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FeedWordPress / 2011.0512
FeedWordPress v2011.0512
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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: 3.1.2
7 Stable tag: 2011.0512
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 = 2011.0512 =
97
98 * DIAGNOSTICS IMPROVEMENTS; "THERE MAY BE A BUG IN FEEDWORDPRESS" CRITICAL
99 ERROR NOTICES ELIMINATED: This version includes some major improvements
100 to the Syndication --> Diagnostics section, which should aid in
101 troubleshooting difficulties with items failing to be imported, posts
102 failing to be properly inserted into the database, or updates failing to
103 be recorded. If you have been encountering critical error / bug notices
104 with a white screen and the message "THERE MAY BE A BUG IN
105 FEEDWORDPRESS," followed by an extraordinarily long dump of mostly
106 incomprehensible diagnostic information, you'll be happy to know that
107 the condition causing these notices has been eliminated. In the few
108 cases where errors may still crop up with database insertions,
109 FeedWordPress will now produce a significantly more manageable and more
110 useful diagnostic message.
111
112 * BUGFIX: NEW POSTS FAILING TO APPEAR IN A CLEANLY-INSTALLED FEEDWORDPRESS
113 SYSTEM. If you encountered a recurring problem with FeedWordPress
114 failing to import new posts, after a clean install of FeedWordPress
115 (i.e., not an upgrade from a previous version), this problem may have
116 been the result of a bug with author-handling which has now been fixed
117 in the 2011.0512 release. (If the problem does *not* go away with the
118 upgrade, this version also includes significant improvements to the
119 Diagnostics system, which will help track down what *is* causing it
120 in your particular case.)
121
122 * PERFORMANCE: New handling of update hashes allows FeedWordPress to avoid
123 a certain kind of infinite loop, caused when two more more different
124 syndicated feeds each carried a version of the same item (for example,
125 because it appeared on two different aggregator feeds that you're
126 syndicating). In previous versions, when this kind of loop cropped up,
127 syndicated posts could pile up an indefinitely large number of revisions
128 -- each revision alternating between the version from each of the two
129 feeds where it appeared -- which would, over time, dramatically inflate
130 the size of the database, and kill the performance of queries on the
131 post table. This issue has been resolved: revisions of the post that
132 have been syndicated once will not be re-syndicated over and over again.
133
134 * AUTHOR LISTS: Lists of authors presented on the Author settings pages
135 should now be easier to scan through, with author names arranged in
136 alphabetical order.
137
138 * FEED ITEM DATE PARSING: More tweaks to make date-time handling more
139 resilient when feeds provide broken or weird values for the timestamps
140 on syndicated items. FWP will now attempt to work around unparseable
141 timezone values.
142
143 * AUTHOR MATCHING: Now attempts to match author names against the WP login
144 name in addition to display_name; when creating user record, also fills
145 in some best-guess values for nickname, firstname and lastname. Also
146 properly picks up Atom 1.0 author/uri data from feed.
147
148 * COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress has been successfully tested for
149 compatibility with recent releases of WordPress, up to version 3.1.2.
150
151 = 2011.0211 =
152
153 * BUGFIX: DUPLICATE POSTS WHEN GUIDS ARE TOO LONG: When feeds included
154 exceptionally long GUIDs, FeedWordPress could occasionally get into
155 a situation where posts with the long GUIDs would be duplicated over
156 and over again with each update (because FWP failed to store the full
157 GUID, due to length constraints in the relevant database tables).
158 Without the full GUID, FWP would not know that the post had already
159 been syndicated once. This bug has been fixed, and should no longer
160 produce duplicate posts.
161
162 * HTTP TIMEOUT SETTING: If you are frequently running into timeout
163 problems with one or more of the feeds you syndicate, FWP now allows you
164 to adjust the timeout for HTTP requests using a global or feed-by-feed
165 setting.
166
167 * HTTP GET PARAMETERS: You can now temporarily or permanently add HTTP
168 GET parameters to a subscription using an interface in Syndication -->
169 Feeds & Updates. This is especially helpful for making quick, short-term
170 changes to a subscription (for example, to pull in all the previous
171 items from a web service, before settling down to pulling in only newly
172 updated items).
173
174 * DIAGNOSTICS SYSTEM: Added several new diagnostics which are useful in
175 troubleshooting, and established a framework for add-on modules to hook
176 in with their own diagnostic messages.
177
178 * UI: Adjusted some internal coding, which should allow for settings
179 pages and add-ons to properly display multiple category pickers on a
180 single settings page.
181
182 * PHP4 COMPATIBILITY TWEAKS: This version makes some tweaks to the handling
183 of object references which should improve compatibility with older
184 versions of PHP. (Although, I should note, web hosts that still force
185 you to run under PHP 4 -- in 2011! -- are *bad web hosts*.)
186
187 * IMPROVED PERFORMANCE: This version eliminates a *major* performance drag
188 that shows up on sites with large numbers of users (due to some poor
189 decisions about where to place a user query, which caused the user table
190 to be scanned frequently when it did not need to be). If you experienced
191 serious problems with CPU load or slow database performance under
192 2010.0905, which kicked in immediately when FWP was loaded and tended
193 to disappear immediately if FWP was de-activated, it is likely that
194 upgrading away from 2010.0905 to the most recent version will resolve
195 your problem.
196
197
198 = 2010.0905 =
199
200 * BUGFIX: CATEGORIES AND TAGS CORRECTLY ASSIGNED IN AUTOMATIC UPDATES.
201 Version 2010.0903 switched over to a new way of assigning categories and
202 tags as part of its support for handling custom taxonomies.
203 Unfortunately, the method that it uses is subjected to some checks of
204 the current user's capabilities, which creates problems for posts that
205 are being inserted into the WordPress database when there *is* no
206 current user logged in (as, for example, when an update is being carried
207 out from a cron job or automatic update). The result was that posts
208 from cron jobs and automatic updates ended up with no Categories and no
209 Tags being assigned. This bug has now been fixed: in 2010.0905, Tags and
210 Categories should be correctly assigned to all posts, regardless of
211 whether they were added from manual updates, cron jobs, or automatic
212 updates.
213
214 = 2010.0903 =
215
216 * WORDPRESS 3 REQUIRED: Please note that this release of FeedWordPress
217 *requires* WordPress 3.0 or later. If you are currently using a 2.x
218 branch of WordPress, you will need to upgrade to WordPress 3 before you
219 can successfully upgrade FeedWordPress.
220
221 * BUGFIX: NO MORE DISAPPEARING "SYNDICATED SOURCES" PANEL; INTERNET
222 EXPLORER UI GLITCH APPARENTLY FIXED: Several users independently
223 reported a problem with FWP 2010.0623 and various versions of IE. A
224 problem with the HTML markup caused IE (but not Firefox or
225 Chrome) to completely hide the Syndicated Sources administration panel
226 (the main list of currently-syndicated sources, and the main location
227 for adding new sources, under the Syndication menu item) when a user
228 added their first syndicated feed. Maddeningly, the glitch seemed to
229 affect some IE users and not others: I was never able to reproduce the
230 problem for myself on my own machines. However, the markup of Syndicated
231 Sources has undergone significant changes and corrections since
232 2010.0623, and two independent sources who had been having this problem
233 confirm that they no longer encounter it with the updated version. For
234 the time being, I am going to declare this bug squashed.
235
236 * BUGFIX: MORE PROTECTION AGAINST FATAL ERRORS FROM PLUGGABLE VERSIONS OF
237 SimplePie: FeedWordPress now takes some precautions that should help to
238 better avoid conflicts for users who have installed pluggable versions
239 of SimplePie for another plugin or theme. (You may not know that you have
240 done this; but if you've been encountering fatal errors indicating that
241 you cannot redeclare class SimplePie, or something along those lines,
242 there is now a better chance that those fatal errors will be eliminated.
243
244 * PERFORMANCE: SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCED MEMORY CONSUMPTION FOR LARGE UPDATES:
245 FeedWordPress is still a memory-hungry little module, especially when
246 you are dealing with very large feeds. However, users should notice a
247 significant reduction in memory overloads, especially if they update a
248 large number of feeds at once.
249
250 * USER INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: Nothing is radically different, but there's
251 been a fair amount of extra spit and polish added, including a convenient
252 new Dashboard widget that may save you a trip to the Syndication menu,
253 a lot of effort to make the relationship between global and feed-by-feed
254 settings more obvious to the user and more easily controllable, to make
255 navigation between settings pages easier, to sand off a few rough edges,
256 and to make other improvements on the margins. I hope you'll like how
257 it looks.
258
259 * ADDING MULTIPLE FEEDS: FeedWordPress now provides a convenient mode for
260 adding multiple feeds at once, using either a copy-and-pasted list, or
261 else an OPML file. Go to Syndication --> Syndicated Sources and check
262 out the two new buttons underneath the New Source input box. When you
263 have to add a number of feeds at once, this can save you considerable
264 time and trouble.
265
266 * IMPROVED HANDLING OF AUTHORS WITH DUPLICATE E-MAIL ADDRESS AND AUTHORS
267 WITH NAMES WRITTEN IN FOREIGN SCRIPTS: WordPress 3 is increasingly picky
268 about what it will accept for new author accounts, and some of the
269 conditions it imposes can cause error conditions that prevent posts from
270 being properly syndicated, or properly attributed, if authors happen to
271 have identical e-mail addresses, or if users are given usernames that are
272 written in non-Western scripts. FeedWordPress now handles these much
273 better, and systematically works to avoid clashes between syndicated
274 authors' account names or in their e-mail addresses, which should result
275 in significantly better results in mapping author names to WordPress
276 user accounts.
277
278 * MAPPING CATEGORIES ON SYNDICATED POSTS TO TAGS NOW BETTER SUPPORTED:
279 In previous versions, the only way for the Categories provided by a
280 syndicated feed to be mapped into Post Tags was to instruct FWP to
281 create new tags, rather than new categories, for unfamiliar categories
282 from the feed. This works fine if you want tags to be the default; but
283 if you want only a *specific* set of tags, there was no way to get them
284 without getting most or all other categories imported as tags. You can
285 now do this by creating a tag (under Posts ==> Post Tags) before
286 importing the post; when the syndicated category matches a pre-existing
287 tag, the incoming post will be tagged with that tag, without creating
288 a local Post Category.
289
290 * REL-TAG MICROFORMAT SUPPORT FOR INLINE TAGS: Syndicated posts that
291 contain inline tags, marked up using the Rel-Tag microformat
292 <http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag>, are now tagged with the tags
293 provided by Rel-Tag format links.
294
295 * MUCH GREATER CONTROL OVER CATEGORY AND TAG MAPPING: This is partly the
296 result of building in support for a potentially endless set of custom
297 taxonomies (see below), but in general there has been a great deal of
298 effort towards giving you more control over how categories and tags
299 provided by the feed are mapped into terms on the local blog. In
300 particular, you can now force FeedWordPress to create only categories
301 from categories and tags provided by the feed; or to create only tags;
302 or to search both categories and tags for a match; or you can simply
303 force it to drop all of the categories provided by the feed and use
304 only categories or tags that you explicitly provide. In addition, you
305 can now also choose whether to override global categories settings with
306 a local, feed-specific setting; or whether to *add together* *both* the
307 global categories and the local feed-specific categories -- depending
308 on whatever your use-case may demand.
309
310 * CUSTOM POST TYPES AND TAXONOMY SUPPORTS: This is mainly for the
311 super-geeky, but if you use other plugins or themes that make
312 significant use of WordPress's support for custom post types and custom
313 taxonomies, you may be pleased to find that FeedWordPress now allows you
314 to feed incoming posts into any custom feed type that you wish, and to
315 map categories and tags from the feed to custom taxonomies as well as
316 to the standard Category and Tag taxonomies.
317
318 * STORING NAMESPACED CUSTOM FEED ELEMENTS IN POST CUSTOM FIELDS: If you
319 would like to use FeedWordPress's support for storing custom meta-data
320 from feed elements in the custom fields for a post (for example, to
321 store geolocation data or iTunes media meta-data), you'll find that it's
322 now much easier for you to access these namespaced elements. You always
323 could access them, but in previous versions you might have to write
324 something ugly like $(/{http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#}lat)
325 just to get at the value of a `<geo:lat>` tag. Now, as long as you use
326 the same mnemonic codes that the feed producer used, you should always
327 be able to write a nice, simple expression like $(/geo:lat) to get the
328 value of a <geo:lat> tag.
329
330 * CUSTOM DIRECTORY STRUCTURE SUPPORT: if you poke at it enough, WordPress
331 is relatively flexible about where it should store admin interface code,
332 uploaded content, plugins, and a number of other things that occupy an
333 important place in the WordPress directory structure. Previous versions
334 of FeedWordPress encountered serious errors or broke entirely when used
335 with directory structures other than the default. This should now be
336 fixed: FWP now supports custom directory structures wherever WordPress
337 allows them to be customized, rather than depending on the default
338 locations. Enjoy your freedom!
339
340 * MANY NEW FILTERS AND API UTILITY FUNCTIONS FOR ADD-ON PROGRAMMERS: There
341 have been too many improvements to list them all in this ChangeLog, but
342 it means that much more power and ease for folks who are customizing
343 FeedWordPress through PHP filters or add-on modules. Fuller
344 documentation will be put up at the Wiki at feedwordpress.radgeek.org
345 soon.
346
347 = 2010.0623 =
348
349 * WORDPRESS 3.0 COMPATIBILITY / AUTHOR MAPPING INTERFACE ISSUES: I
350 resolved a couple of outstanding issues with the author mapping
351 interface (Syndication --> Authors), which were preventing new users
352 from being created correctly and author mapping rules from being set up
353 correctly. These partly had to do with new restrictions on user account
354 creation introduced in WordPress 3.0; anyway, they should now be fixed.
355
356 * MORE EFFICIENT SYNDICATED URL LOOKUPS: Several users noticed that the
357 bug fix introduced in 2010.0528 for compatibility with post-listing
358 plugins caused a lot more queries to the database in order to look up
359 numerical post IDs from the URL provided to the filter. This shouldn't
360 cause any major problems, but it is not as efficient as it could be; the
361 code now takes advantage of a more efficient way of doing things,
362 which usually will not require any additional database queries.
363
364 * SIMPLEPIE FEED UPDATE ISSUES: If you have been having significant
365 problems with getting feeds to update correctly, this may be the result
366 of some bugs in the implementation of SimplePie caching that ships with
367 WordPress (as of version 3.0). (You would most commonly experience this
368 error if you continually saw errors such as "No feed found at <...>" in
369 your updates.) Fortunately, SimplePie allows for a great deal of
370 extensibility and this allows me to work around the problem; these
371 error conditions should now be mostly eliminated when the underlying
372 feed is valid.
373
374 * UI: SHOW INACTIVE SOURCES: When you use the default unsubscribe option
375 -- which turns off the subscription to a feed while preserving the posts
376 from it and the syndication-related meta-data for the feed -- the
377 unsubscribed feed can now easily be viewed in a special "Inactive"
378 section of the Syndicated Sources page. (As a side benefit, if you've
379 accidentally, or only temporarily, turned off the subscription to a
380 feed, it is now much easier to restore the feed to being active, or to
381 delete it permanently, if you prefer.
382
383 * UI: FEED FINDER / SWITCH FEED INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: changes to styling
384 and options for the feed finder / switch feed, which should now make it
385 easier, in some cases, to find alternative feeds, and make interface
386 options more clearly visible.
387
388 * FILTERS: `syndicated_item_published` and `syndicated_item_updated` NOW
389 PROPERLY AFFECT THE DATING OF POSTS. These filters used to affect some
390 date-related settings, but not others -- and, most importantly, not the
391 final date that is set for a post's publication or last-modified date
392 in the WordPress database. Now, they do affect that, as they should.
393 (Filters should receive, and return, a long integer, representing a Unix
394 epoch relative timestamp.)
395
396 * MAGIC URL TO CLEAR THE CACHE: Suppose that you need to clear the feed
397 cache, for whatever reason; suppose, even, that you need to clear it on
398 a regular basis. One way you might do this is by logging into the
399 FeedWordPress administrative interface and going to Syndication -->
400 Performance. Another way you might do it, now, is to simply send an
401 HTTP request to a magic URL provided by FeedWordPress: if your blog is
402 at example.com, the URL would be <http://example.com/?clear_cache=1>
403
404 = 2010.0602 =
405
406 * CATEGORY BOX INTERFACE ELEMENT FIXED FOR WP 3.0: Stylesheet changes
407 between WordPress 2.9.x and the WordPress 3.0 RC caused the Categories
408 box under **Syndication --> Categories & Tags** to malfunction. This
409 has been fixed.
410
411 * LINK CATEGORY SELECTION BOX IN SYNDICATION ==> FEEDS FIXED FOR WP 2.8
412 AND 2.9: A WP 3.0 compatibility change introduced in 2010.0531
413 inadvertently broke the Syndicated Link Category selector under
414 Syndication --> Feeds & Updates in WP 2.8 and WP 2.9, causing the post
415 categories to be displayed in the selector rather than the link
416 categories. This should now be fixed so that the selector will work
417 correctly under both the current versions of WordPress and the 3.0 RC.
418
419 * MORE PERMISSIVE HANDLING OF FEEDS WITH BAD CONTENT-TYPE HEADERS: One of
420 the small advantages that MagpieRSS had over SimplePie is that it was
421 more tolerant about parsing well-formed feeds that the remote web server
422 happened to deliver with weird or incorrect HTTP Content-type headers.
423 In feeds affected by this problem, the new SimplePie parser would simply
424 fail to find a feed, due to its being led astray by the contents of the
425 Content-type header. This version includes an extension to SimplePie's
426 content-type sniffer that offers more permissive handling of the HTTP
427 headers.
428
429 * MORE FULL-TEXT "EXCERPTS" NOW PROPERLY SHORTENED. Version 2010.0528
430 introduced code to control for cases in which elements intended for
431 item summaries are (ill-advisedly) used to carry the full text of posts;
432 past versions of FeedWordPress would simply include the full text of the
433 post in the excerpt field, but newer versions now attempt to detect
434 this condition when it arises and to head it off, by blanking out the
435 excerpt field and filling it with an automatically generated short,
436 plain text excerpt from the full content. This release broadens the
437 test conditions that indicate when an excerpt field is treated as
438 identical to the full text of the post, and should therefore improve
439 the handling of some feeds (such as Google Reader feeds) where the full
440 text of each post was still appearing in the excerpt field.
441
442 * FILTERS: `syndicated_item_published` AND `syndicated_item_updated`
443 FILTERS NOW ALLOW FILTER AUTHORS TO CHANGE POST TIMESTAMPS. You can now
444 use the `syndicated_item_published` and `syndicated_item_updated` filter
445 hooks to write filters or add-ons which directly change the post date
446 and most-recently-updated timestamps on incoming syndicated posts. Props
447 to niska for pointing out where the filters needed to be applied in
448 order to change WordPress's internal timestamps for incoming posts.
449
450 = 2010.0531 =
451
452 * PERMALINK / CUSTOM FIELDS PROBLEM RESOLVED: An issue in 2010.0528 caused
453 some posts to be imported without the proper syndication-related
454 meta-data being attached (thus causing permalinks to point back to the
455 aggregator website rather than to the source website, among other
456 problems). This problem has been resolved (and a fix has been applied
457 which will resolve the problem for any posts affected by this problem,
458 if the original post is recent enough to still be available on the feed).
459
460 * UI: The "Back End" section has been split into two separate sections --
461 "Performance" (dealing with caching, database index, and other
462 performance tweaks), and "Diagnostics" (dealing with debug mode,
463 update logging, and a number of new diagnostic tests which I will be
464 rolling out over the next few releases).
465
466 * Several minor interface bug fixes and PHP warning notices eliminated.
467
468 = 2010.0528 =
469
470 #### Compatibility ####
471
472 * SIMPLEPIE IS NOW USED TO PARSE FEEDS; NO MORE MAGPIERSS UPGRADES NEEDED:
473 One of the biggest changes in this release is that FeedWordPress no
474 longer depends on MagpieRSS to parse feeds, and has switched to the much
475 more up-to-date and flexible SimplePie feed parser, which is included as
476 a standard part of WordPress versions 2.8 and later. Using SimplePie will
477 hopefully allow for better handling of feeds going further, and will
478 allow me greater flexibility in determining how exactly the feed parser
479 will operate. It also means that FeedWordPress no longer requires
480 special upgrades to the WordPress core MagpieRSS files, and should
481 eliminate quite a bit of complexity.
482
483 * MAGPIERSS COMPATIBILITY LAYER FOR EXISTING FILTERS AND ADD-ONS: However,
484 I have also implemented a compatibility layer to ensure that existing
485 filters and add-ons for FeedWordPress which depended on the MagpieRSS
486 data format *should not be broken* by the switch to SimplePie. Going
487 forward, I recommend that new filters and add-ons be written to take
488 advantage of the SimplePie object representations of items, feeds, etc.,
489 rather than the MagpieRSS arrays, but the MagpieRSS arrays will still
490 be available and older filters should continue to work as they have in
491 the past.
492
493 * COMPATIBILITY WITH WORDPRESS 2.9.x and 3.0: This release has been tested
494 for the existing WordPress 2.9.x branch and with the upcoming release of
495 WordPress 3.0. Changes in the user interface JavaScript between WordPress
496 2.8.x and WordPress 2.9 caused the tag box interface element to break in
497 the Syndication --> Categories & Tags settings page; changes in the API
498 functions for adding new authors caused fatal errors under certain
499 conditions in WordPress 3.0. These breakages have been fixed.
500
501 * DROPPED LEGACY SUPPORT FOR WORDPRESS PRIOR TO 2.8: Because SimplePie is
502 not included with versions of WordPress prior to 2.8, I have chosen to
503 drop legacy support for WordPress versions 1.5 through 2.7. If you are
504 using FeedWordPress with a version of WordPress before 2.8, you will
505 have to upgrade your installation of WordPress in order to take
506 advantage of this release.
507
508 * PHP 5.3 COMPATIBILITY: A couple of compatibility issues, which were
509 causing fatal errors amd ugly warnings for users of PHP 5.3,
510 have been eliminated.
511
512 #### Features and Processing ####
513
514 * INTERFACE REORGANIZATION: The interface restructuring, began with
515 Version 2009.0612, has been completed. Catch-all settings pages have
516 been eliminated entirely for pages that cover each aspect of handling
517 a feed: Feeds & Updates, Posts & Links, Authors, Categories & Tags,
518 and Back End handling of the database and diagnostic information.
519 Extensive new interface hooks allow add-on modules to significantly
520 change or extend the FeedWordPress admin interface and workflow.
521
522 * STORING INFORMATION FROM THE FEED IN CUSTOM FIELDS: Many users
523 have written to request the ability to store information from elements
524 in the feed in a custom field on each post. (So that, for example, if
525 post includes a `itunes:duration` element, you could store the contents
526 in a Custom Field called `duration` on the post (for a Theme to access
527 later). The Custom Post Settings under Syndication --> Posts & Links now
528 allow you to access any item or feed tag, using a syntax similar to
529 a much-simplified version of XPath. See Posts & Links settings for
530 details.
531
532 * UPDATE-FREEZING ON MANUALLY EDITED POSTS: FeedWordPress now allows you
533 to mark posts that have been manually edited, so that the changes you
534 make will not be overwritten by later updates from the feed. If you make
535 manual edits to a particular post, just check the "Manual editing"
536 checkbox in order to protect your changes from being overwritten. If you
537 want to block *all* posts from being updated after they are imported
538 for the first time, a new "Updated Posts" setting in Posts & Links
539 allows you to freeze all posts from a particular feed, or all syndicated
540 posts.
541
542 * SETTING: FEED-BY-FEED SETTINGS FOR WHERE PERMALINKS POINT TO: You've
543 always been able to tell FeedWordPress whether permalinks for posts
544 should point to the original source of the story or the local copy. Now
545 you can choose different policies for different feeds, instead of one
546 global policy for all feeds. (Of course, you can still use a global
547 default if you prefer.)
548
549 * SETTING: USER CONTROL OVER TIMING BASIS. You can now determine the
550 schedule on which feeds are considered ready to poll for updates --
551 by default feeds become ready for polling after about 1 hour. You can
552 now increase or decrease the time window under Syndication --> Feeds &
553 Updates. (However, please pay *CAREFUL ATTENTION* to the recommendations
554 and DO NOT set the scheduling lower than 60 minutes unless you are
555 ABSOLUTELY SURE that you have specific permission from webmaster who
556 provides that specific feed to poll more frequently than that. If you
557 set this too low (and about 60 minutes is the polite minimum if you
558 haven't been given a different figure), most webmasters will consider
559 the frequent hits on their server as rude, or even downright abusive.
560
561 * OTHER SETTINGS: New settings also include the ability to stop FWP from
562 resolving relative URLs within syndicated content, and the ability to
563 choose whether FeedWordPress should indicate the comment feed from the
564 original source, or the local comment feed, when providing the comment
565 feed URL for a syndicated post.
566
567 #### Parsing ####
568
569 * BETTER DATE HANDLING -- FEWER FLASHBACKS TO 1969 and 1970: FeedWordPress
570 has made some bugfixes and some improvements in the logic for parsing
571 dates. This should allow FeedWordPress to correctly parse more dates in
572 more feeds; and, in the last resort, when FeedWordPress fails to
573 correctly parse a date, to fall back to a more intelligent default. This
574 should hopefully avoid most or all error conditions that have resulted
575 in articles being erroneously dated to the dawn of the Unix epoch
576 (31 December 1969 or 1 January 1970).
577
578 * FULL-TEXT "EXCERPTS" NOW PROPERLY SHORTENED. Based on a straightforward
579 reading of the existing RSS specs, it's reasonable for the
580 rss:description element to be read as a plaintext summary or excerpt for
581 the item containing the description -- with the full text of the item,
582 if available, in another, better-suited element, such as the de facto
583 standard content:encoded extension element. The problem is that uses of
584 RSS rarely have much to do with anything like a straightforward reading
585 of the specs. As a result, many actual RSS producers in the wild put the
586 full text of the article in a description element. But since
587 FeedWordPress has treated this text as a summary, this produces
588 aggregated posts with lengthy "excerpts" containing the full text of the
589 article. This release of FeedWordPress fixes the problem by doing a
590 little digging before treating rss:description as a summary: if the
591 description element is used properly as a plain text summary, then
592 FeedWordPress will take the summary provided by the feed, rather than
593 recreating its own excerpt from the full text; but if an RSS item has no
594 full-text element other than description, FeedWordPress will treat the
595 description element as the full text of the article, and generate a
596 shortened excerpt automatically from that text.
597
598 #### API ####
599
600 * TEMPLATE API: new template tags `get_local_permalink()` and
601 `the_local_permalink()` allow you to access the permalink for a post on
602 your aggregator site, even when FeedWordPress is rewriting permalinks to
603 point to the original source site.
604
605 * NEW HOOKS FOR ADD-ONS AND FILTERS: I have added a number of new hooks
606 which allow add-on modules to filter more precisely, gather information
607 at more points, and to enhance the FeedWordPress admin interface. For
608 a list of new hooks and documentation, see the FeedWordPress
609 documentation wiki at
610 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/add-ons-and-filters>
611
612 * FILTER API: A number of new utility methods have been added to the
613 SyndicatedPost class to make it easier for filters and add-ons to
614
615 * FILTER API: Globals $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta DEPRECATED. These
616 global variables, originally introduced to allow filters access to
617 information about the source feed in `syndicated_item` filters (which
618 were passed in through global variables rather than as parameters
619 because of a bug in WP 1.5 which was then fixed in 1.5.1) have been
620 DEPRECATED. If you have any filters or add-ons which still depend on
621 these global variables, you should see about fixing them to access data
622 about the source feed using the SyndicatedPost::link element instead.
623 For documentation, see the FeedWordPress documentation wiki at
624 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedpost> and
625 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedlink>.
626
627 * DIAGNOSTICS: I've included a number of new diagnostic options and
628 messages, which should allow an experienced user to better investigate
629 any problems that may crop up.
630
631 #### Bug Fixes ####
632
633 * BUGFIX: & IN PERMALINKS NO LONGER CAUSING ATOM OR HTML VALIDATION
634 EFFORTS: Many users reported an issue in which syndicating a feed with
635 special XML characters in the URLs (& was the most common, since it is
636 used to separate HTTP GET parameters) would cause the aggregator's
637 feeds to produce invalid (malformed) XML. This update addresses the
638 issue in Atom feeds. Unfortunately, it has not been technically possible
639 to address the problem in RSS 2.0 feeds, due to limitations on
640 WordPress's internal templates for RSS feeds.
641
642 * BUGFIX: BROKEN URLS IN "POPULAR POSTS" AND SIMILAR PLUGINS SHOULD NO
643 LONGER BE BROKEN. A number of users noticed an issue where plugins and
644 templates that listed posts in locations outside of the post loop
645 (for example, "Popular Posts"-style plugins that listed posts in the
646 sidebar), often produced the wrong URL for post links. (Typically, all
647 the posts listed would get the same wrong URL.) This should now be
648 fixed. Thanks to Björn for sending in a quick fix!
649
650 * MINOR BUGFIXES: This release includes a number of fixes to minor bugs
651 and compatibility issues, including: silent failures of the "Syndicate"
652 button, "Illegal Offset Type" error messages from MagpieRSS, and others.
653
654 = 2009.0707 =
655
656 * BUGFIX: WORDPRESS 2.8 AJAX COMPATIBILITY ISSUES RESOLVED (blank or
657 truncated "Syndicated Sites" administration page): Due to changes in the
658 AJAX interface elements between WordPress 2.7 and WordPress 2.8, several
659 FeedWordPress users encountered an issue where the front "Syndication"
660 page in the FeedWordPress administrative interface would come up blank,
661 without the normal "Syndicated Sites" list and "Update" control, or
662 sometimes wth the boxes visible but one or both of them truncated, with
663 only the title bar. This issue should now be resolved: with the new
664 version of FeedWordPress, the compatibility issue that caused the
665 disappearance should be eliminated, and if boxes are shown with only
666 their handle visible, you should once again be able to drop down the
667 rest of the box by clicking once on its title bar.
668
669 * BUGFIX: TAG SETTING WIDGET FIXED. Due to changes in interface elements
670 between WordPress 2.7 and WordPress 2.8, people using FeedWordPress with
671 WordPress 2.8 found that the widget for setting tags to be applied to
672 all syndicated posts, or all syndicated posts from a particular feed,
673 no longer displayed "Add" and "Remove" buttons for individual tags. This
674 issue has now been fixed, and the tagging widget should once again work
675 more or less exactly like the tagging widget for individual posts in the
676 normal WordPress admin interface.
677
678 = 2009.0618 =
679
680 * BUGFIX: MYSTERY ERRORS WITH WITH WP_Http_Fsockopen HTTP TRANSPORT
681 ELIMINATED: Thanks to a combination of a subtle bug in FeedWordPress,
682 and changes to the HTTP transport code in WordPress, a number of users
683 encountered an error in which any time they attempted to add a new feed
684 through the FeedFinder interface, FeedWordPress would fail and display
685 an HTTP request failure diagnostic message. The subtle bug has been
686 fixed, and with it, most of these errors should now be eliminated.
687
688 Be sure to upgrade your MagpieRSS to the most recent MagpieRSS version
689 after you have insalled FeedWordPress 2009.0618, or this bug fix will
690 not take effect.
691
692 = 2009.0613 =
693
694 * INTERFACE/BUGFIX: WORDPRESS 2.8 CATEGORY BOX FIX. Thanks to a subtle
695 change in class names between the WordPress 2.7 and 2.8 stylesheets,
696 category boxes in the FeedWordPress settings interface tended to overflow
697 and have a lot of messy-looking overlapping text under WordPress 2.8.
698 This has now been fixed.
699
700 * FeedFinder FAILURE DIAGNOSTICS: When FWP's FeedFinder fails to find any
701 feeds at a given URL (for example, when you are trying to add a
702 subscription through the administrative interface and you run into an
703 error message), FeedWordPress now provides more diagnostic information
704 for the reasons behind the failure. If that helps you, great; if not,
705 it should help me respond more intelligently to your support request..
706
707 = 2009.0612 =
708
709 * WORDPRESS 2.8 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress 2009.0612 has been tested for
710 compatibility with the recent version 2.8 release of WordPress.
711
712 * INTERFACE RESTRUCTURING: In order to avoid settings posts from becoming
713 too crowded, and to modularize and better organize the user interface,
714 new "Posts" and "Categories & Tags" subpages have been created under the
715 "Syndication" menu. "Posts" controls settings for individal syndicated
716 posts (such as publication status, comment and ping status, whether or
717 not to use the original location of the post as the permalink, whether
718 or not to expose posts to formatting filters, and so on). "Categories &
719 Tags" controls settings for assigning new syndicated posts to categories
720 and tags, such as categories or tags to apply to all syndicated posts,
721 and how to handle categories that do not yet exist in the WordPress
722 database. These subpages, like the Authors subpage, handle settings for
723 the global default level and for individual syndicated feeds.
724
725 Corresponding to these new subpages, the old Syndication Settings and
726 Feed Settings subpages have been cleaned up and simplified, and now only
727 link to the appropriate subpages for options that can be set in the
728 Posts, Authors, or Categories & Tags subpages.
729
730 * FEATURE: ADD CUSTOM SETTINGS TO EACH SYNDICATED POST: FeedWordPress has
731 long had an interface for creating custom settings for each syndicated
732 *feed* which could be retrieved in templates using the `get_feed_meta()`
733 template function. But it had no feature for adding custom fields to
734 each individual syndicated *post*. In response to requests from users, I
735 have added the ability to apply custom fields to each individual
736 syndicated post, using the new Syndication --> Posts subpage. You can
737 set up custom fields to be applied to every syndicated post, or custom
738 fields to be applied to syndicated posts from a particular feed.
739
740 * FEATURE: MAGPIERSS VERSION CHECK AND UPGRADE: FeedWordPress will attempt
741 to determine whether or not you are using the upgraded version of
742 MagpieRSS that comes packaged with FeedWordPress. If not, it will throw
743 an error on admin pages, and, if you are a site administrator, it will
744 give you the option to ignore the error message, or to attempt an
745 automatic upgrade (using a native file copy). If the file copy fails,
746 FeedWordPress will offer some guidance on how to perform the upgrade
747 manually.
748
749 * BLANK POSTS PROBLEM NO LONGER OCCURS WITH OLD & BUSTED MAGPIERSS: Due
750 to the fact that I relied on a content normalization that occurs in my
751 upgraded version of MagpieRSS, but not in the old & busted version of
752 MagpieRSS that ships with WordPress, until this version, if you tried to
753 syndicate an Atom feed without having performed the (*strongly
754 recommended*) MagpieRSS upgrade, all of the posts would come up with
755 completely blank contents. That's not because MagpieRSS couldn't read
756 the data, but rather because the new Magpie version puts that data in a
757 location where the old version doesn't, and I was only looking in that
758 newer location. Now it checks for both, meaning that posts will continue
759 to display their contents even if you don't upgrade MagpieRSS. (But you
760 **really should** upgrade it, anyway.)
761
762 * BUGFIX: RELATIVE URI RESOLUTION FOR POST CONTENT RESTORED. Some time
763 back, I added support for resolving relative URIs against xml:base on
764 feeds that support it to the MagpieRSS upgrade in FeedWordPress. Then I
765 took out code that did the same thing from the main FeedWordPress code.
766 Of course, the problem is that some people, even though it is clearly
767 stupid or evil to do so, still include relative URIs for images or links
768 in posts on feed formats that do *not* adequately support xml:base
769 (notably, RSS 2.0 feeds). In response to a user request, I have added
770 this functionality back in, so that MagpieRSS will resolve any relative
771 URIs that it knows how to resolve using xml:base, and then FeedWordPress
772 will attempt to resolve any relative URIs that are left over afterwards.
773
774 * BUGFIX: INTERFACE OPTION FOR SETTING SYNDICATED POST PUBLICATION STATUS
775 ON A FEED-BY-FEED BASIS HAS BEEN RESTORED: Due to a version-checking
776 bug, users of WordPress 2.7.x lost an option from the "Edit a syndicated
777 feed" interface which allowed them to determine whether newly syndicated
778 posts should be published immediately, held as "Pending Review," saved
779 as drafts, or saved as private posts. (The option to change this
780 setting globally remained in place, but users could no longer set it on
781 a feed-by-feed basis.) The version-checking bug has been fixed, and the
782 option has been restored.
783
784 * BUGFIX: "ARE YOU SURE?" FATAL ERROR ELIMINATED AND SECURITY IMPROVED:
785 Under certain circumstances (for example, when users have configured
786 their browser or proxy not to send HTTP Referer headers, for privacy or
787 other reasons), many features in the FeedWordPress administrative
788 interface (such as adding new feeds or changing settings) would hit a
789 fatal error, displaying only a cryptic message reading "Are you sure?"
790 and a blank page following it. This problem has been eliminated by
791 taking advantage of WordPress's nonce functions, which allow the
792 security check which ran into this error to work properly even without
793 receiving an HTTP Referer header. (N.B.: WordPress's nonce functions
794 were first introduced in WordPress 2.0.3. If you're using FeedWordPress
795 with an older version of WordPress, there's no fix for this problem:
796 you'll just need to turn Referer headers back on. Sorry.)
797
798 * BUGFIX: MANUALLY-ALTERED POST STATUS, COMMENT STATUS, AND PING STATUS NO
799 LONGER REVERTED BY POST UPDATES: If you manually altered the post status,
800 comment status, or ping status of a syndicated post from what it was set
801 to when first syndicated -- for example, if you had a feed that was set
802 to bring in new posts as "Pending Review," and you then marked some of
803 the pending posts as "Published" and others as "Unpublished" -- then
804 in previous versions of FeedWordPress, these manual changes to the
805 status would be lost -- so that, for example, your Published or Unpublished
806 articles would revert to Pending Review -- if the source feed made any
807 upates to the item. This could make the Pending Review feature both
808 unreliable and also extremely frustrating to work with. The good news is
809 that this bug has since been fixed: if you manually update the status
810 of a post, it will no longer be reverted if or when the post is updated.
811
812 * BUGFIX: OCCASIONAL FATAL ERROR ON UPDATE ELIMINATED: Under certain
813 limited conditions (specifically, when both the title and the content of
814 a post to be updated are empty), an attempt to update the post would
815 result in a fatal error. This has been fixed.
816
817 * INTERFACE: "CONFIGURE SETTINGS" CONVENIENCE LINK ADDED TO CONFIRMATION
818 MESSAGE WHEN A NEW FEED IS ADDED: When you add a new subscription to
819 FeedWordPress, the message box that appears to confirm it now includes a
820 handy link to the feed's settings subpage, so that you can quickly set
821 up any special settings you may want to set up for the new feed, without
822 having to hunt through the list of all your other subscriptions to pick
823 out the new one.
824
825 * INTERFACE: SIMPLIFYING AND CLARIFYING AUTOMATIC UPDATES SETTINGS. I have
826 removed an interval setting for the cronless automatic updates which has
827 confused many FeedWordPress users. In past versions of FWP, when you
828 turned on automatic updates, you would be presented with a time interval
829 setting which controlled how often FeedWordPress would check for feeds
830 ready to be polled for updates. (That is, it DID NOT control how often
831 feeds *would be polled*; it controlled how often FeedWordPress would
832 *check* for feeds that *had become ready to poll*. The schedule on which
833 feeds became ready for polling was still controlled either by requests
834 encoded in elements within the feed itself, or else according to an
835 internal calculation within FeedWordPress, averaging out to about 1 hour,
836 if the feed did not include any scheduling request elements.) Since many
837 users very often (and understandably) confused the purpose of this
838 setting, and since the setting is for a feature that's actually very
839 unlikely to require any manual control by the user, I have removed the
840 setting; FeedWordPress now simply uses the default value of checking for
841 feeds to poll every 10 minutes.
842
843 * FEEDFINDER PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT: FeedWordPress's FeedFinder class
844 now uses `array_unique()` to make sure that it doesn't waste time
845 repeatedly iterating over and polling the same URI. Props to Camilo
846 (<http://projects.radgeek.com/2008/12/14/feedwordpress-20081214/#comment-20090122160414>).
847
848 = 2008.1214 =
849
850 * WORDPRESS 2.7 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress has been tested for
851 compatibility with the newly released WordPress 2.7. WordPress 2.7 has
852 deprecated the Snoopy library for HTTP requests, which caused a fatal
853 error for users who had not installed the MagpieRSS upgrade (or whose
854 installation of the MagpieRSS upgrade was overwritten by a recent update
855 of WordPress). FeedWordPress now handles things gracefully when Snoopy
856 is not immediately available.
857
858 * INTERFACE SPIFFED UP: Interface elements have been updated so that
859 FeedWordPress's management interface fits in more naturally with the
860 WordPress 2.7 interface (including a new logo and a number of small
861 interface tweaks).
862
863 * BUG WITH TAGS FOR SYNDICATED ARTICLES FIXED: Several users encountered a
864 bug with the option to add tags to all syndicated posts under
865 Syndication --> Settings -- if you told FeedWordPress to add more than
866 one tag to all syndicated posts, instead of doing so correctly, it would
867 add a *single* tag instead, whose name was composed of the names of all
868 the tags you asked it to add. This bug was the result of nothing more
869 dignified than a typographical error on my part. It has now been fixed.
870
871 * MORE INFORMATION AVAILABLE WHEN FEEDWORDPRESS CAN'T FIND A FEED: When
872 you enter a URL for a new syndication source, FeedWordPress uses a
873 simple feed-finding algorithm (originally based on Mark Pilgrim's
874 Universal Feed Finder) to try to determine whether the URL is the URL
875 for a feed, or, if the URL points to an ordinary website rather than to
876 a feed, whether there is a feed for that website. All well and good, but
877 if FeedWordPress failed to find a feed, for whatever reason, it would
878 typically return nothing more than a nasty little note to the effect of
879 "no feed found," without any explanation of what went wrong.
880 FeedWordPress now keeps track of error conditions from the HTTP
881 requests that it uses in the course of looking for the feed, and so may
882 be able to give you a bit more information about the nature of the
883 problem if something goes wrong.
884
885
886 = 2008.1105 =
887
888 * INTERFACE RESTRUCTURING AND SYNDICATION --> AUTHORS PAGE: As a first
889 step towards modularizing and better organizing the user interface, a
890 new "Authors" subpage has been created under the Syndication menu, which
891 controls settings for syndicated authors, both at the global default
892 level and at level of individual syndicated feeds.
893
894 * BUG RELATED TO THE ATTRIBUTION OF POSTS TO THE WRONG AUTHOR FIXED: Some
895 users encountered an issue in which posts by different authors on
896 different blogs -- especially blogs generated by Blogger -- were
897 mistakenly attributed to a single author. The problem was caused by the
898 way in which FeedWordPress matches syndicated authors to user accounts
899 in the WordPress database: normally, if two feeds each list an author
900 with the same e-mail address, they are counted as being the same person.
901 Normally this works well, but it creates an issue in cases where
902 blogging software assigns a single anonymous e-mail address to users who
903 do not want their real e-mail address published. This is, for example,
904 what Blogger does (by giving all users a default e-mail address of
905 <noreply@blogger.com> if they don't want their own e-mail address
906 listed). FeedWordPress now allows the user to correct for this problem
907 with a couple of new settings under **Syndication --> Authors**, which
908 allow users to turn off e-mail based author matching for particular
909 addresses, or, if desired, to turn it off entirely. By default, e-mail
910 based author matching is still turned on, but disabled for a list of
911 known generic e-mail addresses. Right now, the "list" consists entirely
912 of <noreply@blogger.com>; if you know other addresses that should be
913 added, please [contact me](http://radgeek.com/contact) to let me know.
914
915 Please note that if you have already encountered this issue on your
916 blog, upgrading FeedWordPress will prevent it from re-occurring in the
917 future, but you still need to do two other things to fix the existing
918 problem on your blog.
919
920 First, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to
921 change the existing author mapping rules to re-map a a syndicated
922 author's name to the proper target account. Go to **Syndication -->
923 Authors**, select the feed you want to change from the drop-down list,
924 and then change the settings under the "Syndicated Authors" section.
925 (You will probably need to select "will be assigned to a new user..." to
926 create a new user account with the appropriate name.)
927
928 Second, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to
929 re-assign already-syndicated posts that were mis-attributed to the
930 correct author. You can do that from **Syndication --> Authors** by
931 using the author re-assignment feature, described below.
932
933 * AUTHOR RE-ASSIGNMENT FOR A PARTICULAR FEED: The author settings page
934 for each syndicated feed, under **Syndication --> Authors**, now
935 includes an section titled "Fixing mis-matched authors," which provides
936 an interface for re-assigning or deleting all posts attributed to a
937 particular author on a particular feed.
938
939 * SUPPORT FOR `<atom:source>` ELEMENT IN SYNDICATED FEEDS: Some feeds
940 (for example, those produced by FeedWordPress) aggregate content from
941 several different sources, and include information about the original
942 source of the post in an `<atom:source>` element. A new setting under
943 **Syndication --> Options** allows you to control what FeedWordPress
944 will report as the source of posts syndicated from aggregator feeds in
945 your templates and feeds: you can have FeedWordPress report that the
946 source of a post is the aggregator feed itself, or you can have it
947 report that the source of a post is the original source that the
948 aggregator originally syndicated the post from.
949
950 By default, FeedWordPress will report the aggregator, not the original
951 source, as the source of a syndicated item.
952
953 * LOAD BALANCING AND TIME LIMITING FEATURES FOR UPDATES: Some users have
954 encountered issues due to running up against PHP execution time limits
955 during the process of updating large syndicated feeds, or a very large
956 set of syndicated feeds. FeedWordPress now has a feature that allows you
957 to limit the total amount of time spent updating a feed, through the
958 "Time limit on updates" setting under **Syndication --> Options**. By
959 turning on this setting and adjusting the time limit to a low enough
960 figure to avoid your PHP installation's time-out setting. (PHP execution
961 time limits are usually in the vicinity of 30 seconds, so an update
962 time limit of 25 seconds or so should provide plenty of time for updates
963 while allowing a cushion of time for other, non-update-related functions
964 to do their work.)
965
966 If feed updates are interrupted by the time limit, FeedWordPress uses
967 some simple load balancing features to make sure that updates to other
968 feeds will not be blocked by the time-hogging feed, and will also make
969 sure that when the interrupted update is resumed, FeedWordPress will
970 skip ahead to resume processing items at the point at which it was
971 interrupted last time, so that posts further down in the feed will
972 eventually get processed, and not get blocked by the amount of time it
973 takes to process the items higher up in the feed.
974
975 * `guid` INDEX CREATION BUTTON: FeedWordPress frequently issues queries on
976 the `guid` column of the WordPress posts database (since it uses post
977 guid URIs to keep track of which posts it has syndicated). In very large
978 FeedWordPress installations, you can often significantly improve
979 performance by creating a database index on the `guid` column, but
980 normally you would need to poke around with MySQL or a tool like
981 phpMyAdmin to do this. FeedWordPress can now save you the trouble: to
982 create an index on the `guid` column, just go to
983 **Syndication --> Options**, and mash the button at the bottom of the
984 "Back End" section.
985
986 = 2008.1101 =
987
988 * INTERFACE BUG THAT PREVENTED ADDING NEW SITES FIXED: The UI reforms in
989 FWP 2008.1030 unintentionally introduced a bug that prevents clean
990 installations of FeedWordPress from providing an input box for adding
991 new feeds to the list of syndicated feeds. This bug has been fixed.
992
993 = 2008.1030 =
994
995 * WORDPRESS 2.6 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with
996 WordPress 2.6, and should work more or less seamlessly with the new post
997 revision system. A bug which caused multiple new revisions to be created
998 for posts on certain feeds, regardless of whether or not the item had
999 been updated, has been fixed.
1000
1001 * INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: The user interface has been substantially
1002 restyled to fit in better with the visual style of WordPress 2.5 and
1003 2.6.
1004
1005 * YOUTUBE BUG FIXED: POSTS SYNDICATED THROUGH AN AUTOMATIC UPDATE ARE NO
1006 LONGER STRIPPED OF `<OBJECT>` TAGS AND CERTAIN OTHER HTML ELEMENTS: Due
1007 to the way that some versions of WordPress process posts that are
1008 inserted into the database when no user is logged in, many users
1009 experienced an issue where YouTube videos and other content using the
1010 HTML `<object>` tag would be stripped out of posts that were syndicated
1011 during an automatic update. (Posts that were syndicated through manual
1012 updates from within the WordPress Dashboard were not affected, because
1013 the issue does not arise when an update is executed under a logged-in
1014 administrator's credentials.) This bug has now been fixed; YouTube
1015 videos and other content using `<object>` tags should now appear
1016 properly in syndicated posts, regardless of the way in which the post
1017 was syndicated.
1018
1019 * AJAX BUGS FIXED: Bugs which blocked the normal operation of WordPress
1020 2.5's AJAX interface elements when FeedWordPress was activated have been
1021 fixed.
1022
1023 * TAG SUPPORT: A couple of features have been introduced to take advantage
1024 of the tagging features in WordPress 2.3.x, 2.5.x, and 2.6.x. Now, when
1025 unfamiliar categories are encountered for posts on a feed, you can
1026 choose for FeedWordPress (1) to drop the category; (2) to drop the
1027 category and to filter out any post that does not match at least one
1028 familiar category; (3) to create a new category with that name, or,
1029 now, you can also have FeedWordPress (4) create a new *tag* with that
1030 name. This option can be set site-wide under Syndication --> Options,
1031 or it can be set on a feed-by-feed basis in a feed's Edit screen.
1032
1033 In addition, you can now set particular tags to apply to all incoming
1034 syndicated posts, under Syndication --> Options, or you can set tags
1035 to apply to all incoming syndicated posts from a particular feed in that
1036 feed's Edit screen.
1037
1038 * FORMATTING FILTERS: There is a new option available under Syndication ->
1039 Options which allows users to choose whether or not to expose syndicated
1040 posts to being altered by formatting filters. By default, FeedWordPress
1041 has always protected syndicated posts (which are already in display-ready
1042 HTML when they are syndicated) from being reformatted by formatting
1043 filters. However, this approach means that certain plugins which depend
1044 on formatting filters (for example, to add "Share This" bars or relevant
1045 links to the end of a post) are blocked from working on any syndicated
1046 posts. If you want to use one of these plugins together with
1047 FeedWordPress, you can now do so by changing the "Formatting Filters"
1048 setting from "Protect" to "Expose."
1049
1050 * `<atom:source>` ELEMENTS NOW INCLUDED IN ATOM FEED: Atom 1.0 provides
1051 a standard method for aggregators to indicate information about the original source of
1052 a syndicated post, using the `<atom:source>` element. FeedWordPress now
1053 introduces standard `<atom:source>` elements including the title, homepage, and
1054 feed URI of the source from which a syndicated post was syndicated. Cf.
1055 <http://www.atomenabled.org/developers/syndication/atom-format-spec.php#element.source>
1056
1057 * MODULARIZATION OF CODE: The code for different elements of FeedWordPress
1058 has been broken out into several modules for easier inspection,
1059 documentation, and maintenance of the code.
1060
1061 * VERSIONING SCHEME CHANGED: FeedWordPress's feature set has proven stable
1062 enough that it can now be removed from beta status; a good thing, since
1063 I was very quickly running out of version numbers to use. New releases
1064 of FeedWordPress will have version numbers based on the date of their
1065 release.
1066
1067 = 0.993 =
1068
1069 * WORDPRESS 2.5.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible
1070 with WordPress 2.5.1.
1071
1072 * WORDPRESS 2.5 INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: FeedWordPress's Dashboard
1073 interface has undergone several cosmetic changes that should help it
1074 integrate better with the WordPress Dashboard interface in WordPress
1075 version 2.5.x.
1076
1077 * SYNDICATED POSTS CAN BE MARKED AS "PENDING REVIEW": WordPress 2.3 users
1078 can now take advantage of WordPress's new "Pending Review" features for
1079 incoming syndicated posts. Posts marked as "Pending Review" are not
1080 published immediately, but are marked as ready to be reviewed by an
1081 Administrator or Editor, who can then choose to publish the post or
1082 hold it back. If you want to review syndicated posts from a particular
1083 feed, or from all feeds, before they are posted, then use
1084 Syndication --> Syndicated Sites --> Edit or Syndication --> Options to
1085 change the settings for handling new posts.
1086
1087 * AWARE OF NEW URI FOR del.icio.us FEEDS: Previous releases of
1088 FeedWordPress already automatically split del.icio.us tags up
1089 appropriately appropriately when generating categories. (del.icio.us
1090 feeds smoosh all the tags into a single `<dc:subject>` element,
1091 separated by spaces; FeedWordPress un-smooshes them into multiple
1092 categories by separating them at whitespace.) Unfortunately, del.icio.us
1093 recently broke the existing behavior by changing host names for their
1094 feeds from del.icio.us to feeds.delicious.com. Version 0.993 accounts
1095 for the new host name and un-breaks the tag splitting.
1096
1097 = 0.992 =
1098
1099 * AUTHOR RE-MAPPING: FeedWordPress now offers considerable control over
1100 how author names on a feed are translated into usernames within the
1101 WordPress database. When a post by an unrecognized author comes in,
1102 Administrators can now specify any username as the default username to
1103 assign the post to by setting the option in Syndication --> Options
1104 (formerly FeedWordPress only allowed you to assign such posts to user
1105 #1, the site administrator). Administrators can also create re-mapping
1106 rules for particular feeds (under Syndication --> Syndicated Sites -->
1107 Edit), so that (for example) any posts attributed to "Administrator"
1108 on the feed <http://praxeology.net/blog/feed/> will be assigned to
1109 a user named "Roderick T. Long," rather than a user named
1110 "Administrator." These settings also allow administrators to filter out
1111 posts by particular users, and to control what will happen when
1112 FeedWordPress encounters a post by an unrecognized user on that
1113 particular feed.
1114
1115 * BUG RELATED TO URIS CONTAINING AMPERSAND CHARACTERS FIXED: A bug in
1116 WordPress 2.x's handling of URIs in Blogroll links created problems for
1117 updating any feeds whose URIs included an ampersand character, such as
1118 Google News RSS feeds and other feeds that have multiple parameters
1119 passed through HTTP GET. If you experienced this bug, the most likely
1120 effect was that FeedWordPress simply would not import new posts from a
1121 feed when instructred to do so, returning a "0 new posts" response. In
1122 other cases, it might lead to unpredictable results from feed updates,
1123 such as importing posts which were not contained in the feed being
1124 syndicated, but which did appear elsewhere on the same website. This bug
1125 has, hopefully, been resolved, by correcting for the bug in WordPress.
1126
1127 = 0.991 =
1128
1129 * WORDPRESS MU COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with
1130 recent releases of WordPress MU. Once FeedWordPress is made available
1131 as a plugin, each individual blog can choose to activate FeedWordPress
1132 and syndicate content from its own set of contributors.
1133
1134 * DISPLAY OF MAGPIE WARNINGS: A number of MagpieRSS warnings or error
1135 messages that were displayed when performing an automatic update are
1136 no longer displayed, unless debugging parameters have been explicitly
1137 enabled.
1138
1139 * BUG RELATED TO INTERNATIONAL CHARACTERS IN AUTHOR NAMES FIXED: Due to a
1140 subtle incompatability between the way that FeedWordPress generated new
1141 user information, and the way that WordPress 2.0 and later added new
1142 authors to the database, FeedWordPress might end up creating duplicate
1143 authors, or throwing a critical error message, when it encountered
1144 authors whose names included international characters. This
1145 incompatability has now been fixed; hopefully, authors with
1146 international characters in their names should now be handled properly.
1147
1148 * `<media:content>` BUG IN MAGPIERSS FIXED: A bug in MagpieRSS's handling
1149 of namespaced elements has been fixed. Among other things, this bug
1150 caused items containing a Yahoo MediaRSS `<media:content>` element (such
1151 as many of the feeds produced by wordpress.com) to be represented
1152 incorrectly, with only a capital "A" where the content of the post
1153 should have been. Feeds containing `<media:content>` elements should now
1154 be syndicated correctly.
1155
1156 * update_feedwordpress PARAMETER: You can now use an HTTP GET parameter
1157 (`update_feedwordpress=1`) to request that FeedWordPress poll its feeds
1158 for updates. When used together with a crontab or other means of
1159 scheduling tasks, this means that you can keep your blog automatically
1160 updated on a regular schedule, even if you do not choose to use the
1161 cron-less automatic updates option.
1162
1163 * Some minor interface-related bugs were also fixed.
1164
1165
1166 = 0.99 =
1167
1168 Version 0.99 adds several significant new features, fixes some bugs, and
1169 provides compatability with WordPress 2.2.x and 2.3.x.
1170
1171 * WORDPRESS 2.2 AND 2.3 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be
1172 compatible with WordPress version 2.2 and the upcoming WordPress
1173 version 2.3. In particular, it has been tested extensively against
1174 WordPress 2.2.3 and WordPress 2.3 Release Candidate 1.
1175
1176 * AUTOMATIC UPDATES WITHOUT CRON: FeedWordPress now allows you to
1177 automatically schedule checks for new posts without using external task
1178 scheduling tools such as cron. In order to enable automatic updates, go
1179 to **Syndication --> Options** and set "Check for new posts" to
1180 "automatically." For details, see "Automatic Feed Updates" in
1181 README.text.
1182
1183 An important side-effect of the changes to the update system is that if
1184 you were previously using the cron job and the `update-feeds.php` script
1185 to schedule updates, you need to change your cron set-up. The old
1186 `update-feeds.php` script no longer exists. Instead, if you wish to use
1187 a cron job to guarantee updates on a particular schedule, you should
1188 have the cron job fetch the front page of your blog (for example, by
1189 using `curl http://www.zyx.com/blog/ > /dev/null`) instead of activating
1190 the `update-feeds.php` script. If automatic updates have been enabled,
1191 fetching the front page will automatically trigger the update process.
1192
1193 * INTERFACE REORGANIZATION: All FeedWordPress functions are now located
1194 under a top-level "Syndication" menu in the WordPress Dashboard. To
1195 manage the list of syndicated sites, manually check for new posts on
1196 one or more feeds, or syndicate a new site, you should use the main page
1197 under **Syndication**. To change global settings for FeedWordPress,
1198 you should use **Syndication --> Options**.
1199
1200 * FILE STRUCTURE REORGANIZATION: Due to a combination of changing styles
1201 for FeedWordPress plugins and lingering bugs in the FeedWordPress admin
1202 menu code, the code for FeedWordPress is now contained in two different
1203 PHP files, which should be installed together in a subdirectory of your
1204 plugins directory named `feedwordpress`. (See README.text for
1205 installation and upgrade instructions relating to the change.)
1206
1207 * MULTIPLE CATEGORIES SETTING: Some feeds use non-standard methods to
1208 indicate multiple categories within a single category element. (The most
1209 popular site to do this is del.icio.us, which separates tags with a
1210 space.) FeedWordPress now allows you to set an optional setting, for any
1211 feed which does this, indicating the character or characters used to
1212 divide multiple categories, using a Perl-compatible regular expression.
1213 (In the case of del.icio.us feeds, FeedWordPress will automatically use
1214 \s for the pattern without your having to do any further configuration.)
1215 To turn this setting on, simply use the "Edit" link for the feed that
1216 you want to turn it on for.
1217
1218 * REGULAR EXPRESSION BUG FIXED: Eliminated a minor bug in the regular
1219 expressions for e-mail addresses (used in parsing RSS `author`
1220 elements), which could produce unsightly error messages for some users
1221 parsing RSS 2.0 feeds.
1222
1223 * DATE / UPDATE BUG FIXED: A bug in date handling was eliminated that may
1224 have caused problems if any of (1) WordPress, or (2) PHP, or (3) your
1225 web server, or (4) your MySQL server, has been set to use a different
1226 time zone from the one that any of the others is set to use. If
1227 FeedWordPress has not been properly updating updated posts, or has been
1228 updating posts when there shouldn't be any changes for the update, this
1229 release may solve that problem.
1230
1231 * GOOGLE READER BUGS FIXED: A couple of bugs that made it difficult for
1232 FeedWordPress to interact with Google Reader public feeds have been
1233 fixed. Firstly, if you encountered an error message reading "There was a
1234 problem adding the newsfeed. [SQL: ]" when you tried to add the feed,
1235 the cause of this error has been fixed. Secondly, if you succeeded in
1236 getting FeedWordPress to check a Google Reader feed, only to find that
1237 the title of posts had junk squashed on to the end of them, that bug
1238 has been fixed too. To fix this bug, you must install the newest version
1239 of the optional MagpieRSS upgrade.
1240
1241 * FILTER PARAMETERS: Due to an old, old bug in WordPress 1.5.0 (which was
1242 what was available back when I first wrote the filter interface),
1243 FeedWordPress has traditionally only passed one parameter to
1244 syndicated_item and syndicated_post filters functions -- an array
1245 containing either the Magpie representation of a syndicated item from
1246 the feed, or the database representation of a post about to be inserted
1247 into the WordPress database. If you needed information about the feed
1248 that the item came from, this was accessible only through a pair of
1249 global variables, $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta.
1250
1251 Since it's been a pretty long time since WordPress 1.5.0 was in
1252 widespread usage, I have gone ahead and added an optional second
1253 parameter to the invocation of the syndicated_item and syndicated_post
1254 filters. If you have written a filter for FeedWordPress that uses either
1255 of these hooks, you can now register that filter to accept 2 parameters.
1256 If you do so, the second parameter will be a SyndicatedPost object,
1257 which, among other things, allows you to access information about the
1258 feed from which an item is syndicated using the $post->feed and the
1259 $post->feedmeta elements (where $post is the name of the second
1260 parameter).
1261
1262 NOTE THAT THE OLD GLOBAL VARIABLES ARE STILL AVAILABLE, for the time
1263 being at least, so existing filters will not break with the upgrade.
1264 They should be considered deprecated, however, and may be eliminated in
1265 the future.
1266
1267 * FILTER CHANGE / BUGFIX: the array that is passed as the first argument
1268 syndicated_post filters no longer is no longer backslash-escaped for
1269 MySQL when filters are called. This was originally a bug, or an
1270 oversight; the contents of the array should only be escaped for the
1271 database *after* they have gone through all filters. IF YOU HAVE WRITTEN
1272 ANY syndicated_post FILTERS THAT PRESUME THE OLD BEHAVIOR OF PASSING IN
1273 STRINGS THAT ARE ALREADY BACKSLASH-ESCAPED, UPDATE YOUR FILTERS
1274 ACCORDINGLY.
1275
1276 * OTHER MINOR BUGFIXES AND INTERNAL CHANGES: The internal architecture of
1277 FeedWordPress has been significantly changed to make the code more
1278 modular and clean; hopefully this should help reduce the number of
1279 compatibility updates that are needed, and make them easier and quicker
1280 when they are needed.
1281
1282 = 0.981 =
1283
1284 Version 0.981 is a narrowly targeted bugfix and compatibility release, whose
1285 main purpose is to resolve a major outstanding problem: the incompatibility
1286 between version 0.98 of WordPress and the recently released WordPress 2.1.
1287
1288 * WORDPRESS 2.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress is now compatible with
1289 WordPress 2.1, as well as retaining its existing support for WordPress
1290 2.0 and 1.5. Incompatibilities that resulted in database warnings, fatal
1291 errors, and which prevented FeedWordPress from syndicating new posts,
1292 have been eliminated.
1293
1294 * RSS-FUNCTIONS.PHP RENAMED TO RSS.PHP: if you use the upgraded MagpieRSS
1295 replacement that's included with FeedWordPress, be sure to note that
1296 there are now *two* files to upload from the `OPTIONAL/wp-includes`
1297 subdirectory in order to carry out the upgrade: rss-functions.php and
1298 rss.php. **It is necessary to upload both files**, due to a change in
1299 the file naming scheme in WordPress 2.1, and it is necessary to do so
1300 whether you are using WordPress 2.1 or not. If you only upload the
1301 `rss-functions.php` file as in previous installations you will not have
1302 a working copy of MagpieRSS; the rss.php file contains the actual code.
1303
1304 * DATE BUG AFFECTING SOME PHP INSTALLATIONS RESOLVED: due to a subtle bug
1305 in parse_w3cdtf(), some installations of PHP encountered problems with
1306 FeedWordPress's attempt to date posts, which would cause some new posts
1307 on Atom feeds to be dated as if they had apppeared in 1969 or 1970
1308 (thus, effectively, never appearing on front page at all). This bug in
1309 the date handling should now be fixed.
1310
1311 * PHP <?=...?> SHORT FORM ELIMINATED: some installations of PHP do not
1312 allow the <?=...?> short form for printing PHP values, which was used
1313 extensively in the FeedWordPress interface code. Since this could cause
1314 fatal errors for users with the wrong installation of PHP, the short
1315 form has been replaced with full PHP echo statements, and is no longer
1316 used in FeedWordPress.
1317
1318 * BETTER USER INTERFACE INTEGRATION WITH WORDPRESS 2.x: Some minor changes
1319 have been made to help the FeedWordPress interface pages blend in better
1320 with the user interface when running under WordPress 2.x.
1321
1322 * GLOBAL CATEGORIES BUG RESOLVED: a bug that prevented some users from
1323 setting one or more categories to apply to syndicated posts from all
1324 feeds (using the checkbox interface under Options --> Syndication) has
1325 been resolved.
1326
1327 = 0.98 =
1328
1329 * WORDPRESS 2.0 COMPATIBILITY: This is a narrowly-targeted release to
1330 solve a major outstanding problem. FeedWordPress is now compatible with
1331 both WordPress 1.5 and WordPress 2.0. Incompatibilities that caused
1332 fatal SQL errors, and a more subtle bug with off-kilter counts of posts
1333 under a given category, have been resolved. FeedWordPress tests for
1334 database schema using the global $wp_db_version variable (if null, then
1335 we presume that we're dealing with WordPress 1.5).
1336
1337 NOTE: I have **not** fully tested FeedWordPress with WordPress 2.0.
1338 Further testing may reveal more bugs. However, you should now be able
1339 to get at least basic FeedWordPress functionality up and running.
1340
1341 * AUTHOR MATCHING: FeedWordPress tests several fields to see if it can
1342 identify the author of the post as a user already in the WordPress user
1343 database. In previous versions, it tested the user login, the nickname,
1344 and tested for "aliases" listed in the Profile (see documentation). FWP
1345 now also matches authors on the basis of e-mail address (*if* an e-mail
1346 address is present). This is particularly helpful for formats such as
1347 RSS 2.0, in which authors are primarily identified by e-mail addresses.
1348
1349 = 0.97 =
1350
1351 * INSTALLATION PROCEDURE: Some of the changes between 0.96 and 0.97
1352 require upgrades to the meta-data stored by FeedWordPress to work
1353 properly. Thus, if you are upgrading from 0.96 or earlier to 0.97, most
1354 FeedWordPress operations (including updates and template functions)
1355 WILL BE DISABLED until you run the upgrade procedure. Fortunately,
1356 running the upgrade procedure is easy: just go to either Options -->
1357 Syndication or Links --> Syndicated in the WordPress Dashboard and press
1358 the button.
1359
1360 * FEED FORMAT SUPPORT: Support has been added for the Atom 1.0 IETF
1361 standard. Several other elements are also newly supported
1362 (dcterms:created, dcterms:issued, dcterms:modified, dc:identifier,
1363 proper support for the RSS 2.0 guid element, the RSS 2.0 author element,
1364 the use of Atom author or Dublin Core dc:creator constructs at the feed
1365 level to identify the author of individual items, etc.)
1366
1367 N.B.: full support of several Atom 1.0 features, such as categories
1368 and enclosures, requires you to install the optional rss-functions.php
1369 upgrade in your wp-includes directory.
1370
1371 * BUG FIX: Running `update-feeds.php` from command line or crontab
1372 returned "I don't syndicate..." errors. It turns out that WordPress
1373 sometimes tramples on the internal PHP superglobals that I depended on
1374 to determine whether or not the script was being invoked from the
1375 command line. This has been fixed (the variables are now checked
1376 *before* WordPress can trample them). Note that `update-feeds.php` has
1377 been thoroughly overhauled anyway; see below for details.
1378
1379 * BUG FIX: Duplicate categories or author names. Fixed two bugs that could
1380 create duplicate author and/or category names when the name contained
1381 either (a) certain international characters (causing a mismatch between
1382 MySQL and PHP's handling of lowercasing text), or (b) characters that
1383 have a special meaning in regular expressions (causing MySQL errors when
1384 looking for the author or category due to regexp syntax errors). These
1385 should now be fixed thanks to careful escaping of names that go into
1386 regular expressions and careful matching of lowercasing functions
1387 (comparing results from PHP only to other results from PHP, and results
1388 from MySQL only to other results from MySQL).
1389
1390 * BUG FIX: Items dated December 31, 1969 should appear less often. The
1391 function for parsing W3C date-time format dates that ships with
1392 MagpieRSS can only correctly parse fully-specified dates with a
1393 fully-specified time, but valid W3C date-time format dates may omit the
1394 time, the day of the month, or even the month. Some feeds in the wild
1395 date their items with coarse-grained dates, so the optional
1396 `rss-functions.php` upgrade now includes a more flexible parse_w3cdtf()
1397 function that will work with both coarse-grained and fully-specified
1398 dates. (If parts of the date or the time are omitted, they are filled in
1399 with values based on the current time, so '2005-09-10' will be dated to
1400 the current time on that day; '2004' will be dated to this day and time
1401 one year ago.
1402
1403 N.B.: This fix is only available in the optional `rss-functions.php`
1404 upgrade.
1405
1406 * BUG FIX: Evil use of HTTP GET has been undone. The WordPress interface
1407 is riddled with inappropriate (non-idempotent) uses of HTTP GET queries
1408 (ordinary links that make the server do something with significant
1409 side-effects, such as deleting a post or a link from the database).
1410 FeedWordPress did some of this too, especially in places where it aped
1411 the WordPress interface (e.g. the "Delete" links in Links -->
1412 Syndicated). That's bad business, though. I've changed the interface so
1413 that all the examples of improper side-effects that I can find now
1414 require an HTTP POST to take effect. I think I got pretty much
1415 everything; if there's anything that I missed, let me know.
1416
1417 Further reading: [Sam Ruby 2005-05-06: This Stuff Matters](http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2005/05/06/This-Stuff-Matters)
1418
1419 * BUG FIX: Categories applied by `cats` setting should no longer prevent
1420 category-based filtering from working. In FeedWordPress, you can (1)
1421 apply certain categories to all syndicated posts, or all posts from
1422 a particular feed; and (2) filter out all posts that don't match one
1423 of the categories that are already in the WordPress database (allowing
1424 for simple category-based filtering; just load up WordPress with the
1425 categories you want to accept, and then tell FeedWordPress not to create
1426 new ones). However, the way that (1) and (2) were implemented meant that
1427 you couldn't effectively use them together; once you applied a known
1428 category to all syndicated posts from a particular feed, it meant that
1429 they'd have at least one familiar category (the category or categories
1430 you were applying), and that would get all posts past the filter no
1431 matter what categories they were originally from.
1432
1433 Well, no longer. You can still apply categories to all syndicated posts
1434 (using either Syndication --> Options, or the feed-level settings under
1435 Links --> Syndicated). But these categories are not applied to the post
1436 until *after* it has already passed by the "familiar categories" filter.
1437 So now, if you want, you can do category filtering and *then* apply as
1438 many categories as you please to all and only posts that pass the filter.
1439
1440 * BUG FIX: Other minor typos and HTML gaffes were fixed along the way.
1441
1442 * PERFORMANCE: get_feed_meta() no longer hits the database for information
1443 on every call; it now caches link data in memory, so FeedWordPress only
1444 goes to the database once for each syndicated link. This may
1445 substantially improve performance if your database server resources
1446 are tight and your templates make a lot of use of custom settings from
1447 get_feed_meta().
1448
1449 * API CHANGE: Link ID numbers, rather than RSS URIs, are now used to
1450 identify the feed from which a post is syndicated when you use template
1451 functions such as get_feed_meta(). The practical upshot of this is you
1452 can switch feeds, or change the feed address for a particular syndicated
1453 site, without breaking your templates for all the posts that were
1454 syndicated from the earlier URI.
1455
1456 * API CHANGE: if you have plugins or templates that make use of the
1457 get_feed_meta() function or the $fwp_feedmeta global, note that the
1458 data formerly located under the `uri` and `name` fields is now located
1459 under the `link/uri` field and the `link/name` field, respectively. Note
1460 also that you can access the link ID number for any given feed under the
1461 global $fwp_feedmeta['link/id'] (in plugins) or
1462 get_feed_meta('link/id') (in a template in post contexts).
1463
1464 * FEATURE: the settings for individual feeds can now be edited using a
1465 humane interface (where formerly you had to tweak key-value pairs in the
1466 Link Notes section). To edit settings for a feed, pick the feed that you
1467 want under Links --> Syndicated and click the Edit link.
1468
1469 * FEATURE: The "Unsubscribe" button (formerly "Delete") in Links -->
1470 Syndicated now offers three options for unsubscribing from a feed: (1)
1471 turning off the subscription without deleting the feed data or affecting
1472 posts that were syndicated from the feed (this works by setting the Link
1473 for the feed as "invisible"); (2) deleting the feed data and all of the
1474 posts that were syndicated from the feed; or (3) deleting the feed data
1475 and *keeping* the posts that were syndicated from the feed
1476 setting the Link to "Invisible" (meaning that it will not be displayed
1477 in lists of the site links on the front page, and it won't be checked
1478 for updates; (2) deleting the Link and all of the posts that were
1479 syndicated from its feed; or (3) deleting the feed data but keeping the
1480 posts that were syndicated (which will henceforward be treated as if
1481 they were local rather than syndicated posts). (Note that (1) is usually
1482 the best option for aggregator sites, unless you want to clean up the
1483 results of an error or a test.)
1484
1485 * FEATURE / BUG FIX: If you have been receiving mysterious "I don't
1486 syndicate...", or "(local) HTTP status code was not 200", or "(local)
1487 transport error - could not open socket", or "parse error - not well
1488 formed" errors, then this update may solve your problems, and if it does
1489 *not* solve them, it will at least make the reasons for the problems
1490 easier to understand. That's because I've overhauled the way that
1491 FeedWordPress goes about updating feeds.
1492
1493 If you use the command-line PHP scripting method to run scheduled
1494 updates, then not much should change for you, except for fewer
1495 mysterious errors. If you have done updates by sending periodic HTTP
1496 requests to <http://your-blog.com/path/wp-content/update-feeds.php>,
1497 then the details have changed somewhat; mostly in such a way as to make
1498 things easier on you. See the README file or online documentation on
1499 Staying Current for the details.
1500
1501 * FEATURE: FeedWordPress now features a more sophisticated system for
1502 timed updates. Instead of polling *every* subscribed feed for updates
1503 *each* time `update-feeds.php` is run, FeedWordPress now keeps track of
1504 the last time it polled each feed, and only polls them again after a
1505 certain period of time has passed. The amount of time is normally set
1506 randomly for each feed, in a period between 30 minutes and 2 hours (so
1507 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
1508 directly by the feed, which brings us to ...
1509
1510 * FEATURE: FeedWordPress now respects the settings in the `ttl` and
1511 Syndication Module RSS elements. Feeds with these elements set will not
1512 be polled any more frequently than they indicate with these feeds unless
1513 the user manually forces FeedWordPress to poll the feed (see Links -->
1514 Syndicated --> Edit settings).
1515
1516 = 0.96 =
1517
1518 * FEATURE: support has been added for enclosures in RSS 2.0 and Atom
1519 0.6+ newsfeeds. WordPress already supports adding enclosures to an
1520 item; FeedWordPress merely gets the information on the enclosure
1521 from the feed it is syndicating and plugs that information directly
1522 into the WordPress database so that (among other things) that post
1523 will have its enclosure listed in your blog's RSS 2 newsfeed.
1524
1525 Note that enclosure support requires using the optional MagpieRSS
1526 upgrade (i.e., replacing your `wp-includes/rss-functions.php` with
1527 `OPTIONAL/wp-includes/rss-functions.php` from the FWP archive)
1528
1529 * FEATURE: for completeness's sake, there is now a feed setting,
1530 `hardcode url`, that allows you to set the URI for the front page
1531 of a contributor's website manually (that is, prevent it from being
1532 automatically updated from the feed channel link on each update). To
1533 set the URI manually, put a line like this in the Link Notes section
1534 of a feed:
1535
1536 hardcode url: yes
1537
1538 You can also instruct FeedWordPress to use hardcoded URIs by default
1539 on all feeds using Options --> Syndication
1540
1541 * FEATURE: by default, when FeedWordPress finds new syndicated posts,
1542 it (1) publishes them immediately, (2) turns comments off, and (3)
1543 turns trackback / pingback pings off. You can now alter all three
1544 default behaviors (e.g., to allow pings on syndicated posts, or to
1545 send newly-syndicated posts to the draft pile for moderation) using
1546 Options --> Syndication
1547
1548
1549 = From 0.91 to 0.95 =
1550
1551 * BUG FIX: Fixed an obscure bug in the handling of categories:
1552 categories with trailing whitespace could cause categories with
1553 duplicate names to be created. This no longer happens. While I was
1554 at it I tightened up the operation of
1555 FeedWordPress::lookup_categories() a bit in general.
1556
1557 * FEATURE DEPRECATED: the feed setting `hardcode categories` is now
1558 deprecated in favor of `unknown categories` (see below), which
1559 allows you to strip off any syndication categories not already in
1560 your database using `unknown categories: default` or `unknown
1561 categories: filter`. If you have `hardcode categories: yes` set on a
1562 feed, this will be treated as `unknown categories: default` (i.e.,
1563 no new categories will be added, but if a post doesn't match any of
1564 the categories it will be added in the default category--usually
1565 "Uncategorized" or "General").
1566
1567 * FEATURE: You can now set global defaults as to whether or not
1568 FeedWordPress will update the Link Name and Link Description
1569 settings for feeds automatically from the feed title and feed
1570 tagline. (By default, it does, as it has in past versions.) Whether
1571 this behavior is turned on or off, you can still override the
1572 default behavior using feed settings of `hardcode name: yes`,
1573 `hardcode name: no`, `hardcode description: yes`, or `hardcode
1574 description: no`.
1575
1576 * FEATURE: Users can now provide one or several "aliases" for an
1577 author, just as they can for a category. For example, to make
1578 FeedWordPress treat posts by "Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger" and "Pope
1579 Benedict XVI" as by the same author, edit the user profile for Pope
1580 Benedict XVI and add a line like this to the "User profile" field:
1581
1582 a.k.a.: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
1583
1584 You can add several aliases, each on a line by itself. You can also
1585 add any other text you like to the Profile without interfering with
1586 the aliases.
1587
1588 * FEATURE: Users can now choose how to handle syndicated posts that
1589 are in unfamiliar categories or by unfamiliar authors (i.e.,
1590 categories or authors whose names are not yet in the WordPress
1591 database). By default, FeedWordPress will (as before) create a new
1592 category (or new author) and use it for the current post and any
1593 future posts. This behavior can be changed, either for all feeds or
1594 for one or another particular feed.
1595
1596 There are now three different options for an unfamiliar author: (1)
1597 FeedWordPress can create a new author account and attribute the
1598 syndicated post to the new account; (2) FeedWordPress can attribute
1599 the post to an author if the author's name is familiar, and to a
1600 default author (currently, this means the Site Administrator
1601 account) if it is not; (3) FeedWordPress can drop posts by
1602 unfamiliar authors and syndicate only posts by authors who are
1603 already in the database.
1604
1605 There are, similarly, two different options for an unfamiliar
1606 category: (1) FeedWordPress can create new categories and place the
1607 syndicated post in them; (2) FeedWordPress can drop the unfamiliar
1608 categories and place syndicated posts only in categories that it is
1609 already familiar with. In addition, FeedWordPress 0.95 lets you
1610 choose whether posts that are in *no* familiar categories should be
1611 syndicated (and placed in the default category for the blog) or
1612 simply dropped.
1613
1614 You can set the default behavior for both authors and categories
1615 using the settings in Options --> Syndication. You can also set
1616 different behavior for specific feeds by adding the `unfamiliar
1617 author` and / or `unfamiliar categories` settings to the Link Notes
1618 section of a feed:
1619
1620 unfamiliar author: (create|default|filter)
1621 unfamiliar categories: (create|default|filter)
1622
1623 A setting of `unfamiliar author: create` will make FeedWordPress
1624 create new authors to match unfamiliar author names *for this feed
1625 alone*. A setting of `unfamiliar author: default` will make it
1626 assign posts from unfamiliar authors to the default user account. A
1627 setting of `unfamiliar author: filter` will cause all posts (from
1628 this feed alone) to be dropped unless they are by an author already
1629 listed in the database. Similiarly, `unfamiliar categories: create`
1630 will make FeedWordPress create new categories to match unfamiliar
1631 category names *for this feed alone*; `unfamiliar categories:
1632 default` will cause it to drop any unfamiliar category names; and
1633 `unfamiliar categories: filter` will cause it to *both* drop any
1634 unfamiliar category names *and* to only syndicate posts that are
1635 placed in one or more familiar categories.
1636
1637 These two new features allow users to do some coarse-grained
1638 filtering without having to write a PHP filter. Specifically, they
1639 offer an easy way for you to filter feeds by category or by author.
1640 Suppose, for example, that you only wanted to syndicate posts that
1641 your contributors place in the "Llamas" category. You could do so by
1642 setting up your installation of WordPress so that the only category
1643 in the database is "Llamas," and then use Options --> Syndication to
1644 set "Unfamiliar categories" to "don't create new categories and
1645 don't syndicate posts unless they match at least one familiar
1646 category". Now, when you update, only posts in the "Llamas" category
1647 will be syndicated by FeedWordPress.
1648
1649 Similarly, if you wanted to filter one particular feed so that only
1650 posts by (for example) the author "Earl J. Llama" were syndicated to
1651 your site, you could do so by creating a user account for Earl J.
1652 Llama, then adding the following line to the settings for the feed
1653 in Link Notes:
1654
1655 unfamiliar author: filter
1656
1657 This will cause any posts from this feed that are not authored by
1658 Earl J. Llama to be discarded, and only the posts by Earl J. Llama
1659 will be syndicated. (If the setting is used on one specific feed, it
1660 will not affect how posts from other feeds are syndicated.)
1661
1662 == License ==
1663
1664 The FeedWordPress plugin is copyright © 2005-2010 by Charles Johnson. It uses
1665 code derived or translated from:
1666
1667 - [wp-rss-aggregate.php][] by [Kellan Elliot-McCrea](kellan@protest.net)
1668 - [MagpieRSS][] by [Kellan Elliot-McCrea](kellan@protest.net)
1669 - [Ultra-Liberal Feed Finder][] by [Mark Pilgrim](mark@diveintomark.org)
1670 - [WordPress Blog Tool and Publishing Platform](http://wordpress.org/)
1671
1672 according to the terms of the [GNU General Public License][].
1673
1674 This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
1675 the terms of the [GNU General Public License][] as published by the Free
1676 Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any
1677 later version.
1678
1679 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
1680 WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
1681 PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
1682
1683 [wp-rss-aggregate.php]: http://laughingmeme.org/archives/002203.html
1684 [MagpieRSS]: http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/
1685 [HTTP Navigator 2]: http://www.keyvan.net/2004/11/16/http-navigator/
1686 [Ultra-Liberal Feed Finder]: http://diveintomark.org/projects/feed_finder/
1687 [GNU General Public License]: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
1688
1689