PluginProbe
FeedWordPress / 2012.1212
FeedWordPress v2012.1212
trunk 0.8 0.9 0.91 0.95 0.96 0.97 0.98 0.981 0.99 0.991 0.992 0.993 2008.1030 2008.1101 2008.1105 2008.1214 2009.0612 2009.0613 2009.0618 2009.0707 2009.1111 2009.1112 2010.0127 2010.0528 All 65 releases
← All changes | readme.txt +1841 -86 0.9932012.1212 View file →
@@ -1,11 +1,11 @@
1 1 === FeedWordPress ===
2 2 Contributors: Charles Johnson
3 -Donate link: http://projects.radgeek.com/feedwordpress/
3 +Donate link: http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/
4 4 Tags: syndication, aggregation, feed, atom, rss
5 -Requires at least: 1.5
6 -Tested up to: 2.5.1
7 -Stable tag: 0.993
5 +Requires at least: 3.0
6 +Tested up to: 3.5
7 +Stable tag: 2012.1212
8 8
9 9 FeedWordPress syndicates content from feeds you choose into your WordPress weblog.
10 10
11 11 == Description ==
@@ -14,44 +14,43 @@
14 14 * Project URI: <http://projects.radgeek.com/feedwordpress>
15 15 * License: GPL 2. See License below for copyright jots and tittles.
16 16
17 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](http://www.planetplanet.org/)
22 -to use at [Feminist Blogs](http://feministblogs.org/).
18 +from feeds that you choose into your WordPress weblog; the content it syndicates
19 +appears as a series of special posts in your WordPress posts database. If you
20 +syndicate several feeds then you can use WordPress's posts database and
21 +templating engine as the back-end of an aggregation ("planet") website. It was
22 +developed, originally, because I needed a more flexible replacement for
23 +[Planet][] to use at [Feminist Blogs][].
23 24
25 +[Planet]: http://www.planetplanet.org/
26 +[Feminist Blogs]: http://feministblogs.org/
27 +
24 28 FeedWordPress is designed with flexibility, ease of use, and ease of
25 29 configuration in mind. You'll need a working installation of WordPress or
26 -WordPress MU (versions [2.5][], [2.3][], [2.2][], [2.1][], [2.0][] or [1.5][]),
27 -and also FTP or SFTP access to your web host. The ability to create cron jobs on
28 -your web host is helpful but not absolutely necessary. You *don't* need to tweak
29 -any plain-text configuration files and you *don't* need shell access to your web
30 -host to make it work. (Although, I should point out, web hosts that *don't*
31 -offer shell access are *bad web hosts*.)
30 +WordPress MU (version [3.0] or later), and also FTP or SFTP access to your web
31 +host. The ability to create cron jobs on your web host is helpful but not
32 +required. You *don't* need to tweak any plain-text configuration files and you
33 +*don't* need shell access to your web host to make it work. (Although, I should
34 +point out, web hosts that *don't* offer shell access are *bad web hosts*.)
32 35
33 - [2.5]: http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_2.5
34 - [2.3]: http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_2.3
35 - [2.2]: http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_2.2
36 - [2.1]: http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_2.1
37 - [2.0]: http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_2.0
38 - [1.5]: http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_1.5
36 + [WordPress]: http://wordpress.org/
37 + [WordPress MU]: http://mu.wordpress.org/
38 + [3.0]: http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.0
39 39
40 40 == Installation ==
41 41
42 -To use version 0.993 of FeedWordPress, you will need:
42 +To use FeedWordPress, you will need:
43 43
44 -* an installed and configured copy of WordPress version 2.3.x, 2.2.x,
45 - 2.1.x, 2.0.x, or 1.5.x. (FeedWordPress will also work with the
46 - equivalent versions of WordPress MU.)
44 +* an installed and configured copy of [WordPress][] or [WordPress MU][]
45 + (version 3.0 or later).
47 46
48 -* FTP or SFTP access to your web host
47 +* FTP, SFTP or shell access to your web host
49 48
50 49 = New Installations =
51 50
52 -1. Download the FeedWordPress archive in zip or gzipped tar format and
53 - extract the files on your computer.
51 +1. Download the FeedWordPress installation package and extract the files on
52 + your computer.
54 53
55 54 2. Create a new directory named `feedwordpress` in the `wp-content/plugins`
56 55 directory of your WordPress installation. Use an FTP or SFTP client to
57 56 upload the contents of your FeedWordPress archive to the new directory
@@ -56,69 +55,35 @@
56 55 directory of your WordPress installation. Use an FTP or SFTP client to
57 56 upload the contents of your FeedWordPress archive to the new directory
58 57 that you just created on your web host.
59 58
60 -3. Upgrade the copy of MagpieRSS packaged with WordPress by installing the
61 - new copies of `rss.php` and `rss-functions.php` into the `wp-includes`
62 - directory of your FeedWordPress installation. These files are stored in
63 - the `MagpieRSS-upgrade` directory of your FeedWordPress archive. Strictly
64 - speaking, upgrading MagpieRSS is optional; FeedWordPress will run
65 - correctly without the upgrade. But if you hope to take advantage of
66 - numerous bug fixes, or support for Atom 1.0, multiple post categories,
67 - RSS enclosures, or multiple character encodings, then you need to
68 - install the upgrade.
59 +3. Log in to the WordPress Dashboard and activate the FeedWordPress plugin.
69 60
70 -4. Log in to the WordPress Dashboard and activate the FeedWordPress plugin.
61 +4. Once the plugin is activated, a new **Syndication** section should
62 + appear in your WordPress admin menu. Click here to add new syndicated
63 + feeds, set up configuration options, and determine how FeedWordPress
64 + will check for updates. For help, see the [FeedWordPress Quick Start][]
65 + page.
66 +
67 +[FeedWordPress Quick Start]: http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/quick-start
71 68
72 -5. Once the plugin is activated, you can go to **Syndication --> Options**
73 - and set (1) the link category that FeedWordPress will syndicate links
74 - from (by default, "Contributors"), and (2) whether FeedWordPress will
75 - use automatic updates or only manual updates.
76 -
77 -5. Go to the main **Syndication** page to set up the list of sites that
78 - you want FeedWordPress to syndicate onto your blog.
79 -
80 69 = Upgrades =
81 70
82 -To *upgrade* an existing installation of FeedWordPress to version 0.993:
71 +To *upgrade* an existing installation of FeedWordPress to the most recent
72 +release:
83 73
84 -1. Download the FeedWordPress archive in zip or gzipped tar format and
85 - extract the files on your computer.
74 +1. Download the FeedWordPress installation package and extract the files on
75 + your computer.
86 76
87 -2. If you are upgrading from version 0.98 or earlier, then you need to
88 - create a new directory named `feedwordpress` in the `wp-content/plugins`
89 - directory of your WordPress installation, and you also need to *delete*
90 - your existing `wp-content/update-feeds.php` and
91 - `wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress.php` files. The file structure for
92 - FeedWordPress has changed and the files from your old version will not
93 - be overwritten, which could cause conflicts if you leave them in place.
77 +2. Upload the new PHP files to `wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress`,
78 + overwriting any existing FeedWordPress files that are there.
79 +
80 +3. Log in to your WordPress administrative interface immediately in order
81 + to see whether there are any further tasks that you need to perform
82 + to complete the upgrade.
94 83
95 -3. Upload the new PHP files to `wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress`,
96 - overwriting any existing FeedWordPress files that are there. Also be
97 - sure to upgrade the MagpieRSS module by uploading `rss.php` and
98 - `rss-functions.php` from the `MagpieRSS-upgrade` directory in your
99 - archive to the `wp-includes` directory of your WordPress installation.
84 +4. Enjoy your newer and hotter installation of FeedWordPress
100 85
101 -3. If you are upgrading from version 0.96 or earlier, **immediately** log
102 - in to the WordPress Dashboard, and go to **Options --> Syndicated**.
103 - Follow the directions to launch the database upgrade procedure. The new
104 - versions of FeedWordPress incorporate some long-needed improvements, but
105 - old meta-data needs to be updated to prevent duplicate posts and other
106 - possible maladies. If you're upgrading an existing installation, updates
107 - and FeedWordPress template functions *will not work* until you've done
108 - the upgrade. Then take a coffee break while the upgrade runs. It should,
109 - hopefully, finish within a few minutes even on relatively large
110 - databases.
111 -
112 -4. If you are upgrading from version 0.98 or earlier, note that the old
113 - `update-feeds.php` has been eliminated in favor of a (hopefully) more
114 - humane method for automatic updating. If you used a cron job for
115 - scheduled updates, it will not work anymore, but there is another,
116 - simpler method which will. See [Setting Up Feed Updates](http://projects.radgeek.com/feedwordpress/install/#setting-up-feed-updates)
117 - to get scheduled updates back on track.
118 -
119 -5. Enjoy your new installation of FeedWordPress.
120 -
121 86 == Using and Customizing FeedWordPress ==
122 87
123 88 FeedWordPress has many options which can be accessed through the WordPress
124 89 Dashboard, and a lot of functionality accessible programmatically through
@@ -124,19 +89,1810 @@
124 89 Dashboard, and a lot of functionality accessible programmatically through
125 90 WordPress templates or plugins. For further documentation of the ins and
126 91 outs, see the documentation at the [FeedWordPress project homepage][].
127 92
128 - [FeedWordPress project homepage]: http://projects.radgeek.com/feedwordpress/
93 + [FeedWordPress project homepage]: http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/
129 94
95 +== Changelog ==
96 +
97 += 2012.1212 =
98 +
99 +* WORDPRESS 3.5 COMPATIBILITY: This release has been tested for compatibility
100 + with new releases of WordPress, up to version 3.5, and any documented
101 + compatibility issues have been cleared -- in particular, if you were seeing
102 + error pages stating that you don't have permission to access the
103 + FeedWordPress Syndication page within the WordPress admin interface, then
104 + upgrading to this release should fix the problem.
105 +
106 + As always, if you encounter any compatibility problems after upgrading your
107 + version of WordPress and your version of FeedWordPress to the most recent
108 + versions, please contact me with as detailed a description as possible of
109 + the issue you are encountering, the circumstances you're encountering it
110 + under, what you expect to see happening, and what is happening instead.
111 +
112 +* PHP 5.4 COMPATIBILITY: This release has been audited to fix potential
113 + problems with deprecation notices or fatal errors under recent versions
114 + of PHP. In particular, all uses of run-time pass-by-reference have been
115 + eliminated from the code; if you were seeing a fatal error reading
116 + "Call-time pass-by-reference has been removed ..." then upgrading to
117 + this release should fix the problem.
118 +
119 +* CUSTOMIZATION FRAMEWORK: A great deal of work has been done to make the
120 + underlying framework more flexible, so that PHP add-ons can be written
121 + to adapt FeedWordPress to handle custom XML vocabularies, expiration of
122 + posts under specified conditions, and other custom behavior.
123 +
124 +* BUGFIX: MANUALLY EDITED POST SLUGS NOT OVERWRITTEN. Thanks to a report
125 + by Chris Fritz, I've identified some code that causes post slugs for the
126 + posts generated by FWP to be rewritten with every update, even if the
127 + user has manually updated the slug from within the WordPress editing
128 + interface. This has been fixed: FWP will continue to generate new slugs
129 + for syndicated posts, but when syndicated posts are updated, they will
130 + retain the slug that they had at the time of the update; any manual
131 + changes to the post slug should be preserved.
132 +
133 +* USER-AGENT STRING: FeedWordPress now sends a distinctive User-Agent
134 + string identifying itself, and noting that it is a feed aggregator.
135 +
136 +* MISCELLANEOUS PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS: A number of changes have been
137 + made to try to reduce the intensity and expense in terms of both
138 + database performance and web server memory consumption.
139 +
140 +* DIAGNOSTICS IMPROVEMENTS: A number of new and improved diagnostics have
141 + been added which should aid in understanding and troubleshooting issues
142 + that may arise.
143 +
144 += 2011.1019 =
145 +
146 +* BUGFIX: "THERE ARE NO HTTP TRANSPORTS AVAILABLE" ERROR FIXED: The initial
147 + support for HTTP Basic and Digest authentication in version 2011.1018
148 + contained a bug that could cause HTTP requests for feeds or for other
149 + WordPress resources to break down if you do not have the PHP curl module
150 + installed. This bug has been fixed, and these errors should no longer
151 + appear.
152 +
153 +* IMPROVED HTTP AUTHENTICATION SUPPORT: In addition, the HTTP Authentication
154 + support in FeedWordPress has been extended, to ensure that Basic
155 + authentication is available in many web host configurations, and to allow
156 + you to add a username and password for a feed immediately when you
157 + subscribe to it.
158 +
159 += 2011.1018 =
160 +
161 +* HTTP BASIC AND DIGEST AUTHENTICATION SUPPORT: FeedWordPress now offers
162 + improved support for syndicating feeds that make use of HTTP Basic or HTTP
163 + Digest authentication methods. In order to set up authentication on one of
164 + your feeds, just go to its Settings > Feed page, and click on the "Uses
165 + Username/Password" link underneath the Feed URL. Enter the username and
166 + password for accessing the feed, then select the authentication method. (If
167 + you're not sure which method your feed provider uses, try Basic first.)
168 + Save Changes, and syndicate away.
169 +
170 + NOTE: HTTP Digest support requires the curl module for PHP. If you are not
171 + sure whether this module has been installed, contact your web hosting
172 + provider to check.
173 +
174 +* WP 3.3 (BETA) COMPATIBILITY: This version fixes an init-sequence bug that
175 + could cause intrusive warning messages or fatal errors in WP 3.3 beta
176 + versions.
177 +
178 +* BUGFIX: FIXES LONG DELAYS IN UPDATES SCHEDULES IN LARGE INSTALLATIONS. A
179 + performance feature introduced in version 2011.0721 had some flaws in its
180 + implementation, which tended to create serious delays (on the order of
181 + several hours) in FeedWordPress's attempts to schedule updates for feeds,
182 + when users had a very large number of feeds (several dozen or more) in their
183 + FeedWordPress installation. This feature has been reconfigured to adjust
184 + dynamically to the number of feeds in Syndicated Sources and the frequency
185 + with which they are updated. If you've seen a lot of ready-to-update feeds
186 + piling up, several hours after they were supposed to get updated, then this
187 + upgrade should better ensure that your feeds get updated in a timely fashion.
188 +
189 +* BUGFIX: syndicated_item_guid FILTERS FIXED. Previous versions of
190 + FeedWordPress theoretically allowed for filters on the syndicated_item_guid
191 + hook, which was intended to filter the globally-unique identifier element
192 + (rss:guid or atom:id) -- useful if you need to convince FeedWordPress to use
193 + different guids, or to recognize two or more incoming posts as versions of
194 + the same post rather than as distinct items. However, while the hook
195 + affected the guid stored in the WordPress database, it did not affect the
196 + guid used to check whether an incoming feed item had already been syndicated
197 + or was a new item -- which greatly limited the practical usefulness of the
198 + filter. This bug has been fixed: syndicated_item_guid filters should now
199 + properly control not only the final database record, but also the initial
200 + uniqueness test applied to posts.
201 +
202 += 2011.0721 =
203 +
204 +* BUGFIX: SERIOUS BUG CAUSING RARE UNEXPECTED DELETION OF PAGES AND OTHER
205 + CONTENT. A bug in the guid-checking code for some rare kinds of guids could
206 + cause content in the wp_posts table to seemingly disappear at random after
207 + FeedWordPress updates.This most frequently but not exclusively affected
208 + static pages. What actually happened is that in these rare cases the
209 + existing static page was mistaken for an older version of the new incoming
210 + syndicated post, which was then stored as a new revision of the original
211 + page. The bug that caused these mistaken identities has been fixed.
212 +
213 +* BUGFIX: UNWANTED AUTOMATIC PAGE-LOAD-BASED UPDATES NO LONGER A NUISANCE.
214 + Some users encountered a bug in which FeedWordPress would adopt an automatic
215 + page-load-based update method, even if they had requested that it not do
216 + so, and that it use a manual or cron job update method instead. The bug
217 + causing this has been fixed, and page-load-based updates should no longer
218 + trigger unless explicitly turned on.
219 +
220 +* WP 3.2 USER INTERFACE COMPATIBILITY: POST TAGS BOX NOW WORKS AGAIN. The
221 + release of WordPress 3.2 caused a breakage in the tags box which prevented
222 + you from adding or removing tags under Syndication --> Categories & Tags.
223 + (The breakage was the result of an incompatibility introduced by the new
224 + release of jQuery.) This breakage has now been fixed, and the tags box
225 + should work correctly again.
226 +
227 +* FEED UPDATE SCHEDULING IMPROVEMENTS: UI. The Syndicated Sources table now
228 + provides considerably more data to understand update scheduling, when
229 + specific scheduling decisions are made because of, e.g., requests from the
230 + feed producer.
231 +
232 +* FEED UPDATE SCHEDULING IMPROVEMENTS: ENFORCEABLE "MINIMUM INTERVAL" SETTING
233 + TO SPACE OUT UPDATES. Some feeds request specific update schedules, using
234 + standard elements such as sy:updateFrequency and rss:ttl. Normally,
235 + FeedWordPress respects any scheduling requests that a feed makes -- if it
236 + requests a longer gap between polls than what FWP would normally adopt, then
237 + FWP slows down to meet the request. If it indicates a shorter gap than what
238 + FWP would normally adopt, FWP speeds up and checks that feed for updates
239 + more often than it normally would. Now, there should not be any way for user
240 + settings to override an explicit slow-down request from the feed producer --
241 + if producers indicate a particular update schedule, then polling the feed
242 + more frequently than they request is considered abusive behavior. But
243 + there's no reason why users should not be able -- if they so desire -- to
244 + override speed-up requests, and poll a feed *less* frequently than the
245 + indicated update schedule, if the FWP user wants to space update checkins
246 + over a longer interval of time. Before, they could not do this: FWP always
247 + sped up to meet the indicated update schedule. Now, they can do this, by
248 + using the new "Minimum Interval" setting in Syndication --> Feeds &
249 + Updates..
250 +
251 += 2011.0706 =
252 +
253 +* WP 3.2 COMPATIBILITY: ELIMINATES FATAL ERROR "Call to undefined method
254 + WP_SimplePie_File::WP_SimplePie_File() in
255 + [...]/wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress/feedwordpress.php on line 1841." The
256 + latest release of WordPress, version 3.2, has shifted the minimum
257 + requirements up to PHP 5.2, and in line with the shift to PHP5 they have
258 + rewritten a number of code segments that made use of now-obsolete PHP4
259 + idioms. Unfortunately, this caused a fatal error whenever FeedWordPress
260 + attempted to make use of the cache, since FWP's caching plugin was written
261 + to match the older idiom. FeedWordPress has been updated to follow the new,
262 + PHP5 idiom when possible, thus eliminating the fatal error.
263 +
264 +* PERFORMANCE: The handling of queries to determine whether posts had been
265 + previously syndicated produced some very slow queries (usually, but not
266 + always, involving a scan over the MD5(post_guid) column of the table). The
267 + code that prepares MySQL queries for previously-syndicated checks has been
268 + revised to eliminate the MD5(post_guid) scan entirely, and to significantly
269 + improve performance by eliminating other unnecessary clauses.
270 +
271 +* BUGFIX: NO LONGER DESTROYS STICKY POSTS. Previous versions could destroy
272 + (or, more precisely, replace the content of) sticky posts due to some
273 + queries mashed together in unexpected ways by WordPress. Version 2011.0706
274 + accounts for and eliminates the problem; your sticky posts should be safe
275 + once again.
276 +
277 +* BUGFIX: GUIDS CONTAINING MYSQL-ESCAPED CHARACTERS NO LONGER CAUSE DUPLICATE
278 + POSTS TO APPEAR. One remaining source of duplicate post issues in 2011.0602
279 + was guids that contained characters that needed to be escaped for MySQL,
280 + such as single quotes and double quotes. The work-around for handling
281 + filtered URIs has now been corrected to ensure that these do not cause
282 + duplicate posts.
283 +
284 += 2011.0602 =
285 +
286 +* WP 3.1.3 COMPAT / BUGFIX: WHITESPACE IN GUIDS NO LONGER PRODUCES DUPLICATE
287 + POSTS. The work-around for handling filtered URIs in guid elements has now
288 + been extended to handle URIs that were filtered because of leading or
289 + trailing whitespace, in addition to URIs that were filtered because of
290 + unapproved schemes.
291 +
292 +* WP 3.1.3 COMPAT / BUGFIX: RELATIVE URLS IN GUIDS NO LONGER PRODUCE DUPLICATE
293 + POSTS. The work-around for handling filtered URIs in guid elements has now
294 + been extended to handle URIs that were altered without being filtered out
295 + entirely (most commonly because a scheme was added to a relative URL).
296 +
297 +* BUGFIX: UPDATES TO POST NO LONGER CAUSE DUPLICATE DRAFT VERSION TO APPEAR.
298 + Under certain conditions in 2011.0531, an update to an existing post would
299 + not be properly applied to the post itself, but rather would appear as a
300 + duplicate post with Draft status. This bug has been eliminated, and updates
301 + will now be properly inserted as revisions to the existing post.
302 +
303 += 2011.0531 =
304 +
305 +* WORDPRESS 3.1.3 COMPATIBILITY: DUPLICATE POSTS ISSUE FIXED. Due to
306 + internal changes in the way that WordPress handles post guids in the
307 + most recent release (3.1.3), many users experienced problems with many
308 + duplicate posts appearing in rapid succession. (Specifically, this would
309 + happen with any posts using tag: URL guids -- such as all the posts
310 + coming from Blogger feeds or feeds from other Google services.) This
311 + compatibility release of FeedWordPress eliminates the issue by working
312 + around the new restrictions on tag: URLs.
313 +
314 +* NEW AND IMPROVED DIAGNOSTICS: Syndication --> Diagnostics now contains some
315 + new diagnostics settings useful for debugging problems with duplicate posts
316 + (allowing you to easily view the guid of posts in the WordPress posts
317 + database and allowing you to track the SQL used to check for existing
318 + versions of a syndicated post).
319 +
320 += 2011.0512 =
321 +
322 +* DIAGNOSTICS IMPROVEMENTS; "THERE MAY BE A BUG IN FEEDWORDPRESS" CRITICAL
323 + ERROR NOTICES ELIMINATED: This version includes some major improvements
324 + to the Syndication --> Diagnostics section, which should aid in
325 + troubleshooting difficulties with items failing to be imported, posts
326 + failing to be properly inserted into the database, or updates failing to
327 + be recorded. If you have been encountering critical error / bug notices
328 + with a white screen and the message "THERE MAY BE A BUG IN
329 + FEEDWORDPRESS," followed by an extraordinarily long dump of mostly
330 + incomprehensible diagnostic information, you'll be happy to know that
331 + the condition causing these notices has been eliminated. In the few
332 + cases where errors may still crop up with database insertions,
333 + FeedWordPress will now produce a significantly more manageable and more
334 + useful diagnostic message.
335 +
336 +* BUGFIX: NEW POSTS FAILING TO APPEAR IN A CLEANLY-INSTALLED FEEDWORDPRESS
337 + SYSTEM. If you encountered a recurring problem with FeedWordPress
338 + failing to import new posts, after a clean install of FeedWordPress
339 + (i.e., not an upgrade from a previous version), this problem may have
340 + been the result of a bug with author-handling which has now been fixed
341 + in the 2011.0512 release. (If the problem does *not* go away with the
342 + upgrade, this version also includes significant improvements to the
343 + Diagnostics system, which will help track down what *is* causing it
344 + in your particular case.)
345 +
346 +* PERFORMANCE: New handling of update hashes allows FeedWordPress to avoid
347 + a certain kind of infinite loop, caused when two more more different
348 + syndicated feeds each carried a version of the same item (for example,
349 + because it appeared on two different aggregator feeds that you're
350 + syndicating). In previous versions, when this kind of loop cropped up,
351 + syndicated posts could pile up an indefinitely large number of revisions
352 + -- each revision alternating between the version from each of the two
353 + feeds where it appeared -- which would, over time, dramatically inflate
354 + the size of the database, and kill the performance of queries on the
355 + post table. This issue has been resolved: revisions of the post that
356 + have been syndicated once will not be re-syndicated over and over again.
357 +
358 +* AUTHOR LISTS: Lists of authors presented on the Author settings pages
359 + should now be easier to scan through, with author names arranged in
360 + alphabetical order.
361 +
362 +* FEED ITEM DATE PARSING: More tweaks to make date-time handling more
363 + resilient when feeds provide broken or weird values for the timestamps
364 + on syndicated items. FWP will now attempt to work around unparseable
365 + timezone values.
366 +
367 +* AUTHOR MATCHING: Now attempts to match author names against the WP login
368 + name in addition to display_name; when creating user record, also fills
369 + in some best-guess values for nickname, firstname and lastname. Also
370 + properly picks up Atom 1.0 author/uri data from feed.
371 +
372 +* COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress has been successfully tested for
373 + compatibility with recent releases of WordPress, up to version 3.1.2.
374 +
375 += 2011.0211 =
376 +
377 +* BUGFIX: DUPLICATE POSTS WHEN GUIDS ARE TOO LONG: When feeds included
378 + exceptionally long GUIDs, FeedWordPress could occasionally get into
379 + a situation where posts with the long GUIDs would be duplicated over
380 + and over again with each update (because FWP failed to store the full
381 + GUID, due to length constraints in the relevant database tables).
382 + Without the full GUID, FWP would not know that the post had already
383 + been syndicated once. This bug has been fixed, and should no longer
384 + produce duplicate posts.
385 +
386 +* HTTP TIMEOUT SETTING: If you are frequently running into timeout
387 + problems with one or more of the feeds you syndicate, FWP now allows you
388 + to adjust the timeout for HTTP requests using a global or feed-by-feed
389 + setting.
390 +
391 +* HTTP GET PARAMETERS: You can now temporarily or permanently add HTTP
392 + GET parameters to a subscription using an interface in Syndication -->
393 + Feeds & Updates. This is especially helpful for making quick, short-term
394 + changes to a subscription (for example, to pull in all the previous
395 + items from a web service, before settling down to pulling in only newly
396 + updated items).
397 +
398 +* DIAGNOSTICS SYSTEM: Added several new diagnostics which are useful in
399 + troubleshooting, and established a framework for add-on modules to hook
400 + in with their own diagnostic messages.
401 +
402 +* UI: Adjusted some internal coding, which should allow for settings
403 + pages and add-ons to properly display multiple category pickers on a
404 + single settings page.
405 +
406 +* PHP4 COMPATIBILITY TWEAKS: This version makes some tweaks to the handling
407 + of object references which should improve compatibility with older
408 + versions of PHP. (Although, I should note, web hosts that still force
409 + you to run under PHP 4 -- in 2011! -- are *bad web hosts*.)
410 +
411 +* IMPROVED PERFORMANCE: This version eliminates a *major* performance drag
412 + that shows up on sites with large numbers of users (due to some poor
413 + decisions about where to place a user query, which caused the user table
414 + to be scanned frequently when it did not need to be). If you experienced
415 + serious problems with CPU load or slow database performance under
416 + 2010.0905, which kicked in immediately when FWP was loaded and tended
417 + to disappear immediately if FWP was de-activated, it is likely that
418 + upgrading away from 2010.0905 to the most recent version will resolve
419 + your problem.
420 +
421 +
422 += 2010.0905 =
423 +
424 +* BUGFIX: CATEGORIES AND TAGS CORRECTLY ASSIGNED IN AUTOMATIC UPDATES.
425 + Version 2010.0903 switched over to a new way of assigning categories and
426 + tags as part of its support for handling custom taxonomies.
427 + Unfortunately, the method that it uses is subjected to some checks of
428 + the current user's capabilities, which creates problems for posts that
429 + are being inserted into the WordPress database when there *is* no
430 + current user logged in (as, for example, when an update is being carried
431 + out from a cron job or automatic update). The result was that posts
432 + from cron jobs and automatic updates ended up with no Categories and no
433 + Tags being assigned. This bug has now been fixed: in 2010.0905, Tags and
434 + Categories should be correctly assigned to all posts, regardless of
435 + whether they were added from manual updates, cron jobs, or automatic
436 + updates.
437 +
438 += 2010.0903 =
439 +
440 +* WORDPRESS 3 REQUIRED: Please note that this release of FeedWordPress
441 + *requires* WordPress 3.0 or later. If you are currently using a 2.x
442 + branch of WordPress, you will need to upgrade to WordPress 3 before you
443 + can successfully upgrade FeedWordPress.
444 +
445 +* BUGFIX: NO MORE DISAPPEARING "SYNDICATED SOURCES" PANEL; INTERNET
446 + EXPLORER UI GLITCH APPARENTLY FIXED: Several users independently
447 + reported a problem with FWP 2010.0623 and various versions of IE. A
448 + problem with the HTML markup caused IE (but not Firefox or
449 + Chrome) to completely hide the Syndicated Sources administration panel
450 + (the main list of currently-syndicated sources, and the main location
451 + for adding new sources, under the Syndication menu item) when a user
452 + added their first syndicated feed. Maddeningly, the glitch seemed to
453 + affect some IE users and not others: I was never able to reproduce the
454 + problem for myself on my own machines. However, the markup of Syndicated
455 + Sources has undergone significant changes and corrections since
456 + 2010.0623, and two independent sources who had been having this problem
457 + confirm that they no longer encounter it with the updated version. For
458 + the time being, I am going to declare this bug squashed.
459 +
460 +* BUGFIX: MORE PROTECTION AGAINST FATAL ERRORS FROM PLUGGABLE VERSIONS OF
461 + SimplePie: FeedWordPress now takes some precautions that should help to
462 + better avoid conflicts for users who have installed pluggable versions
463 + of SimplePie for another plugin or theme. (You may not know that you have
464 + done this; but if you've been encountering fatal errors indicating that
465 + you cannot redeclare class SimplePie, or something along those lines,
466 + there is now a better chance that those fatal errors will be eliminated.
467 +
468 +* PERFORMANCE: SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCED MEMORY CONSUMPTION FOR LARGE UPDATES:
469 + FeedWordPress is still a memory-hungry little module, especially when
470 + you are dealing with very large feeds. However, users should notice a
471 + significant reduction in memory overloads, especially if they update a
472 + large number of feeds at once.
473 +
474 +* USER INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: Nothing is radically different, but there's
475 + been a fair amount of extra spit and polish added, including a convenient
476 + new Dashboard widget that may save you a trip to the Syndication menu,
477 + a lot of effort to make the relationship between global and feed-by-feed
478 + settings more obvious to the user and more easily controllable, to make
479 + navigation between settings pages easier, to sand off a few rough edges,
480 + and to make other improvements on the margins. I hope you'll like how
481 + it looks.
482 +
483 +* ADDING MULTIPLE FEEDS: FeedWordPress now provides a convenient mode for
484 + adding multiple feeds at once, using either a copy-and-pasted list, or
485 + else an OPML file. Go to Syndication --> Syndicated Sources and check
486 + out the two new buttons underneath the New Source input box. When you
487 + have to add a number of feeds at once, this can save you considerable
488 + time and trouble.
489 +
490 +* IMPROVED HANDLING OF AUTHORS WITH DUPLICATE E-MAIL ADDRESS AND AUTHORS
491 + WITH NAMES WRITTEN IN FOREIGN SCRIPTS: WordPress 3 is increasingly picky
492 + about what it will accept for new author accounts, and some of the
493 + conditions it imposes can cause error conditions that prevent posts from
494 + being properly syndicated, or properly attributed, if authors happen to
495 + have identical e-mail addresses, or if users are given usernames that are
496 + written in non-Western scripts. FeedWordPress now handles these much
497 + better, and systematically works to avoid clashes between syndicated
498 + authors' account names or in their e-mail addresses, which should result
499 + in significantly better results in mapping author names to WordPress
500 + user accounts.
501 +
502 +* MAPPING CATEGORIES ON SYNDICATED POSTS TO TAGS NOW BETTER SUPPORTED:
503 + In previous versions, the only way for the Categories provided by a
504 + syndicated feed to be mapped into Post Tags was to instruct FWP to
505 + create new tags, rather than new categories, for unfamiliar categories
506 + from the feed. This works fine if you want tags to be the default; but
507 + if you want only a *specific* set of tags, there was no way to get them
508 + without getting most or all other categories imported as tags. You can
509 + now do this by creating a tag (under Posts ==> Post Tags) before
510 + importing the post; when the syndicated category matches a pre-existing
511 + tag, the incoming post will be tagged with that tag, without creating
512 + a local Post Category.
513 +
514 +* REL-TAG MICROFORMAT SUPPORT FOR INLINE TAGS: Syndicated posts that
515 + contain inline tags, marked up using the Rel-Tag microformat
516 + <http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag>, are now tagged with the tags
517 + provided by Rel-Tag format links.
518 +
519 +* MUCH GREATER CONTROL OVER CATEGORY AND TAG MAPPING: This is partly the
520 + result of building in support for a potentially endless set of custom
521 + taxonomies (see below), but in general there has been a great deal of
522 + effort towards giving you more control over how categories and tags
523 + provided by the feed are mapped into terms on the local blog. In
524 + particular, you can now force FeedWordPress to create only categories
525 + from categories and tags provided by the feed; or to create only tags;
526 + or to search both categories and tags for a match; or you can simply
527 + force it to drop all of the categories provided by the feed and use
528 + only categories or tags that you explicitly provide. In addition, you
529 + can now also choose whether to override global categories settings with
530 + a local, feed-specific setting; or whether to *add together* *both* the
531 + global categories and the local feed-specific categories -- depending
532 + on whatever your use-case may demand.
533 +
534 +* CUSTOM POST TYPES AND TAXONOMY SUPPORTS: This is mainly for the
535 + super-geeky, but if you use other plugins or themes that make
536 + significant use of WordPress's support for custom post types and custom
537 + taxonomies, you may be pleased to find that FeedWordPress now allows you
538 + to feed incoming posts into any custom feed type that you wish, and to
539 + map categories and tags from the feed to custom taxonomies as well as
540 + to the standard Category and Tag taxonomies.
541 +
542 +* STORING NAMESPACED CUSTOM FEED ELEMENTS IN POST CUSTOM FIELDS: If you
543 + would like to use FeedWordPress's support for storing custom meta-data
544 + from feed elements in the custom fields for a post (for example, to
545 + store geolocation data or iTunes media meta-data), you'll find that it's
546 + now much easier for you to access these namespaced elements. You always
547 + could access them, but in previous versions you might have to write
548 + something ugly like $(/{http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#}lat)
549 + just to get at the value of a `<geo:lat>` tag. Now, as long as you use
550 + the same mnemonic codes that the feed producer used, you should always
551 + be able to write a nice, simple expression like $(/geo:lat) to get the
552 + value of a <geo:lat> tag.
553 +
554 +* CUSTOM DIRECTORY STRUCTURE SUPPORT: if you poke at it enough, WordPress
555 + is relatively flexible about where it should store admin interface code,
556 + uploaded content, plugins, and a number of other things that occupy an
557 + important place in the WordPress directory structure. Previous versions
558 + of FeedWordPress encountered serious errors or broke entirely when used
559 + with directory structures other than the default. This should now be
560 + fixed: FWP now supports custom directory structures wherever WordPress
561 + allows them to be customized, rather than depending on the default
562 + locations. Enjoy your freedom!
563 +
564 +* MANY NEW FILTERS AND API UTILITY FUNCTIONS FOR ADD-ON PROGRAMMERS: There
565 + have been too many improvements to list them all in this ChangeLog, but
566 + it means that much more power and ease for folks who are customizing
567 + FeedWordPress through PHP filters or add-on modules. Fuller
568 + documentation will be put up at the Wiki at feedwordpress.radgeek.org
569 + soon.
570 +
571 += 2010.0623 =
572 +
573 +* WORDPRESS 3.0 COMPATIBILITY / AUTHOR MAPPING INTERFACE ISSUES: I
574 + resolved a couple of outstanding issues with the author mapping
575 + interface (Syndication --> Authors), which were preventing new users
576 + from being created correctly and author mapping rules from being set up
577 + correctly. These partly had to do with new restrictions on user account
578 + creation introduced in WordPress 3.0; anyway, they should now be fixed.
579 +
580 +* MORE EFFICIENT SYNDICATED URL LOOKUPS: Several users noticed that the
581 + bug fix introduced in 2010.0528 for compatibility with post-listing
582 + plugins caused a lot more queries to the database in order to look up
583 + numerical post IDs from the URL provided to the filter. This shouldn't
584 + cause any major problems, but it is not as efficient as it could be; the
585 + code now takes advantage of a more efficient way of doing things,
586 + which usually will not require any additional database queries.
587 +
588 +* SIMPLEPIE FEED UPDATE ISSUES: If you have been having significant
589 + problems with getting feeds to update correctly, this may be the result
590 + of some bugs in the implementation of SimplePie caching that ships with
591 + WordPress (as of version 3.0). (You would most commonly experience this
592 + error if you continually saw errors such as "No feed found at <...>" in
593 + your updates.) Fortunately, SimplePie allows for a great deal of
594 + extensibility and this allows me to work around the problem; these
595 + error conditions should now be mostly eliminated when the underlying
596 + feed is valid.
597 +
598 +* UI: SHOW INACTIVE SOURCES: When you use the default unsubscribe option
599 + -- which turns off the subscription to a feed while preserving the posts
600 + from it and the syndication-related meta-data for the feed -- the
601 + unsubscribed feed can now easily be viewed in a special "Inactive"
602 + section of the Syndicated Sources page. (As a side benefit, if you've
603 + accidentally, or only temporarily, turned off the subscription to a
604 + feed, it is now much easier to restore the feed to being active, or to
605 + delete it permanently, if you prefer.
606 +
607 +* UI: FEED FINDER / SWITCH FEED INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: changes to styling
608 + and options for the feed finder / switch feed, which should now make it
609 + easier, in some cases, to find alternative feeds, and make interface
610 + options more clearly visible.
611 +
612 +* FILTERS: `syndicated_item_published` and `syndicated_item_updated` NOW
613 + PROPERLY AFFECT THE DATING OF POSTS. These filters used to affect some
614 + date-related settings, but not others -- and, most importantly, not the
615 + final date that is set for a post's publication or last-modified date
616 + in the WordPress database. Now, they do affect that, as they should.
617 + (Filters should receive, and return, a long integer, representing a Unix
618 + epoch relative timestamp.)
619 +
620 +* MAGIC URL TO CLEAR THE CACHE: Suppose that you need to clear the feed
621 + cache, for whatever reason; suppose, even, that you need to clear it on
622 + a regular basis. One way you might do this is by logging into the
623 + FeedWordPress administrative interface and going to Syndication -->
624 + Performance. Another way you might do it, now, is to simply send an
625 + HTTP request to a magic URL provided by FeedWordPress: if your blog is
626 + at example.com, the URL would be <http://example.com/?clear_cache=1>
627 +
628 += 2010.0602 =
629 +
630 +* CATEGORY BOX INTERFACE ELEMENT FIXED FOR WP 3.0: Stylesheet changes
631 + between WordPress 2.9.x and the WordPress 3.0 RC caused the Categories
632 + box under **Syndication --> Categories & Tags** to malfunction. This
633 + has been fixed.
634 +
635 +* LINK CATEGORY SELECTION BOX IN SYNDICATION ==> FEEDS FIXED FOR WP 2.8
636 + AND 2.9: A WP 3.0 compatibility change introduced in 2010.0531
637 + inadvertently broke the Syndicated Link Category selector under
638 + Syndication --> Feeds & Updates in WP 2.8 and WP 2.9, causing the post
639 + categories to be displayed in the selector rather than the link
640 + categories. This should now be fixed so that the selector will work
641 + correctly under both the current versions of WordPress and the 3.0 RC.
642 +
643 +* MORE PERMISSIVE HANDLING OF FEEDS WITH BAD CONTENT-TYPE HEADERS: One of
644 + the small advantages that MagpieRSS had over SimplePie is that it was
645 + more tolerant about parsing well-formed feeds that the remote web server
646 + happened to deliver with weird or incorrect HTTP Content-type headers.
647 + In feeds affected by this problem, the new SimplePie parser would simply
648 + fail to find a feed, due to its being led astray by the contents of the
649 + Content-type header. This version includes an extension to SimplePie's
650 + content-type sniffer that offers more permissive handling of the HTTP
651 + headers.
652 +
653 +* MORE FULL-TEXT "EXCERPTS" NOW PROPERLY SHORTENED. Version 2010.0528
654 + introduced code to control for cases in which elements intended for
655 + item summaries are (ill-advisedly) used to carry the full text of posts;
656 + past versions of FeedWordPress would simply include the full text of the
657 + post in the excerpt field, but newer versions now attempt to detect
658 + this condition when it arises and to head it off, by blanking out the
659 + excerpt field and filling it with an automatically generated short,
660 + plain text excerpt from the full content. This release broadens the
661 + test conditions that indicate when an excerpt field is treated as
662 + identical to the full text of the post, and should therefore improve
663 + the handling of some feeds (such as Google Reader feeds) where the full
664 + text of each post was still appearing in the excerpt field.
665 +
666 +* FILTERS: `syndicated_item_published` AND `syndicated_item_updated`
667 + FILTERS NOW ALLOW FILTER AUTHORS TO CHANGE POST TIMESTAMPS. You can now
668 + use the `syndicated_item_published` and `syndicated_item_updated` filter
669 + hooks to write filters or add-ons which directly change the post date
670 + and most-recently-updated timestamps on incoming syndicated posts. Props
671 + to niska for pointing out where the filters needed to be applied in
672 + order to change WordPress's internal timestamps for incoming posts.
673 +
674 += 2010.0531 =
675 +
676 +* PERMALINK / CUSTOM FIELDS PROBLEM RESOLVED: An issue in 2010.0528 caused
677 + some posts to be imported without the proper syndication-related
678 + meta-data being attached (thus causing permalinks to point back to the
679 + aggregator website rather than to the source website, among other
680 + problems). This problem has been resolved (and a fix has been applied
681 + which will resolve the problem for any posts affected by this problem,
682 + if the original post is recent enough to still be available on the feed).
683 +
684 +* UI: The "Back End" section has been split into two separate sections --
685 + "Performance" (dealing with caching, database index, and other
686 + performance tweaks), and "Diagnostics" (dealing with debug mode,
687 + update logging, and a number of new diagnostic tests which I will be
688 + rolling out over the next few releases).
689 +
690 +* Several minor interface bug fixes and PHP warning notices eliminated.
691 +
692 += 2010.0528 =
693 +
694 +#### Compatibility ####
695 +
696 +* SIMPLEPIE IS NOW USED TO PARSE FEEDS; NO MORE MAGPIERSS UPGRADES NEEDED:
697 + One of the biggest changes in this release is that FeedWordPress no
698 + longer depends on MagpieRSS to parse feeds, and has switched to the much
699 + more up-to-date and flexible SimplePie feed parser, which is included as
700 + a standard part of WordPress versions 2.8 and later. Using SimplePie will
701 + hopefully allow for better handling of feeds going further, and will
702 + allow me greater flexibility in determining how exactly the feed parser
703 + will operate. It also means that FeedWordPress no longer requires
704 + special upgrades to the WordPress core MagpieRSS files, and should
705 + eliminate quite a bit of complexity.
706 +
707 +* MAGPIERSS COMPATIBILITY LAYER FOR EXISTING FILTERS AND ADD-ONS: However,
708 + I have also implemented a compatibility layer to ensure that existing
709 + filters and add-ons for FeedWordPress which depended on the MagpieRSS
710 + data format *should not be broken* by the switch to SimplePie. Going
711 + forward, I recommend that new filters and add-ons be written to take
712 + advantage of the SimplePie object representations of items, feeds, etc.,
713 + rather than the MagpieRSS arrays, but the MagpieRSS arrays will still
714 + be available and older filters should continue to work as they have in
715 + the past.
716 +
717 +* COMPATIBILITY WITH WORDPRESS 2.9.x and 3.0: This release has been tested
718 + for the existing WordPress 2.9.x branch and with the upcoming release of
719 + WordPress 3.0. Changes in the user interface JavaScript between WordPress
720 + 2.8.x and WordPress 2.9 caused the tag box interface element to break in
721 + the Syndication --> Categories & Tags settings page; changes in the API
722 + functions for adding new authors caused fatal errors under certain
723 + conditions in WordPress 3.0. These breakages have been fixed.
724 +
725 +* DROPPED LEGACY SUPPORT FOR WORDPRESS PRIOR TO 2.8: Because SimplePie is
726 + not included with versions of WordPress prior to 2.8, I have chosen to
727 + drop legacy support for WordPress versions 1.5 through 2.7. If you are
728 + using FeedWordPress with a version of WordPress before 2.8, you will
729 + have to upgrade your installation of WordPress in order to take
730 + advantage of this release.
731 +
732 +* PHP 5.3 COMPATIBILITY: A couple of compatibility issues, which were
733 + causing fatal errors amd ugly warnings for users of PHP 5.3,
734 + have been eliminated.
735 +
736 +#### Features and Processing ####
737 +
738 +* INTERFACE REORGANIZATION: The interface restructuring, began with
739 + Version 2009.0612, has been completed. Catch-all settings pages have
740 + been eliminated entirely for pages that cover each aspect of handling
741 + a feed: Feeds & Updates, Posts & Links, Authors, Categories & Tags,
742 + and Back End handling of the database and diagnostic information.
743 + Extensive new interface hooks allow add-on modules to significantly
744 + change or extend the FeedWordPress admin interface and workflow.
745 +
746 +* STORING INFORMATION FROM THE FEED IN CUSTOM FIELDS: Many users
747 + have written to request the ability to store information from elements
748 + in the feed in a custom field on each post. (So that, for example, if
749 + post includes a `itunes:duration` element, you could store the contents
750 + in a Custom Field called `duration` on the post (for a Theme to access
751 + later). The Custom Post Settings under Syndication --> Posts & Links now
752 + allow you to access any item or feed tag, using a syntax similar to
753 + a much-simplified version of XPath. See Posts & Links settings for
754 + details.
755 +
756 +* UPDATE-FREEZING ON MANUALLY EDITED POSTS: FeedWordPress now allows you
757 + to mark posts that have been manually edited, so that the changes you
758 + make will not be overwritten by later updates from the feed. If you make
759 + manual edits to a particular post, just check the "Manual editing"
760 + checkbox in order to protect your changes from being overwritten. If you
761 + want to block *all* posts from being updated after they are imported
762 + for the first time, a new "Updated Posts" setting in Posts & Links
763 + allows you to freeze all posts from a particular feed, or all syndicated
764 + posts.
765 +
766 +* SETTING: FEED-BY-FEED SETTINGS FOR WHERE PERMALINKS POINT TO: You've
767 + always been able to tell FeedWordPress whether permalinks for posts
768 + should point to the original source of the story or the local copy. Now
769 + you can choose different policies for different feeds, instead of one
770 + global policy for all feeds. (Of course, you can still use a global
771 + default if you prefer.)
772 +
773 +* SETTING: USER CONTROL OVER TIMING BASIS. You can now determine the
774 + schedule on which feeds are considered ready to poll for updates --
775 + by default feeds become ready for polling after about 1 hour. You can
776 + now increase or decrease the time window under Syndication --> Feeds &
777 + Updates. (However, please pay *CAREFUL ATTENTION* to the recommendations
778 + and DO NOT set the scheduling lower than 60 minutes unless you are
779 + ABSOLUTELY SURE that you have specific permission from webmaster who
780 + provides that specific feed to poll more frequently than that. If you
781 + set this too low (and about 60 minutes is the polite minimum if you
782 + haven't been given a different figure), most webmasters will consider
783 + the frequent hits on their server as rude, or even downright abusive.
784 +
785 +* OTHER SETTINGS: New settings also include the ability to stop FWP from
786 + resolving relative URLs within syndicated content, and the ability to
787 + choose whether FeedWordPress should indicate the comment feed from the
788 + original source, or the local comment feed, when providing the comment
789 + feed URL for a syndicated post.
790 +
791 +#### Parsing ####
792 +
793 +* BETTER DATE HANDLING -- FEWER FLASHBACKS TO 1969 and 1970: FeedWordPress
794 + has made some bugfixes and some improvements in the logic for parsing
795 + dates. This should allow FeedWordPress to correctly parse more dates in
796 + more feeds; and, in the last resort, when FeedWordPress fails to
797 + correctly parse a date, to fall back to a more intelligent default. This
798 + should hopefully avoid most or all error conditions that have resulted
799 + in articles being erroneously dated to the dawn of the Unix epoch
800 + (31 December 1969 or 1 January 1970).
801 +
802 +* FULL-TEXT "EXCERPTS" NOW PROPERLY SHORTENED. Based on a straightforward
803 + reading of the existing RSS specs, it's reasonable for the
804 + rss:description element to be read as a plaintext summary or excerpt for
805 + the item containing the description -- with the full text of the item,
806 + if available, in another, better-suited element, such as the de facto
807 + standard content:encoded extension element. The problem is that uses of
808 + RSS rarely have much to do with anything like a straightforward reading
809 + of the specs. As a result, many actual RSS producers in the wild put the
810 + full text of the article in a description element. But since
811 + FeedWordPress has treated this text as a summary, this produces
812 + aggregated posts with lengthy "excerpts" containing the full text of the
813 + article. This release of FeedWordPress fixes the problem by doing a
814 + little digging before treating rss:description as a summary: if the
815 + description element is used properly as a plain text summary, then
816 + FeedWordPress will take the summary provided by the feed, rather than
817 + recreating its own excerpt from the full text; but if an RSS item has no
818 + full-text element other than description, FeedWordPress will treat the
819 + description element as the full text of the article, and generate a
820 + shortened excerpt automatically from that text.
821 +
822 +#### API ####
823 +
824 +* TEMPLATE API: new template tags `get_local_permalink()` and
825 + `the_local_permalink()` allow you to access the permalink for a post on
826 + your aggregator site, even when FeedWordPress is rewriting permalinks to
827 + point to the original source site.
828 +
829 +* NEW HOOKS FOR ADD-ONS AND FILTERS: I have added a number of new hooks
830 + which allow add-on modules to filter more precisely, gather information
831 + at more points, and to enhance the FeedWordPress admin interface. For
832 + a list of new hooks and documentation, see the FeedWordPress
833 + documentation wiki at
834 + <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/add-ons-and-filters>
835 +
836 +* FILTER API: A number of new utility methods have been added to the
837 + SyndicatedPost class to make it easier for filters and add-ons to
838 +
839 +* FILTER API: Globals $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta DEPRECATED. These
840 + global variables, originally introduced to allow filters access to
841 + information about the source feed in `syndicated_item` filters (which
842 + were passed in through global variables rather than as parameters
843 + because of a bug in WP 1.5 which was then fixed in 1.5.1) have been
844 + DEPRECATED. If you have any filters or add-ons which still depend on
845 + these global variables, you should see about fixing them to access data
846 + about the source feed using the SyndicatedPost::link element instead.
847 + For documentation, see the FeedWordPress documentation wiki at
848 + <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedpost> and
849 + <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedlink>.
850 +
851 +* DIAGNOSTICS: I've included a number of new diagnostic options and
852 + messages, which should allow an experienced user to better investigate
853 + any problems that may crop up.
854 +
855 +#### Bug Fixes ####
856 +
857 +* BUGFIX: & IN PERMALINKS NO LONGER CAUSING ATOM OR HTML VALIDATION
858 + EFFORTS: Many users reported an issue in which syndicating a feed with
859 + special XML characters in the URLs (& was the most common, since it is
860 + used to separate HTTP GET parameters) would cause the aggregator's
861 + feeds to produce invalid (malformed) XML. This update addresses the
862 + issue in Atom feeds. Unfortunately, it has not been technically possible
863 + to address the problem in RSS 2.0 feeds, due to limitations on
864 + WordPress's internal templates for RSS feeds.
865 +
866 +* BUGFIX: BROKEN URLS IN "POPULAR POSTS" AND SIMILAR PLUGINS SHOULD NO
867 + LONGER BE BROKEN. A number of users noticed an issue where plugins and
868 + templates that listed posts in locations outside of the post loop
869 + (for example, "Popular Posts"-style plugins that listed posts in the
870 + sidebar), often produced the wrong URL for post links. (Typically, all
871 + the posts listed would get the same wrong URL.) This should now be
872 + fixed. Thanks to Björn for sending in a quick fix!
873 +
874 +* MINOR BUGFIXES: This release includes a number of fixes to minor bugs
875 + and compatibility issues, including: silent failures of the "Syndicate"
876 + button, "Illegal Offset Type" error messages from MagpieRSS, and others.
877 +
878 += 2009.0707 =
879 +
880 +* BUGFIX: WORDPRESS 2.8 AJAX COMPATIBILITY ISSUES RESOLVED (blank or
881 + truncated "Syndicated Sites" administration page): Due to changes in the
882 + AJAX interface elements between WordPress 2.7 and WordPress 2.8, several
883 + FeedWordPress users encountered an issue where the front "Syndication"
884 + page in the FeedWordPress administrative interface would come up blank,
885 + without the normal "Syndicated Sites" list and "Update" control, or
886 + sometimes wth the boxes visible but one or both of them truncated, with
887 + only the title bar. This issue should now be resolved: with the new
888 + version of FeedWordPress, the compatibility issue that caused the
889 + disappearance should be eliminated, and if boxes are shown with only
890 + their handle visible, you should once again be able to drop down the
891 + rest of the box by clicking once on its title bar.
892 +
893 +* BUGFIX: TAG SETTING WIDGET FIXED. Due to changes in interface elements
894 + between WordPress 2.7 and WordPress 2.8, people using FeedWordPress with
895 + WordPress 2.8 found that the widget for setting tags to be applied to
896 + all syndicated posts, or all syndicated posts from a particular feed,
897 + no longer displayed "Add" and "Remove" buttons for individual tags. This
898 + issue has now been fixed, and the tagging widget should once again work
899 + more or less exactly like the tagging widget for individual posts in the
900 + normal WordPress admin interface.
901 +
902 += 2009.0618 =
903 +
904 +* BUGFIX: MYSTERY ERRORS WITH WITH WP_Http_Fsockopen HTTP TRANSPORT
905 + ELIMINATED: Thanks to a combination of a subtle bug in FeedWordPress,
906 + and changes to the HTTP transport code in WordPress, a number of users
907 + encountered an error in which any time they attempted to add a new feed
908 + through the FeedFinder interface, FeedWordPress would fail and display
909 + an HTTP request failure diagnostic message. The subtle bug has been
910 + fixed, and with it, most of these errors should now be eliminated.
911 +
912 + Be sure to upgrade your MagpieRSS to the most recent MagpieRSS version
913 + after you have insalled FeedWordPress 2009.0618, or this bug fix will
914 + not take effect.
915 +
916 += 2009.0613 =
917 +
918 +* INTERFACE/BUGFIX: WORDPRESS 2.8 CATEGORY BOX FIX. Thanks to a subtle
919 + change in class names between the WordPress 2.7 and 2.8 stylesheets,
920 + category boxes in the FeedWordPress settings interface tended to overflow
921 + and have a lot of messy-looking overlapping text under WordPress 2.8.
922 + This has now been fixed.
923 +
924 +* FeedFinder FAILURE DIAGNOSTICS: When FWP's FeedFinder fails to find any
925 + feeds at a given URL (for example, when you are trying to add a
926 + subscription through the administrative interface and you run into an
927 + error message), FeedWordPress now provides more diagnostic information
928 + for the reasons behind the failure. If that helps you, great; if not,
929 + it should help me respond more intelligently to your support request..
930 +
931 += 2009.0612 =
932 +
933 +* WORDPRESS 2.8 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress 2009.0612 has been tested for
934 + compatibility with the recent version 2.8 release of WordPress.
935 +
936 +* INTERFACE RESTRUCTURING: In order to avoid settings posts from becoming
937 + too crowded, and to modularize and better organize the user interface,
938 + new "Posts" and "Categories & Tags" subpages have been created under the
939 + "Syndication" menu. "Posts" controls settings for individal syndicated
940 + posts (such as publication status, comment and ping status, whether or
941 + not to use the original location of the post as the permalink, whether
942 + or not to expose posts to formatting filters, and so on). "Categories &
943 + Tags" controls settings for assigning new syndicated posts to categories
944 + and tags, such as categories or tags to apply to all syndicated posts,
945 + and how to handle categories that do not yet exist in the WordPress
946 + database. These subpages, like the Authors subpage, handle settings for
947 + the global default level and for individual syndicated feeds.
948 +
949 + Corresponding to these new subpages, the old Syndication Settings and
950 + Feed Settings subpages have been cleaned up and simplified, and now only
951 + link to the appropriate subpages for options that can be set in the
952 + Posts, Authors, or Categories & Tags subpages.
953 +
954 +* FEATURE: ADD CUSTOM SETTINGS TO EACH SYNDICATED POST: FeedWordPress has
955 + long had an interface for creating custom settings for each syndicated
956 + *feed* which could be retrieved in templates using the `get_feed_meta()`
957 + template function. But it had no feature for adding custom fields to
958 + each individual syndicated *post*. In response to requests from users, I
959 + have added the ability to apply custom fields to each individual
960 + syndicated post, using the new Syndication --> Posts subpage. You can
961 + set up custom fields to be applied to every syndicated post, or custom
962 + fields to be applied to syndicated posts from a particular feed.
963 +
964 +* FEATURE: MAGPIERSS VERSION CHECK AND UPGRADE: FeedWordPress will attempt
965 + to determine whether or not you are using the upgraded version of
966 + MagpieRSS that comes packaged with FeedWordPress. If not, it will throw
967 + an error on admin pages, and, if you are a site administrator, it will
968 + give you the option to ignore the error message, or to attempt an
969 + automatic upgrade (using a native file copy). If the file copy fails,
970 + FeedWordPress will offer some guidance on how to perform the upgrade
971 + manually.
972 +
973 +* BLANK POSTS PROBLEM NO LONGER OCCURS WITH OLD & BUSTED MAGPIERSS: Due
974 + to the fact that I relied on a content normalization that occurs in my
975 + upgraded version of MagpieRSS, but not in the old & busted version of
976 + MagpieRSS that ships with WordPress, until this version, if you tried to
977 + syndicate an Atom feed without having performed the (*strongly
978 + recommended*) MagpieRSS upgrade, all of the posts would come up with
979 + completely blank contents. That's not because MagpieRSS couldn't read
980 + the data, but rather because the new Magpie version puts that data in a
981 + location where the old version doesn't, and I was only looking in that
982 + newer location. Now it checks for both, meaning that posts will continue
983 + to display their contents even if you don't upgrade MagpieRSS. (But you
984 + **really should** upgrade it, anyway.)
985 +
986 +* BUGFIX: RELATIVE URI RESOLUTION FOR POST CONTENT RESTORED. Some time
987 + back, I added support for resolving relative URIs against xml:base on
988 + feeds that support it to the MagpieRSS upgrade in FeedWordPress. Then I
989 + took out code that did the same thing from the main FeedWordPress code.
990 + Of course, the problem is that some people, even though it is clearly
991 + stupid or evil to do so, still include relative URIs for images or links
992 + in posts on feed formats that do *not* adequately support xml:base
993 + (notably, RSS 2.0 feeds). In response to a user request, I have added
994 + this functionality back in, so that MagpieRSS will resolve any relative
995 + URIs that it knows how to resolve using xml:base, and then FeedWordPress
996 + will attempt to resolve any relative URIs that are left over afterwards.
997 +
998 +* BUGFIX: INTERFACE OPTION FOR SETTING SYNDICATED POST PUBLICATION STATUS
999 + ON A FEED-BY-FEED BASIS HAS BEEN RESTORED: Due to a version-checking
1000 + bug, users of WordPress 2.7.x lost an option from the "Edit a syndicated
1001 + feed" interface which allowed them to determine whether newly syndicated
1002 + posts should be published immediately, held as "Pending Review," saved
1003 + as drafts, or saved as private posts. (The option to change this
1004 + setting globally remained in place, but users could no longer set it on
1005 + a feed-by-feed basis.) The version-checking bug has been fixed, and the
1006 + option has been restored.
1007 +
1008 +* BUGFIX: "ARE YOU SURE?" FATAL ERROR ELIMINATED AND SECURITY IMPROVED:
1009 + Under certain circumstances (for example, when users have configured
1010 + their browser or proxy not to send HTTP Referer headers, for privacy or
1011 + other reasons), many features in the FeedWordPress administrative
1012 + interface (such as adding new feeds or changing settings) would hit a
1013 + fatal error, displaying only a cryptic message reading "Are you sure?"
1014 + and a blank page following it. This problem has been eliminated by
1015 + taking advantage of WordPress's nonce functions, which allow the
1016 + security check which ran into this error to work properly even without
1017 + receiving an HTTP Referer header. (N.B.: WordPress's nonce functions
1018 + were first introduced in WordPress 2.0.3. If you're using FeedWordPress
1019 + with an older version of WordPress, there's no fix for this problem:
1020 + you'll just need to turn Referer headers back on. Sorry.)
1021 +
1022 +* BUGFIX: MANUALLY-ALTERED POST STATUS, COMMENT STATUS, AND PING STATUS NO
1023 + LONGER REVERTED BY POST UPDATES: If you manually altered the post status,
1024 + comment status, or ping status of a syndicated post from what it was set
1025 + to when first syndicated -- for example, if you had a feed that was set
1026 + to bring in new posts as "Pending Review," and you then marked some of
1027 + the pending posts as "Published" and others as "Unpublished" -- then
1028 + in previous versions of FeedWordPress, these manual changes to the
1029 + status would be lost -- so that, for example, your Published or Unpublished
1030 + articles would revert to Pending Review -- if the source feed made any
1031 + upates to the item. This could make the Pending Review feature both
1032 + unreliable and also extremely frustrating to work with. The good news is
1033 + that this bug has since been fixed: if you manually update the status
1034 + of a post, it will no longer be reverted if or when the post is updated.
1035 +
1036 +* BUGFIX: OCCASIONAL FATAL ERROR ON UPDATE ELIMINATED: Under certain
1037 + limited conditions (specifically, when both the title and the content of
1038 + a post to be updated are empty), an attempt to update the post would
1039 + result in a fatal error. This has been fixed.
1040 +
1041 +* INTERFACE: "CONFIGURE SETTINGS" CONVENIENCE LINK ADDED TO CONFIRMATION
1042 + MESSAGE WHEN A NEW FEED IS ADDED: When you add a new subscription to
1043 + FeedWordPress, the message box that appears to confirm it now includes a
1044 + handy link to the feed's settings subpage, so that you can quickly set
1045 + up any special settings you may want to set up for the new feed, without
1046 + having to hunt through the list of all your other subscriptions to pick
1047 + out the new one.
1048 +
1049 +* INTERFACE: SIMPLIFYING AND CLARIFYING AUTOMATIC UPDATES SETTINGS. I have
1050 + removed an interval setting for the cronless automatic updates which has
1051 + confused many FeedWordPress users. In past versions of FWP, when you
1052 + turned on automatic updates, you would be presented with a time interval
1053 + setting which controlled how often FeedWordPress would check for feeds
1054 + ready to be polled for updates. (That is, it DID NOT control how often
1055 + feeds *would be polled*; it controlled how often FeedWordPress would
1056 + *check* for feeds that *had become ready to poll*. The schedule on which
1057 + feeds became ready for polling was still controlled either by requests
1058 + encoded in elements within the feed itself, or else according to an
1059 + internal calculation within FeedWordPress, averaging out to about 1 hour,
1060 + if the feed did not include any scheduling request elements.) Since many
1061 + users very often (and understandably) confused the purpose of this
1062 + setting, and since the setting is for a feature that's actually very
1063 + unlikely to require any manual control by the user, I have removed the
1064 + setting; FeedWordPress now simply uses the default value of checking for
1065 + feeds to poll every 10 minutes.
1066 +
1067 +* FEEDFINDER PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT: FeedWordPress's FeedFinder class
1068 + now uses `array_unique()` to make sure that it doesn't waste time
1069 + repeatedly iterating over and polling the same URI. Props to Camilo
1070 + (<http://projects.radgeek.com/2008/12/14/feedwordpress-20081214/#comment-20090122160414>).
1071 +
1072 += 2008.1214 =
1073 +
1074 +* WORDPRESS 2.7 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress has been tested for
1075 + compatibility with the newly released WordPress 2.7. WordPress 2.7 has
1076 + deprecated the Snoopy library for HTTP requests, which caused a fatal
1077 + error for users who had not installed the MagpieRSS upgrade (or whose
1078 + installation of the MagpieRSS upgrade was overwritten by a recent update
1079 + of WordPress). FeedWordPress now handles things gracefully when Snoopy
1080 + is not immediately available.
1081 +
1082 +* INTERFACE SPIFFED UP: Interface elements have been updated so that
1083 + FeedWordPress's management interface fits in more naturally with the
1084 + WordPress 2.7 interface (including a new logo and a number of small
1085 + interface tweaks).
1086 +
1087 +* BUG WITH TAGS FOR SYNDICATED ARTICLES FIXED: Several users encountered a
1088 + bug with the option to add tags to all syndicated posts under
1089 + Syndication --> Settings -- if you told FeedWordPress to add more than
1090 + one tag to all syndicated posts, instead of doing so correctly, it would
1091 + add a *single* tag instead, whose name was composed of the names of all
1092 + the tags you asked it to add. This bug was the result of nothing more
1093 + dignified than a typographical error on my part. It has now been fixed.
1094 +
1095 +* MORE INFORMATION AVAILABLE WHEN FEEDWORDPRESS CAN'T FIND A FEED: When
1096 + you enter a URL for a new syndication source, FeedWordPress uses a
1097 + simple feed-finding algorithm (originally based on Mark Pilgrim's
1098 + Universal Feed Finder) to try to determine whether the URL is the URL
1099 + for a feed, or, if the URL points to an ordinary website rather than to
1100 + a feed, whether there is a feed for that website. All well and good, but
1101 + if FeedWordPress failed to find a feed, for whatever reason, it would
1102 + typically return nothing more than a nasty little note to the effect of
1103 + "no feed found," without any explanation of what went wrong.
1104 + FeedWordPress now keeps track of error conditions from the HTTP
1105 + requests that it uses in the course of looking for the feed, and so may
1106 + be able to give you a bit more information about the nature of the
1107 + problem if something goes wrong.
1108 +
1109 +
1110 += 2008.1105 =
1111 +
1112 +* INTERFACE RESTRUCTURING AND SYNDICATION --> AUTHORS PAGE: As a first
1113 + step towards modularizing and better organizing the user interface, a
1114 + new "Authors" subpage has been created under the Syndication menu, which
1115 + controls settings for syndicated authors, both at the global default
1116 + level and at level of individual syndicated feeds.
1117 +
1118 +* BUG RELATED TO THE ATTRIBUTION OF POSTS TO THE WRONG AUTHOR FIXED: Some
1119 + users encountered an issue in which posts by different authors on
1120 + different blogs -- especially blogs generated by Blogger -- were
1121 + mistakenly attributed to a single author. The problem was caused by the
1122 + way in which FeedWordPress matches syndicated authors to user accounts
1123 + in the WordPress database: normally, if two feeds each list an author
1124 + with the same e-mail address, they are counted as being the same person.
1125 + Normally this works well, but it creates an issue in cases where
1126 + blogging software assigns a single anonymous e-mail address to users who
1127 + do not want their real e-mail address published. This is, for example,
1128 + what Blogger does (by giving all users a default e-mail address of
1129 + <noreply@blogger.com> if they don't want their own e-mail address
1130 + listed). FeedWordPress now allows the user to correct for this problem
1131 + with a couple of new settings under **Syndication --> Authors**, which
1132 + allow users to turn off e-mail based author matching for particular
1133 + addresses, or, if desired, to turn it off entirely. By default, e-mail
1134 + based author matching is still turned on, but disabled for a list of
1135 + known generic e-mail addresses. Right now, the "list" consists entirely
1136 + of <noreply@blogger.com>; if you know other addresses that should be
1137 + added, please [contact me](http://radgeek.com/contact) to let me know.
1138 +
1139 + Please note that if you have already encountered this issue on your
1140 + blog, upgrading FeedWordPress will prevent it from re-occurring in the
1141 + future, but you still need to do two other things to fix the existing
1142 + problem on your blog.
1143 +
1144 + First, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to
1145 + change the existing author mapping rules to re-map a a syndicated
1146 + author's name to the proper target account. Go to **Syndication -->
1147 + Authors**, select the feed you want to change from the drop-down list,
1148 + and then change the settings under the "Syndicated Authors" section.
1149 + (You will probably need to select "will be assigned to a new user..." to
1150 + create a new user account with the appropriate name.)
1151 +
1152 + Second, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to
1153 + re-assign already-syndicated posts that were mis-attributed to the
1154 + correct author. You can do that from **Syndication --> Authors** by
1155 + using the author re-assignment feature, described below.
1156 +
1157 +* AUTHOR RE-ASSIGNMENT FOR A PARTICULAR FEED: The author settings page
1158 + for each syndicated feed, under **Syndication --> Authors**, now
1159 + includes an section titled "Fixing mis-matched authors," which provides
1160 + an interface for re-assigning or deleting all posts attributed to a
1161 + particular author on a particular feed.
1162 +
1163 +* SUPPORT FOR `<atom:source>` ELEMENT IN SYNDICATED FEEDS: Some feeds
1164 + (for example, those produced by FeedWordPress) aggregate content from
1165 + several different sources, and include information about the original
1166 + source of the post in an `<atom:source>` element. A new setting under
1167 + **Syndication --> Options** allows you to control what FeedWordPress
1168 + will report as the source of posts syndicated from aggregator feeds in
1169 + your templates and feeds: you can have FeedWordPress report that the
1170 + source of a post is the aggregator feed itself, or you can have it
1171 + report that the source of a post is the original source that the
1172 + aggregator originally syndicated the post from.
1173 +
1174 + By default, FeedWordPress will report the aggregator, not the original
1175 + source, as the source of a syndicated item.
1176 +
1177 +* LOAD BALANCING AND TIME LIMITING FEATURES FOR UPDATES: Some users have
1178 + encountered issues due to running up against PHP execution time limits
1179 + during the process of updating large syndicated feeds, or a very large
1180 + set of syndicated feeds. FeedWordPress now has a feature that allows you
1181 + to limit the total amount of time spent updating a feed, through the
1182 + "Time limit on updates" setting under **Syndication --> Options**. By
1183 + turning on this setting and adjusting the time limit to a low enough
1184 + figure to avoid your PHP installation's time-out setting. (PHP execution
1185 + time limits are usually in the vicinity of 30 seconds, so an update
1186 + time limit of 25 seconds or so should provide plenty of time for updates
1187 + while allowing a cushion of time for other, non-update-related functions
1188 + to do their work.)
1189 +
1190 + If feed updates are interrupted by the time limit, FeedWordPress uses
1191 + some simple load balancing features to make sure that updates to other
1192 + feeds will not be blocked by the time-hogging feed, and will also make
1193 + sure that when the interrupted update is resumed, FeedWordPress will
1194 + skip ahead to resume processing items at the point at which it was
1195 + interrupted last time, so that posts further down in the feed will
1196 + eventually get processed, and not get blocked by the amount of time it
1197 + takes to process the items higher up in the feed.
1198 +
1199 +* `guid` INDEX CREATION BUTTON: FeedWordPress frequently issues queries on
1200 + the `guid` column of the WordPress posts database (since it uses post
1201 + guid URIs to keep track of which posts it has syndicated). In very large
1202 + FeedWordPress installations, you can often significantly improve
1203 + performance by creating a database index on the `guid` column, but
1204 + normally you would need to poke around with MySQL or a tool like
1205 + phpMyAdmin to do this. FeedWordPress can now save you the trouble: to
1206 + create an index on the `guid` column, just go to
1207 + **Syndication --> Options**, and mash the button at the bottom of the
1208 + "Back End" section.
1209 +
1210 += 2008.1101 =
1211 +
1212 +* INTERFACE BUG THAT PREVENTED ADDING NEW SITES FIXED: The UI reforms in
1213 + FWP 2008.1030 unintentionally introduced a bug that prevents clean
1214 + installations of FeedWordPress from providing an input box for adding
1215 + new feeds to the list of syndicated feeds. This bug has been fixed.
1216 +
1217 += 2008.1030 =
1218 +
1219 +* WORDPRESS 2.6 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with
1220 + WordPress 2.6, and should work more or less seamlessly with the new post
1221 + revision system. A bug which caused multiple new revisions to be created
1222 + for posts on certain feeds, regardless of whether or not the item had
1223 + been updated, has been fixed.
1224 +
1225 +* INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: The user interface has been substantially
1226 + restyled to fit in better with the visual style of WordPress 2.5 and
1227 + 2.6.
1228 +
1229 +* YOUTUBE BUG FIXED: POSTS SYNDICATED THROUGH AN AUTOMATIC UPDATE ARE NO
1230 + LONGER STRIPPED OF `<OBJECT>` TAGS AND CERTAIN OTHER HTML ELEMENTS: Due
1231 + to the way that some versions of WordPress process posts that are
1232 + inserted into the database when no user is logged in, many users
1233 + experienced an issue where YouTube videos and other content using the
1234 + HTML `<object>` tag would be stripped out of posts that were syndicated
1235 + during an automatic update. (Posts that were syndicated through manual
1236 + updates from within the WordPress Dashboard were not affected, because
1237 + the issue does not arise when an update is executed under a logged-in
1238 + administrator's credentials.) This bug has now been fixed; YouTube
1239 + videos and other content using `<object>` tags should now appear
1240 + properly in syndicated posts, regardless of the way in which the post
1241 + was syndicated.
1242 +
1243 +* AJAX BUGS FIXED: Bugs which blocked the normal operation of WordPress
1244 + 2.5's AJAX interface elements when FeedWordPress was activated have been
1245 + fixed.
1246 +
1247 +* TAG SUPPORT: A couple of features have been introduced to take advantage
1248 + of the tagging features in WordPress 2.3.x, 2.5.x, and 2.6.x. Now, when
1249 + unfamiliar categories are encountered for posts on a feed, you can
1250 + choose for FeedWordPress (1) to drop the category; (2) to drop the
1251 + category and to filter out any post that does not match at least one
1252 + familiar category; (3) to create a new category with that name, or,
1253 + now, you can also have FeedWordPress (4) create a new *tag* with that
1254 + name. This option can be set site-wide under Syndication --> Options,
1255 + or it can be set on a feed-by-feed basis in a feed's Edit screen.
1256 +
1257 + In addition, you can now set particular tags to apply to all incoming
1258 + syndicated posts, under Syndication --> Options, or you can set tags
1259 + to apply to all incoming syndicated posts from a particular feed in that
1260 + feed's Edit screen.
1261 +
1262 +* FORMATTING FILTERS: There is a new option available under Syndication ->
1263 + Options which allows users to choose whether or not to expose syndicated
1264 + posts to being altered by formatting filters. By default, FeedWordPress
1265 + has always protected syndicated posts (which are already in display-ready
1266 + HTML when they are syndicated) from being reformatted by formatting
1267 + filters. However, this approach means that certain plugins which depend
1268 + on formatting filters (for example, to add "Share This" bars or relevant
1269 + links to the end of a post) are blocked from working on any syndicated
1270 + posts. If you want to use one of these plugins together with
1271 + FeedWordPress, you can now do so by changing the "Formatting Filters"
1272 + setting from "Protect" to "Expose."
1273 +
1274 +* `<atom:source>` ELEMENTS NOW INCLUDED IN ATOM FEED: Atom 1.0 provides
1275 + a standard method for aggregators to indicate information about the original source of
1276 + a syndicated post, using the `<atom:source>` element. FeedWordPress now
1277 + introduces standard `<atom:source>` elements including the title, homepage, and
1278 + feed URI of the source from which a syndicated post was syndicated. Cf.
1279 + <http://www.atomenabled.org/developers/syndication/atom-format-spec.php#element.source>
1280 +
1281 +* MODULARIZATION OF CODE: The code for different elements of FeedWordPress
1282 + has been broken out into several modules for easier inspection,
1283 + documentation, and maintenance of the code.
1284 +
1285 +* VERSIONING SCHEME CHANGED: FeedWordPress's feature set has proven stable
1286 + enough that it can now be removed from beta status; a good thing, since
1287 + I was very quickly running out of version numbers to use. New releases
1288 + of FeedWordPress will have version numbers based on the date of their
1289 + release.
1290 +
1291 += 0.993 =
1292 +
1293 +* WORDPRESS 2.5.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible
1294 + with WordPress 2.5.1.
1295 +
1296 +* WORDPRESS 2.5 INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: FeedWordPress's Dashboard
1297 + interface has undergone several cosmetic changes that should help it
1298 + integrate better with the WordPress Dashboard interface in WordPress
1299 + version 2.5.x.
1300 +
1301 +* SYNDICATED POSTS CAN BE MARKED AS "PENDING REVIEW": WordPress 2.3 users
1302 + can now take advantage of WordPress's new "Pending Review" features for
1303 + incoming syndicated posts. Posts marked as "Pending Review" are not
1304 + published immediately, but are marked as ready to be reviewed by an
1305 + Administrator or Editor, who can then choose to publish the post or
1306 + hold it back. If you want to review syndicated posts from a particular
1307 + feed, or from all feeds, before they are posted, then use
1308 + Syndication --> Syndicated Sites --> Edit or Syndication --> Options to
1309 + change the settings for handling new posts.
1310 +
1311 +* AWARE OF NEW URI FOR del.icio.us FEEDS: Previous releases of
1312 + FeedWordPress already automatically split del.icio.us tags up
1313 + appropriately appropriately when generating categories. (del.icio.us
1314 + feeds smoosh all the tags into a single `<dc:subject>` element,
1315 + separated by spaces; FeedWordPress un-smooshes them into multiple
1316 + categories by separating them at whitespace.) Unfortunately, del.icio.us
1317 + recently broke the existing behavior by changing host names for their
1318 + feeds from del.icio.us to feeds.delicious.com. Version 0.993 accounts
1319 + for the new host name and un-breaks the tag splitting.
1320 +
1321 += 0.992 =
1322 +
1323 +* AUTHOR RE-MAPPING: FeedWordPress now offers considerable control over
1324 + how author names on a feed are translated into usernames within the
1325 + WordPress database. When a post by an unrecognized author comes in,
1326 + Administrators can now specify any username as the default username to
1327 + assign the post to by setting the option in Syndication --> Options
1328 + (formerly FeedWordPress only allowed you to assign such posts to user
1329 + #1, the site administrator). Administrators can also create re-mapping
1330 + rules for particular feeds (under Syndication --> Syndicated Sites -->
1331 + Edit), so that (for example) any posts attributed to "Administrator"
1332 + on the feed <http://praxeology.net/blog/feed/> will be assigned to
1333 + a user named "Roderick T. Long," rather than a user named
1334 + "Administrator." These settings also allow administrators to filter out
1335 + posts by particular users, and to control what will happen when
1336 + FeedWordPress encounters a post by an unrecognized user on that
1337 + particular feed.
1338 +
1339 +* BUG RELATED TO URIS CONTAINING AMPERSAND CHARACTERS FIXED: A bug in
1340 + WordPress 2.x's handling of URIs in Blogroll links created problems for
1341 + updating any feeds whose URIs included an ampersand character, such as
1342 + Google News RSS feeds and other feeds that have multiple parameters
1343 + passed through HTTP GET. If you experienced this bug, the most likely
1344 + effect was that FeedWordPress simply would not import new posts from a
1345 + feed when instructred to do so, returning a "0 new posts" response. In
1346 + other cases, it might lead to unpredictable results from feed updates,
1347 + such as importing posts which were not contained in the feed being
1348 + syndicated, but which did appear elsewhere on the same website. This bug
1349 + has, hopefully, been resolved, by correcting for the bug in WordPress.
1350 +
1351 += 0.991 =
1352 +
1353 +* WORDPRESS MU COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with
1354 + recent releases of WordPress MU. Once FeedWordPress is made available
1355 + as a plugin, each individual blog can choose to activate FeedWordPress
1356 + and syndicate content from its own set of contributors.
1357 +
1358 +* DISPLAY OF MAGPIE WARNINGS: A number of MagpieRSS warnings or error
1359 + messages that were displayed when performing an automatic update are
1360 + no longer displayed, unless debugging parameters have been explicitly
1361 + enabled.
1362 +
1363 +* BUG RELATED TO INTERNATIONAL CHARACTERS IN AUTHOR NAMES FIXED: Due to a
1364 + subtle incompatability between the way that FeedWordPress generated new
1365 + user information, and the way that WordPress 2.0 and later added new
1366 + authors to the database, FeedWordPress might end up creating duplicate
1367 + authors, or throwing a critical error message, when it encountered
1368 + authors whose names included international characters. This
1369 + incompatability has now been fixed; hopefully, authors with
1370 + international characters in their names should now be handled properly.
1371 +
1372 +* `<media:content>` BUG IN MAGPIERSS FIXED: A bug in MagpieRSS's handling
1373 + of namespaced elements has been fixed. Among other things, this bug
1374 + caused items containing a Yahoo MediaRSS `<media:content>` element (such
1375 + as many of the feeds produced by wordpress.com) to be represented
1376 + incorrectly, with only a capital "A" where the content of the post
1377 + should have been. Feeds containing `<media:content>` elements should now
1378 + be syndicated correctly.
1379 +
1380 +* update_feedwordpress PARAMETER: You can now use an HTTP GET parameter
1381 + (`update_feedwordpress=1`) to request that FeedWordPress poll its feeds
1382 + for updates. When used together with a crontab or other means of
1383 + scheduling tasks, this means that you can keep your blog automatically
1384 + updated on a regular schedule, even if you do not choose to use the
1385 + cron-less automatic updates option.
1386 +
1387 +* Some minor interface-related bugs were also fixed.
1388 +
1389 +
1390 += 0.99 =
1391 +
1392 +Version 0.99 adds several significant new features, fixes some bugs, and
1393 +provides compatability with WordPress 2.2.x and 2.3.x.
1394 +
1395 +* WORDPRESS 2.2 AND 2.3 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be
1396 + compatible with WordPress version 2.2 and the upcoming WordPress
1397 + version 2.3. In particular, it has been tested extensively against
1398 + WordPress 2.2.3 and WordPress 2.3 Release Candidate 1.
1399 +
1400 +* AUTOMATIC UPDATES WITHOUT CRON: FeedWordPress now allows you to
1401 + automatically schedule checks for new posts without using external task
1402 + scheduling tools such as cron. In order to enable automatic updates, go
1403 + to **Syndication --> Options** and set "Check for new posts" to
1404 + "automatically." For details, see "Automatic Feed Updates" in
1405 + README.text.
1406 +
1407 + An important side-effect of the changes to the update system is that if
1408 + you were previously using the cron job and the `update-feeds.php` script
1409 + to schedule updates, you need to change your cron set-up. The old
1410 + `update-feeds.php` script no longer exists. Instead, if you wish to use
1411 + a cron job to guarantee updates on a particular schedule, you should
1412 + have the cron job fetch the front page of your blog (for example, by
1413 + using `curl http://www.zyx.com/blog/ > /dev/null`) instead of activating
1414 + the `update-feeds.php` script. If automatic updates have been enabled,
1415 + fetching the front page will automatically trigger the update process.
1416 +
1417 +* INTERFACE REORGANIZATION: All FeedWordPress functions are now located
1418 + under a top-level "Syndication" menu in the WordPress Dashboard. To
1419 + manage the list of syndicated sites, manually check for new posts on
1420 + one or more feeds, or syndicate a new site, you should use the main page
1421 + under **Syndication**. To change global settings for FeedWordPress,
1422 + you should use **Syndication --> Options**.
1423 +
1424 +* FILE STRUCTURE REORGANIZATION: Due to a combination of changing styles
1425 + for FeedWordPress plugins and lingering bugs in the FeedWordPress admin
1426 + menu code, the code for FeedWordPress is now contained in two different
1427 + PHP files, which should be installed together in a subdirectory of your
1428 + plugins directory named `feedwordpress`. (See README.text for
1429 + installation and upgrade instructions relating to the change.)
1430 +
1431 +* MULTIPLE CATEGORIES SETTING: Some feeds use non-standard methods to
1432 + indicate multiple categories within a single category element. (The most
1433 + popular site to do this is del.icio.us, which separates tags with a
1434 + space.) FeedWordPress now allows you to set an optional setting, for any
1435 + feed which does this, indicating the character or characters used to
1436 + divide multiple categories, using a Perl-compatible regular expression.
1437 + (In the case of del.icio.us feeds, FeedWordPress will automatically use
1438 + \s for the pattern without your having to do any further configuration.)
1439 + To turn this setting on, simply use the "Edit" link for the feed that
1440 + you want to turn it on for.
1441 +
1442 +* REGULAR EXPRESSION BUG FIXED: Eliminated a minor bug in the regular
1443 + expressions for e-mail addresses (used in parsing RSS `author`
1444 + elements), which could produce unsightly error messages for some users
1445 + parsing RSS 2.0 feeds.
1446 +
1447 +* DATE / UPDATE BUG FIXED: A bug in date handling was eliminated that may
1448 + have caused problems if any of (1) WordPress, or (2) PHP, or (3) your
1449 + web server, or (4) your MySQL server, has been set to use a different
1450 + time zone from the one that any of the others is set to use. If
1451 + FeedWordPress has not been properly updating updated posts, or has been
1452 + updating posts when there shouldn't be any changes for the update, this
1453 + release may solve that problem.
1454 +
1455 +* GOOGLE READER BUGS FIXED: A couple of bugs that made it difficult for
1456 + FeedWordPress to interact with Google Reader public feeds have been
1457 + fixed. Firstly, if you encountered an error message reading "There was a
1458 + problem adding the newsfeed. [SQL: ]" when you tried to add the feed,
1459 + the cause of this error has been fixed. Secondly, if you succeeded in
1460 + getting FeedWordPress to check a Google Reader feed, only to find that
1461 + the title of posts had junk squashed on to the end of them, that bug
1462 + has been fixed too. To fix this bug, you must install the newest version
1463 + of the optional MagpieRSS upgrade.
1464 +
1465 +* FILTER PARAMETERS: Due to an old, old bug in WordPress 1.5.0 (which was
1466 + what was available back when I first wrote the filter interface),
1467 + FeedWordPress has traditionally only passed one parameter to
1468 + syndicated_item and syndicated_post filters functions -- an array
1469 + containing either the Magpie representation of a syndicated item from
1470 + the feed, or the database representation of a post about to be inserted
1471 + into the WordPress database. If you needed information about the feed
1472 + that the item came from, this was accessible only through a pair of
1473 + global variables, $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta.
1474 +
1475 + Since it's been a pretty long time since WordPress 1.5.0 was in
1476 + widespread usage, I have gone ahead and added an optional second
1477 + parameter to the invocation of the syndicated_item and syndicated_post
1478 + filters. If you have written a filter for FeedWordPress that uses either
1479 + of these hooks, you can now register that filter to accept 2 parameters.
1480 + If you do so, the second parameter will be a SyndicatedPost object,
1481 + which, among other things, allows you to access information about the
1482 + feed from which an item is syndicated using the $post->feed and the
1483 + $post->feedmeta elements (where $post is the name of the second
1484 + parameter).
1485 +
1486 + NOTE THAT THE OLD GLOBAL VARIABLES ARE STILL AVAILABLE, for the time
1487 + being at least, so existing filters will not break with the upgrade.
1488 + They should be considered deprecated, however, and may be eliminated in
1489 + the future.
1490 +
1491 +* FILTER CHANGE / BUGFIX: the array that is passed as the first argument
1492 + syndicated_post filters no longer is no longer backslash-escaped for
1493 + MySQL when filters are called. This was originally a bug, or an
1494 + oversight; the contents of the array should only be escaped for the
1495 + database *after* they have gone through all filters. IF YOU HAVE WRITTEN
1496 + ANY syndicated_post FILTERS THAT PRESUME THE OLD BEHAVIOR OF PASSING IN
1497 + STRINGS THAT ARE ALREADY BACKSLASH-ESCAPED, UPDATE YOUR FILTERS
1498 + ACCORDINGLY.
1499 +
1500 +* OTHER MINOR BUGFIXES AND INTERNAL CHANGES: The internal architecture of
1501 + FeedWordPress has been significantly changed to make the code more
1502 + modular and clean; hopefully this should help reduce the number of
1503 + compatibility updates that are needed, and make them easier and quicker
1504 + when they are needed.
1505 +
1506 += 0.981 =
1507 +
1508 +Version 0.981 is a narrowly targeted bugfix and compatibility release, whose
1509 +main purpose is to resolve a major outstanding problem: the incompatibility
1510 +between version 0.98 of WordPress and the recently released WordPress 2.1.
1511 +
1512 +* WORDPRESS 2.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress is now compatible with
1513 + WordPress 2.1, as well as retaining its existing support for WordPress
1514 + 2.0 and 1.5. Incompatibilities that resulted in database warnings, fatal
1515 + errors, and which prevented FeedWordPress from syndicating new posts,
1516 + have been eliminated.
1517 +
1518 +* RSS-FUNCTIONS.PHP RENAMED TO RSS.PHP: if you use the upgraded MagpieRSS
1519 + replacement that's included with FeedWordPress, be sure to note that
1520 + there are now *two* files to upload from the `OPTIONAL/wp-includes`
1521 + subdirectory in order to carry out the upgrade: rss-functions.php and
1522 + rss.php. **It is necessary to upload both files**, due to a change in
1523 + the file naming scheme in WordPress 2.1, and it is necessary to do so
1524 + whether you are using WordPress 2.1 or not. If you only upload the
1525 + `rss-functions.php` file as in previous installations you will not have
1526 + a working copy of MagpieRSS; the rss.php file contains the actual code.
1527 +
1528 +* DATE BUG AFFECTING SOME PHP INSTALLATIONS RESOLVED: due to a subtle bug
1529 + in parse_w3cdtf(), some installations of PHP encountered problems with
1530 + FeedWordPress's attempt to date posts, which would cause some new posts
1531 + on Atom feeds to be dated as if they had apppeared in 1969 or 1970
1532 + (thus, effectively, never appearing on front page at all). This bug in
1533 + the date handling should now be fixed.
1534 +
1535 +* PHP <?=...?> SHORT FORM ELIMINATED: some installations of PHP do not
1536 + allow the <?=...?> short form for printing PHP values, which was used
1537 + extensively in the FeedWordPress interface code. Since this could cause
1538 + fatal errors for users with the wrong installation of PHP, the short
1539 + form has been replaced with full PHP echo statements, and is no longer
1540 + used in FeedWordPress.
1541 +
1542 +* BETTER USER INTERFACE INTEGRATION WITH WORDPRESS 2.x: Some minor changes
1543 + have been made to help the FeedWordPress interface pages blend in better
1544 + with the user interface when running under WordPress 2.x.
1545 +
1546 +* GLOBAL CATEGORIES BUG RESOLVED: a bug that prevented some users from
1547 + setting one or more categories to apply to syndicated posts from all
1548 + feeds (using the checkbox interface under Options --> Syndication) has
1549 + been resolved.
1550 +
1551 += 0.98 =
1552 +
1553 +* WORDPRESS 2.0 COMPATIBILITY: This is a narrowly-targeted release to
1554 + solve a major outstanding problem. FeedWordPress is now compatible with
1555 + both WordPress 1.5 and WordPress 2.0. Incompatibilities that caused
1556 + fatal SQL errors, and a more subtle bug with off-kilter counts of posts
1557 + under a given category, have been resolved. FeedWordPress tests for
1558 + database schema using the global $wp_db_version variable (if null, then
1559 + we presume that we're dealing with WordPress 1.5).
1560 +
1561 + NOTE: I have **not** fully tested FeedWordPress with WordPress 2.0.
1562 + Further testing may reveal more bugs. However, you should now be able
1563 + to get at least basic FeedWordPress functionality up and running.
1564 +
1565 +* AUTHOR MATCHING: FeedWordPress tests several fields to see if it can
1566 + identify the author of the post as a user already in the WordPress user
1567 + database. In previous versions, it tested the user login, the nickname,
1568 + and tested for "aliases" listed in the Profile (see documentation). FWP
1569 + now also matches authors on the basis of e-mail address (*if* an e-mail
1570 + address is present). This is particularly helpful for formats such as
1571 + RSS 2.0, in which authors are primarily identified by e-mail addresses.
1572 +
1573 += 0.97 =
1574 +
1575 +* INSTALLATION PROCEDURE: Some of the changes between 0.96 and 0.97
1576 + require upgrades to the meta-data stored by FeedWordPress to work
1577 + properly. Thus, if you are upgrading from 0.96 or earlier to 0.97, most
1578 + FeedWordPress operations (including updates and template functions)
1579 + WILL BE DISABLED until you run the upgrade procedure. Fortunately,
1580 + running the upgrade procedure is easy: just go to either Options -->
1581 + Syndication or Links --> Syndicated in the WordPress Dashboard and press
1582 + the button.
1583 +
1584 +* FEED FORMAT SUPPORT: Support has been added for the Atom 1.0 IETF
1585 + standard. Several other elements are also newly supported
1586 + (dcterms:created, dcterms:issued, dcterms:modified, dc:identifier,
1587 + proper support for the RSS 2.0 guid element, the RSS 2.0 author element,
1588 + the use of Atom author or Dublin Core dc:creator constructs at the feed
1589 + level to identify the author of individual items, etc.)
1590 +
1591 + N.B.: full support of several Atom 1.0 features, such as categories
1592 + and enclosures, requires you to install the optional rss-functions.php
1593 + upgrade in your wp-includes directory.
1594 +
1595 +* BUG FIX: Running `update-feeds.php` from command line or crontab
1596 + returned "I don't syndicate..." errors. It turns out that WordPress
1597 + sometimes tramples on the internal PHP superglobals that I depended on
1598 + to determine whether or not the script was being invoked from the
1599 + command line. This has been fixed (the variables are now checked
1600 + *before* WordPress can trample them). Note that `update-feeds.php` has
1601 + been thoroughly overhauled anyway; see below for details.
1602 +
1603 +* BUG FIX: Duplicate categories or author names. Fixed two bugs that could
1604 + create duplicate author and/or category names when the name contained
1605 + either (a) certain international characters (causing a mismatch between
1606 + MySQL and PHP's handling of lowercasing text), or (b) characters that
1607 + have a special meaning in regular expressions (causing MySQL errors when
1608 + looking for the author or category due to regexp syntax errors). These
1609 + should now be fixed thanks to careful escaping of names that go into
1610 + regular expressions and careful matching of lowercasing functions
1611 + (comparing results from PHP only to other results from PHP, and results
1612 + from MySQL only to other results from MySQL).
1613 +
1614 +* BUG FIX: Items dated December 31, 1969 should appear less often. The
1615 + function for parsing W3C date-time format dates that ships with
1616 + MagpieRSS can only correctly parse fully-specified dates with a
1617 + fully-specified time, but valid W3C date-time format dates may omit the
1618 + time, the day of the month, or even the month. Some feeds in the wild
1619 + date their items with coarse-grained dates, so the optional
1620 + `rss-functions.php` upgrade now includes a more flexible parse_w3cdtf()
1621 + function that will work with both coarse-grained and fully-specified
1622 + dates. (If parts of the date or the time are omitted, they are filled in
1623 + with values based on the current time, so '2005-09-10' will be dated to
1624 + the current time on that day; '2004' will be dated to this day and time
1625 + one year ago.
1626 +
1627 + N.B.: This fix is only available in the optional `rss-functions.php`
1628 + upgrade.
1629 +
1630 +* BUG FIX: Evil use of HTTP GET has been undone. The WordPress interface
1631 + is riddled with inappropriate (non-idempotent) uses of HTTP GET queries
1632 + (ordinary links that make the server do something with significant
1633 + side-effects, such as deleting a post or a link from the database).
1634 + FeedWordPress did some of this too, especially in places where it aped
1635 + the WordPress interface (e.g. the "Delete" links in Links -->
1636 + Syndicated). That's bad business, though. I've changed the interface so
1637 + that all the examples of improper side-effects that I can find now
1638 + require an HTTP POST to take effect. I think I got pretty much
1639 + everything; if there's anything that I missed, let me know.
1640 +
1641 + Further reading: [Sam Ruby 2005-05-06: This Stuff Matters](http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2005/05/06/This-Stuff-Matters)
1642 +
1643 +* BUG FIX: Categories applied by `cats` setting should no longer prevent
1644 + category-based filtering from working. In FeedWordPress, you can (1)
1645 + apply certain categories to all syndicated posts, or all posts from
1646 + a particular feed; and (2) filter out all posts that don't match one
1647 + of the categories that are already in the WordPress database (allowing
1648 + for simple category-based filtering; just load up WordPress with the
1649 + categories you want to accept, and then tell FeedWordPress not to create
1650 + new ones). However, the way that (1) and (2) were implemented meant that
1651 + you couldn't effectively use them together; once you applied a known
1652 + category to all syndicated posts from a particular feed, it meant that
1653 + they'd have at least one familiar category (the category or categories
1654 + you were applying), and that would get all posts past the filter no
1655 + matter what categories they were originally from.
1656 +
1657 + Well, no longer. You can still apply categories to all syndicated posts
1658 + (using either Syndication --> Options, or the feed-level settings under
1659 + Links --> Syndicated). But these categories are not applied to the post
1660 + until *after* it has already passed by the "familiar categories" filter.
1661 + So now, if you want, you can do category filtering and *then* apply as
1662 + many categories as you please to all and only posts that pass the filter.
1663 +
1664 +* BUG FIX: Other minor typos and HTML gaffes were fixed along the way.
1665 +
1666 +* PERFORMANCE: get_feed_meta() no longer hits the database for information
1667 + on every call; it now caches link data in memory, so FeedWordPress only
1668 + goes to the database once for each syndicated link. This may
1669 + substantially improve performance if your database server resources
1670 + are tight and your templates make a lot of use of custom settings from
1671 + get_feed_meta().
1672 +
1673 +* API CHANGE: Link ID numbers, rather than RSS URIs, are now used to
1674 + identify the feed from which a post is syndicated when you use template
1675 + functions such as get_feed_meta(). The practical upshot of this is you
1676 + can switch feeds, or change the feed address for a particular syndicated
1677 + site, without breaking your templates for all the posts that were
1678 + syndicated from the earlier URI.
1679 +
1680 +* API CHANGE: if you have plugins or templates that make use of the
1681 + get_feed_meta() function or the $fwp_feedmeta global, note that the
1682 + data formerly located under the `uri` and `name` fields is now located
1683 + under the `link/uri` field and the `link/name` field, respectively. Note
1684 + also that you can access the link ID number for any given feed under the
1685 + global $fwp_feedmeta['link/id'] (in plugins) or
1686 + get_feed_meta('link/id') (in a template in post contexts).
1687 +
1688 +* FEATURE: the settings for individual feeds can now be edited using a
1689 + humane interface (where formerly you had to tweak key-value pairs in the
1690 + Link Notes section). To edit settings for a feed, pick the feed that you
1691 + want under Links --> Syndicated and click the Edit link.
1692 +
1693 +* FEATURE: The "Unsubscribe" button (formerly "Delete") in Links -->
1694 + Syndicated now offers three options for unsubscribing from a feed: (1)
1695 + turning off the subscription without deleting the feed data or affecting
1696 + posts that were syndicated from the feed (this works by setting the Link
1697 + for the feed as "invisible"); (2) deleting the feed data and all of the
1698 + posts that were syndicated from the feed; or (3) deleting the feed data
1699 + and *keeping* the posts that were syndicated from the feed
1700 + setting the Link to "Invisible" (meaning that it will not be displayed
1701 + in lists of the site links on the front page, and it won't be checked
1702 + for updates; (2) deleting the Link and all of the posts that were
1703 + syndicated from its feed; or (3) deleting the feed data but keeping the
1704 + posts that were syndicated (which will henceforward be treated as if
1705 + they were local rather than syndicated posts). (Note that (1) is usually
1706 + the best option for aggregator sites, unless you want to clean up the
1707 + results of an error or a test.)
1708 +
1709 +* FEATURE / BUG FIX: If you have been receiving mysterious "I don't
1710 + syndicate...", or "(local) HTTP status code was not 200", or "(local)
1711 + transport error - could not open socket", or "parse error - not well
1712 + formed" errors, then this update may solve your problems, and if it does
1713 + *not* solve them, it will at least make the reasons for the problems
1714 + easier to understand. That's because I've overhauled the way that
1715 + FeedWordPress goes about updating feeds.
1716 +
1717 + If you use the command-line PHP scripting method to run scheduled
1718 + updates, then not much should change for you, except for fewer
1719 + mysterious errors. If you have done updates by sending periodic HTTP
1720 + requests to <http://your-blog.com/path/wp-content/update-feeds.php>,
1721 + then the details have changed somewhat; mostly in such a way as to make
1722 + things easier on you. See the README file or online documentation on
1723 + Staying Current for the details.
1724 +
1725 +* FEATURE: FeedWordPress now features a more sophisticated system for
1726 + timed updates. Instead of polling *every* subscribed feed for updates
1727 + *each* time `update-feeds.php` is run, FeedWordPress now keeps track of
1728 + the last time it polled each feed, and only polls them again after a
1729 + certain period of time has passed. The amount of time is normally set
1730 + randomly for each feed, in a period between 30 minutes and 2 hours (so
1731 + 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
1732 + directly by the feed, which brings us to ...
1733 +
1734 +* FEATURE: FeedWordPress now respects the settings in the `ttl` and
1735 + Syndication Module RSS elements. Feeds with these elements set will not
1736 + be polled any more frequently than they indicate with these feeds unless
1737 + the user manually forces FeedWordPress to poll the feed (see Links -->
1738 + Syndicated --> Edit settings).
1739 +
1740 += 0.96 =
1741 +
1742 +* FEATURE: support has been added for enclosures in RSS 2.0 and Atom
1743 + 0.6+ newsfeeds. WordPress already supports adding enclosures to an
1744 + item; FeedWordPress merely gets the information on the enclosure
1745 + from the feed it is syndicating and plugs that information directly
1746 + into the WordPress database so that (among other things) that post
1747 + will have its enclosure listed in your blog's RSS 2 newsfeed.
1748 +
1749 + Note that enclosure support requires using the optional MagpieRSS
1750 + upgrade (i.e., replacing your `wp-includes/rss-functions.php` with
1751 + `OPTIONAL/wp-includes/rss-functions.php` from the FWP archive)
1752 +
1753 +* FEATURE: for completeness's sake, there is now a feed setting,
1754 + `hardcode url`, that allows you to set the URI for the front page
1755 + of a contributor's website manually (that is, prevent it from being
1756 + automatically updated from the feed channel link on each update). To
1757 + set the URI manually, put a line like this in the Link Notes section
1758 + of a feed:
1759 +
1760 + hardcode url: yes
1761 +
1762 + You can also instruct FeedWordPress to use hardcoded URIs by default
1763 + on all feeds using Options --> Syndication
1764 +
1765 +* FEATURE: by default, when FeedWordPress finds new syndicated posts,
1766 + it (1) publishes them immediately, (2) turns comments off, and (3)
1767 + turns trackback / pingback pings off. You can now alter all three
1768 + default behaviors (e.g., to allow pings on syndicated posts, or to
1769 + send newly-syndicated posts to the draft pile for moderation) using
1770 + Options --> Syndication
1771 +
1772 +
1773 += From 0.91 to 0.95 =
1774 +
1775 +* BUG FIX: Fixed an obscure bug in the handling of categories:
1776 + categories with trailing whitespace could cause categories with
1777 + duplicate names to be created. This no longer happens. While I was
1778 + at it I tightened up the operation of
1779 + FeedWordPress::lookup_categories() a bit in general.
1780 +
1781 +* FEATURE DEPRECATED: the feed setting `hardcode categories` is now
1782 + deprecated in favor of `unknown categories` (see below), which
1783 + allows you to strip off any syndication categories not already in
1784 + your database using `unknown categories: default` or `unknown
1785 + categories: filter`. If you have `hardcode categories: yes` set on a
1786 + feed, this will be treated as `unknown categories: default` (i.e.,
1787 + no new categories will be added, but if a post doesn't match any of
1788 + the categories it will be added in the default category--usually
1789 + "Uncategorized" or "General").
1790 +
1791 +* FEATURE: You can now set global defaults as to whether or not
1792 + FeedWordPress will update the Link Name and Link Description
1793 + settings for feeds automatically from the feed title and feed
1794 + tagline. (By default, it does, as it has in past versions.) Whether
1795 + this behavior is turned on or off, you can still override the
1796 + default behavior using feed settings of `hardcode name: yes`,
1797 + `hardcode name: no`, `hardcode description: yes`, or `hardcode
1798 + description: no`.
1799 +
1800 +* FEATURE: Users can now provide one or several "aliases" for an
1801 + author, just as they can for a category. For example, to make
1802 + FeedWordPress treat posts by "Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger" and "Pope
1803 + Benedict XVI" as by the same author, edit the user profile for Pope
1804 + Benedict XVI and add a line like this to the "User profile" field:
1805 +
1806 + a.k.a.: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
1807 +
1808 + You can add several aliases, each on a line by itself. You can also
1809 + add any other text you like to the Profile without interfering with
1810 + the aliases.
1811 +
1812 +* FEATURE: Users can now choose how to handle syndicated posts that
1813 + are in unfamiliar categories or by unfamiliar authors (i.e.,
1814 + categories or authors whose names are not yet in the WordPress
1815 + database). By default, FeedWordPress will (as before) create a new
1816 + category (or new author) and use it for the current post and any
1817 + future posts. This behavior can be changed, either for all feeds or
1818 + for one or another particular feed.
1819 +
1820 + There are now three different options for an unfamiliar author: (1)
1821 + FeedWordPress can create a new author account and attribute the
1822 + syndicated post to the new account; (2) FeedWordPress can attribute
1823 + the post to an author if the author's name is familiar, and to a
1824 + default author (currently, this means the Site Administrator
1825 + account) if it is not; (3) FeedWordPress can drop posts by
1826 + unfamiliar authors and syndicate only posts by authors who are
1827 + already in the database.
1828 +
1829 + There are, similarly, two different options for an unfamiliar
1830 + category: (1) FeedWordPress can create new categories and place the
1831 + syndicated post in them; (2) FeedWordPress can drop the unfamiliar
1832 + categories and place syndicated posts only in categories that it is
1833 + already familiar with. In addition, FeedWordPress 0.95 lets you
1834 + choose whether posts that are in *no* familiar categories should be
1835 + syndicated (and placed in the default category for the blog) or
1836 + simply dropped.
1837 +
1838 + You can set the default behavior for both authors and categories
1839 + using the settings in Options --> Syndication. You can also set
1840 + different behavior for specific feeds by adding the `unfamiliar
1841 + author` and / or `unfamiliar categories` settings to the Link Notes
1842 + section of a feed:
1843 +
1844 + unfamiliar author: (create|default|filter)
1845 + unfamiliar categories: (create|default|filter)
1846 +
1847 + A setting of `unfamiliar author: create` will make FeedWordPress
1848 + create new authors to match unfamiliar author names *for this feed
1849 + alone*. A setting of `unfamiliar author: default` will make it
1850 + assign posts from unfamiliar authors to the default user account. A
1851 + setting of `unfamiliar author: filter` will cause all posts (from
1852 + this feed alone) to be dropped unless they are by an author already
1853 + listed in the database. Similiarly, `unfamiliar categories: create`
1854 + will make FeedWordPress create new categories to match unfamiliar
1855 + category names *for this feed alone*; `unfamiliar categories:
1856 + default` will cause it to drop any unfamiliar category names; and
1857 + `unfamiliar categories: filter` will cause it to *both* drop any
1858 + unfamiliar category names *and* to only syndicate posts that are
1859 + placed in one or more familiar categories.
1860 +
1861 + These two new features allow users to do some coarse-grained
1862 + filtering without having to write a PHP filter. Specifically, they
1863 + offer an easy way for you to filter feeds by category or by author.
1864 + Suppose, for example, that you only wanted to syndicate posts that
1865 + your contributors place in the "Llamas" category. You could do so by
1866 + setting up your installation of WordPress so that the only category
1867 + in the database is "Llamas," and then use Options --> Syndication to
1868 + set "Unfamiliar categories" to "don't create new categories and
1869 + don't syndicate posts unless they match at least one familiar
1870 + category". Now, when you update, only posts in the "Llamas" category
1871 + will be syndicated by FeedWordPress.
1872 +
1873 + Similarly, if you wanted to filter one particular feed so that only
1874 + posts by (for example) the author "Earl J. Llama" were syndicated to
1875 + your site, you could do so by creating a user account for Earl J.
1876 + Llama, then adding the following line to the settings for the feed
1877 + in Link Notes:
1878 +
1879 + unfamiliar author: filter
1880 +
1881 + This will cause any posts from this feed that are not authored by
1882 + Earl J. Llama to be discarded, and only the posts by Earl J. Llama
1883 + will be syndicated. (If the setting is used on one specific feed, it
1884 + will not affect how posts from other feeds are syndicated.)
1885 +
130 1886 == License ==
131 1887
132 -The FeedWordPress plugin is copyright © 2005-2007 by Charles Johnson. It uses
1888 +The FeedWordPress plugin is copyright © 2005-2010 by Charles Johnson. It uses
133 1889 code derived or translated from:
134 1890
135 1891 - [wp-rss-aggregate.php][] by [Kellan Elliot-McCrea](kellan@protest.net)
136 -- [MagpieRSS][] by [Kellan Elliot-McCrea](kellan@protest.net)
137 -- [HTTP Navigator 2][] by [Keyvan Minoukadeh](keyvan@k1m.com)
1892 +- [MagpieRSS][] by [Kellan Elliot-McCrea](kellan@protest.net)
138 1893 - [Ultra-Liberal Feed Finder][] by [Mark Pilgrim](mark@diveintomark.org)
1894 +- [WordPress Blog Tool and Publishing Platform](http://wordpress.org/)
139 1895
140 1896 according to the terms of the [GNU General Public License][].
141 1897
142 1898 This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
@@ -151,7 +1907,6 @@
151 1907 [wp-rss-aggregate.php]: http://laughingmeme.org/archives/002203.html
152 1908 [MagpieRSS]: http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/
153 1909 [HTTP Navigator 2]: http://www.keyvan.net/2004/11/16/http-navigator/
154 1910 [Ultra-Liberal Feed Finder]: http://diveintomark.org/projects/feed_finder/
155 -
156 1911 [GNU General Public License]: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
157 1912