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FeedWordPress / 2011.0706
FeedWordPress v2011.0706
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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: 3.2
7 Stable tag: 2011.0706
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 = 2011.0706 =
97
98 * WP 3.2 COMPATIBILITY: ELIMINATES FATAL ERROR "Call to undefined method
99 WP_SimplePie_File::WP_SimplePie_File() in
100 [...]/wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress/feedwordpress.php on line 1841." The
101 latest release of WordPress, version 3.2, has shifted the minimum
102 requirements up to PHP 5.2, and in line with the shift to PHP5 they have
103 rewritten a number of code segments that made use of now-obsolete PHP4
104 idioms. Unfortunately, this caused a fatal error whenever FeedWordPress
105 attempted to make use of the cache, since FWP's caching plugin was written
106 to match the older idiom. FeedWordPress has been updated to follow the new,
107 PHP5 idiom when possible, thus eliminating the fatal error.
108
109 * PERFORMANCE: The handling of queries to determine whether posts had been
110 previously syndicated produced some very slow queries (usually, but not
111 always, involving a scan over the MD5(post_guid) column of the table). The
112 code that prepares MySQL queries for previously-syndicated checks has been
113 revised to eliminate the MD5(post_guid) scan entirely, and to significantly
114 improve performance by eliminating other unnecessary clauses.
115
116 * BUGFIX: NO LONGER DESTROYS STICKY POSTS. Previous versions could destroy
117 (or, more precisely, replace the content of) sticky posts due to some
118 queries mashed together in unexpected ways by WordPress. Version 2011.0706
119 accounts for and eliminates the problem; your sticky posts should be safe
120 once again.
121
122 * BUGFIX: GUIDS CONTAINING MYSQL-ESCAPED CHARACTERS NO LONGER CAUSE DUPLICATE
123 POSTS TO APPEAR. One remaining source of duplicate post issues in 2011.0602
124 was guids that contained characters that needed to be escaped for MySQL,
125 such as single quotes and double quotes. The work-around for handling
126 filtered URIs has now been corrected to ensure that these do not cause
127 duplicate posts.
128
129 = 2011.0602 =
130
131 * WP 3.1.3 COMPAT / BUGFIX: WHITESPACE IN GUIDS NO LONGER PRODUCES DUPLICATE
132 POSTS. The work-around for handling filtered URIs in guid elements has now
133 been extended to handle URIs that were filtered because of leading or
134 trailing whitespace, in addition to URIs that were filtered because of
135 unapproved schemes.
136
137 * WP 3.1.3 COMPAT / BUGFIX: RELATIVE URLS IN GUIDS NO LONGER PRODUCE DUPLICATE
138 POSTS. The work-around for handling filtered URIs in guid elements has now
139 been extended to handle URIs that were altered without being filtered out
140 entirely (most commonly because a scheme was added to a relative URL).
141
142 * BUGFIX: UPDATES TO POST NO LONGER CAUSE DUPLICATE DRAFT VERSION TO APPEAR.
143 Under certain conditions in 2011.0531, an update to an existing post would
144 not be properly applied to the post itself, but rather would appear as a
145 duplicate post with Draft status. This bug has been eliminated, and updates
146 will now be properly inserted as revisions to the existing post.
147
148 = 2011.0531 =
149
150 * WORDPRESS 3.1.3 COMPATIBILITY: DUPLICATE POSTS ISSUE FIXED. Due to
151 internal changes in the way that WordPress handles post guids in the
152 most recent release (3.1.3), many users experienced problems with many
153 duplicate posts appearing in rapid succession. (Specifically, this would
154 happen with any posts using tag: URL guids -- such as all the posts
155 coming from Blogger feeds or feeds from other Google services.) This
156 compatibility release of FeedWordPress eliminates the issue by working
157 around the new restrictions on tag: URLs.
158
159 * NEW AND IMPROVED DIAGNOSTICS: Syndication --> Diagnostics now contains some
160 new diagnostics settings useful for debugging problems with duplicate posts
161 (allowing you to easily view the guid of posts in the WordPress posts
162 database and allowing you to track the SQL used to check for existing
163 versions of a syndicated post).
164
165 = 2011.0512 =
166
167 * DIAGNOSTICS IMPROVEMENTS; "THERE MAY BE A BUG IN FEEDWORDPRESS" CRITICAL
168 ERROR NOTICES ELIMINATED: This version includes some major improvements
169 to the Syndication --> Diagnostics section, which should aid in
170 troubleshooting difficulties with items failing to be imported, posts
171 failing to be properly inserted into the database, or updates failing to
172 be recorded. If you have been encountering critical error / bug notices
173 with a white screen and the message "THERE MAY BE A BUG IN
174 FEEDWORDPRESS," followed by an extraordinarily long dump of mostly
175 incomprehensible diagnostic information, you'll be happy to know that
176 the condition causing these notices has been eliminated. In the few
177 cases where errors may still crop up with database insertions,
178 FeedWordPress will now produce a significantly more manageable and more
179 useful diagnostic message.
180
181 * BUGFIX: NEW POSTS FAILING TO APPEAR IN A CLEANLY-INSTALLED FEEDWORDPRESS
182 SYSTEM. If you encountered a recurring problem with FeedWordPress
183 failing to import new posts, after a clean install of FeedWordPress
184 (i.e., not an upgrade from a previous version), this problem may have
185 been the result of a bug with author-handling which has now been fixed
186 in the 2011.0512 release. (If the problem does *not* go away with the
187 upgrade, this version also includes significant improvements to the
188 Diagnostics system, which will help track down what *is* causing it
189 in your particular case.)
190
191 * PERFORMANCE: New handling of update hashes allows FeedWordPress to avoid
192 a certain kind of infinite loop, caused when two more more different
193 syndicated feeds each carried a version of the same item (for example,
194 because it appeared on two different aggregator feeds that you're
195 syndicating). In previous versions, when this kind of loop cropped up,
196 syndicated posts could pile up an indefinitely large number of revisions
197 -- each revision alternating between the version from each of the two
198 feeds where it appeared -- which would, over time, dramatically inflate
199 the size of the database, and kill the performance of queries on the
200 post table. This issue has been resolved: revisions of the post that
201 have been syndicated once will not be re-syndicated over and over again.
202
203 * AUTHOR LISTS: Lists of authors presented on the Author settings pages
204 should now be easier to scan through, with author names arranged in
205 alphabetical order.
206
207 * FEED ITEM DATE PARSING: More tweaks to make date-time handling more
208 resilient when feeds provide broken or weird values for the timestamps
209 on syndicated items. FWP will now attempt to work around unparseable
210 timezone values.
211
212 * AUTHOR MATCHING: Now attempts to match author names against the WP login
213 name in addition to display_name; when creating user record, also fills
214 in some best-guess values for nickname, firstname and lastname. Also
215 properly picks up Atom 1.0 author/uri data from feed.
216
217 * COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress has been successfully tested for
218 compatibility with recent releases of WordPress, up to version 3.1.2.
219
220 = 2011.0211 =
221
222 * BUGFIX: DUPLICATE POSTS WHEN GUIDS ARE TOO LONG: When feeds included
223 exceptionally long GUIDs, FeedWordPress could occasionally get into
224 a situation where posts with the long GUIDs would be duplicated over
225 and over again with each update (because FWP failed to store the full
226 GUID, due to length constraints in the relevant database tables).
227 Without the full GUID, FWP would not know that the post had already
228 been syndicated once. This bug has been fixed, and should no longer
229 produce duplicate posts.
230
231 * HTTP TIMEOUT SETTING: If you are frequently running into timeout
232 problems with one or more of the feeds you syndicate, FWP now allows you
233 to adjust the timeout for HTTP requests using a global or feed-by-feed
234 setting.
235
236 * HTTP GET PARAMETERS: You can now temporarily or permanently add HTTP
237 GET parameters to a subscription using an interface in Syndication -->
238 Feeds & Updates. This is especially helpful for making quick, short-term
239 changes to a subscription (for example, to pull in all the previous
240 items from a web service, before settling down to pulling in only newly
241 updated items).
242
243 * DIAGNOSTICS SYSTEM: Added several new diagnostics which are useful in
244 troubleshooting, and established a framework for add-on modules to hook
245 in with their own diagnostic messages.
246
247 * UI: Adjusted some internal coding, which should allow for settings
248 pages and add-ons to properly display multiple category pickers on a
249 single settings page.
250
251 * PHP4 COMPATIBILITY TWEAKS: This version makes some tweaks to the handling
252 of object references which should improve compatibility with older
253 versions of PHP. (Although, I should note, web hosts that still force
254 you to run under PHP 4 -- in 2011! -- are *bad web hosts*.)
255
256 * IMPROVED PERFORMANCE: This version eliminates a *major* performance drag
257 that shows up on sites with large numbers of users (due to some poor
258 decisions about where to place a user query, which caused the user table
259 to be scanned frequently when it did not need to be). If you experienced
260 serious problems with CPU load or slow database performance under
261 2010.0905, which kicked in immediately when FWP was loaded and tended
262 to disappear immediately if FWP was de-activated, it is likely that
263 upgrading away from 2010.0905 to the most recent version will resolve
264 your problem.
265
266
267 = 2010.0905 =
268
269 * BUGFIX: CATEGORIES AND TAGS CORRECTLY ASSIGNED IN AUTOMATIC UPDATES.
270 Version 2010.0903 switched over to a new way of assigning categories and
271 tags as part of its support for handling custom taxonomies.
272 Unfortunately, the method that it uses is subjected to some checks of
273 the current user's capabilities, which creates problems for posts that
274 are being inserted into the WordPress database when there *is* no
275 current user logged in (as, for example, when an update is being carried
276 out from a cron job or automatic update). The result was that posts
277 from cron jobs and automatic updates ended up with no Categories and no
278 Tags being assigned. This bug has now been fixed: in 2010.0905, Tags and
279 Categories should be correctly assigned to all posts, regardless of
280 whether they were added from manual updates, cron jobs, or automatic
281 updates.
282
283 = 2010.0903 =
284
285 * WORDPRESS 3 REQUIRED: Please note that this release of FeedWordPress
286 *requires* WordPress 3.0 or later. If you are currently using a 2.x
287 branch of WordPress, you will need to upgrade to WordPress 3 before you
288 can successfully upgrade FeedWordPress.
289
290 * BUGFIX: NO MORE DISAPPEARING "SYNDICATED SOURCES" PANEL; INTERNET
291 EXPLORER UI GLITCH APPARENTLY FIXED: Several users independently
292 reported a problem with FWP 2010.0623 and various versions of IE. A
293 problem with the HTML markup caused IE (but not Firefox or
294 Chrome) to completely hide the Syndicated Sources administration panel
295 (the main list of currently-syndicated sources, and the main location
296 for adding new sources, under the Syndication menu item) when a user
297 added their first syndicated feed. Maddeningly, the glitch seemed to
298 affect some IE users and not others: I was never able to reproduce the
299 problem for myself on my own machines. However, the markup of Syndicated
300 Sources has undergone significant changes and corrections since
301 2010.0623, and two independent sources who had been having this problem
302 confirm that they no longer encounter it with the updated version. For
303 the time being, I am going to declare this bug squashed.
304
305 * BUGFIX: MORE PROTECTION AGAINST FATAL ERRORS FROM PLUGGABLE VERSIONS OF
306 SimplePie: FeedWordPress now takes some precautions that should help to
307 better avoid conflicts for users who have installed pluggable versions
308 of SimplePie for another plugin or theme. (You may not know that you have
309 done this; but if you've been encountering fatal errors indicating that
310 you cannot redeclare class SimplePie, or something along those lines,
311 there is now a better chance that those fatal errors will be eliminated.
312
313 * PERFORMANCE: SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCED MEMORY CONSUMPTION FOR LARGE UPDATES:
314 FeedWordPress is still a memory-hungry little module, especially when
315 you are dealing with very large feeds. However, users should notice a
316 significant reduction in memory overloads, especially if they update a
317 large number of feeds at once.
318
319 * USER INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: Nothing is radically different, but there's
320 been a fair amount of extra spit and polish added, including a convenient
321 new Dashboard widget that may save you a trip to the Syndication menu,
322 a lot of effort to make the relationship between global and feed-by-feed
323 settings more obvious to the user and more easily controllable, to make
324 navigation between settings pages easier, to sand off a few rough edges,
325 and to make other improvements on the margins. I hope you'll like how
326 it looks.
327
328 * ADDING MULTIPLE FEEDS: FeedWordPress now provides a convenient mode for
329 adding multiple feeds at once, using either a copy-and-pasted list, or
330 else an OPML file. Go to Syndication --> Syndicated Sources and check
331 out the two new buttons underneath the New Source input box. When you
332 have to add a number of feeds at once, this can save you considerable
333 time and trouble.
334
335 * IMPROVED HANDLING OF AUTHORS WITH DUPLICATE E-MAIL ADDRESS AND AUTHORS
336 WITH NAMES WRITTEN IN FOREIGN SCRIPTS: WordPress 3 is increasingly picky
337 about what it will accept for new author accounts, and some of the
338 conditions it imposes can cause error conditions that prevent posts from
339 being properly syndicated, or properly attributed, if authors happen to
340 have identical e-mail addresses, or if users are given usernames that are
341 written in non-Western scripts. FeedWordPress now handles these much
342 better, and systematically works to avoid clashes between syndicated
343 authors' account names or in their e-mail addresses, which should result
344 in significantly better results in mapping author names to WordPress
345 user accounts.
346
347 * MAPPING CATEGORIES ON SYNDICATED POSTS TO TAGS NOW BETTER SUPPORTED:
348 In previous versions, the only way for the Categories provided by a
349 syndicated feed to be mapped into Post Tags was to instruct FWP to
350 create new tags, rather than new categories, for unfamiliar categories
351 from the feed. This works fine if you want tags to be the default; but
352 if you want only a *specific* set of tags, there was no way to get them
353 without getting most or all other categories imported as tags. You can
354 now do this by creating a tag (under Posts ==> Post Tags) before
355 importing the post; when the syndicated category matches a pre-existing
356 tag, the incoming post will be tagged with that tag, without creating
357 a local Post Category.
358
359 * REL-TAG MICROFORMAT SUPPORT FOR INLINE TAGS: Syndicated posts that
360 contain inline tags, marked up using the Rel-Tag microformat
361 <http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag>, are now tagged with the tags
362 provided by Rel-Tag format links.
363
364 * MUCH GREATER CONTROL OVER CATEGORY AND TAG MAPPING: This is partly the
365 result of building in support for a potentially endless set of custom
366 taxonomies (see below), but in general there has been a great deal of
367 effort towards giving you more control over how categories and tags
368 provided by the feed are mapped into terms on the local blog. In
369 particular, you can now force FeedWordPress to create only categories
370 from categories and tags provided by the feed; or to create only tags;
371 or to search both categories and tags for a match; or you can simply
372 force it to drop all of the categories provided by the feed and use
373 only categories or tags that you explicitly provide. In addition, you
374 can now also choose whether to override global categories settings with
375 a local, feed-specific setting; or whether to *add together* *both* the
376 global categories and the local feed-specific categories -- depending
377 on whatever your use-case may demand.
378
379 * CUSTOM POST TYPES AND TAXONOMY SUPPORTS: This is mainly for the
380 super-geeky, but if you use other plugins or themes that make
381 significant use of WordPress's support for custom post types and custom
382 taxonomies, you may be pleased to find that FeedWordPress now allows you
383 to feed incoming posts into any custom feed type that you wish, and to
384 map categories and tags from the feed to custom taxonomies as well as
385 to the standard Category and Tag taxonomies.
386
387 * STORING NAMESPACED CUSTOM FEED ELEMENTS IN POST CUSTOM FIELDS: If you
388 would like to use FeedWordPress's support for storing custom meta-data
389 from feed elements in the custom fields for a post (for example, to
390 store geolocation data or iTunes media meta-data), you'll find that it's
391 now much easier for you to access these namespaced elements. You always
392 could access them, but in previous versions you might have to write
393 something ugly like $(/{http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#}lat)
394 just to get at the value of a `<geo:lat>` tag. Now, as long as you use
395 the same mnemonic codes that the feed producer used, you should always
396 be able to write a nice, simple expression like $(/geo:lat) to get the
397 value of a <geo:lat> tag.
398
399 * CUSTOM DIRECTORY STRUCTURE SUPPORT: if you poke at it enough, WordPress
400 is relatively flexible about where it should store admin interface code,
401 uploaded content, plugins, and a number of other things that occupy an
402 important place in the WordPress directory structure. Previous versions
403 of FeedWordPress encountered serious errors or broke entirely when used
404 with directory structures other than the default. This should now be
405 fixed: FWP now supports custom directory structures wherever WordPress
406 allows them to be customized, rather than depending on the default
407 locations. Enjoy your freedom!
408
409 * MANY NEW FILTERS AND API UTILITY FUNCTIONS FOR ADD-ON PROGRAMMERS: There
410 have been too many improvements to list them all in this ChangeLog, but
411 it means that much more power and ease for folks who are customizing
412 FeedWordPress through PHP filters or add-on modules. Fuller
413 documentation will be put up at the Wiki at feedwordpress.radgeek.org
414 soon.
415
416 = 2010.0623 =
417
418 * WORDPRESS 3.0 COMPATIBILITY / AUTHOR MAPPING INTERFACE ISSUES: I
419 resolved a couple of outstanding issues with the author mapping
420 interface (Syndication --> Authors), which were preventing new users
421 from being created correctly and author mapping rules from being set up
422 correctly. These partly had to do with new restrictions on user account
423 creation introduced in WordPress 3.0; anyway, they should now be fixed.
424
425 * MORE EFFICIENT SYNDICATED URL LOOKUPS: Several users noticed that the
426 bug fix introduced in 2010.0528 for compatibility with post-listing
427 plugins caused a lot more queries to the database in order to look up
428 numerical post IDs from the URL provided to the filter. This shouldn't
429 cause any major problems, but it is not as efficient as it could be; the
430 code now takes advantage of a more efficient way of doing things,
431 which usually will not require any additional database queries.
432
433 * SIMPLEPIE FEED UPDATE ISSUES: If you have been having significant
434 problems with getting feeds to update correctly, this may be the result
435 of some bugs in the implementation of SimplePie caching that ships with
436 WordPress (as of version 3.0). (You would most commonly experience this
437 error if you continually saw errors such as "No feed found at <...>" in
438 your updates.) Fortunately, SimplePie allows for a great deal of
439 extensibility and this allows me to work around the problem; these
440 error conditions should now be mostly eliminated when the underlying
441 feed is valid.
442
443 * UI: SHOW INACTIVE SOURCES: When you use the default unsubscribe option
444 -- which turns off the subscription to a feed while preserving the posts
445 from it and the syndication-related meta-data for the feed -- the
446 unsubscribed feed can now easily be viewed in a special "Inactive"
447 section of the Syndicated Sources page. (As a side benefit, if you've
448 accidentally, or only temporarily, turned off the subscription to a
449 feed, it is now much easier to restore the feed to being active, or to
450 delete it permanently, if you prefer.
451
452 * UI: FEED FINDER / SWITCH FEED INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: changes to styling
453 and options for the feed finder / switch feed, which should now make it
454 easier, in some cases, to find alternative feeds, and make interface
455 options more clearly visible.
456
457 * FILTERS: `syndicated_item_published` and `syndicated_item_updated` NOW
458 PROPERLY AFFECT THE DATING OF POSTS. These filters used to affect some
459 date-related settings, but not others -- and, most importantly, not the
460 final date that is set for a post's publication or last-modified date
461 in the WordPress database. Now, they do affect that, as they should.
462 (Filters should receive, and return, a long integer, representing a Unix
463 epoch relative timestamp.)
464
465 * MAGIC URL TO CLEAR THE CACHE: Suppose that you need to clear the feed
466 cache, for whatever reason; suppose, even, that you need to clear it on
467 a regular basis. One way you might do this is by logging into the
468 FeedWordPress administrative interface and going to Syndication -->
469 Performance. Another way you might do it, now, is to simply send an
470 HTTP request to a magic URL provided by FeedWordPress: if your blog is
471 at example.com, the URL would be <http://example.com/?clear_cache=1>
472
473 = 2010.0602 =
474
475 * CATEGORY BOX INTERFACE ELEMENT FIXED FOR WP 3.0: Stylesheet changes
476 between WordPress 2.9.x and the WordPress 3.0 RC caused the Categories
477 box under **Syndication --> Categories & Tags** to malfunction. This
478 has been fixed.
479
480 * LINK CATEGORY SELECTION BOX IN SYNDICATION ==> FEEDS FIXED FOR WP 2.8
481 AND 2.9: A WP 3.0 compatibility change introduced in 2010.0531
482 inadvertently broke the Syndicated Link Category selector under
483 Syndication --> Feeds & Updates in WP 2.8 and WP 2.9, causing the post
484 categories to be displayed in the selector rather than the link
485 categories. This should now be fixed so that the selector will work
486 correctly under both the current versions of WordPress and the 3.0 RC.
487
488 * MORE PERMISSIVE HANDLING OF FEEDS WITH BAD CONTENT-TYPE HEADERS: One of
489 the small advantages that MagpieRSS had over SimplePie is that it was
490 more tolerant about parsing well-formed feeds that the remote web server
491 happened to deliver with weird or incorrect HTTP Content-type headers.
492 In feeds affected by this problem, the new SimplePie parser would simply
493 fail to find a feed, due to its being led astray by the contents of the
494 Content-type header. This version includes an extension to SimplePie's
495 content-type sniffer that offers more permissive handling of the HTTP
496 headers.
497
498 * MORE FULL-TEXT "EXCERPTS" NOW PROPERLY SHORTENED. Version 2010.0528
499 introduced code to control for cases in which elements intended for
500 item summaries are (ill-advisedly) used to carry the full text of posts;
501 past versions of FeedWordPress would simply include the full text of the
502 post in the excerpt field, but newer versions now attempt to detect
503 this condition when it arises and to head it off, by blanking out the
504 excerpt field and filling it with an automatically generated short,
505 plain text excerpt from the full content. This release broadens the
506 test conditions that indicate when an excerpt field is treated as
507 identical to the full text of the post, and should therefore improve
508 the handling of some feeds (such as Google Reader feeds) where the full
509 text of each post was still appearing in the excerpt field.
510
511 * FILTERS: `syndicated_item_published` AND `syndicated_item_updated`
512 FILTERS NOW ALLOW FILTER AUTHORS TO CHANGE POST TIMESTAMPS. You can now
513 use the `syndicated_item_published` and `syndicated_item_updated` filter
514 hooks to write filters or add-ons which directly change the post date
515 and most-recently-updated timestamps on incoming syndicated posts. Props
516 to niska for pointing out where the filters needed to be applied in
517 order to change WordPress's internal timestamps for incoming posts.
518
519 = 2010.0531 =
520
521 * PERMALINK / CUSTOM FIELDS PROBLEM RESOLVED: An issue in 2010.0528 caused
522 some posts to be imported without the proper syndication-related
523 meta-data being attached (thus causing permalinks to point back to the
524 aggregator website rather than to the source website, among other
525 problems). This problem has been resolved (and a fix has been applied
526 which will resolve the problem for any posts affected by this problem,
527 if the original post is recent enough to still be available on the feed).
528
529 * UI: The "Back End" section has been split into two separate sections --
530 "Performance" (dealing with caching, database index, and other
531 performance tweaks), and "Diagnostics" (dealing with debug mode,
532 update logging, and a number of new diagnostic tests which I will be
533 rolling out over the next few releases).
534
535 * Several minor interface bug fixes and PHP warning notices eliminated.
536
537 = 2010.0528 =
538
539 #### Compatibility ####
540
541 * SIMPLEPIE IS NOW USED TO PARSE FEEDS; NO MORE MAGPIERSS UPGRADES NEEDED:
542 One of the biggest changes in this release is that FeedWordPress no
543 longer depends on MagpieRSS to parse feeds, and has switched to the much
544 more up-to-date and flexible SimplePie feed parser, which is included as
545 a standard part of WordPress versions 2.8 and later. Using SimplePie will
546 hopefully allow for better handling of feeds going further, and will
547 allow me greater flexibility in determining how exactly the feed parser
548 will operate. It also means that FeedWordPress no longer requires
549 special upgrades to the WordPress core MagpieRSS files, and should
550 eliminate quite a bit of complexity.
551
552 * MAGPIERSS COMPATIBILITY LAYER FOR EXISTING FILTERS AND ADD-ONS: However,
553 I have also implemented a compatibility layer to ensure that existing
554 filters and add-ons for FeedWordPress which depended on the MagpieRSS
555 data format *should not be broken* by the switch to SimplePie. Going
556 forward, I recommend that new filters and add-ons be written to take
557 advantage of the SimplePie object representations of items, feeds, etc.,
558 rather than the MagpieRSS arrays, but the MagpieRSS arrays will still
559 be available and older filters should continue to work as they have in
560 the past.
561
562 * COMPATIBILITY WITH WORDPRESS 2.9.x and 3.0: This release has been tested
563 for the existing WordPress 2.9.x branch and with the upcoming release of
564 WordPress 3.0. Changes in the user interface JavaScript between WordPress
565 2.8.x and WordPress 2.9 caused the tag box interface element to break in
566 the Syndication --> Categories & Tags settings page; changes in the API
567 functions for adding new authors caused fatal errors under certain
568 conditions in WordPress 3.0. These breakages have been fixed.
569
570 * DROPPED LEGACY SUPPORT FOR WORDPRESS PRIOR TO 2.8: Because SimplePie is
571 not included with versions of WordPress prior to 2.8, I have chosen to
572 drop legacy support for WordPress versions 1.5 through 2.7. If you are
573 using FeedWordPress with a version of WordPress before 2.8, you will
574 have to upgrade your installation of WordPress in order to take
575 advantage of this release.
576
577 * PHP 5.3 COMPATIBILITY: A couple of compatibility issues, which were
578 causing fatal errors amd ugly warnings for users of PHP 5.3,
579 have been eliminated.
580
581 #### Features and Processing ####
582
583 * INTERFACE REORGANIZATION: The interface restructuring, began with
584 Version 2009.0612, has been completed. Catch-all settings pages have
585 been eliminated entirely for pages that cover each aspect of handling
586 a feed: Feeds & Updates, Posts & Links, Authors, Categories & Tags,
587 and Back End handling of the database and diagnostic information.
588 Extensive new interface hooks allow add-on modules to significantly
589 change or extend the FeedWordPress admin interface and workflow.
590
591 * STORING INFORMATION FROM THE FEED IN CUSTOM FIELDS: Many users
592 have written to request the ability to store information from elements
593 in the feed in a custom field on each post. (So that, for example, if
594 post includes a `itunes:duration` element, you could store the contents
595 in a Custom Field called `duration` on the post (for a Theme to access
596 later). The Custom Post Settings under Syndication --> Posts & Links now
597 allow you to access any item or feed tag, using a syntax similar to
598 a much-simplified version of XPath. See Posts & Links settings for
599 details.
600
601 * UPDATE-FREEZING ON MANUALLY EDITED POSTS: FeedWordPress now allows you
602 to mark posts that have been manually edited, so that the changes you
603 make will not be overwritten by later updates from the feed. If you make
604 manual edits to a particular post, just check the "Manual editing"
605 checkbox in order to protect your changes from being overwritten. If you
606 want to block *all* posts from being updated after they are imported
607 for the first time, a new "Updated Posts" setting in Posts & Links
608 allows you to freeze all posts from a particular feed, or all syndicated
609 posts.
610
611 * SETTING: FEED-BY-FEED SETTINGS FOR WHERE PERMALINKS POINT TO: You've
612 always been able to tell FeedWordPress whether permalinks for posts
613 should point to the original source of the story or the local copy. Now
614 you can choose different policies for different feeds, instead of one
615 global policy for all feeds. (Of course, you can still use a global
616 default if you prefer.)
617
618 * SETTING: USER CONTROL OVER TIMING BASIS. You can now determine the
619 schedule on which feeds are considered ready to poll for updates --
620 by default feeds become ready for polling after about 1 hour. You can
621 now increase or decrease the time window under Syndication --> Feeds &
622 Updates. (However, please pay *CAREFUL ATTENTION* to the recommendations
623 and DO NOT set the scheduling lower than 60 minutes unless you are
624 ABSOLUTELY SURE that you have specific permission from webmaster who
625 provides that specific feed to poll more frequently than that. If you
626 set this too low (and about 60 minutes is the polite minimum if you
627 haven't been given a different figure), most webmasters will consider
628 the frequent hits on their server as rude, or even downright abusive.
629
630 * OTHER SETTINGS: New settings also include the ability to stop FWP from
631 resolving relative URLs within syndicated content, and the ability to
632 choose whether FeedWordPress should indicate the comment feed from the
633 original source, or the local comment feed, when providing the comment
634 feed URL for a syndicated post.
635
636 #### Parsing ####
637
638 * BETTER DATE HANDLING -- FEWER FLASHBACKS TO 1969 and 1970: FeedWordPress
639 has made some bugfixes and some improvements in the logic for parsing
640 dates. This should allow FeedWordPress to correctly parse more dates in
641 more feeds; and, in the last resort, when FeedWordPress fails to
642 correctly parse a date, to fall back to a more intelligent default. This
643 should hopefully avoid most or all error conditions that have resulted
644 in articles being erroneously dated to the dawn of the Unix epoch
645 (31 December 1969 or 1 January 1970).
646
647 * FULL-TEXT "EXCERPTS" NOW PROPERLY SHORTENED. Based on a straightforward
648 reading of the existing RSS specs, it's reasonable for the
649 rss:description element to be read as a plaintext summary or excerpt for
650 the item containing the description -- with the full text of the item,
651 if available, in another, better-suited element, such as the de facto
652 standard content:encoded extension element. The problem is that uses of
653 RSS rarely have much to do with anything like a straightforward reading
654 of the specs. As a result, many actual RSS producers in the wild put the
655 full text of the article in a description element. But since
656 FeedWordPress has treated this text as a summary, this produces
657 aggregated posts with lengthy "excerpts" containing the full text of the
658 article. This release of FeedWordPress fixes the problem by doing a
659 little digging before treating rss:description as a summary: if the
660 description element is used properly as a plain text summary, then
661 FeedWordPress will take the summary provided by the feed, rather than
662 recreating its own excerpt from the full text; but if an RSS item has no
663 full-text element other than description, FeedWordPress will treat the
664 description element as the full text of the article, and generate a
665 shortened excerpt automatically from that text.
666
667 #### API ####
668
669 * TEMPLATE API: new template tags `get_local_permalink()` and
670 `the_local_permalink()` allow you to access the permalink for a post on
671 your aggregator site, even when FeedWordPress is rewriting permalinks to
672 point to the original source site.
673
674 * NEW HOOKS FOR ADD-ONS AND FILTERS: I have added a number of new hooks
675 which allow add-on modules to filter more precisely, gather information
676 at more points, and to enhance the FeedWordPress admin interface. For
677 a list of new hooks and documentation, see the FeedWordPress
678 documentation wiki at
679 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/add-ons-and-filters>
680
681 * FILTER API: A number of new utility methods have been added to the
682 SyndicatedPost class to make it easier for filters and add-ons to
683
684 * FILTER API: Globals $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta DEPRECATED. These
685 global variables, originally introduced to allow filters access to
686 information about the source feed in `syndicated_item` filters (which
687 were passed in through global variables rather than as parameters
688 because of a bug in WP 1.5 which was then fixed in 1.5.1) have been
689 DEPRECATED. If you have any filters or add-ons which still depend on
690 these global variables, you should see about fixing them to access data
691 about the source feed using the SyndicatedPost::link element instead.
692 For documentation, see the FeedWordPress documentation wiki at
693 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedpost> and
694 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedlink>.
695
696 * DIAGNOSTICS: I've included a number of new diagnostic options and
697 messages, which should allow an experienced user to better investigate
698 any problems that may crop up.
699
700 #### Bug Fixes ####
701
702 * BUGFIX: & IN PERMALINKS NO LONGER CAUSING ATOM OR HTML VALIDATION
703 EFFORTS: Many users reported an issue in which syndicating a feed with
704 special XML characters in the URLs (& was the most common, since it is
705 used to separate HTTP GET parameters) would cause the aggregator's
706 feeds to produce invalid (malformed) XML. This update addresses the
707 issue in Atom feeds. Unfortunately, it has not been technically possible
708 to address the problem in RSS 2.0 feeds, due to limitations on
709 WordPress's internal templates for RSS feeds.
710
711 * BUGFIX: BROKEN URLS IN "POPULAR POSTS" AND SIMILAR PLUGINS SHOULD NO
712 LONGER BE BROKEN. A number of users noticed an issue where plugins and
713 templates that listed posts in locations outside of the post loop
714 (for example, "Popular Posts"-style plugins that listed posts in the
715 sidebar), often produced the wrong URL for post links. (Typically, all
716 the posts listed would get the same wrong URL.) This should now be
717 fixed. Thanks to Björn for sending in a quick fix!
718
719 * MINOR BUGFIXES: This release includes a number of fixes to minor bugs
720 and compatibility issues, including: silent failures of the "Syndicate"
721 button, "Illegal Offset Type" error messages from MagpieRSS, and others.
722
723 = 2009.0707 =
724
725 * BUGFIX: WORDPRESS 2.8 AJAX COMPATIBILITY ISSUES RESOLVED (blank or
726 truncated "Syndicated Sites" administration page): Due to changes in the
727 AJAX interface elements between WordPress 2.7 and WordPress 2.8, several
728 FeedWordPress users encountered an issue where the front "Syndication"
729 page in the FeedWordPress administrative interface would come up blank,
730 without the normal "Syndicated Sites" list and "Update" control, or
731 sometimes wth the boxes visible but one or both of them truncated, with
732 only the title bar. This issue should now be resolved: with the new
733 version of FeedWordPress, the compatibility issue that caused the
734 disappearance should be eliminated, and if boxes are shown with only
735 their handle visible, you should once again be able to drop down the
736 rest of the box by clicking once on its title bar.
737
738 * BUGFIX: TAG SETTING WIDGET FIXED. Due to changes in interface elements
739 between WordPress 2.7 and WordPress 2.8, people using FeedWordPress with
740 WordPress 2.8 found that the widget for setting tags to be applied to
741 all syndicated posts, or all syndicated posts from a particular feed,
742 no longer displayed "Add" and "Remove" buttons for individual tags. This
743 issue has now been fixed, and the tagging widget should once again work
744 more or less exactly like the tagging widget for individual posts in the
745 normal WordPress admin interface.
746
747 = 2009.0618 =
748
749 * BUGFIX: MYSTERY ERRORS WITH WITH WP_Http_Fsockopen HTTP TRANSPORT
750 ELIMINATED: Thanks to a combination of a subtle bug in FeedWordPress,
751 and changes to the HTTP transport code in WordPress, a number of users
752 encountered an error in which any time they attempted to add a new feed
753 through the FeedFinder interface, FeedWordPress would fail and display
754 an HTTP request failure diagnostic message. The subtle bug has been
755 fixed, and with it, most of these errors should now be eliminated.
756
757 Be sure to upgrade your MagpieRSS to the most recent MagpieRSS version
758 after you have insalled FeedWordPress 2009.0618, or this bug fix will
759 not take effect.
760
761 = 2009.0613 =
762
763 * INTERFACE/BUGFIX: WORDPRESS 2.8 CATEGORY BOX FIX. Thanks to a subtle
764 change in class names between the WordPress 2.7 and 2.8 stylesheets,
765 category boxes in the FeedWordPress settings interface tended to overflow
766 and have a lot of messy-looking overlapping text under WordPress 2.8.
767 This has now been fixed.
768
769 * FeedFinder FAILURE DIAGNOSTICS: When FWP's FeedFinder fails to find any
770 feeds at a given URL (for example, when you are trying to add a
771 subscription through the administrative interface and you run into an
772 error message), FeedWordPress now provides more diagnostic information
773 for the reasons behind the failure. If that helps you, great; if not,
774 it should help me respond more intelligently to your support request..
775
776 = 2009.0612 =
777
778 * WORDPRESS 2.8 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress 2009.0612 has been tested for
779 compatibility with the recent version 2.8 release of WordPress.
780
781 * INTERFACE RESTRUCTURING: In order to avoid settings posts from becoming
782 too crowded, and to modularize and better organize the user interface,
783 new "Posts" and "Categories & Tags" subpages have been created under the
784 "Syndication" menu. "Posts" controls settings for individal syndicated
785 posts (such as publication status, comment and ping status, whether or
786 not to use the original location of the post as the permalink, whether
787 or not to expose posts to formatting filters, and so on). "Categories &
788 Tags" controls settings for assigning new syndicated posts to categories
789 and tags, such as categories or tags to apply to all syndicated posts,
790 and how to handle categories that do not yet exist in the WordPress
791 database. These subpages, like the Authors subpage, handle settings for
792 the global default level and for individual syndicated feeds.
793
794 Corresponding to these new subpages, the old Syndication Settings and
795 Feed Settings subpages have been cleaned up and simplified, and now only
796 link to the appropriate subpages for options that can be set in the
797 Posts, Authors, or Categories & Tags subpages.
798
799 * FEATURE: ADD CUSTOM SETTINGS TO EACH SYNDICATED POST: FeedWordPress has
800 long had an interface for creating custom settings for each syndicated
801 *feed* which could be retrieved in templates using the `get_feed_meta()`
802 template function. But it had no feature for adding custom fields to
803 each individual syndicated *post*. In response to requests from users, I
804 have added the ability to apply custom fields to each individual
805 syndicated post, using the new Syndication --> Posts subpage. You can
806 set up custom fields to be applied to every syndicated post, or custom
807 fields to be applied to syndicated posts from a particular feed.
808
809 * FEATURE: MAGPIERSS VERSION CHECK AND UPGRADE: FeedWordPress will attempt
810 to determine whether or not you are using the upgraded version of
811 MagpieRSS that comes packaged with FeedWordPress. If not, it will throw
812 an error on admin pages, and, if you are a site administrator, it will
813 give you the option to ignore the error message, or to attempt an
814 automatic upgrade (using a native file copy). If the file copy fails,
815 FeedWordPress will offer some guidance on how to perform the upgrade
816 manually.
817
818 * BLANK POSTS PROBLEM NO LONGER OCCURS WITH OLD & BUSTED MAGPIERSS: Due
819 to the fact that I relied on a content normalization that occurs in my
820 upgraded version of MagpieRSS, but not in the old & busted version of
821 MagpieRSS that ships with WordPress, until this version, if you tried to
822 syndicate an Atom feed without having performed the (*strongly
823 recommended*) MagpieRSS upgrade, all of the posts would come up with
824 completely blank contents. That's not because MagpieRSS couldn't read
825 the data, but rather because the new Magpie version puts that data in a
826 location where the old version doesn't, and I was only looking in that
827 newer location. Now it checks for both, meaning that posts will continue
828 to display their contents even if you don't upgrade MagpieRSS. (But you
829 **really should** upgrade it, anyway.)
830
831 * BUGFIX: RELATIVE URI RESOLUTION FOR POST CONTENT RESTORED. Some time
832 back, I added support for resolving relative URIs against xml:base on
833 feeds that support it to the MagpieRSS upgrade in FeedWordPress. Then I
834 took out code that did the same thing from the main FeedWordPress code.
835 Of course, the problem is that some people, even though it is clearly
836 stupid or evil to do so, still include relative URIs for images or links
837 in posts on feed formats that do *not* adequately support xml:base
838 (notably, RSS 2.0 feeds). In response to a user request, I have added
839 this functionality back in, so that MagpieRSS will resolve any relative
840 URIs that it knows how to resolve using xml:base, and then FeedWordPress
841 will attempt to resolve any relative URIs that are left over afterwards.
842
843 * BUGFIX: INTERFACE OPTION FOR SETTING SYNDICATED POST PUBLICATION STATUS
844 ON A FEED-BY-FEED BASIS HAS BEEN RESTORED: Due to a version-checking
845 bug, users of WordPress 2.7.x lost an option from the "Edit a syndicated
846 feed" interface which allowed them to determine whether newly syndicated
847 posts should be published immediately, held as "Pending Review," saved
848 as drafts, or saved as private posts. (The option to change this
849 setting globally remained in place, but users could no longer set it on
850 a feed-by-feed basis.) The version-checking bug has been fixed, and the
851 option has been restored.
852
853 * BUGFIX: "ARE YOU SURE?" FATAL ERROR ELIMINATED AND SECURITY IMPROVED:
854 Under certain circumstances (for example, when users have configured
855 their browser or proxy not to send HTTP Referer headers, for privacy or
856 other reasons), many features in the FeedWordPress administrative
857 interface (such as adding new feeds or changing settings) would hit a
858 fatal error, displaying only a cryptic message reading "Are you sure?"
859 and a blank page following it. This problem has been eliminated by
860 taking advantage of WordPress's nonce functions, which allow the
861 security check which ran into this error to work properly even without
862 receiving an HTTP Referer header. (N.B.: WordPress's nonce functions
863 were first introduced in WordPress 2.0.3. If you're using FeedWordPress
864 with an older version of WordPress, there's no fix for this problem:
865 you'll just need to turn Referer headers back on. Sorry.)
866
867 * BUGFIX: MANUALLY-ALTERED POST STATUS, COMMENT STATUS, AND PING STATUS NO
868 LONGER REVERTED BY POST UPDATES: If you manually altered the post status,
869 comment status, or ping status of a syndicated post from what it was set
870 to when first syndicated -- for example, if you had a feed that was set
871 to bring in new posts as "Pending Review," and you then marked some of
872 the pending posts as "Published" and others as "Unpublished" -- then
873 in previous versions of FeedWordPress, these manual changes to the
874 status would be lost -- so that, for example, your Published or Unpublished
875 articles would revert to Pending Review -- if the source feed made any
876 upates to the item. This could make the Pending Review feature both
877 unreliable and also extremely frustrating to work with. The good news is
878 that this bug has since been fixed: if you manually update the status
879 of a post, it will no longer be reverted if or when the post is updated.
880
881 * BUGFIX: OCCASIONAL FATAL ERROR ON UPDATE ELIMINATED: Under certain
882 limited conditions (specifically, when both the title and the content of
883 a post to be updated are empty), an attempt to update the post would
884 result in a fatal error. This has been fixed.
885
886 * INTERFACE: "CONFIGURE SETTINGS" CONVENIENCE LINK ADDED TO CONFIRMATION
887 MESSAGE WHEN A NEW FEED IS ADDED: When you add a new subscription to
888 FeedWordPress, the message box that appears to confirm it now includes a
889 handy link to the feed's settings subpage, so that you can quickly set
890 up any special settings you may want to set up for the new feed, without
891 having to hunt through the list of all your other subscriptions to pick
892 out the new one.
893
894 * INTERFACE: SIMPLIFYING AND CLARIFYING AUTOMATIC UPDATES SETTINGS. I have
895 removed an interval setting for the cronless automatic updates which has
896 confused many FeedWordPress users. In past versions of FWP, when you
897 turned on automatic updates, you would be presented with a time interval
898 setting which controlled how often FeedWordPress would check for feeds
899 ready to be polled for updates. (That is, it DID NOT control how often
900 feeds *would be polled*; it controlled how often FeedWordPress would
901 *check* for feeds that *had become ready to poll*. The schedule on which
902 feeds became ready for polling was still controlled either by requests
903 encoded in elements within the feed itself, or else according to an
904 internal calculation within FeedWordPress, averaging out to about 1 hour,
905 if the feed did not include any scheduling request elements.) Since many
906 users very often (and understandably) confused the purpose of this
907 setting, and since the setting is for a feature that's actually very
908 unlikely to require any manual control by the user, I have removed the
909 setting; FeedWordPress now simply uses the default value of checking for
910 feeds to poll every 10 minutes.
911
912 * FEEDFINDER PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT: FeedWordPress's FeedFinder class
913 now uses `array_unique()` to make sure that it doesn't waste time
914 repeatedly iterating over and polling the same URI. Props to Camilo
915 (<http://projects.radgeek.com/2008/12/14/feedwordpress-20081214/#comment-20090122160414>).
916
917 = 2008.1214 =
918
919 * WORDPRESS 2.7 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress has been tested for
920 compatibility with the newly released WordPress 2.7. WordPress 2.7 has
921 deprecated the Snoopy library for HTTP requests, which caused a fatal
922 error for users who had not installed the MagpieRSS upgrade (or whose
923 installation of the MagpieRSS upgrade was overwritten by a recent update
924 of WordPress). FeedWordPress now handles things gracefully when Snoopy
925 is not immediately available.
926
927 * INTERFACE SPIFFED UP: Interface elements have been updated so that
928 FeedWordPress's management interface fits in more naturally with the
929 WordPress 2.7 interface (including a new logo and a number of small
930 interface tweaks).
931
932 * BUG WITH TAGS FOR SYNDICATED ARTICLES FIXED: Several users encountered a
933 bug with the option to add tags to all syndicated posts under
934 Syndication --> Settings -- if you told FeedWordPress to add more than
935 one tag to all syndicated posts, instead of doing so correctly, it would
936 add a *single* tag instead, whose name was composed of the names of all
937 the tags you asked it to add. This bug was the result of nothing more
938 dignified than a typographical error on my part. It has now been fixed.
939
940 * MORE INFORMATION AVAILABLE WHEN FEEDWORDPRESS CAN'T FIND A FEED: When
941 you enter a URL for a new syndication source, FeedWordPress uses a
942 simple feed-finding algorithm (originally based on Mark Pilgrim's
943 Universal Feed Finder) to try to determine whether the URL is the URL
944 for a feed, or, if the URL points to an ordinary website rather than to
945 a feed, whether there is a feed for that website. All well and good, but
946 if FeedWordPress failed to find a feed, for whatever reason, it would
947 typically return nothing more than a nasty little note to the effect of
948 "no feed found," without any explanation of what went wrong.
949 FeedWordPress now keeps track of error conditions from the HTTP
950 requests that it uses in the course of looking for the feed, and so may
951 be able to give you a bit more information about the nature of the
952 problem if something goes wrong.
953
954
955 = 2008.1105 =
956
957 * INTERFACE RESTRUCTURING AND SYNDICATION --> AUTHORS PAGE: As a first
958 step towards modularizing and better organizing the user interface, a
959 new "Authors" subpage has been created under the Syndication menu, which
960 controls settings for syndicated authors, both at the global default
961 level and at level of individual syndicated feeds.
962
963 * BUG RELATED TO THE ATTRIBUTION OF POSTS TO THE WRONG AUTHOR FIXED: Some
964 users encountered an issue in which posts by different authors on
965 different blogs -- especially blogs generated by Blogger -- were
966 mistakenly attributed to a single author. The problem was caused by the
967 way in which FeedWordPress matches syndicated authors to user accounts
968 in the WordPress database: normally, if two feeds each list an author
969 with the same e-mail address, they are counted as being the same person.
970 Normally this works well, but it creates an issue in cases where
971 blogging software assigns a single anonymous e-mail address to users who
972 do not want their real e-mail address published. This is, for example,
973 what Blogger does (by giving all users a default e-mail address of
974 <noreply@blogger.com> if they don't want their own e-mail address
975 listed). FeedWordPress now allows the user to correct for this problem
976 with a couple of new settings under **Syndication --> Authors**, which
977 allow users to turn off e-mail based author matching for particular
978 addresses, or, if desired, to turn it off entirely. By default, e-mail
979 based author matching is still turned on, but disabled for a list of
980 known generic e-mail addresses. Right now, the "list" consists entirely
981 of <noreply@blogger.com>; if you know other addresses that should be
982 added, please [contact me](http://radgeek.com/contact) to let me know.
983
984 Please note that if you have already encountered this issue on your
985 blog, upgrading FeedWordPress will prevent it from re-occurring in the
986 future, but you still need to do two other things to fix the existing
987 problem on your blog.
988
989 First, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to
990 change the existing author mapping rules to re-map a a syndicated
991 author's name to the proper target account. Go to **Syndication -->
992 Authors**, select the feed you want to change from the drop-down list,
993 and then change the settings under the "Syndicated Authors" section.
994 (You will probably need to select "will be assigned to a new user..." to
995 create a new user account with the appropriate name.)
996
997 Second, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to
998 re-assign already-syndicated posts that were mis-attributed to the
999 correct author. You can do that from **Syndication --> Authors** by
1000 using the author re-assignment feature, described below.
1001
1002 * AUTHOR RE-ASSIGNMENT FOR A PARTICULAR FEED: The author settings page
1003 for each syndicated feed, under **Syndication --> Authors**, now
1004 includes an section titled "Fixing mis-matched authors," which provides
1005 an interface for re-assigning or deleting all posts attributed to a
1006 particular author on a particular feed.
1007
1008 * SUPPORT FOR `<atom:source>` ELEMENT IN SYNDICATED FEEDS: Some feeds
1009 (for example, those produced by FeedWordPress) aggregate content from
1010 several different sources, and include information about the original
1011 source of the post in an `<atom:source>` element. A new setting under
1012 **Syndication --> Options** allows you to control what FeedWordPress
1013 will report as the source of posts syndicated from aggregator feeds in
1014 your templates and feeds: you can have FeedWordPress report that the
1015 source of a post is the aggregator feed itself, or you can have it
1016 report that the source of a post is the original source that the
1017 aggregator originally syndicated the post from.
1018
1019 By default, FeedWordPress will report the aggregator, not the original
1020 source, as the source of a syndicated item.
1021
1022 * LOAD BALANCING AND TIME LIMITING FEATURES FOR UPDATES: Some users have
1023 encountered issues due to running up against PHP execution time limits
1024 during the process of updating large syndicated feeds, or a very large
1025 set of syndicated feeds. FeedWordPress now has a feature that allows you
1026 to limit the total amount of time spent updating a feed, through the
1027 "Time limit on updates" setting under **Syndication --> Options**. By
1028 turning on this setting and adjusting the time limit to a low enough
1029 figure to avoid your PHP installation's time-out setting. (PHP execution
1030 time limits are usually in the vicinity of 30 seconds, so an update
1031 time limit of 25 seconds or so should provide plenty of time for updates
1032 while allowing a cushion of time for other, non-update-related functions
1033 to do their work.)
1034
1035 If feed updates are interrupted by the time limit, FeedWordPress uses
1036 some simple load balancing features to make sure that updates to other
1037 feeds will not be blocked by the time-hogging feed, and will also make
1038 sure that when the interrupted update is resumed, FeedWordPress will
1039 skip ahead to resume processing items at the point at which it was
1040 interrupted last time, so that posts further down in the feed will
1041 eventually get processed, and not get blocked by the amount of time it
1042 takes to process the items higher up in the feed.
1043
1044 * `guid` INDEX CREATION BUTTON: FeedWordPress frequently issues queries on
1045 the `guid` column of the WordPress posts database (since it uses post
1046 guid URIs to keep track of which posts it has syndicated). In very large
1047 FeedWordPress installations, you can often significantly improve
1048 performance by creating a database index on the `guid` column, but
1049 normally you would need to poke around with MySQL or a tool like
1050 phpMyAdmin to do this. FeedWordPress can now save you the trouble: to
1051 create an index on the `guid` column, just go to
1052 **Syndication --> Options**, and mash the button at the bottom of the
1053 "Back End" section.
1054
1055 = 2008.1101 =
1056
1057 * INTERFACE BUG THAT PREVENTED ADDING NEW SITES FIXED: The UI reforms in
1058 FWP 2008.1030 unintentionally introduced a bug that prevents clean
1059 installations of FeedWordPress from providing an input box for adding
1060 new feeds to the list of syndicated feeds. This bug has been fixed.
1061
1062 = 2008.1030 =
1063
1064 * WORDPRESS 2.6 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with
1065 WordPress 2.6, and should work more or less seamlessly with the new post
1066 revision system. A bug which caused multiple new revisions to be created
1067 for posts on certain feeds, regardless of whether or not the item had
1068 been updated, has been fixed.
1069
1070 * INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: The user interface has been substantially
1071 restyled to fit in better with the visual style of WordPress 2.5 and
1072 2.6.
1073
1074 * YOUTUBE BUG FIXED: POSTS SYNDICATED THROUGH AN AUTOMATIC UPDATE ARE NO
1075 LONGER STRIPPED OF `<OBJECT>` TAGS AND CERTAIN OTHER HTML ELEMENTS: Due
1076 to the way that some versions of WordPress process posts that are
1077 inserted into the database when no user is logged in, many users
1078 experienced an issue where YouTube videos and other content using the
1079 HTML `<object>` tag would be stripped out of posts that were syndicated
1080 during an automatic update. (Posts that were syndicated through manual
1081 updates from within the WordPress Dashboard were not affected, because
1082 the issue does not arise when an update is executed under a logged-in
1083 administrator's credentials.) This bug has now been fixed; YouTube
1084 videos and other content using `<object>` tags should now appear
1085 properly in syndicated posts, regardless of the way in which the post
1086 was syndicated.
1087
1088 * AJAX BUGS FIXED: Bugs which blocked the normal operation of WordPress
1089 2.5's AJAX interface elements when FeedWordPress was activated have been
1090 fixed.
1091
1092 * TAG SUPPORT: A couple of features have been introduced to take advantage
1093 of the tagging features in WordPress 2.3.x, 2.5.x, and 2.6.x. Now, when
1094 unfamiliar categories are encountered for posts on a feed, you can
1095 choose for FeedWordPress (1) to drop the category; (2) to drop the
1096 category and to filter out any post that does not match at least one
1097 familiar category; (3) to create a new category with that name, or,
1098 now, you can also have FeedWordPress (4) create a new *tag* with that
1099 name. This option can be set site-wide under Syndication --> Options,
1100 or it can be set on a feed-by-feed basis in a feed's Edit screen.
1101
1102 In addition, you can now set particular tags to apply to all incoming
1103 syndicated posts, under Syndication --> Options, or you can set tags
1104 to apply to all incoming syndicated posts from a particular feed in that
1105 feed's Edit screen.
1106
1107 * FORMATTING FILTERS: There is a new option available under Syndication ->
1108 Options which allows users to choose whether or not to expose syndicated
1109 posts to being altered by formatting filters. By default, FeedWordPress
1110 has always protected syndicated posts (which are already in display-ready
1111 HTML when they are syndicated) from being reformatted by formatting
1112 filters. However, this approach means that certain plugins which depend
1113 on formatting filters (for example, to add "Share This" bars or relevant
1114 links to the end of a post) are blocked from working on any syndicated
1115 posts. If you want to use one of these plugins together with
1116 FeedWordPress, you can now do so by changing the "Formatting Filters"
1117 setting from "Protect" to "Expose."
1118
1119 * `<atom:source>` ELEMENTS NOW INCLUDED IN ATOM FEED: Atom 1.0 provides
1120 a standard method for aggregators to indicate information about the original source of
1121 a syndicated post, using the `<atom:source>` element. FeedWordPress now
1122 introduces standard `<atom:source>` elements including the title, homepage, and
1123 feed URI of the source from which a syndicated post was syndicated. Cf.
1124 <http://www.atomenabled.org/developers/syndication/atom-format-spec.php#element.source>
1125
1126 * MODULARIZATION OF CODE: The code for different elements of FeedWordPress
1127 has been broken out into several modules for easier inspection,
1128 documentation, and maintenance of the code.
1129
1130 * VERSIONING SCHEME CHANGED: FeedWordPress's feature set has proven stable
1131 enough that it can now be removed from beta status; a good thing, since
1132 I was very quickly running out of version numbers to use. New releases
1133 of FeedWordPress will have version numbers based on the date of their
1134 release.
1135
1136 = 0.993 =
1137
1138 * WORDPRESS 2.5.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible
1139 with WordPress 2.5.1.
1140
1141 * WORDPRESS 2.5 INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: FeedWordPress's Dashboard
1142 interface has undergone several cosmetic changes that should help it
1143 integrate better with the WordPress Dashboard interface in WordPress
1144 version 2.5.x.
1145
1146 * SYNDICATED POSTS CAN BE MARKED AS "PENDING REVIEW": WordPress 2.3 users
1147 can now take advantage of WordPress's new "Pending Review" features for
1148 incoming syndicated posts. Posts marked as "Pending Review" are not
1149 published immediately, but are marked as ready to be reviewed by an
1150 Administrator or Editor, who can then choose to publish the post or
1151 hold it back. If you want to review syndicated posts from a particular
1152 feed, or from all feeds, before they are posted, then use
1153 Syndication --> Syndicated Sites --> Edit or Syndication --> Options to
1154 change the settings for handling new posts.
1155
1156 * AWARE OF NEW URI FOR del.icio.us FEEDS: Previous releases of
1157 FeedWordPress already automatically split del.icio.us tags up
1158 appropriately appropriately when generating categories. (del.icio.us
1159 feeds smoosh all the tags into a single `<dc:subject>` element,
1160 separated by spaces; FeedWordPress un-smooshes them into multiple
1161 categories by separating them at whitespace.) Unfortunately, del.icio.us
1162 recently broke the existing behavior by changing host names for their
1163 feeds from del.icio.us to feeds.delicious.com. Version 0.993 accounts
1164 for the new host name and un-breaks the tag splitting.
1165
1166 = 0.992 =
1167
1168 * AUTHOR RE-MAPPING: FeedWordPress now offers considerable control over
1169 how author names on a feed are translated into usernames within the
1170 WordPress database. When a post by an unrecognized author comes in,
1171 Administrators can now specify any username as the default username to
1172 assign the post to by setting the option in Syndication --> Options
1173 (formerly FeedWordPress only allowed you to assign such posts to user
1174 #1, the site administrator). Administrators can also create re-mapping
1175 rules for particular feeds (under Syndication --> Syndicated Sites -->
1176 Edit), so that (for example) any posts attributed to "Administrator"
1177 on the feed <http://praxeology.net/blog/feed/> will be assigned to
1178 a user named "Roderick T. Long," rather than a user named
1179 "Administrator." These settings also allow administrators to filter out
1180 posts by particular users, and to control what will happen when
1181 FeedWordPress encounters a post by an unrecognized user on that
1182 particular feed.
1183
1184 * BUG RELATED TO URIS CONTAINING AMPERSAND CHARACTERS FIXED: A bug in
1185 WordPress 2.x's handling of URIs in Blogroll links created problems for
1186 updating any feeds whose URIs included an ampersand character, such as
1187 Google News RSS feeds and other feeds that have multiple parameters
1188 passed through HTTP GET. If you experienced this bug, the most likely
1189 effect was that FeedWordPress simply would not import new posts from a
1190 feed when instructred to do so, returning a "0 new posts" response. In
1191 other cases, it might lead to unpredictable results from feed updates,
1192 such as importing posts which were not contained in the feed being
1193 syndicated, but which did appear elsewhere on the same website. This bug
1194 has, hopefully, been resolved, by correcting for the bug in WordPress.
1195
1196 = 0.991 =
1197
1198 * WORDPRESS MU COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with
1199 recent releases of WordPress MU. Once FeedWordPress is made available
1200 as a plugin, each individual blog can choose to activate FeedWordPress
1201 and syndicate content from its own set of contributors.
1202
1203 * DISPLAY OF MAGPIE WARNINGS: A number of MagpieRSS warnings or error
1204 messages that were displayed when performing an automatic update are
1205 no longer displayed, unless debugging parameters have been explicitly
1206 enabled.
1207
1208 * BUG RELATED TO INTERNATIONAL CHARACTERS IN AUTHOR NAMES FIXED: Due to a
1209 subtle incompatability between the way that FeedWordPress generated new
1210 user information, and the way that WordPress 2.0 and later added new
1211 authors to the database, FeedWordPress might end up creating duplicate
1212 authors, or throwing a critical error message, when it encountered
1213 authors whose names included international characters. This
1214 incompatability has now been fixed; hopefully, authors with
1215 international characters in their names should now be handled properly.
1216
1217 * `<media:content>` BUG IN MAGPIERSS FIXED: A bug in MagpieRSS's handling
1218 of namespaced elements has been fixed. Among other things, this bug
1219 caused items containing a Yahoo MediaRSS `<media:content>` element (such
1220 as many of the feeds produced by wordpress.com) to be represented
1221 incorrectly, with only a capital "A" where the content of the post
1222 should have been. Feeds containing `<media:content>` elements should now
1223 be syndicated correctly.
1224
1225 * update_feedwordpress PARAMETER: You can now use an HTTP GET parameter
1226 (`update_feedwordpress=1`) to request that FeedWordPress poll its feeds
1227 for updates. When used together with a crontab or other means of
1228 scheduling tasks, this means that you can keep your blog automatically
1229 updated on a regular schedule, even if you do not choose to use the
1230 cron-less automatic updates option.
1231
1232 * Some minor interface-related bugs were also fixed.
1233
1234
1235 = 0.99 =
1236
1237 Version 0.99 adds several significant new features, fixes some bugs, and
1238 provides compatability with WordPress 2.2.x and 2.3.x.
1239
1240 * WORDPRESS 2.2 AND 2.3 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be
1241 compatible with WordPress version 2.2 and the upcoming WordPress
1242 version 2.3. In particular, it has been tested extensively against
1243 WordPress 2.2.3 and WordPress 2.3 Release Candidate 1.
1244
1245 * AUTOMATIC UPDATES WITHOUT CRON: FeedWordPress now allows you to
1246 automatically schedule checks for new posts without using external task
1247 scheduling tools such as cron. In order to enable automatic updates, go
1248 to **Syndication --> Options** and set "Check for new posts" to
1249 "automatically." For details, see "Automatic Feed Updates" in
1250 README.text.
1251
1252 An important side-effect of the changes to the update system is that if
1253 you were previously using the cron job and the `update-feeds.php` script
1254 to schedule updates, you need to change your cron set-up. The old
1255 `update-feeds.php` script no longer exists. Instead, if you wish to use
1256 a cron job to guarantee updates on a particular schedule, you should
1257 have the cron job fetch the front page of your blog (for example, by
1258 using `curl http://www.zyx.com/blog/ > /dev/null`) instead of activating
1259 the `update-feeds.php` script. If automatic updates have been enabled,
1260 fetching the front page will automatically trigger the update process.
1261
1262 * INTERFACE REORGANIZATION: All FeedWordPress functions are now located
1263 under a top-level "Syndication" menu in the WordPress Dashboard. To
1264 manage the list of syndicated sites, manually check for new posts on
1265 one or more feeds, or syndicate a new site, you should use the main page
1266 under **Syndication**. To change global settings for FeedWordPress,
1267 you should use **Syndication --> Options**.
1268
1269 * FILE STRUCTURE REORGANIZATION: Due to a combination of changing styles
1270 for FeedWordPress plugins and lingering bugs in the FeedWordPress admin
1271 menu code, the code for FeedWordPress is now contained in two different
1272 PHP files, which should be installed together in a subdirectory of your
1273 plugins directory named `feedwordpress`. (See README.text for
1274 installation and upgrade instructions relating to the change.)
1275
1276 * MULTIPLE CATEGORIES SETTING: Some feeds use non-standard methods to
1277 indicate multiple categories within a single category element. (The most
1278 popular site to do this is del.icio.us, which separates tags with a
1279 space.) FeedWordPress now allows you to set an optional setting, for any
1280 feed which does this, indicating the character or characters used to
1281 divide multiple categories, using a Perl-compatible regular expression.
1282 (In the case of del.icio.us feeds, FeedWordPress will automatically use
1283 \s for the pattern without your having to do any further configuration.)
1284 To turn this setting on, simply use the "Edit" link for the feed that
1285 you want to turn it on for.
1286
1287 * REGULAR EXPRESSION BUG FIXED: Eliminated a minor bug in the regular
1288 expressions for e-mail addresses (used in parsing RSS `author`
1289 elements), which could produce unsightly error messages for some users
1290 parsing RSS 2.0 feeds.
1291
1292 * DATE / UPDATE BUG FIXED: A bug in date handling was eliminated that may
1293 have caused problems if any of (1) WordPress, or (2) PHP, or (3) your
1294 web server, or (4) your MySQL server, has been set to use a different
1295 time zone from the one that any of the others is set to use. If
1296 FeedWordPress has not been properly updating updated posts, or has been
1297 updating posts when there shouldn't be any changes for the update, this
1298 release may solve that problem.
1299
1300 * GOOGLE READER BUGS FIXED: A couple of bugs that made it difficult for
1301 FeedWordPress to interact with Google Reader public feeds have been
1302 fixed. Firstly, if you encountered an error message reading "There was a
1303 problem adding the newsfeed. [SQL: ]" when you tried to add the feed,
1304 the cause of this error has been fixed. Secondly, if you succeeded in
1305 getting FeedWordPress to check a Google Reader feed, only to find that
1306 the title of posts had junk squashed on to the end of them, that bug
1307 has been fixed too. To fix this bug, you must install the newest version
1308 of the optional MagpieRSS upgrade.
1309
1310 * FILTER PARAMETERS: Due to an old, old bug in WordPress 1.5.0 (which was
1311 what was available back when I first wrote the filter interface),
1312 FeedWordPress has traditionally only passed one parameter to
1313 syndicated_item and syndicated_post filters functions -- an array
1314 containing either the Magpie representation of a syndicated item from
1315 the feed, or the database representation of a post about to be inserted
1316 into the WordPress database. If you needed information about the feed
1317 that the item came from, this was accessible only through a pair of
1318 global variables, $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta.
1319
1320 Since it's been a pretty long time since WordPress 1.5.0 was in
1321 widespread usage, I have gone ahead and added an optional second
1322 parameter to the invocation of the syndicated_item and syndicated_post
1323 filters. If you have written a filter for FeedWordPress that uses either
1324 of these hooks, you can now register that filter to accept 2 parameters.
1325 If you do so, the second parameter will be a SyndicatedPost object,
1326 which, among other things, allows you to access information about the
1327 feed from which an item is syndicated using the $post->feed and the
1328 $post->feedmeta elements (where $post is the name of the second
1329 parameter).
1330
1331 NOTE THAT THE OLD GLOBAL VARIABLES ARE STILL AVAILABLE, for the time
1332 being at least, so existing filters will not break with the upgrade.
1333 They should be considered deprecated, however, and may be eliminated in
1334 the future.
1335
1336 * FILTER CHANGE / BUGFIX: the array that is passed as the first argument
1337 syndicated_post filters no longer is no longer backslash-escaped for
1338 MySQL when filters are called. This was originally a bug, or an
1339 oversight; the contents of the array should only be escaped for the
1340 database *after* they have gone through all filters. IF YOU HAVE WRITTEN
1341 ANY syndicated_post FILTERS THAT PRESUME THE OLD BEHAVIOR OF PASSING IN
1342 STRINGS THAT ARE ALREADY BACKSLASH-ESCAPED, UPDATE YOUR FILTERS
1343 ACCORDINGLY.
1344
1345 * OTHER MINOR BUGFIXES AND INTERNAL CHANGES: The internal architecture of
1346 FeedWordPress has been significantly changed to make the code more
1347 modular and clean; hopefully this should help reduce the number of
1348 compatibility updates that are needed, and make them easier and quicker
1349 when they are needed.
1350
1351 = 0.981 =
1352
1353 Version 0.981 is a narrowly targeted bugfix and compatibility release, whose
1354 main purpose is to resolve a major outstanding problem: the incompatibility
1355 between version 0.98 of WordPress and the recently released WordPress 2.1.
1356
1357 * WORDPRESS 2.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress is now compatible with
1358 WordPress 2.1, as well as retaining its existing support for WordPress
1359 2.0 and 1.5. Incompatibilities that resulted in database warnings, fatal
1360 errors, and which prevented FeedWordPress from syndicating new posts,
1361 have been eliminated.
1362
1363 * RSS-FUNCTIONS.PHP RENAMED TO RSS.PHP: if you use the upgraded MagpieRSS
1364 replacement that's included with FeedWordPress, be sure to note that
1365 there are now *two* files to upload from the `OPTIONAL/wp-includes`
1366 subdirectory in order to carry out the upgrade: rss-functions.php and
1367 rss.php. **It is necessary to upload both files**, due to a change in
1368 the file naming scheme in WordPress 2.1, and it is necessary to do so
1369 whether you are using WordPress 2.1 or not. If you only upload the
1370 `rss-functions.php` file as in previous installations you will not have
1371 a working copy of MagpieRSS; the rss.php file contains the actual code.
1372
1373 * DATE BUG AFFECTING SOME PHP INSTALLATIONS RESOLVED: due to a subtle bug
1374 in parse_w3cdtf(), some installations of PHP encountered problems with
1375 FeedWordPress's attempt to date posts, which would cause some new posts
1376 on Atom feeds to be dated as if they had apppeared in 1969 or 1970
1377 (thus, effectively, never appearing on front page at all). This bug in
1378 the date handling should now be fixed.
1379
1380 * PHP <?=...?> SHORT FORM ELIMINATED: some installations of PHP do not
1381 allow the <?=...?> short form for printing PHP values, which was used
1382 extensively in the FeedWordPress interface code. Since this could cause
1383 fatal errors for users with the wrong installation of PHP, the short
1384 form has been replaced with full PHP echo statements, and is no longer
1385 used in FeedWordPress.
1386
1387 * BETTER USER INTERFACE INTEGRATION WITH WORDPRESS 2.x: Some minor changes
1388 have been made to help the FeedWordPress interface pages blend in better
1389 with the user interface when running under WordPress 2.x.
1390
1391 * GLOBAL CATEGORIES BUG RESOLVED: a bug that prevented some users from
1392 setting one or more categories to apply to syndicated posts from all
1393 feeds (using the checkbox interface under Options --> Syndication) has
1394 been resolved.
1395
1396 = 0.98 =
1397
1398 * WORDPRESS 2.0 COMPATIBILITY: This is a narrowly-targeted release to
1399 solve a major outstanding problem. FeedWordPress is now compatible with
1400 both WordPress 1.5 and WordPress 2.0. Incompatibilities that caused
1401 fatal SQL errors, and a more subtle bug with off-kilter counts of posts
1402 under a given category, have been resolved. FeedWordPress tests for
1403 database schema using the global $wp_db_version variable (if null, then
1404 we presume that we're dealing with WordPress 1.5).
1405
1406 NOTE: I have **not** fully tested FeedWordPress with WordPress 2.0.
1407 Further testing may reveal more bugs. However, you should now be able
1408 to get at least basic FeedWordPress functionality up and running.
1409
1410 * AUTHOR MATCHING: FeedWordPress tests several fields to see if it can
1411 identify the author of the post as a user already in the WordPress user
1412 database. In previous versions, it tested the user login, the nickname,
1413 and tested for "aliases" listed in the Profile (see documentation). FWP
1414 now also matches authors on the basis of e-mail address (*if* an e-mail
1415 address is present). This is particularly helpful for formats such as
1416 RSS 2.0, in which authors are primarily identified by e-mail addresses.
1417
1418 = 0.97 =
1419
1420 * INSTALLATION PROCEDURE: Some of the changes between 0.96 and 0.97
1421 require upgrades to the meta-data stored by FeedWordPress to work
1422 properly. Thus, if you are upgrading from 0.96 or earlier to 0.97, most
1423 FeedWordPress operations (including updates and template functions)
1424 WILL BE DISABLED until you run the upgrade procedure. Fortunately,
1425 running the upgrade procedure is easy: just go to either Options -->
1426 Syndication or Links --> Syndicated in the WordPress Dashboard and press
1427 the button.
1428
1429 * FEED FORMAT SUPPORT: Support has been added for the Atom 1.0 IETF
1430 standard. Several other elements are also newly supported
1431 (dcterms:created, dcterms:issued, dcterms:modified, dc:identifier,
1432 proper support for the RSS 2.0 guid element, the RSS 2.0 author element,
1433 the use of Atom author or Dublin Core dc:creator constructs at the feed
1434 level to identify the author of individual items, etc.)
1435
1436 N.B.: full support of several Atom 1.0 features, such as categories
1437 and enclosures, requires you to install the optional rss-functions.php
1438 upgrade in your wp-includes directory.
1439
1440 * BUG FIX: Running `update-feeds.php` from command line or crontab
1441 returned "I don't syndicate..." errors. It turns out that WordPress
1442 sometimes tramples on the internal PHP superglobals that I depended on
1443 to determine whether or not the script was being invoked from the
1444 command line. This has been fixed (the variables are now checked
1445 *before* WordPress can trample them). Note that `update-feeds.php` has
1446 been thoroughly overhauled anyway; see below for details.
1447
1448 * BUG FIX: Duplicate categories or author names. Fixed two bugs that could
1449 create duplicate author and/or category names when the name contained
1450 either (a) certain international characters (causing a mismatch between
1451 MySQL and PHP's handling of lowercasing text), or (b) characters that
1452 have a special meaning in regular expressions (causing MySQL errors when
1453 looking for the author or category due to regexp syntax errors). These
1454 should now be fixed thanks to careful escaping of names that go into
1455 regular expressions and careful matching of lowercasing functions
1456 (comparing results from PHP only to other results from PHP, and results
1457 from MySQL only to other results from MySQL).
1458
1459 * BUG FIX: Items dated December 31, 1969 should appear less often. The
1460 function for parsing W3C date-time format dates that ships with
1461 MagpieRSS can only correctly parse fully-specified dates with a
1462 fully-specified time, but valid W3C date-time format dates may omit the
1463 time, the day of the month, or even the month. Some feeds in the wild
1464 date their items with coarse-grained dates, so the optional
1465 `rss-functions.php` upgrade now includes a more flexible parse_w3cdtf()
1466 function that will work with both coarse-grained and fully-specified
1467 dates. (If parts of the date or the time are omitted, they are filled in
1468 with values based on the current time, so '2005-09-10' will be dated to
1469 the current time on that day; '2004' will be dated to this day and time
1470 one year ago.
1471
1472 N.B.: This fix is only available in the optional `rss-functions.php`
1473 upgrade.
1474
1475 * BUG FIX: Evil use of HTTP GET has been undone. The WordPress interface
1476 is riddled with inappropriate (non-idempotent) uses of HTTP GET queries
1477 (ordinary links that make the server do something with significant
1478 side-effects, such as deleting a post or a link from the database).
1479 FeedWordPress did some of this too, especially in places where it aped
1480 the WordPress interface (e.g. the "Delete" links in Links -->
1481 Syndicated). That's bad business, though. I've changed the interface so
1482 that all the examples of improper side-effects that I can find now
1483 require an HTTP POST to take effect. I think I got pretty much
1484 everything; if there's anything that I missed, let me know.
1485
1486 Further reading: [Sam Ruby 2005-05-06: This Stuff Matters](http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2005/05/06/This-Stuff-Matters)
1487
1488 * BUG FIX: Categories applied by `cats` setting should no longer prevent
1489 category-based filtering from working. In FeedWordPress, you can (1)
1490 apply certain categories to all syndicated posts, or all posts from
1491 a particular feed; and (2) filter out all posts that don't match one
1492 of the categories that are already in the WordPress database (allowing
1493 for simple category-based filtering; just load up WordPress with the
1494 categories you want to accept, and then tell FeedWordPress not to create
1495 new ones). However, the way that (1) and (2) were implemented meant that
1496 you couldn't effectively use them together; once you applied a known
1497 category to all syndicated posts from a particular feed, it meant that
1498 they'd have at least one familiar category (the category or categories
1499 you were applying), and that would get all posts past the filter no
1500 matter what categories they were originally from.
1501
1502 Well, no longer. You can still apply categories to all syndicated posts
1503 (using either Syndication --> Options, or the feed-level settings under
1504 Links --> Syndicated). But these categories are not applied to the post
1505 until *after* it has already passed by the "familiar categories" filter.
1506 So now, if you want, you can do category filtering and *then* apply as
1507 many categories as you please to all and only posts that pass the filter.
1508
1509 * BUG FIX: Other minor typos and HTML gaffes were fixed along the way.
1510
1511 * PERFORMANCE: get_feed_meta() no longer hits the database for information
1512 on every call; it now caches link data in memory, so FeedWordPress only
1513 goes to the database once for each syndicated link. This may
1514 substantially improve performance if your database server resources
1515 are tight and your templates make a lot of use of custom settings from
1516 get_feed_meta().
1517
1518 * API CHANGE: Link ID numbers, rather than RSS URIs, are now used to
1519 identify the feed from which a post is syndicated when you use template
1520 functions such as get_feed_meta(). The practical upshot of this is you
1521 can switch feeds, or change the feed address for a particular syndicated
1522 site, without breaking your templates for all the posts that were
1523 syndicated from the earlier URI.
1524
1525 * API CHANGE: if you have plugins or templates that make use of the
1526 get_feed_meta() function or the $fwp_feedmeta global, note that the
1527 data formerly located under the `uri` and `name` fields is now located
1528 under the `link/uri` field and the `link/name` field, respectively. Note
1529 also that you can access the link ID number for any given feed under the
1530 global $fwp_feedmeta['link/id'] (in plugins) or
1531 get_feed_meta('link/id') (in a template in post contexts).
1532
1533 * FEATURE: the settings for individual feeds can now be edited using a
1534 humane interface (where formerly you had to tweak key-value pairs in the
1535 Link Notes section). To edit settings for a feed, pick the feed that you
1536 want under Links --> Syndicated and click the Edit link.
1537
1538 * FEATURE: The "Unsubscribe" button (formerly "Delete") in Links -->
1539 Syndicated now offers three options for unsubscribing from a feed: (1)
1540 turning off the subscription without deleting the feed data or affecting
1541 posts that were syndicated from the feed (this works by setting the Link
1542 for the feed as "invisible"); (2) deleting the feed data and all of the
1543 posts that were syndicated from the feed; or (3) deleting the feed data
1544 and *keeping* the posts that were syndicated from the feed
1545 setting the Link to "Invisible" (meaning that it will not be displayed
1546 in lists of the site links on the front page, and it won't be checked
1547 for updates; (2) deleting the Link and all of the posts that were
1548 syndicated from its feed; or (3) deleting the feed data but keeping the
1549 posts that were syndicated (which will henceforward be treated as if
1550 they were local rather than syndicated posts). (Note that (1) is usually
1551 the best option for aggregator sites, unless you want to clean up the
1552 results of an error or a test.)
1553
1554 * FEATURE / BUG FIX: If you have been receiving mysterious "I don't
1555 syndicate...", or "(local) HTTP status code was not 200", or "(local)
1556 transport error - could not open socket", or "parse error - not well
1557 formed" errors, then this update may solve your problems, and if it does
1558 *not* solve them, it will at least make the reasons for the problems
1559 easier to understand. That's because I've overhauled the way that
1560 FeedWordPress goes about updating feeds.
1561
1562 If you use the command-line PHP scripting method to run scheduled
1563 updates, then not much should change for you, except for fewer
1564 mysterious errors. If you have done updates by sending periodic HTTP
1565 requests to <http://your-blog.com/path/wp-content/update-feeds.php>,
1566 then the details have changed somewhat; mostly in such a way as to make
1567 things easier on you. See the README file or online documentation on
1568 Staying Current for the details.
1569
1570 * FEATURE: FeedWordPress now features a more sophisticated system for
1571 timed updates. Instead of polling *every* subscribed feed for updates
1572 *each* time `update-feeds.php` is run, FeedWordPress now keeps track of
1573 the last time it polled each feed, and only polls them again after a
1574 certain period of time has passed. The amount of time is normally set
1575 randomly for each feed, in a period between 30 minutes and 2 hours (so
1576 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
1577 directly by the feed, which brings us to ...
1578
1579 * FEATURE: FeedWordPress now respects the settings in the `ttl` and
1580 Syndication Module RSS elements. Feeds with these elements set will not
1581 be polled any more frequently than they indicate with these feeds unless
1582 the user manually forces FeedWordPress to poll the feed (see Links -->
1583 Syndicated --> Edit settings).
1584
1585 = 0.96 =
1586
1587 * FEATURE: support has been added for enclosures in RSS 2.0 and Atom
1588 0.6+ newsfeeds. WordPress already supports adding enclosures to an
1589 item; FeedWordPress merely gets the information on the enclosure
1590 from the feed it is syndicating and plugs that information directly
1591 into the WordPress database so that (among other things) that post
1592 will have its enclosure listed in your blog's RSS 2 newsfeed.
1593
1594 Note that enclosure support requires using the optional MagpieRSS
1595 upgrade (i.e., replacing your `wp-includes/rss-functions.php` with
1596 `OPTIONAL/wp-includes/rss-functions.php` from the FWP archive)
1597
1598 * FEATURE: for completeness's sake, there is now a feed setting,
1599 `hardcode url`, that allows you to set the URI for the front page
1600 of a contributor's website manually (that is, prevent it from being
1601 automatically updated from the feed channel link on each update). To
1602 set the URI manually, put a line like this in the Link Notes section
1603 of a feed:
1604
1605 hardcode url: yes
1606
1607 You can also instruct FeedWordPress to use hardcoded URIs by default
1608 on all feeds using Options --> Syndication
1609
1610 * FEATURE: by default, when FeedWordPress finds new syndicated posts,
1611 it (1) publishes them immediately, (2) turns comments off, and (3)
1612 turns trackback / pingback pings off. You can now alter all three
1613 default behaviors (e.g., to allow pings on syndicated posts, or to
1614 send newly-syndicated posts to the draft pile for moderation) using
1615 Options --> Syndication
1616
1617
1618 = From 0.91 to 0.95 =
1619
1620 * BUG FIX: Fixed an obscure bug in the handling of categories:
1621 categories with trailing whitespace could cause categories with
1622 duplicate names to be created. This no longer happens. While I was
1623 at it I tightened up the operation of
1624 FeedWordPress::lookup_categories() a bit in general.
1625
1626 * FEATURE DEPRECATED: the feed setting `hardcode categories` is now
1627 deprecated in favor of `unknown categories` (see below), which
1628 allows you to strip off any syndication categories not already in
1629 your database using `unknown categories: default` or `unknown
1630 categories: filter`. If you have `hardcode categories: yes` set on a
1631 feed, this will be treated as `unknown categories: default` (i.e.,
1632 no new categories will be added, but if a post doesn't match any of
1633 the categories it will be added in the default category--usually
1634 "Uncategorized" or "General").
1635
1636 * FEATURE: You can now set global defaults as to whether or not
1637 FeedWordPress will update the Link Name and Link Description
1638 settings for feeds automatically from the feed title and feed
1639 tagline. (By default, it does, as it has in past versions.) Whether
1640 this behavior is turned on or off, you can still override the
1641 default behavior using feed settings of `hardcode name: yes`,
1642 `hardcode name: no`, `hardcode description: yes`, or `hardcode
1643 description: no`.
1644
1645 * FEATURE: Users can now provide one or several "aliases" for an
1646 author, just as they can for a category. For example, to make
1647 FeedWordPress treat posts by "Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger" and "Pope
1648 Benedict XVI" as by the same author, edit the user profile for Pope
1649 Benedict XVI and add a line like this to the "User profile" field:
1650
1651 a.k.a.: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
1652
1653 You can add several aliases, each on a line by itself. You can also
1654 add any other text you like to the Profile without interfering with
1655 the aliases.
1656
1657 * FEATURE: Users can now choose how to handle syndicated posts that
1658 are in unfamiliar categories or by unfamiliar authors (i.e.,
1659 categories or authors whose names are not yet in the WordPress
1660 database). By default, FeedWordPress will (as before) create a new
1661 category (or new author) and use it for the current post and any
1662 future posts. This behavior can be changed, either for all feeds or
1663 for one or another particular feed.
1664
1665 There are now three different options for an unfamiliar author: (1)
1666 FeedWordPress can create a new author account and attribute the
1667 syndicated post to the new account; (2) FeedWordPress can attribute
1668 the post to an author if the author's name is familiar, and to a
1669 default author (currently, this means the Site Administrator
1670 account) if it is not; (3) FeedWordPress can drop posts by
1671 unfamiliar authors and syndicate only posts by authors who are
1672 already in the database.
1673
1674 There are, similarly, two different options for an unfamiliar
1675 category: (1) FeedWordPress can create new categories and place the
1676 syndicated post in them; (2) FeedWordPress can drop the unfamiliar
1677 categories and place syndicated posts only in categories that it is
1678 already familiar with. In addition, FeedWordPress 0.95 lets you
1679 choose whether posts that are in *no* familiar categories should be
1680 syndicated (and placed in the default category for the blog) or
1681 simply dropped.
1682
1683 You can set the default behavior for both authors and categories
1684 using the settings in Options --> Syndication. You can also set
1685 different behavior for specific feeds by adding the `unfamiliar
1686 author` and / or `unfamiliar categories` settings to the Link Notes
1687 section of a feed:
1688
1689 unfamiliar author: (create|default|filter)
1690 unfamiliar categories: (create|default|filter)
1691
1692 A setting of `unfamiliar author: create` will make FeedWordPress
1693 create new authors to match unfamiliar author names *for this feed
1694 alone*. A setting of `unfamiliar author: default` will make it
1695 assign posts from unfamiliar authors to the default user account. A
1696 setting of `unfamiliar author: filter` will cause all posts (from
1697 this feed alone) to be dropped unless they are by an author already
1698 listed in the database. Similiarly, `unfamiliar categories: create`
1699 will make FeedWordPress create new categories to match unfamiliar
1700 category names *for this feed alone*; `unfamiliar categories:
1701 default` will cause it to drop any unfamiliar category names; and
1702 `unfamiliar categories: filter` will cause it to *both* drop any
1703 unfamiliar category names *and* to only syndicate posts that are
1704 placed in one or more familiar categories.
1705
1706 These two new features allow users to do some coarse-grained
1707 filtering without having to write a PHP filter. Specifically, they
1708 offer an easy way for you to filter feeds by category or by author.
1709 Suppose, for example, that you only wanted to syndicate posts that
1710 your contributors place in the "Llamas" category. You could do so by
1711 setting up your installation of WordPress so that the only category
1712 in the database is "Llamas," and then use Options --> Syndication to
1713 set "Unfamiliar categories" to "don't create new categories and
1714 don't syndicate posts unless they match at least one familiar
1715 category". Now, when you update, only posts in the "Llamas" category
1716 will be syndicated by FeedWordPress.
1717
1718 Similarly, if you wanted to filter one particular feed so that only
1719 posts by (for example) the author "Earl J. Llama" were syndicated to
1720 your site, you could do so by creating a user account for Earl J.
1721 Llama, then adding the following line to the settings for the feed
1722 in Link Notes:
1723
1724 unfamiliar author: filter
1725
1726 This will cause any posts from this feed that are not authored by
1727 Earl J. Llama to be discarded, and only the posts by Earl J. Llama
1728 will be syndicated. (If the setting is used on one specific feed, it
1729 will not affect how posts from other feeds are syndicated.)
1730
1731 == License ==
1732
1733 The FeedWordPress plugin is copyright © 2005-2010 by Charles Johnson. It uses
1734 code derived or translated from:
1735
1736 - [wp-rss-aggregate.php][] by [Kellan Elliot-McCrea](kellan@protest.net)
1737 - [MagpieRSS][] by [Kellan Elliot-McCrea](kellan@protest.net)
1738 - [Ultra-Liberal Feed Finder][] by [Mark Pilgrim](mark@diveintomark.org)
1739 - [WordPress Blog Tool and Publishing Platform](http://wordpress.org/)
1740
1741 according to the terms of the [GNU General Public License][].
1742
1743 This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
1744 the terms of the [GNU General Public License][] as published by the Free
1745 Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any
1746 later version.
1747
1748 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
1749 WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
1750 PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
1751
1752 [wp-rss-aggregate.php]: http://laughingmeme.org/archives/002203.html
1753 [MagpieRSS]: http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/
1754 [HTTP Navigator 2]: http://www.keyvan.net/2004/11/16/http-navigator/
1755 [Ultra-Liberal Feed Finder]: http://diveintomark.org/projects/feed_finder/
1756 [GNU General Public License]: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
1757
1758