MagpieRSS to parse feeds, and has switched to the much
373 more up-to-date and flexible SimplePie feed parser, which is included as
374 a standard part of WordPress versions 2.8 and later. Using SimplePie will
375 hopefully allow for better handling of feeds going further, and will
376 allow me greater flexibility in determining how exactly the feed parser
377 will operate. It also means that FeedWordPress no longer requires
378 special upgrades to the WordPress core MagpieRSS files, and should
379 eliminate quite a bit of complexity.
380
381 * MAGPIERSS COMPATIBILITY LAYER FOR EXISTING FILTERS AND ADD-ONS: However,
382 I have also implemented a compatibility layer to ensure that existing
383 filters and add-ons for FeedWordPress which depended on the MagpieRSS
384 data format *should not be broken* by the switch to SimplePie. Going
385 forward, I recommend that new filters and add-ons be written to take
386 advantage of the SimplePie object representations of items, feeds, etc.,
387 rather than the MagpieRSS arrays, but the MagpieRSS arrays will still
388 be available and older filters should continue to work as they have in
389 the past.
390
391 * COMPATIBILITY WITH WORDPRESS 2.9.x and 3.0: This release has been tested
392 for the existing WordPress 2.9.x branch and with the upcoming release of
393 WordPress 3.0. Changes in the user interface JavaScript between WordPress
394 2.8.x and WordPress 2.9 caused the tag box interface element to break in
395 the Syndication --> Categories & Tags settings page; changes in the API
396 functions for adding new authors caused fatal errors under certain
397 conditions in WordPress 3.0. These breakages have been fixed.
398
399 * DROPPED LEGACY SUPPORT FOR WORDPRESS PRIOR TO 2.8: Because SimplePie is
400 not included with versions of WordPress prior to 2.8, I have chosen to
401 drop legacy support for WordPress versions 1.5 through 2.7. If you are
402 using FeedWordPress with a version of WordPress before 2.8, you will
403 have to upgrade your installation of WordPress in order to take
404 advantage of this release.
405
406 * PHP 5.3 COMPATIBILITY: A couple of compatibility issues, which were
407 causing fatal errors amd ugly warnings for users of PHP 5.3,
408 have been eliminated.
409
410 #### Features and Processing ####
411
412 * INTERFACE REORGANIZATION: The interface restructuring, began with
413 Version 2009.0612, has been completed. Catch-all settings pages have
414 been eliminated entirely for pages that cover each aspect of handling
415 a feed: Feeds & Updates, Posts & Links, Authors, Categories & Tags,
416 and Back End handling of the database and diagnostic information.
417 Extensive new interface hooks allow add-on modules to significantly
418 change or extend the FeedWordPress admin interface and workflow.
419
420 * STORING INFORMATION FROM THE FEED IN CUSTOM FIELDS: Many users
421 have written to request the ability to store information from elements
422 in the feed in a custom field on each post. (So that, for example, if
423 post includes a `itunes:duration` element, you could store the contents
424 in a Custom Field called `duration` on the post (for a Theme to access
425 later). The Custom Post Settings under Syndication --> Posts & Links now
426 allow you to access any item or feed tag, using a syntax similar to
427 a much-simplified version of XPath. See Posts & Links settings for
428 details.
429
430 * UPDATE-FREEZING ON MANUALLY EDITED POSTS: FeedWordPress now allows you
431 to mark posts that have been manually edited, so that the changes you
432 make will not be overwritten by later updates from the feed. If you make
433 manual edits to a particular post, just check the "Manual editing"
434 checkbox in order to protect your changes from being overwritten. If you
435 want to block *all* posts from being updated after they are imported
436 for the first time, a new "Updated Posts" setting in Posts & Links
437 allows you to freeze all posts from a particular feed, or all syndicated
438 posts.
439
440 * SETTING: FEED-BY-FEED SETTINGS FOR WHERE PERMALINKS POINT TO: You've
441 always been able to tell FeedWordPress whether permalinks for posts
442 should point to the original source of the story or the local copy. Now
443 you can choose different policies for different feeds, instead of one
444 global policy for all feeds. (Of course, you can still use a global
445 default if you prefer.)
446
447 * SETTING: USER CONTROL OVER TIMING BASIS. You can now determine the
448 schedule on which feeds are considered ready to poll for updates --
449 by default feeds become ready for polling after about 1 hour. You can
450 now increase or decrease the time window under Syndication --> Feeds &
451 Updates. (However, please pay *CAREFUL ATTENTION* to the recommendations
452 and DO NOT set the scheduling lower than 60 minutes unless you are
453 ABSOLUTELY SURE that you have specific permission from webmaster who
454 provides that specific feed to poll more frequently than that. If you
455 set this too low (and about 60 minutes is the polite minimum if you
456 haven't been given a different figure), most webmasters will consider
457 the frequent hits on their server as rude, or even downright abusive.
458
459 * OTHER SETTINGS: New settings also include the ability to stop FWP from
460 resolving relative URLs within syndicated content, and the ability to
461 choose whether FeedWordPress should indicate the comment feed from the
462 original source, or the local comment feed, when providing the comment
463 feed URL for a syndicated post.
464
465 #### Parsing ####
466
467 * BETTER DATE HANDLING -- FEWER FLASHBACKS TO 1969 and 1970: FeedWordPress
468 has made some bugfixes and some improvements in the logic for parsing
469 dates. This should allow FeedWordPress to correctly parse more dates in
470 more feeds; and, in the last resort, when FeedWordPress fails to
471 correctly parse a date, to fall back to a more intelligent default. This
472 should hopefully avoid most or all error conditions that have resulted
473 in articles being erroneously dated to the dawn of the Unix epoch
474 (31 December 1969 or 1 January 1970).
475
476 * FULL-TEXT "EXCERPTS" NOW PROPERLY SHORTENED. Based on a straightforward
477 reading of the existing RSS specs, it's reasonable for the
478 rss:description element to be read as a plaintext summary or excerpt for
479 the item containing the description -- with the full text of the item,
480 if available, in another, better-suited element, such as the de facto
481 standard content:encoded extension element. The problem is that uses of
482 RSS rarely have much to do with anything like a straightforward reading
483 of the specs. As a result, many actual RSS producers in the wild put the
484 full text of the article in a description element. But since
485 FeedWordPress has treated this text as a summary, this produces
486 aggregated posts with lengthy "excerpts" containing the full text of the
487 article. This release of FeedWordPress fixes the problem by doing a
488 little digging before treating rss:description as a summary: if the
489 description element is used properly as a plain text summary, then
490 FeedWordPress will take the summary provided by the feed, rather than
491 recreating its own excerpt from the full text; but if an RSS item has no
492 full-text element other than description, FeedWordPress will treat the
493 description element as the full text of the article, and generate a
494 shortened excerpt automatically from that text.
495
496 #### API ####
497
498 * TEMPLATE API: new template tags `get_local_permalink()` and
499 `the_local_permalink()` allow you to access the permalink for a post on
500 your aggregator site, even when FeedWordPress is rewriting permalinks to
501 point to the original source site.
502
503 * NEW HOOKS FOR ADD-ONS AND FILTERS: I have added a number of new hooks
504 which allow add-on modules to filter more precisely, gather information
505 at more points, and to enhance the FeedWordPress admin interface. For
506 a list of new hooks and documentation, see the FeedWordPress
507 documentation wiki at
508 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/add-ons-and-filters>
509
510 * FILTER API: A number of new utility methods have been added to the
511 SyndicatedPost class to make it easier for filters and add-ons to
512
513 * FILTER API: Globals $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta DEPRECATED. These
514 global variables, originally introduced to allow filters access to
515 information about the source feed in `syndicated_item` filters (which
516 were passed in through global variables rather than as parameters
517 because of a bug in WP 1.5 which was then fixed in 1.5.1) have been
518 DEPRECATED. If you have any filters or add-ons which still depend on
519 these global variables, you should see about fixing them to access data
520 about the source feed using the SyndicatedPost::link element instead.
521 For documentation, see the FeedWordPress documentation wiki at
522 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedpost> and
523 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedlink>.
524
525 * DIAGNOSTICS: I've included a number of new diagnostic options and
526 messages, which should allow an experienced user to better investigate
527 any problems that may crop up.
528
529 #### Bug Fixes ####
530
531 * BUGFIX: & IN PERMALINKS NO LONGER CAUSING ATOM OR HTML VALIDATION
532 EFFORTS: Many users reported an issue in which syndicating a feed with
533 special XML characters in the URLs (& was the most common, since it is
534 used to separate HTTP GET parameters) would cause the aggregator's
535 feeds to produce invalid (malformed) XML. This update addresses the
536 issue in Atom feeds. Unfortunately, it has not been technically possible
537 to address the problem in RSS 2.0 feeds, due to limitations on
538 WordPress's internal templates for RSS feeds.
539
540 * BUGFIX: BROKEN URLS IN "POPULAR POSTS" AND SIMILAR PLUGINS SHOULD NO
541 LONGER BE BROKEN. A number of users noticed an issue where plugins and
542 templates that listed posts in locations outside of the post loop
543 (for example, "Popular Posts"-style plugins that listed posts in the
544 sidebar), often produced the wrong URL for post links. (Typically, all
545 the posts listed would get the same wrong URL.) This should now be
546 fixed. Thanks to Björn for sending in a quick fix!
547
548 * MINOR BUGFIXES: This release includes a number of fixes to minor bugs
549 and compatibility issues, including: silent failures of the "Syndicate"
550 button, "Illegal Offset Type" error messages from MagpieRSS, and others.
551
552 = 2009.0707 =
553
554 * BUGFIX: WORDPRESS 2.8 AJAX COMPATIBILITY ISSUES RESOLVED (blank or
555 truncated "Syndicated Sites" administration page): Due to changes in the
556 AJAX interface elements between WordPress 2.7 and WordPress 2.8, several
557 FeedWordPress users encountered an issue where the front "Syndication"
558 page in the FeedWordPress administrative interface would come up blank,
559 without the normal "Syndicated Sites" list and "Update" control, or
560 sometimes wth the boxes visible but one or both of them truncated, with
561 only the title bar. This issue should now be resolved: with the new
562 version of FeedWordPress, the compatibility issue that caused the
563 disappearance should be eliminated, and if boxes are shown with only
564 their handle visible, you should once again be able to drop down the
565 rest of the box by clicking once on its title bar.
566
567 * BUGFIX: TAG SETTING WIDGET FIXED. Due to changes in interface elements
568 between WordPress 2.7 and WordPress 2.8, people using FeedWordPress with
569 WordPress 2.8 found that the widget for setting tags to be applied to
570 all syndicated posts, or all syndicated posts from a particular feed,
571 no longer displayed "Add" and "Remove" buttons for individual tags. This
572 issue has now been fixed, and the tagging widget should once again work
573 more or less exactly like the tagging widget for individual posts in the
574 normal WordPress admin interface.
575
576 = 2009.0618 =
577
578 * BUGFIX: MYSTERY ERRORS WITH WITH WP_Http_Fsockopen HTTP TRANSPORT
579 ELIMINATED: Thanks to a combination of a subtle bug in FeedWordPress,
580 and changes to the HTTP transport code in WordPress, a number of users
581 encountered an error in which any time they attempted to add a new feed
582 through the FeedFinder interface, FeedWordPress would fail and display
583 an HTTP request failure diagnostic message. The subtle bug has been
584 fixed, and with it, most of these errors should now be eliminated.
585
586 Be sure to upgrade your MagpieRSS to the most recent MagpieRSS version
587 after you have insalled FeedWordPress 2009.0618, or this bug fix will
588 not take effect.
589
590 = 2009.0613 =
591
592 * INTERFACE/BUGFIX: WORDPRESS 2.8 CATEGORY BOX FIX. Thanks to a subtle
593 change in class names between the WordPress 2.7 and 2.8 stylesheets,
594 category boxes in the FeedWordPress settings interface tended to overflow
595 and have a lot of messy-looking overlapping text under WordPress 2.8.
596 This has now been fixed.
597
598 * FeedFinder FAILURE DIAGNOSTICS: When FWP's FeedFinder fails to find any
599 feeds at a given URL (for example, when you are trying to add a
600 subscription through the administrative interface and you run into an
601 error message), FeedWordPress now provides more diagnostic information
602 for the reasons behind the failure. If that helps you, great; if not,
603 it should help me respond more intelligently to your support request..
604
605 = 2009.0612 =
606
607 * WORDPRESS 2.8 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress 2009.0612 has been tested for
608 compatibility with the recent version 2.8 release of WordPress.
609
610 * INTERFACE RESTRUCTURING: In order to avoid settings posts from becoming
611 too crowded, and to modularize and better organize the user interface,
612 new "Posts" and "Categories & Tags" subpages have been created under the
613 "Syndication" menu. "Posts" controls settings for individal syndicated
614 posts (such as publication status, comment and ping status, whether or
615 not to use the original location of the post as the permalink, whether
616 or not to expose posts to formatting filters, and so on). "Categories &
617 Tags" controls settings for assigning new syndicated posts to categories
618 and tags, such as categories or tags to apply to all syndicated posts,
619 and how to handle categories that do not yet exist in the WordPress
620 database. These subpages, like the Authors subpage, handle settings for
621 the global default level and for individual syndicated feeds.
622
623 Corresponding to these new subpages, the old Syndication Settings and
624 Feed Settings subpages have been cleaned up and simplified, and now only
625 link to the appropriate subpages for options that can be set in the
626 Posts, Authors, or Categories & Tags subpages.
627
628 * FEATURE: ADD CUSTOM SETTINGS TO EACH SYNDICATED POST: FeedWordPress has
629 long had an interface for creating custom settings for each syndicated
630 *feed* which could be retrieved in templates using the `get_feed_meta()`
631 template function. But it had no feature for adding custom fields to
632 each individual syndicated *post*. In response to requests from users, I
633 have added the ability to apply custom fields to each individual
634 syndicated post, using the new Syndication --> Posts subpage. You can
635 set up custom fields to be applied to every syndicated post, or custom
636 fields to be applied to syndicated posts from a particular feed.
637
638 * FEATURE: MAGPIERSS VERSION CHECK AND UPGRADE: FeedWordPress will attempt
639 to determine whether or not you are using the upgraded version of
640 MagpieRSS that comes packaged with FeedWordPress. If not, it will throw
641 an error on admin pages, and, if you are a site administrator, it will
642 give you the option to ignore the error message, or to attempt an
643 automatic upgrade (using a native file copy). If the file copy fails,
644 FeedWordPress will offer some guidance on how to perform the upgrade
645 manually.
646
647 * BLANK POSTS PROBLEM NO LONGER OCCURS WITH OLD & BUSTED MAGPIERSS: Due
648 to the fact that I relied on a content normalization that occurs in my
649 upgraded version of MagpieRSS, but not in the old & busted version of
650 MagpieRSS that ships with WordPress, until this version, if you tried to
651 syndicate an Atom feed without having performed the (*strongly
652 recommended*) MagpieRSS upgrade, all of the posts would come up with
653 completely blank contents. That's not because MagpieRSS couldn't read
654 the data, but rather because the new Magpie version puts that data in a
655 location where the old version doesn't, and I was only looking in that
656 newer location. Now it checks for both, meaning that posts will continue
657 to display their contents even if you don't upgrade MagpieRSS. (But you
658 **really should** upgrade it, anyway.)
659
660 * BUGFIX: RELATIVE URI RESOLUTION FOR POST CONTENT RESTORED. Some time
661 back, I added support for resolving relative URIs against xml:base on
662 feeds that support it to the MagpieRSS upgrade in FeedWordPress. Then I
663 took out code that did the same thing from the main FeedWordPress code.
664 Of course, the problem is that some people, even though it is clearly
665 stupid or evil to do so, still include relative URIs for images or links
666 in posts on feed formats that do *not* adequately support xml:base
667 (notably, RSS 2.0 feeds). In response to a user request, I have added
668 this functionality back in, so that MagpieRSS will resolve any relative
669 URIs that it knows how to resolve using xml:base, and then FeedWordPress
670 will attempt to resolve any relative URIs that are left over afterwards.
671
672 * BUGFIX: INTERFACE OPTION FOR SETTING SYNDICATED POST PUBLICATION STATUS
673 ON A FEED-BY-FEED BASIS HAS BEEN RESTORED: Due to a version-checking
674 bug, users of WordPress 2.7.x lost an option from the "Edit a syndicated
675 feed" interface which allowed them to determine whether newly syndicated
676 posts should be published immediately, held as "Pending Review," saved
677 as drafts, or saved as private posts. (The option to change this
678 setting globally remained in place, but users could no longer set it on
679 a feed-by-feed basis.) The version-checking bug has been fixed, and the
680 option has been restored.
681
682 * BUGFIX: "ARE YOU SURE?" FATAL ERROR ELIMINATED AND SECURITY IMPROVED:
683 Under certain circumstances (for example, when users have configured
684 their browser or proxy not to send HTTP Referer headers, for privacy or
685 other reasons), many features in the FeedWordPress administrative
686 interface (such as adding new feeds or changing settings) would hit a
687 fatal error, displaying only a cryptic message reading "Are you sure?"
688 and a blank page following it. This problem has been eliminated by
689 taking advantage of WordPress's nonce functions, which allow the
690 security check which ran into this error to work properly even without
691 receiving an HTTP Referer header. (N.B.: WordPress's nonce functions
692 were first introduced in WordPress 2.0.3. If you're using FeedWordPress
693 with an older version of WordPress, there's no fix for this problem:
694 you'll just need to turn Referer headers back on. Sorry.)
695
696 * BUGFIX: MANUALLY-ALTERED POST STATUS, COMMENT STATUS, AND PING STATUS NO
697 LONGER REVERTED BY POST UPDATES: If you manually altered the post status,
698 comment status, or ping status of a syndicated post from what it was set
699 to when first syndicated -- for example, if you had a feed that was set
700 to bring in new posts as "Pending Review," and you then marked some of
701 the pending posts as "Published" and others as "Unpublished" -- then
702 in previous versions of FeedWordPress, these manual changes to the
703 status would be lost -- so that, for example, your Published or Unpublished
704 articles would revert to Pending Review -- if the source feed made any
705 upates to the item. This could make the Pending Review feature both
706 unreliable and also extremely frustrating to work with. The good news is
707 that this bug has since been fixed: if you manually update the status
708 of a post, it will no longer be reverted if or when the post is updated.
709
710 * BUGFIX: OCCASIONAL FATAL ERROR ON UPDATE ELIMINATED: Under certain
711 limited conditions (specifically, when both the title and the content of
712 a post to be updated are empty), an attempt to update the post would
713 result in a fatal error. This has been fixed.
714
715 * INTERFACE: "CONFIGURE SETTINGS" CONVENIENCE LINK ADDED TO CONFIRMATION
716 MESSAGE WHEN A NEW FEED IS ADDED: When you add a new subscription to
717 FeedWordPress, the message box that appears to confirm it now includes a
718 handy link to the feed's settings subpage, so that you can quickly set
719 up any special settings you may want to set up for the new feed, without
720 having to hunt through the list of all your other subscriptions to pick
721 out the new one.
722
723 * INTERFACE: SIMPLIFYING AND CLARIFYING AUTOMATIC UPDATES SETTINGS. I have
724 removed an interval setting for the cronless automatic updates which has
725 confused many FeedWordPress users. In past versions of FWP, when you
726 turned on automatic updates, you would be presented with a time interval
727 setting which controlled how often FeedWordPress would check for feeds
728 ready to be polled for updates. (That is, it DID NOT control how often
729 feeds *would be polled*; it controlled how often FeedWordPress would
730 *check* for feeds that *had become ready to poll*. The schedule on which
731 feeds became ready for polling was still controlled either by requests
732 encoded in elements within the feed itself, or else according to an
733 internal calculation within FeedWordPress, averaging out to about 1 hour,
734 if the feed did not include any scheduling request elements.) Since many
735 users very often (and understandably) confused the purpose of this
736 setting, and since the setting is for a feature that's actually very
737 unlikely to require any manual control by the user, I have removed the
738 setting; FeedWordPress now simply uses the default value of checking for
739 feeds to poll every 10 minutes.
740
741 * FEEDFINDER PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT: FeedWordPress's FeedFinder class
742 now uses `array_unique()` to make sure that it doesn't waste time
743 repeatedly iterating over and polling the same URI. Props to Camilo
744 (<http://projects.radgeek.com/2008/12/14/feedwordpress-20081214/#comment-20090122160414>).
745
746 = 2008.1214 =
747
748 * WORDPRESS 2.7 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress has been tested for
749 compatibility with the newly released WordPress 2.7. WordPress 2.7 has
750 deprecated the Snoopy library for HTTP requests, which caused a fatal
751 error for users who had not installed the MagpieRSS upgrade (or whose
752 installation of the MagpieRSS upgrade was overwritten by a recent update
753 of WordPress). FeedWordPress now handles things gracefully when Snoopy
754 is not immediately available.
755
756 * INTERFACE SPIFFED UP: Interface elements have been updated so that
757 FeedWordPress's management interface fits in more naturally with the
758 WordPress 2.7 interface (including a new logo and a number of small
759 interface tweaks).
760
761 * BUG WITH TAGS FOR SYNDICATED ARTICLES FIXED: Several users encountered a
762 bug with the option to add tags to all syndicated posts under
763 Syndication --> Settings -- if you told FeedWordPress to add more than
764 one tag to all syndicated posts, instead of doing so correctly, it would
765 add a *single* tag instead, whose name was composed of the names of all
766 the tags you asked it to add. This bug was the result of nothing more
767 dignified than a typographical error on my part. It has now been fixed.
768
769 * MORE INFORMATION AVAILABLE WHEN FEEDWORDPRESS CAN'T FIND A FEED: When
770 you enter a URL for a new syndication source, FeedWordPress uses a
771 simple feed-finding algorithm (originally based on Mark Pilgrim's
772 Universal Feed Finder) to try to determine whether the URL is the URL
773 for a feed, or, if the URL points to an ordinary website rather than to
774 a feed, whether there is a feed for that website. All well and good, but
775 if FeedWordPress failed to find a feed, for whatever reason, it would
776 typically return nothing more than a nasty little note to the effect of
777 "no feed found," without any explanation of what went wrong.
778 FeedWordPress now keeps track of error conditions from the HTTP
779 requests that it uses in the course of looking for the feed, and so may
780 be able to give you a bit more information about the nature of the
781 problem if something goes wrong.
782
783
784 = 2008.1105 =
785
786 * INTERFACE RESTRUCTURING AND SYNDICATION --> AUTHORS PAGE: As a first
787 step towards modularizing and better organizing the user interface, a
788 new "Authors" subpage has been created under the Syndication menu, which
789 controls settings for syndicated authors, both at the global default
790 level and at level of individual syndicated feeds.
791
792 * BUG RELATED TO THE ATTRIBUTION OF POSTS TO THE WRONG AUTHOR FIXED: Some
793 users encountered an issue in which posts by different authors on
794 different blogs -- especially blogs generated by Blogger -- were
795 mistakenly attributed to a single author. The problem was caused by the
796 way in which FeedWordPress matches syndicated authors to user accounts
797 in the WordPress database: normally, if two feeds each list an author
798 with the same e-mail address, they are counted as being the same person.
799 Normally this works well, but it creates an issue in cases where
800 blogging software assigns a single anonymous e-mail address to users who
801 do not want their real e-mail address published. This is, for example,
802 what Blogger does (by giving all users a default e-mail address of
803 <noreply@blogger.com> if they don't want their own e-mail address
804 listed). FeedWordPress now allows the user to correct for this problem
805 with a couple of new settings under **Syndication --> Authors**, which
806 allow users to turn off e-mail based author matching for particular
807 addresses, or, if desired, to turn it off entirely. By default, e-mail
808 based author matching is still turned on, but disabled for a list of
809 known generic e-mail addresses. Right now, the "list" consists entirely
810 of <noreply@blogger.com>; if you know other addresses that should be
811 added, please [contact me](http://radgeek.com/contact) to let me know.
812
813 Please note that if you have already encountered this issue on your
814 blog, upgrading FeedWordPress will prevent it from re-occurring in the
815 future, but you still need to do two other things to fix the existing
816 problem on your blog.
817
818 First, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to
819 change the existing author mapping rules to re-map a a syndicated
820 author's name to the proper target account. Go to **Syndication -->
821 Authors**, select the feed you want to change from the drop-down list,
822 and then change the settings under the "Syndicated Authors" section.
823 (You will probably need to select "will be assigned to a new user..." to
824 create a new user account with the appropriate name.)
825
826 Second, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to
827 re-assign already-syndicated posts that were mis-attributed to the
828 correct author. You can do that from **Syndication --> Authors** by
829 using the author re-assignment feature, described below.
830
831 * AUTHOR RE-ASSIGNMENT FOR A PARTICULAR FEED: The author settings page
832 for each syndicated feed, under **Syndication --> Authors**, now
833 includes an section titled "Fixing mis-matched authors," which provides
834 an interface for re-assigning or deleting all posts attributed to a
835 particular author on a particular feed.
836
837 * SUPPORT FOR `<atom:source>` ELEMENT IN SYNDICATED FEEDS: Some feeds
838 (for example, those produced by FeedWordPress) aggregate content from
839 several different sources, and include information about the original
840 source of the post in an `<atom:source>` element. A new setting under
841 **Syndication --> Options** allows you to control what FeedWordPress
842 will report as the source of posts syndicated from aggregator feeds in
843 your templates and feeds: you can have FeedWordPress report that the
844 source of a post is the aggregator feed itself, or you can have it
845 report that the source of a post is the original source that the
846 aggregator originally syndicated the post from.
847
848 By default, FeedWordPress will report the aggregator, not the original
849 source, as the source of a syndicated item.
850
851 * LOAD BALANCING AND TIME LIMITING FEATURES FOR UPDATES: Some users have
852 encountered issues due to running up against PHP execution time limits
853 during the process of updating large syndicated feeds, or a very large
854 set of syndicated feeds. FeedWordPress now has a feature that allows you
855 to limit the total amount of time spent updating a feed, through the
856 "Time limit on updates" setting under **Syndication --> Options**. By
857 turning on this setting and adjusting the time limit to a low enough
858 figure to avoid your PHP installation's time-out setting. (PHP execution
859 time limits are usually in the vicinity of 30 seconds, so an update
860 time limit of 25 seconds or so should provide plenty of time for updates
861 while allowing a cushion of time for other, non-update-related functions
862 to do their work.)
863
864 If feed updates are interrupted by the time limit, FeedWordPress uses
865 some simple load balancing features to make sure that updates to other
866 feeds will not be blocked by the time-hogging feed, and will also make
867 sure that when the interrupted update is resumed, FeedWordPress will
868 skip ahead to resume processing items at the point at which it was
869 interrupted last time, so that posts further down in the feed will
870 eventually get processed, and not get blocked by the amount of time it
871 takes to process the items higher up in the feed.
872
873 * `guid` INDEX CREATION BUTTON: FeedWordPress frequently issues queries on
874 the `guid` column of the WordPress posts database (since it uses post
875 guid URIs to keep track of which posts it has syndicated). In very large
876 FeedWordPress installations, you can often significantly improve
877 performance by creating a database index on the `guid` column, but
878 normally you would need to poke around with MySQL or a tool like
879 phpMyAdmin to do this. FeedWordPress can now save you the trouble: to
880 create an index on the `guid` column, just go to
881 **Syndication --> Options**, and mash the button at the bottom of the
882 "Back End" section.
883
884 = 2008.1101 =
885
886 * INTERFACE BUG THAT PREVENTED ADDING NEW SITES FIXED: The UI reforms in
887 FWP 2008.1030 unintentionally introduced a bug that prevents clean
888 installations of FeedWordPress from providing an input box for adding
889 new feeds to the list of syndicated feeds. This bug has been fixed.
890
891 = 2008.1030 =
892
893 * WORDPRESS 2.6 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with
894 WordPress 2.6, and should work more or less seamlessly with the new post
895 revision system. A bug which caused multiple new revisions to be created
896 for posts on certain feeds, regardless of whether or not the item had
897 been updated, has been fixed.
898
899 * INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: The user interface has been substantially
900 restyled to fit in better with the visual style of WordPress 2.5 and
901 2.6.
902
903 * YOUTUBE BUG FIXED: POSTS SYNDICATED THROUGH AN AUTOMATIC UPDATE ARE NO
904 LONGER STRIPPED OF `<OBJECT>` TAGS AND CERTAIN OTHER HTML ELEMENTS: Due
905 to the way that some versions of WordPress process posts that are
906 inserted into the database when no user is logged in, many users
907 experienced an issue where YouTube videos and other content using the
908 HTML `<object>` tag would be stripped out of posts that were syndicated
909 during an automatic update. (Posts that were syndicated through manual
910 updates from within the WordPress Dashboard were not affected, because
911 the issue does not arise when an update is executed under a logged-in
912 administrator's credentials.) This bug has now been fixed; YouTube
913 videos and other content using `<object>` tags should now appear
914 properly in syndicated posts, regardless of the way in which the post
915 was syndicated.
916
917 * AJAX BUGS FIXED: Bugs which blocked the normal operation of WordPress
918 2.5's AJAX interface elements when FeedWordPress was activated have been
919 fixed.
920
921 * TAG SUPPORT: A couple of features have been introduced to take advantage
922 of the tagging features in WordPress 2.3.x, 2.5.x, and 2.6.x. Now, when
923 unfamiliar categories are encountered for posts on a feed, you can
924 choose for FeedWordPress (1) to drop the category; (2) to drop the
925 category and to filter out any post that does not match at least one
926 familiar category; (3) to create a new category with that name, or,
927 now, you can also have FeedWordPress (4) create a new *tag* with that
928 name. This option can be set site-wide under Syndication --> Options,
929 or it can be set on a feed-by-feed basis in a feed's Edit screen.
930
931 In addition, you can now set particular tags to apply to all incoming
932 syndicated posts, under Syndication --> Options, or you can set tags
933 to apply to all incoming syndicated posts from a particular feed in that
934 feed's Edit screen.
935
936 * FORMATTING FILTERS: There is a new option available under Syndication ->
937 Options which allows users to choose whether or not to expose syndicated
938 posts to being altered by formatting filters. By default, FeedWordPress
939 has always protected syndicated posts (which are already in display-ready
940 HTML when they are syndicated) from being reformatted by formatting
941 filters. However, this approach means that certain plugins which depend
942 on formatting filters (for example, to add "Share This" bars or relevant
943 links to the end of a post) are blocked from working on any syndicated
944 posts. If you want to use one of these plugins together with
945 FeedWordPress, you can now do so by changing the "Formatting Filters"
946 setting from "Protect" to "Expose."
947
948 * `<atom:source>` ELEMENTS NOW INCLUDED IN ATOM FEED: Atom 1.0 provides
949 a standard method for aggregators to indicate information about the original source of
950 a syndicated post, using the `<atom:source>` element. FeedWordPress now
951 introduces standard `<atom:source>` elements including the title, homepage, and
952 feed URI of the source from which a syndicated post was syndicated. Cf.
953 <http://www.atomenabled.org/developers/syndication/atom-format-spec.php#element.source>
954
955 * MODULARIZATION OF CODE: The code for different elements of FeedWordPress
956 has been broken out into several modules for easier inspection,
957 documentation, and maintenance of the code.
958
959 * VERSIONING SCHEME CHANGED: FeedWordPress's feature set has proven stable
960 enough that it can now be removed from beta status; a good thing, since
961 I was very quickly running out of version numbers to use. New releases
962 of FeedWordPress will have version numbers based on the date of their
963 release.
964
965 = 0.993 =
966
967 * WORDPRESS 2.5.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible
968 with WordPress 2.5.1.
969
970 * WORDPRESS 2.5 INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: FeedWordPress's Dashboard
971 interface has undergone several cosmetic changes that should help it
972 integrate better with the WordPress Dashboard interface in WordPress
973 version 2.5.x.
974
975 * SYNDICATED POSTS CAN BE MARKED AS "PENDING REVIEW": WordPress 2.3 users
976 can now take advantage of WordPress's new "Pending Review" features for
977 incoming syndicated posts. Posts marked as "Pending Review" are not
978 published immediately, but are marked as ready to be reviewed by an
979 Administrator or Editor, who can then choose to publish the post or
980 hold it back. If you want to review syndicated posts from a particular
981 feed, or from all feeds, before they are posted, then use
982 Syndication --> Syndicated Sites --> Edit or Syndication --> Options to
983 change the settings for handling new posts.
984
985 * AWARE OF NEW URI FOR del.icio.us FEEDS: Previous releases of
986 FeedWordPress already automatically split del.icio.us tags up
987 appropriately appropriately when generating categories. (del.icio.us
988 feeds smoosh all the tags into a single `<dc:subject>` element,
989 separated by spaces; FeedWordPress un-smooshes them into multiple
990 categories by separating them at whitespace.) Unfortunately, del.icio.us
991 recently broke the existing behavior by changing host names for their
992 feeds from del.icio.us to feeds.delicious.com. Version 0.993 accounts
993 for the new host name and un-breaks the tag splitting.
994
995 = 0.992 =
996
997 * AUTHOR RE-MAPPING: FeedWordPress now offers considerable control over
998 how author names on a feed are translated into usernames within the
999 WordPress database. When a post by an unrecognized author comes in,
1000 Administrators can now specify any username as the default username to
1001 assign the post to by setting the option in Syndication --> Options
1002 (formerly FeedWordPress only allowed you to assign such posts to user
1003 #1, the site administrator). Administrators can also create re-mapping
1004 rules for particular feeds (under Syndication --> Syndicated Sites -->
1005 Edit), so that (for example) any posts attributed to "Administrator"
1006 on the feed <http://praxeology.net/blog/feed/> will be assigned to
1007 a user named "Roderick T. Long," rather than a user named
1008 "Administrator." These settings also allow administrators to filter out
1009 posts by particular users, and to control what will happen when
1010 FeedWordPress encounters a post by an unrecognized user on that
1011 particular feed.
1012
1013 * BUG RELATED TO URIS CONTAINING AMPERSAND CHARACTERS FIXED: A bug in
1014 WordPress 2.x's handling of URIs in Blogroll links created problems for
1015 updating any feeds whose URIs included an ampersand character, such as
1016 Google News RSS feeds and other feeds that have multiple parameters
1017 passed through HTTP GET. If you experienced this bug, the most likely
1018 effect was that FeedWordPress simply would not import new posts from a
1019 feed when instructred to do so, returning a "0 new posts" response. In
1020 other cases, it might lead to unpredictable results from feed updates,
1021 such as importing posts which were not contained in the feed being
1022 syndicated, but which did appear elsewhere on the same website. This bug
1023 has, hopefully, been resolved, by correcting for the bug in WordPress.
1024
1025 = 0.991 =
1026
1027 * WORDPRESS MU COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with
1028 recent releases of WordPress MU. Once FeedWordPress is made available
1029 as a plugin, each individual blog can choose to activate FeedWordPress
1030 and syndicate content from its own set of contributors.
1031
1032 * DISPLAY OF MAGPIE WARNINGS: A number of MagpieRSS warnings or error
1033 messages that were displayed when performing an automatic update are
1034 no longer displayed, unless debugging parameters have been explicitly
1035 enabled.
1036
1037 * BUG RELATED TO INTERNATIONAL CHARACTERS IN AUTHOR NAMES FIXED: Due to a
1038 subtle incompatability between the way that FeedWordPress generated new
1039 user information, and the way that WordPress 2.0 and later added new
1040 authors to the database, FeedWordPress might end up creating duplicate
1041 authors, or throwing a critical error message, when it encountered
1042 authors whose names included international characters. This
1043 incompatability has now been fixed; hopefully, authors with
1044 international characters in their names should now be handled properly.
1045
1046 * `<media:content>` BUG IN MAGPIERSS FIXED: A bug in MagpieRSS's handling
1047 of namespaced elements has been fixed. Among other things, this bug
1048 caused items containing a Yahoo MediaRSS `<media:content>` element (such
1049 as many of the feeds produced by wordpress.com) to be represented
1050 incorrectly, with only a capital "A" where the content of the post
1051 should have been. Feeds containing `<media:content>` elements should now
1052 be syndicated correctly.
1053
1054 * update_feedwordpress PARAMETER: You can now use an HTTP GET parameter
1055 (`update_feedwordpress=1`) to request that FeedWordPress poll its feeds
1056 for updates. When used together with a crontab or other means of
1057 scheduling tasks, this means that you can keep your blog automatically
1058 updated on a regular schedule, even if you do not choose to use the
1059 cron-less automatic updates option.
1060
1061 * Some minor interface-related bugs were also fixed.
1062
1063
1064 = 0.99 =
1065
1066 Version 0.99 adds several significant new features, fixes some bugs, and
1067 provides compatability with WordPress 2.2.x and 2.3.x.
1068
1069 * WORDPRESS 2.2 AND 2.3 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be
1070 compatible with WordPress version 2.2 and the upcoming WordPress
1071 version 2.3. In particular, it has been tested extensively against
1072 WordPress 2.2.3 and WordPress 2.3 Release Candidate 1.
1073
1074 * AUTOMATIC UPDATES WITHOUT CRON: FeedWordPress now allows you to
1075 automatically schedule checks for new posts without using external task
1076 scheduling tools such as cron. In order to enable automatic updates, go
1077 to **Syndication --> Options** and set "Check for new posts" to
1078 "automatically." For details, see "Automatic Feed Updates" in
1079 README.text.
1080
1081 An important side-effect of the changes to the update system is that if
1082 you were previously using the cron job and the `update-feeds.php` script
1083 to schedule updates, you need to change your cron set-up. The old
1084 `update-feeds.php` script no longer exists. Instead, if you wish to use
1085 a cron job to guarantee updates on a particular schedule, you should
1086 have the cron job fetch the front page of your blog (for example, by
1087 using `curl http://www.zyx.com/blog/ > /dev/null`) instead of activating
1088 the `update-feeds.php` script. If automatic updates have been enabled,
1089 fetching the front page will automatically trigger the update process.
1090
1091 * INTERFACE REORGANIZATION: All FeedWordPress functions are now located
1092 under a top-level "Syndication" menu in the WordPress Dashboard. To
1093 manage the list of syndicated sites, manually check for new posts on
1094 one or more feeds, or syndicate a new site, you should use the main page
1095 under **Syndication**. To change global settings for FeedWordPress,
1096 you should use **Syndication --> Options**.
1097
1098 * FILE STRUCTURE REORGANIZATION: Due to a combination of changing styles
1099 for FeedWordPress plugins and lingering bugs in the FeedWordPress admin
1100 menu code, the code for FeedWordPress is now contained in two different
1101 PHP files, which should be installed together in a subdirectory of your
1102 plugins directory named `feedwordpress`. (See README.text for
1103 installation and upgrade instructions relating to the change.)
1104
1105 * MULTIPLE CATEGORIES SETTING: Some feeds use non-standard methods to
1106 indicate multiple categories within a single category element. (The most
1107 popular site to do this is del.icio.us, which separates tags with a
1108 space.) FeedWordPress now allows you to set an optional setting, for any
1109 feed which does this, indicating the character or characters used to
1110 divide multiple categories, using a Perl-compatible regular expression.
1111 (In the case of del.icio.us feeds, FeedWordPress will automatically use
1112 \s for the pattern without your having to do any further configuration.)
1113 To turn this setting on, simply use the "Edit" link for the feed that
1114 you want to turn it on for.
1115
1116 * REGULAR EXPRESSION BUG FIXED: Eliminated a minor bug in the regular
1117 expressions for e-mail addresses (used in parsing RSS `author`
1118 elements), which could produce unsightly error messages for some users
1119 parsing RSS 2.0 feeds.
1120
1121 * DATE / UPDATE BUG FIXED: A bug in date handling was eliminated that may
1122 have caused problems if any of (1) WordPress, or (2) PHP, or (3) your
1123 web server, or (4) your MySQL server, has been set to use a different
1124 time zone from the one that any of the others is set to use. If
1125 FeedWordPress has not been properly updating updated posts, or has been
1126 updating posts when there shouldn't be any changes for the update, this
1127 release may solve that problem.
1128
1129 * GOOGLE READER BUGS FIXED: A couple of bugs that made it difficult for
1130 FeedWordPress to interact with Google Reader public feeds have been
1131 fixed. Firstly, if you encountered an error message reading "There was a
1132 problem adding the newsfeed. [SQL: ]" when you tried to add the feed,
1133 the cause of this error has been fixed. Secondly, if you succeeded in
1134 getting FeedWordPress to check a Google Reader feed, only to find that
1135 the title of posts had junk squashed on to the end of them, that bug
1136 has been fixed too. To fix this bug, you must install the newest version
1137 of the optional MagpieRSS upgrade.
1138
1139 * FILTER PARAMETERS: Due to an old, old bug in WordPress 1.5.0 (which was
1140 what was available back when I first wrote the filter interface),
1141 FeedWordPress has traditionally only passed one parameter to
1142 syndicated_item and syndicated_post filters functions -- an array
1143 containing either the Magpie representation of a syndicated item from
1144 the feed, or the database representation of a post about to be inserted
1145 into the WordPress database. If you needed information about the feed
1146 that the item came from, this was accessible only through a pair of
1147 global variables, $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta.
1148
1149 Since it's been a pretty long time since WordPress 1.5.0 was in
1150 widespread usage, I have gone ahead and added an optional second
1151 parameter to the invocation of the syndicated_item and syndicated_post
1152 filters. If you have written a filter for FeedWordPress that uses either
1153 of these hooks, you can now register that filter to accept 2 parameters.
1154 If you do so, the second parameter will be a SyndicatedPost object,
1155 which, among other things, allows you to access information about the
1156 feed from which an item is syndicated using the $post->feed and the
1157 $post->feedmeta elements (where $post is the name of the second
1158 parameter).
1159
1160 NOTE THAT THE OLD GLOBAL VARIABLES ARE STILL AVAILABLE, for the time
1161 being at least, so existing filters will not break with the upgrade.
1162 They should be considered deprecated, however, and may be eliminated in
1163 the future.
1164
1165 * FILTER CHANGE / BUGFIX: the array that is passed as the first argument
1166 syndicated_post filters no longer is no longer backslash-escaped for
1167 MySQL when filters are called. This was originally a bug, or an
1168 oversight; the contents of the array should only be escaped for the
1169 database *after* they have gone through all filters. IF YOU HAVE WRITTEN
1170 ANY syndicated_post FILTERS THAT PRESUME THE OLD BEHAVIOR OF PASSING IN
1171 STRINGS THAT ARE ALREADY BACKSLASH-ESCAPED, UPDATE YOUR FILTERS
1172 ACCORDINGLY.
1173
1174 * OTHER MINOR BUGFIXES AND INTERNAL CHANGES: The internal architecture of
1175 FeedWordPress has been significantly changed to make the code more
1176 modular and clean; hopefully this should help reduce the number of
1177 compatibility updates that are needed, and make them easier and quicker
1178 when they are needed.
1179
1180 = 0.981 =
1181
1182 Version 0.981 is a narrowly targeted bugfix and compatibility release, whose
1183 main purpose is to resolve a major outstanding problem: the incompatibility
1184 between version 0.98 of WordPress and the recently released WordPress 2.1.
1185
1186 * WORDPRESS 2.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress is now compatible with
1187 WordPress 2.1, as well as retaining its existing support for WordPress
1188 2.0 and 1.5. Incompatibilities that resulted in database warnings, fatal
1189 errors, and which prevented FeedWordPress from syndicating new posts,
1190 have been eliminated.
1191
1192 * RSS-FUNCTIONS.PHP RENAMED TO RSS.PHP: if you use the upgraded MagpieRSS
1193 replacement that's included with FeedWordPress, be sure to note that
1194 there are now *two* files to upload from the `OPTIONAL/wp-includes`
1195 subdirectory in order to carry out the upgrade: rss-functions.php and
1196 rss.php. **It is necessary to upload both files**, due to a change in
1197 the file naming scheme in WordPress 2.1, and it is necessary to do so
1198 whether you are using WordPress 2.1 or not. If you only upload the
1199 `rss-functions.php` file as in previous installations you will not have
1200 a working copy of MagpieRSS; the rss.php file contains the actual code.
1201
1202 * DATE BUG AFFECTING SOME PHP INSTALLATIONS RESOLVED: due to a subtle bug
1203 in parse_w3cdtf(), some installations of PHP encountered problems with
1204 FeedWordPress's attempt to date posts, which would cause some new posts
1205 on Atom feeds to be dated as if they had apppeared in 1969 or 1970
1206 (thus, effectively, never appearing on front page at all). This bug in
1207 the date handling should now be fixed.
1208
1209 * PHP <?=...?> SHORT FORM ELIMINATED: some installations of PHP do not
1210 allow the <?=...?> short form for printing PHP values, which was used
1211 extensively in the FeedWordPress interface code. Since this could cause
1212 fatal errors for users with the wrong installation of PHP, the short
1213 form has been replaced with full PHP echo statements, and is no longer
1214 used in FeedWordPress.
1215
1216 * BETTER USER INTERFACE INTEGRATION WITH WORDPRESS 2.x: Some minor changes
1217 have been made to help the FeedWordPress interface pages blend in better
1218 with the user interface when running under WordPress 2.x.
1219
1220 * GLOBAL CATEGORIES BUG RESOLVED: a bug that prevented some users from
1221 setting one or more categories to apply to syndicated posts from all
1222 feeds (using the checkbox interface under Options --> Syndication) has
1223 been resolved.
1224
1225 = 0.98 =
1226
1227 * WORDPRESS 2.0 COMPATIBILITY: This is a narrowly-targeted release to
1228 solve a major outstanding problem. FeedWordPress is now compatible with
1229 both WordPress 1.5 and WordPress 2.0. Incompatibilities that caused
1230 fatal SQL errors, and a more subtle bug with off-kilter counts of posts
1231 under a given category, have been resolved. FeedWordPress tests for
1232 database schema using the global $wp_db_version variable (if null, then
1233 we presume that we're dealing with WordPress 1.5).
1234
1235 NOTE: I have **not** fully tested FeedWordPress with WordPress 2.0.
1236 Further testing may reveal more bugs. However, you should now be able
1237 to get at least basic FeedWordPress functionality up and running.
1238
1239 * AUTHOR MATCHING: FeedWordPress tests several fields to see if it can
1240 identify the author of the post as a user already in the WordPress user
1241 database. In previous versions, it tested the user login, the nickname,
1242 and tested for "aliases" listed in the Profile (see documentation). FWP
1243 now also matches authors on the basis of e-mail address (*if* an e-mail
1244 address is present). This is particularly helpful for formats such as
1245 RSS 2.0, in which authors are primarily identified by e-mail addresses.
1246
1247 = 0.97 =
1248
1249 * INSTALLATION PROCEDURE: Some of the changes between 0.96 and 0.97
1250 require upgrades to the meta-data stored by FeedWordPress to work
1251 properly. Thus, if you are upgrading from 0.96 or earlier to 0.97, most
1252 FeedWordPress operations (including updates and template functions)
1253 WILL BE DISABLED until you run the upgrade procedure. Fortunately,
1254 running the upgrade procedure is easy: just go to either Options -->
1255 Syndication or Links --> Syndicated in the WordPress Dashboard and press
1256 the button.
1257
1258 * FEED FORMAT SUPPORT: Support has been added for the Atom 1.0 IETF
1259 standard. Several other elements are also newly supported
1260 (dcterms:created, dcterms:issued, dcterms:modified, dc:identifier,
1261 proper support for the RSS 2.0 guid element, the RSS 2.0 author element,
1262 the use of Atom author or Dublin Core dc:creator constructs at the feed
1263 level to identify the author of individual items, etc.)
1264
1265 N.B.: full support of several Atom 1.0 features, such as categories
1266 and enclosures, requires you to install the optional rss-functions.php
1267 upgrade in your wp-includes directory.
1268
1269 * BUG FIX: Running `update-feeds.php` from command line or crontab
1270 returned "I don't syndicate..." errors. It turns out that WordPress
1271 sometimes tramples on the internal PHP superglobals that I depended on
1272 to determine whether or not the script was being invoked from the
1273 command line. This has been fixed (the variables are now checked
1274 *before* WordPress can trample them). Note that `update-feeds.php` has
1275 been thoroughly overhauled anyway; see below for details.
1276
1277 * BUG FIX: Duplicate categories or author names. Fixed two bugs that could
1278 create duplicate author and/or category names when the name contained
1279 either (a) certain international characters (causing a mismatch between
1280 MySQL and PHP's handling of lowercasing text), or (b) characters that
1281 have a special meaning in regular expressions (causing MySQL errors when
1282 looking for the author or category due to regexp syntax errors). These
1283 should now be fixed thanks to careful escaping of names that go into
1284 regular expressions and careful matching of lowercasing functions
1285 (comparing results from PHP only to other results from PHP, and results
1286 from MySQL only to other results from MySQL).
1287
1288 * BUG FIX: Items dated December 31, 1969 should appear less often. The
1289 function for parsing W3C date-time format dates that ships with
1290 MagpieRSS can only correctly parse fully-specified dates with a
1291 fully-specified time, but valid W3C date-time format dates may omit the
1292 time, the day of the month, or even the month. Some feeds in the wild
1293 date their items with coarse-grained dates, so the optional
1294 `rss-functions.php` upgrade now includes a more flexible parse_w3cdtf()
1295 function that will work with both coarse-grained and fully-specified
1296 dates. (If parts of the date or the time are omitted, they are filled in
1297 with values based on the current time, so '2005-09-10' will be dated to
1298 the current time on that day; '2004' will be dated to this day and time
1299 one year ago.
1300
1301 N.B.: This fix is only available in the optional `rss-functions.php`
1302 upgrade.
1303
1304 * BUG FIX: Evil use of HTTP GET has been undone. The WordPress interface
1305 is riddled with inappropriate (non-idempotent) uses of HTTP GET queries
1306 (ordinary links that make the server do something with significant
1307 side-effects, such as deleting a post or a link from the database).
1308 FeedWordPress did some of this too, especially in places where it aped
1309 the WordPress interface (e.g. the "Delete" links in Links -->
1310 Syndicated). That's bad business, though. I've changed the interface so
1311 that all the examples of improper side-effects that I can find now
1312 require an HTTP POST to take effect. I think I got pretty much
1313 everything; if there's anything that I missed, let me know.
1314
1315 Further reading: [Sam Ruby 2005-05-06: This Stuff Matters](http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2005/05/06/This-Stuff-Matters)
1316
1317 * BUG FIX: Categories applied by `cats` setting should no longer prevent
1318 category-based filtering from working. In FeedWordPress, you can (1)
1319 apply certain categories to all syndicated posts, or all posts from
1320 a particular feed; and (2) filter out all posts that don't match one
1321 of the categories that are already in the WordPress database (allowing
1322 for simple category-based filtering; just load up WordPress with the
1323 categories you want to accept, and then tell FeedWordPress not to create
1324 new ones). However, the way that (1) and (2) were implemented meant that
1325 you couldn't effectively use them together; once you applied a known
1326 category to all syndicated posts from a particular feed, it meant that
1327 they'd have at least one familiar category (the category or categories
1328 you were applying), and that would get all posts past the filter no
1329 matter what categories they were originally from.
1330
1331 Well, no longer. You can still apply categories to all syndicated posts
1332 (using either Syndication --> Options, or the feed-level settings under
1333 Links --> Syndicated). But these categories are not applied to the post
1334 until *after* it has already passed by the "familiar categories" filter.
1335 So now, if you want, you can do category filtering and *then* apply as
1336 many categories as you please to all and only posts that pass the filter.
1337
1338 * BUG FIX: Other minor typos and HTML gaffes were fixed along the way.
1339
1340 * PERFORMANCE: get_feed_meta() no longer hits the database for information
1341 on every call; it now caches link data in memory, so FeedWordPress only
1342 goes to the database once for each syndicated link. This may
1343 substantially improve performance if your database server resources
1344 are tight and your templates make a lot of use of custom settings from
1345 get_feed_meta().
1346
1347 * API CHANGE: Link ID numbers, rather than RSS URIs, are now used to
1348 identify the feed from which a post is syndicated when you use template
1349 functions such as get_feed_meta(). The practical upshot of this is you
1350 can switch feeds, or change the feed address for a particular syndicated
1351 site, without breaking your templates for all the posts that were
1352 syndicated from the earlier URI.
1353
1354 * API CHANGE: if you have plugins or templates that make use of the
1355 get_feed_meta() function or the $fwp_feedmeta global, note that the
1356 data formerly located under the `uri` and `name` fields is now located
1357 under the `link/uri` field and the `link/name` field, respectively. Note
1358 also that you can access the link ID number for any given feed under the
1359 global $fwp_feedmeta['link/id'] (in plugins) or
1360 get_feed_meta('link/id') (in a template in post contexts).
1361
1362 * FEATURE: the settings for individual feeds can now be edited using a
1363 humane interface (where formerly you had to tweak key-value pairs in the
1364 Link Notes section). To edit settings for a feed, pick the feed that you
1365 want under Links --> Syndicated and click the Edit link.
1366
1367 * FEATURE: The "Unsubscribe" button (formerly "Delete") in Links -->
1368 Syndicated now offers three options for unsubscribing from a feed: (1)
1369 turning off the subscription without deleting the feed data or affecting
1370 posts that were syndicated from the feed (this works by setting the Link
1371 for the feed as "invisible"); (2) deleting the feed data and all of the
1372 posts that were syndicated from the feed; or (3) deleting the feed data
1373 and *keeping* the posts that were syndicated from the feed
1374 setting the Link to "Invisible" (meaning that it will not be displayed
1375 in lists of the site links on the front page, and it won't be checked
1376 for updates; (2) deleting the Link and all of the posts that were
1377 syndicated from its feed; or (3) deleting the feed data but keeping the
1378 posts that were syndicated (which will henceforward be treated as if
1379 they were local rather than syndicated posts). (Note that (1) is usually
1380 the best option for aggregator sites, unless you want to clean up the
1381 results of an error or a test.)
1382
1383 * FEATURE / BUG FIX: If you have been receiving mysterious "I don't
1384 syndicate...", or "(local) HTTP status code was not 200", or "(local)
1385 transport error - could not open socket", or "parse error - not well
1386 formed" errors, then this update may solve your problems, and if it does
1387 *not* solve them, it will at least make the reasons for the problems
1388 easier to understand. That's because I've overhauled the way that
1389 FeedWordPress goes about updating feeds.
1390
1391 If you use the command-line PHP scripting method to run scheduled
1392 updates, then not much should change for you, except for fewer
1393 mysterious errors. If you have done updates by sending periodic HTTP
1394 requests to <http://your-blog.com/path/wp-content/update-feeds.php>,
1395 then the details have changed somewhat; mostly in such a way as to make
1396 things easier on you. See the README file or online documentation on
1397 Staying Current for the details.
1398
1399 * FEATURE: FeedWordPress now features a more sophisticated system for
1400 timed updates. Instead of polling *every* subscribed feed for updates
1401 *each* time `update-feeds.php` is run, FeedWordPress now keeps track of
1402 the last time it polled each feed, and only polls them again after a
1403 certain period of time has passed. The amount of time is normally set
1404 randomly for each feed, in a period between 30 minutes and 2 hours (so
1405 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
1406 directly by the feed, which brings us to ...
1407
1408 * FEATURE: FeedWordPress now respects the settings in the `ttl` and
1409 Syndication Module RSS elements. Feeds with these elements set will not
1410 be polled any more frequently than they indicate with these feeds unless
1411 the user manually forces FeedWordPress to poll the feed (see Links -->
1412 Syndicated --> Edit settings).
1413
1414 = 0.96 =
1415
1416 * FEATURE: support has been added for enclosures in RSS 2.0 and Atom
1417 0.6+ newsfeeds. WordPress already supports adding enclosures to an
1418 item; FeedWordPress merely gets the information on the enclosure
1419 from the feed it is syndicating and plugs that information directly
1420 into the WordPress database so that (among other things) that post
1421 will have its enclosure listed in your blog's RSS 2 newsfeed.
1422
1423 Note that enclosure support requires using the optional MagpieRSS
1424 upgrade (i.e., replacing your `wp-includes/rss-functions.php` with
1425 `OPTIONAL/wp-includes/rss-functions.php` from the FWP archive)
1426
1427 * FEATURE: for completeness's sake, there is now a feed setting,
1428 `hardcode url`, that allows you to set the URI for the front page
1429 of a contributor's website manually (that is, prevent it from being
1430 automatically updated from the feed channel link on each update). To
1431 set the URI manually, put a line like this in the Link Notes section
1432 of a feed:
1433
1434 hardcode url: yes
1435
1436 You can also instruct FeedWordPress to use hardcoded URIs by default
1437 on all feeds using Options --> Syndication
1438
1439 * FEATURE: by default, when FeedWordPress finds new syndicated posts,
1440 it (1) publishes them immediately, (2) turns comments off, and (3)
1441 turns trackback / pingback pings off. You can now alter all three
1442 default behaviors (e.g., to allow pings on syndicated posts, or to
1443 send newly-syndicated posts to the draft pile for moderation) using
1444 Options --> Syndication
1445
1446
1447 = From 0.91 to 0.95 =
1448
1449 * BUG FIX: Fixed an obscure bug in the handling of categories:
1450 categories with trailing whitespace could cause categories with
1451 duplicate names to be created. This no longer happens. While I was
1452 at it I tightened up the operation of
1453 FeedWordPress::lookup_categories() a bit in general.
1454
1455 * FEATURE DEPRECATED: the feed setting `hardcode categories` is now
1456 deprecated in favor of `unknown categories` (see below), which
1457 allows you to strip off any syndication categories not already in
1458 your database using `unknown categories: default` or `unknown
1459 categories: filter`. If you have `hardcode categories: yes` set on a
1460 feed, this will be treated as `unknown categories: default` (i.e.,
1461 no new categories will be added, but if a post doesn't match any of
1462 the categories it will be added in the default category--usually
1463 "Uncategorized" or "General").
1464
1465 * FEATURE: You can now set global defaults as to whether or not
1466 FeedWordPress will update the Link Name and Link Description
1467 settings for feeds automatically from the feed title and feed
1468 tagline. (By default, it does, as it has in past versions.) Whether
1469 this behavior is turned on or off, you can still override the
1470 default behavior using feed settings of `hardcode name: yes`,
1471 `hardcode name: no`, `hardcode description: yes`, or `hardcode
1472 description: no`.
1473
1474 * FEATURE: Users can now provide one or several "aliases" for an
1475 author, just as they can for a category. For example, to make
1476 FeedWordPress treat posts by "Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger" and "Pope
1477 Benedict XVI" as by the same author, edit the user profile for Pope
1478 Benedict XVI and add a line like this to the "User profile" field:
1479
1480 a.k.a.: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
1481
1482 You can add several aliases, each on a line by itself. You can also
1483 add any other text you like to the Profile without interfering with
1484 the aliases.
1485
1486 * FEATURE: Users can now choose how to handle syndicated posts that
1487 are in unfamiliar categories or by unfamiliar authors (i.e.,
1488 categories or authors whose names are not yet in the WordPress
1489 database). By default, FeedWordPress will (as before) create a new
1490 category (or new author) and use it for the current post and any
1491 future posts. This behavior can be changed, either for all feeds or
1492 for one or another particular feed.
1493
1494 There are now three different options for an unfamiliar author: (1)
1495 FeedWordPress can create a new author account and attribute the
1496 syndicated post to the new account; (2) FeedWordPress can attribute
1497 the post to an author if the author's name is familiar, and to a
1498 default author (currently, this means the Site Administrator
1499 account) if it is not; (3) FeedWordPress can drop posts by
1500 unfamiliar authors and syndicate only posts by authors who are
1501 already in the database.
1502
1503 There are, similarly, two different options for an unfamiliar
1504 category: (1) FeedWordPress can create new categories and place the
1505 syndicated post in them; (2) FeedWordPress can drop the unfamiliar
1506 categories and place syndicated posts only in categories that it is
1507 already familiar with. In addition, FeedWordPress 0.95 lets you
1508 choose whether posts that are in *no* familiar categories should be
1509 syndicated (and placed in the default category for the blog) or
1510 simply dropped.
1511
1512 You can set the default behavior for both authors and categories
1513 using the settings in Options --> Syndication. You can also set
1514 different behavior for specific feeds by adding the `unfamiliar
1515 author` and / or `unfamiliar categories` settings to the Link Notes
1516 section of a feed:
1517
1518 unfamiliar author: (create|default|filter)
1519 unfamiliar categories: (create|default|filter)
1520
1521 A setting of `unfamiliar author: create` will make FeedWordPress
1522 create new authors to match unfamiliar author names *for this feed
1523 alone*. A setting of `unfamiliar author: default` will make it
1524 assign posts from unfamiliar authors to the default user account. A
1525 setting of `unfamiliar author: filter` will cause all posts (from
1526 this feed alone) to be dropped unless they are by an author already
1527 listed in the database. Similiarly, `unfamiliar categories: create`
1528 will make FeedWordPress create new categories to match unfamiliar
1529 category names *for this feed alone*; `unfamiliar categories:
1530 default` will cause it to drop any unfamiliar category names; and
1531 `unfamiliar categories: filter` will cause it to *both* drop any
1532 unfamiliar category names *and* to only syndicate posts that are
1533 placed in one or more familiar categories.
1534
1535 These two new features allow users to do some coarse-grained
1536 filtering without having to write a PHP filter. Specifically, they
1537 offer an easy way for you to filter feeds by category or by author.
1538 Suppose, for example, that you only wanted to syndicate posts that
1539 your contributors place in the "Llamas" category. You could do so by
1540 setting up your installation of WordPress so that the only category
1541 in the database is "Llamas," and then use Options --> Syndication to
1542 set "Unfamiliar categories" to "don't create new categories and
1543 don't syndicate posts unless they match at least one familiar
1544 category". Now, when you update, only posts in the "Llamas" category
1545 will be syndicated by FeedWordPress.
1546
1547 Similarly, if you wanted to filter one particular feed so that only
1548 posts by (for example) the author "Earl J. Llama" were syndicated to
1549 your site, you could do so by creating a user account for Earl J.
1550 Llama, then adding the following line to the settings for the feed
1551 in Link Notes:
1552
1553 unfamiliar author: filter
1554
1555 This will cause any posts from this feed that are not authored by
1556 Earl J. Llama to be discarded, and only the posts by Earl J. Llama
1557 will be syndicated. (If the setting is used on one specific feed, it
1558 will not affect how posts from other feeds are syndicated.)
1559
1560 == License ==
1561
1562 The FeedWordPress plugin is copyright © 2005-2010 by Charles Johnson. It uses
1563 code derived or translated from:
1564
1565 - [wp-rss-aggregate.php][] by [Kellan Elliot-McCrea](kellan@protest.net)
1566 - [MagpieRSS][] by [Kellan Elliot-McCrea](kellan@protest.net)
1567 - [Ultra-Liberal Feed Finder][] by [Mark Pilgrim](mark@diveintomark.org)
1568 - [WordPress Blog Tool and Publishing Platform](http://wordpress.org/)
1569
1570 according to the terms of the [GNU General Public License][].
1571
1572 This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
1573 the terms of the [GNU General Public License][] as published by the Free
1574 Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any
1575 later version.
1576
1577 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
1578 WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
1579 PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
1580
1581 [wp-rss-aggregate.php]: http://laughingmeme.org/archives/002203.html
1582 [MagpieRSS]: http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/
1583 [HTTP Navigator 2]: http://www.keyvan.net/2004/11/16/http-navigator/
1584 [Ultra-Liberal Feed Finder]: http://diveintomark.org/projects/feed_finder/
1585 [GNU General Public License]: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
1586
1587