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FeedWordPress / 2013.0504
FeedWordPress v2013.0504
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1 === FeedWordPress ===
2 Contributors: Charles Johnson
3 Donate link: http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/
4 Tags: syndication, aggregation, feed, atom, rss
5 Requires at least: 3.0
6 Tested up to: 3.5.1
7 Stable tag: 2013.0504
8
9 FeedWordPress syndicates content from feeds you choose into your WordPress weblog.
10
11 == Description ==
12
13 * Author: [Charles Johnson](http://radgeek.com/contact)
14 * Project URI: <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/>
15 * License: GPL 2. See License below for copyright jots and tittles.
16
17 FeedWordPress is an Atom/RSS aggregator for WordPress. It syndicates content
18 from feeds that you choose into your WordPress weblog; 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][].
24
25 [Planet]: http://www.planetplanet.org/
26 [Feminist Blogs]: http://feministblogs.org/
27
28 FeedWordPress is designed with flexibility, ease of use, and ease of
29 configuration in mind. You'll need a working installation of WordPress or
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*.)
35
36 [WordPress]: http://wordpress.org/
37 [WordPress MU]: http://mu.wordpress.org/
38 [3.0]: http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.0
39
40 == Installation ==
41
42 To use FeedWordPress, you will need:
43
44 * an installed and configured copy of [WordPress][] or [WordPress MU][]
45 (version 3.0 or later).
46
47 * FTP, SFTP or shell access to your web host
48
49 = New Installations =
50
51 1. Download the FeedWordPress installation package and extract the files on
52 your computer.
53
54 2. Create a new directory named `feedwordpress` in the `wp-content/plugins`
55 directory of your WordPress installation. Use an FTP or SFTP client to
56 upload the contents of your FeedWordPress archive to the new directory
57 that you just created on your web host.
58
59 3. Log in to the WordPress Dashboard and activate the FeedWordPress plugin.
60
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
68
69 = Upgrades =
70
71 To *upgrade* an existing installation of FeedWordPress to the most recent
72 release:
73
74 1. Download the FeedWordPress installation package and extract the files on
75 your computer.
76
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.
83
84 4. Enjoy your newer and hotter installation of FeedWordPress
85
86 == Using and Customizing FeedWordPress ==
87
88 FeedWordPress has many options which can be accessed through the WordPress
89 Dashboard, and a lot of functionality accessible programmatically through
90 WordPress templates or plugins. For further documentation of the ins and
91 outs, see the documentation at the [FeedWordPress project homepage][].
92
93 [FeedWordPress project homepage]: http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/
94
95 == Changelog ==
96
97 = 2012.0504 =
98
99 * BUGFIX: PHP 5.4 compatibility -- includes some more extensive fixes to
100 compatibility issues with PHP 5.4's handling of global variables
101
102 * MODULE REORGANIZATION: Should ensures that all needed submodules will be
103 properly included regardless of whether you are installing from github,
104 from SVN, or from the WordPress plugins page. If you've been getting
105 fatal errors about required modules not being found, this release should
106 hopefully resolve the issue.
107
108 = 2012.0503 =
109
110 * BUGFIX: Works properly again with WordPress installations that use a
111 MySQL table name prefix other than the default `wp_` prefix.
112
113 * BUGFIX: Includes a couple of significant PHP 5.4 compatibility fixes.
114 Now that PHP 5.4 is more widely deployed, Diagnostics will now also
115 show PHP version and some other potentially useful troubleshooting
116 information.
117
118 * ADMIN UI: Better indicates your options when deleting a syndicated post
119 so as to let you know whether it will be Trashed (and thus not
120 resyndicated) or Erased (and thus potentially resyndicated)
121
122 * ADMIN UI: Adds an AJAXy Test Expression button to allow live testing of
123 sample results from expressions in Custom Post Settings.
124
125 = 2012.1218 =
126
127 * WORDPRESS VISUAL EDITOR FIXED. There was an unlisted change in the
128 2012.1212 release which had the effect of disabling the WordPress Visual
129 Editor for all posts syndicated by FeedWordPress. Many users reported
130 this as a bug. It was actually a deliberate decision -- a crappy way to
131 try to deal with a crappy situation. (Many users had previously reported
132 a "bug" in which all the paragraph or line breaks seemed to be stripped
133 out of their syndicated posts; the issue turned out to be that the
134 Visual Editor was stripping out `<p>` and `<br/>` tags on the assumption
135 that the resulting post would be sent through standard WordPress
136 formatting filters. But under default settings, posts syndicated by FWP
137 deliberately bypass WordPress formatting filters.) In any case, this
138 version adopts a more flexible compromise. *If* FeedWordPress is set up
139 to bypass WordPress formatting filters (as it is by default), *then*
140 the Visual Editor will be disabled for syndicated posts (since using it
141 would produce incorrect results). If on the other hand FeedWordPress is
142 set up to expose syndicated posts to WordPress formatting filters (as it
143 usually is for those using the Visual Editor to manually edit posts),
144 then the Visual Editor tab will be re-enabled for syndicated posts.
145
146 * BUG FIX: PERMALINKS REWRITTEN FOR CUSTOM POST TYPES AS WELL AS NORMAL
147 WORDPRESS POSTS. If you had WordPress set up to syndicate incoming posts
148 to a custom post type (under Syndication > Posts & Links), and asked
149 FeedWordPress to make "permalinks point to the original site", then
150 previous versions of FeedWordPress would fail to do the rewriting --
151 permalinks would only be rewritten to point to the original source for
152 normal WordPress posts, not for custom post types. In 2012.1218 this bug
153 has been fixed: all post types will now have permalinks rewritten unless
154 you request for permalinks to point to the local copy on your aggregator
155 site.
156
157 * BUG FIX: ELIMINATES "PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function
158 setting() on a non-object...." Some changes to the in-memory caching of
159 information about feed subscriptions could result in a fatal PHP error
160 in cases where you have de-activated one of your subscriptions, but
161 posts from that subscription were still in the archive. This would
162 normally show up through half-completed feeds or half-completed pages
163 that suddenly broke off in the middle, and displayed or logged an error
164 message like: "PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function setting() on a
165 non-object in {...}/wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress/feedwordpress.php
166 on line 615". This bug has been eliminated, so affected feeds and pages
167 should now render correctly, and the error message should no longer
168 appear.
169
170 * BUG FIX: CATEGORY BOXES IN SYNDICATION > CATEGORIES & TAGS. Some minor
171 bugs in the appearance and animation of category checkboxes (for
172 example, the checkbox used to select categories for syndicated posts on
173 the Syndication > Categories & Tags settings page) have been fixed.
174
175 = 2012.1212 =
176
177 * WORDPRESS 3.5 COMPATIBILITY: This release has been tested for compatibility
178 with new releases of WordPress, up to version 3.5, and any documented
179 compatibility issues have been cleared -- in particular, if you were seeing
180 error pages stating that you don't have permission to access the
181 FeedWordPress Syndication page within the WordPress admin interface, then
182 upgrading to this release should fix the problem.
183
184 As always, if you encounter any compatibility problems after upgrading your
185 version of WordPress and your version of FeedWordPress to the most recent
186 versions, please contact me with as detailed a description as possible of
187 the issue you are encountering, the circumstances you're encountering it
188 under, what you expect to see happening, and what is happening instead.
189
190 * PHP 5.4 COMPATIBILITY: This release has been audited to fix potential
191 problems with deprecation notices or fatal errors under recent versions
192 of PHP. In particular, all uses of run-time pass-by-reference have been
193 eliminated from the code; if you were seeing a fatal error reading
194 "Call-time pass-by-reference has been removed ..." then upgrading to
195 this release should fix the problem.
196
197 * CUSTOMIZATION FRAMEWORK: A great deal of work has been done to make the
198 underlying framework more flexible, so that PHP add-ons can be written
199 to adapt FeedWordPress to handle custom XML vocabularies, expiration of
200 posts under specified conditions, and other custom behavior.
201
202 * BUGFIX: MANUALLY EDITED POST SLUGS NOT OVERWRITTEN. Thanks to a report
203 by Chris Fritz, I've identified some code that causes post slugs for the
204 posts generated by FWP to be rewritten with every update, even if the
205 user has manually updated the slug from within the WordPress editing
206 interface. This has been fixed: FWP will continue to generate new slugs
207 for syndicated posts, but when syndicated posts are updated, they will
208 retain the slug that they had at the time of the update; any manual
209 changes to the post slug should be preserved.
210
211 * USER-AGENT STRING: FeedWordPress now sends a distinctive User-Agent
212 string identifying itself, and noting that it is a feed aggregator.
213
214 * MISCELLANEOUS PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS: A number of changes have been
215 made to try to reduce the intensity and expense in terms of both
216 database performance and web server memory consumption.
217
218 * DIAGNOSTICS IMPROVEMENTS: A number of new and improved diagnostics have
219 been added which should aid in understanding and troubleshooting issues
220 that may arise.
221
222 = 2011.1019 =
223
224 * BUGFIX: "THERE ARE NO HTTP TRANSPORTS AVAILABLE" ERROR FIXED: The initial
225 support for HTTP Basic and Digest authentication in version 2011.1018
226 contained a bug that could cause HTTP requests for feeds or for other
227 WordPress resources to break down if you do not have the PHP curl module
228 installed. This bug has been fixed, and these errors should no longer
229 appear.
230
231 * IMPROVED HTTP AUTHENTICATION SUPPORT: In addition, the HTTP Authentication
232 support in FeedWordPress has been extended, to ensure that Basic
233 authentication is available in many web host configurations, and to allow
234 you to add a username and password for a feed immediately when you
235 subscribe to it.
236
237 = 2011.1018 =
238
239 * HTTP BASIC AND DIGEST AUTHENTICATION SUPPORT: FeedWordPress now offers
240 improved support for syndicating feeds that make use of HTTP Basic or HTTP
241 Digest authentication methods. In order to set up authentication on one of
242 your feeds, just go to its Settings > Feed page, and click on the "Uses
243 Username/Password" link underneath the Feed URL. Enter the username and
244 password for accessing the feed, then select the authentication method. (If
245 you're not sure which method your feed provider uses, try Basic first.)
246 Save Changes, and syndicate away.
247
248 NOTE: HTTP Digest support requires the curl module for PHP. If you are not
249 sure whether this module has been installed, contact your web hosting
250 provider to check.
251
252 * WP 3.3 (BETA) COMPATIBILITY: This version fixes an init-sequence bug that
253 could cause intrusive warning messages or fatal errors in WP 3.3 beta
254 versions.
255
256 * BUGFIX: FIXES LONG DELAYS IN UPDATES SCHEDULES IN LARGE INSTALLATIONS. A
257 performance feature introduced in version 2011.0721 had some flaws in its
258 implementation, which tended to create serious delays (on the order of
259 several hours) in FeedWordPress's attempts to schedule updates for feeds,
260 when users had a very large number of feeds (several dozen or more) in their
261 FeedWordPress installation. This feature has been reconfigured to adjust
262 dynamically to the number of feeds in Syndicated Sources and the frequency
263 with which they are updated. If you've seen a lot of ready-to-update feeds
264 piling up, several hours after they were supposed to get updated, then this
265 upgrade should better ensure that your feeds get updated in a timely fashion.
266
267 * BUGFIX: syndicated_item_guid FILTERS FIXED. Previous versions of
268 FeedWordPress theoretically allowed for filters on the syndicated_item_guid
269 hook, which was intended to filter the globally-unique identifier element
270 (rss:guid or atom:id) -- useful if you need to convince FeedWordPress to use
271 different guids, or to recognize two or more incoming posts as versions of
272 the same post rather than as distinct items. However, while the hook
273 affected the guid stored in the WordPress database, it did not affect the
274 guid used to check whether an incoming feed item had already been syndicated
275 or was a new item -- which greatly limited the practical usefulness of the
276 filter. This bug has been fixed: syndicated_item_guid filters should now
277 properly control not only the final database record, but also the initial
278 uniqueness test applied to posts.
279
280 = 2011.0721 =
281
282 * BUGFIX: SERIOUS BUG CAUSING RARE UNEXPECTED DELETION OF PAGES AND OTHER
283 CONTENT. A bug in the guid-checking code for some rare kinds of guids could
284 cause content in the wp_posts table to seemingly disappear at random after
285 FeedWordPress updates.This most frequently but not exclusively affected
286 static pages. What actually happened is that in these rare cases the
287 existing static page was mistaken for an older version of the new incoming
288 syndicated post, which was then stored as a new revision of the original
289 page. The bug that caused these mistaken identities has been fixed.
290
291 * BUGFIX: UNWANTED AUTOMATIC PAGE-LOAD-BASED UPDATES NO LONGER A NUISANCE.
292 Some users encountered a bug in which FeedWordPress would adopt an automatic
293 page-load-based update method, even if they had requested that it not do
294 so, and that it use a manual or cron job update method instead. The bug
295 causing this has been fixed, and page-load-based updates should no longer
296 trigger unless explicitly turned on.
297
298 * WP 3.2 USER INTERFACE COMPATIBILITY: POST TAGS BOX NOW WORKS AGAIN. The
299 release of WordPress 3.2 caused a breakage in the tags box which prevented
300 you from adding or removing tags under Syndication --> Categories & Tags.
301 (The breakage was the result of an incompatibility introduced by the new
302 release of jQuery.) This breakage has now been fixed, and the tags box
303 should work correctly again.
304
305 * FEED UPDATE SCHEDULING IMPROVEMENTS: UI. The Syndicated Sources table now
306 provides considerably more data to understand update scheduling, when
307 specific scheduling decisions are made because of, e.g., requests from the
308 feed producer.
309
310 * FEED UPDATE SCHEDULING IMPROVEMENTS: ENFORCEABLE "MINIMUM INTERVAL" SETTING
311 TO SPACE OUT UPDATES. Some feeds request specific update schedules, using
312 standard elements such as sy:updateFrequency and rss:ttl. Normally,
313 FeedWordPress respects any scheduling requests that a feed makes -- if it
314 requests a longer gap between polls than what FWP would normally adopt, then
315 FWP slows down to meet the request. If it indicates a shorter gap than what
316 FWP would normally adopt, FWP speeds up and checks that feed for updates
317 more often than it normally would. Now, there should not be any way for user
318 settings to override an explicit slow-down request from the feed producer --
319 if producers indicate a particular update schedule, then polling the feed
320 more frequently than they request is considered abusive behavior. But
321 there's no reason why users should not be able -- if they so desire -- to
322 override speed-up requests, and poll a feed *less* frequently than the
323 indicated update schedule, if the FWP user wants to space update checkins
324 over a longer interval of time. Before, they could not do this: FWP always
325 sped up to meet the indicated update schedule. Now, they can do this, by
326 using the new "Minimum Interval" setting in Syndication --> Feeds &
327 Updates..
328
329 = 2011.0706 =
330
331 * WP 3.2 COMPATIBILITY: ELIMINATES FATAL ERROR "Call to undefined method
332 WP_SimplePie_File::WP_SimplePie_File() in
333 [...]/wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress/feedwordpress.php on line 1841." The
334 latest release of WordPress, version 3.2, has shifted the minimum
335 requirements up to PHP 5.2, and in line with the shift to PHP5 they have
336 rewritten a number of code segments that made use of now-obsolete PHP4
337 idioms. Unfortunately, this caused a fatal error whenever FeedWordPress
338 attempted to make use of the cache, since FWP's caching plugin was written
339 to match the older idiom. FeedWordPress has been updated to follow the new,
340 PHP5 idiom when possible, thus eliminating the fatal error.
341
342 * PERFORMANCE: The handling of queries to determine whether posts had been
343 previously syndicated produced some very slow queries (usually, but not
344 always, involving a scan over the MD5(post_guid) column of the table). The
345 code that prepares MySQL queries for previously-syndicated checks has been
346 revised to eliminate the MD5(post_guid) scan entirely, and to significantly
347 improve performance by eliminating other unnecessary clauses.
348
349 * BUGFIX: NO LONGER DESTROYS STICKY POSTS. Previous versions could destroy
350 (or, more precisely, replace the content of) sticky posts due to some
351 queries mashed together in unexpected ways by WordPress. Version 2011.0706
352 accounts for and eliminates the problem; your sticky posts should be safe
353 once again.
354
355 * BUGFIX: GUIDS CONTAINING MYSQL-ESCAPED CHARACTERS NO LONGER CAUSE DUPLICATE
356 POSTS TO APPEAR. One remaining source of duplicate post issues in 2011.0602
357 was guids that contained characters that needed to be escaped for MySQL,
358 such as single quotes and double quotes. The work-around for handling
359 filtered URIs has now been corrected to ensure that these do not cause
360 duplicate posts.
361
362 = 2011.0602 =
363
364 * WP 3.1.3 COMPAT / BUGFIX: WHITESPACE IN GUIDS NO LONGER PRODUCES DUPLICATE
365 POSTS. The work-around for handling filtered URIs in guid elements has now
366 been extended to handle URIs that were filtered because of leading or
367 trailing whitespace, in addition to URIs that were filtered because of
368 unapproved schemes.
369
370 * WP 3.1.3 COMPAT / BUGFIX: RELATIVE URLS IN GUIDS NO LONGER PRODUCE DUPLICATE
371 POSTS. The work-around for handling filtered URIs in guid elements has now
372 been extended to handle URIs that were altered without being filtered out
373 entirely (most commonly because a scheme was added to a relative URL).
374
375 * BUGFIX: UPDATES TO POST NO LONGER CAUSE DUPLICATE DRAFT VERSION TO APPEAR.
376 Under certain conditions in 2011.0531, an update to an existing post would
377 not be properly applied to the post itself, but rather would appear as a
378 duplicate post with Draft status. This bug has been eliminated, and updates
379 will now be properly inserted as revisions to the existing post.
380
381 = 2011.0531 =
382
383 * WORDPRESS 3.1.3 COMPATIBILITY: DUPLICATE POSTS ISSUE FIXED. Due to
384 internal changes in the way that WordPress handles post guids in the
385 most recent release (3.1.3), many users experienced problems with many
386 duplicate posts appearing in rapid succession. (Specifically, this would
387 happen with any posts using tag: URL guids -- such as all the posts
388 coming from Blogger feeds or feeds from other Google services.) This
389 compatibility release of FeedWordPress eliminates the issue by working
390 around the new restrictions on tag: URLs.
391
392 * NEW AND IMPROVED DIAGNOSTICS: Syndication --> Diagnostics now contains some
393 new diagnostics settings useful for debugging problems with duplicate posts
394 (allowing you to easily view the guid of posts in the WordPress posts
395 database and allowing you to track the SQL used to check for existing
396 versions of a syndicated post).
397
398 = 2011.0512 =
399
400 * DIAGNOSTICS IMPROVEMENTS; "THERE MAY BE A BUG IN FEEDWORDPRESS" CRITICAL
401 ERROR NOTICES ELIMINATED: This version includes some major improvements
402 to the Syndication --> Diagnostics section, which should aid in
403 troubleshooting difficulties with items failing to be imported, posts
404 failing to be properly inserted into the database, or updates failing to
405 be recorded. If you have been encountering critical error / bug notices
406 with a white screen and the message "THERE MAY BE A BUG IN
407 FEEDWORDPRESS," followed by an extraordinarily long dump of mostly
408 incomprehensible diagnostic information, you'll be happy to know that
409 the condition causing these notices has been eliminated. In the few
410 cases where errors may still crop up with database insertions,
411 FeedWordPress will now produce a significantly more manageable and more
412 useful diagnostic message.
413
414 * BUGFIX: NEW POSTS FAILING TO APPEAR IN A CLEANLY-INSTALLED FEEDWORDPRESS
415 SYSTEM. If you encountered a recurring problem with FeedWordPress
416 failing to import new posts, after a clean install of FeedWordPress
417 (i.e., not an upgrade from a previous version), this problem may have
418 been the result of a bug with author-handling which has now been fixed
419 in the 2011.0512 release. (If the problem does *not* go away with the
420 upgrade, this version also includes significant improvements to the
421 Diagnostics system, which will help track down what *is* causing it
422 in your particular case.)
423
424 * PERFORMANCE: New handling of update hashes allows FeedWordPress to avoid
425 a certain kind of infinite loop, caused when two more more different
426 syndicated feeds each carried a version of the same item (for example,
427 because it appeared on two different aggregator feeds that you're
428 syndicating). In previous versions, when this kind of loop cropped up,
429 syndicated posts could pile up an indefinitely large number of revisions
430 -- each revision alternating between the version from each of the two
431 feeds where it appeared -- which would, over time, dramatically inflate
432 the size of the database, and kill the performance of queries on the
433 post table. This issue has been resolved: revisions of the post that
434 have been syndicated once will not be re-syndicated over and over again.
435
436 * AUTHOR LISTS: Lists of authors presented on the Author settings pages
437 should now be easier to scan through, with author names arranged in
438 alphabetical order.
439
440 * FEED ITEM DATE PARSING: More tweaks to make date-time handling more
441 resilient when feeds provide broken or weird values for the timestamps
442 on syndicated items. FWP will now attempt to work around unparseable
443 timezone values.
444
445 * AUTHOR MATCHING: Now attempts to match author names against the WP login
446 name in addition to display_name; when creating user record, also fills
447 in some best-guess values for nickname, firstname and lastname. Also
448 properly picks up Atom 1.0 author/uri data from feed.
449
450 * COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress has been successfully tested for
451 compatibility with recent releases of WordPress, up to version 3.1.2.
452
453 = 2011.0211 =
454
455 * BUGFIX: DUPLICATE POSTS WHEN GUIDS ARE TOO LONG: When feeds included
456 exceptionally long GUIDs, FeedWordPress could occasionally get into
457 a situation where posts with the long GUIDs would be duplicated over
458 and over again with each update (because FWP failed to store the full
459 GUID, due to length constraints in the relevant database tables).
460 Without the full GUID, FWP would not know that the post had already
461 been syndicated once. This bug has been fixed, and should no longer
462 produce duplicate posts.
463
464 * HTTP TIMEOUT SETTING: If you are frequently running into timeout
465 problems with one or more of the feeds you syndicate, FWP now allows you
466 to adjust the timeout for HTTP requests using a global or feed-by-feed
467 setting.
468
469 * HTTP GET PARAMETERS: You can now temporarily or permanently add HTTP
470 GET parameters to a subscription using an interface in Syndication -->
471 Feeds & Updates. This is especially helpful for making quick, short-term
472 changes to a subscription (for example, to pull in all the previous
473 items from a web service, before settling down to pulling in only newly
474 updated items).
475
476 * DIAGNOSTICS SYSTEM: Added several new diagnostics which are useful in
477 troubleshooting, and established a framework for add-on modules to hook
478 in with their own diagnostic messages.
479
480 * UI: Adjusted some internal coding, which should allow for settings
481 pages and add-ons to properly display multiple category pickers on a
482 single settings page.
483
484 * PHP4 COMPATIBILITY TWEAKS: This version makes some tweaks to the handling
485 of object references which should improve compatibility with older
486 versions of PHP. (Although, I should note, web hosts that still force
487 you to run under PHP 4 -- in 2011! -- are *bad web hosts*.)
488
489 * IMPROVED PERFORMANCE: This version eliminates a *major* performance drag
490 that shows up on sites with large numbers of users (due to some poor
491 decisions about where to place a user query, which caused the user table
492 to be scanned frequently when it did not need to be). If you experienced
493 serious problems with CPU load or slow database performance under
494 2010.0905, which kicked in immediately when FWP was loaded and tended
495 to disappear immediately if FWP was de-activated, it is likely that
496 upgrading away from 2010.0905 to the most recent version will resolve
497 your problem.
498
499
500 = 2010.0905 =
501
502 * BUGFIX: CATEGORIES AND TAGS CORRECTLY ASSIGNED IN AUTOMATIC UPDATES.
503 Version 2010.0903 switched over to a new way of assigning categories and
504 tags as part of its support for handling custom taxonomies.
505 Unfortunately, the method that it uses is subjected to some checks of
506 the current user's capabilities, which creates problems for posts that
507 are being inserted into the WordPress database when there *is* no
508 current user logged in (as, for example, when an update is being carried
509 out from a cron job or automatic update). The result was that posts
510 from cron jobs and automatic updates ended up with no Categories and no
511 Tags being assigned. This bug has now been fixed: in 2010.0905, Tags and
512 Categories should be correctly assigned to all posts, regardless of
513 whether they were added from manual updates, cron jobs, or automatic
514 updates.
515
516 = 2010.0903 =
517
518 * WORDPRESS 3 REQUIRED: Please note that this release of FeedWordPress
519 *requires* WordPress 3.0 or later. If you are currently using a 2.x
520 branch of WordPress, you will need to upgrade to WordPress 3 before you
521 can successfully upgrade FeedWordPress.
522
523 * BUGFIX: NO MORE DISAPPEARING "SYNDICATED SOURCES" PANEL; INTERNET
524 EXPLORER UI GLITCH APPARENTLY FIXED: Several users independently
525 reported a problem with FWP 2010.0623 and various versions of IE. A
526 problem with the HTML markup caused IE (but not Firefox or
527 Chrome) to completely hide the Syndicated Sources administration panel
528 (the main list of currently-syndicated sources, and the main location
529 for adding new sources, under the Syndication menu item) when a user
530 added their first syndicated feed. Maddeningly, the glitch seemed to
531 affect some IE users and not others: I was never able to reproduce the
532 problem for myself on my own machines. However, the markup of Syndicated
533 Sources has undergone significant changes and corrections since
534 2010.0623, and two independent sources who had been having this problem
535 confirm that they no longer encounter it with the updated version. For
536 the time being, I am going to declare this bug squashed.
537
538 * BUGFIX: MORE PROTECTION AGAINST FATAL ERRORS FROM PLUGGABLE VERSIONS OF
539 SimplePie: FeedWordPress now takes some precautions that should help to
540 better avoid conflicts for users who have installed pluggable versions
541 of SimplePie for another plugin or theme. (You may not know that you have
542 done this; but if you've been encountering fatal errors indicating that
543 you cannot redeclare class SimplePie, or something along those lines,
544 there is now a better chance that those fatal errors will be eliminated.
545
546 * PERFORMANCE: SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCED MEMORY CONSUMPTION FOR LARGE UPDATES:
547 FeedWordPress is still a memory-hungry little module, especially when
548 you are dealing with very large feeds. However, users should notice a
549 significant reduction in memory overloads, especially if they update a
550 large number of feeds at once.
551
552 * USER INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: Nothing is radically different, but there's
553 been a fair amount of extra spit and polish added, including a convenient
554 new Dashboard widget that may save you a trip to the Syndication menu,
555 a lot of effort to make the relationship between global and feed-by-feed
556 settings more obvious to the user and more easily controllable, to make
557 navigation between settings pages easier, to sand off a few rough edges,
558 and to make other improvements on the margins. I hope you'll like how
559 it looks.
560
561 * ADDING MULTIPLE FEEDS: FeedWordPress now provides a convenient mode for
562 adding multiple feeds at once, using either a copy-and-pasted list, or
563 else an OPML file. Go to Syndication --> Syndicated Sources and check
564 out the two new buttons underneath the New Source input box. When you
565 have to add a number of feeds at once, this can save you considerable
566 time and trouble.
567
568 * IMPROVED HANDLING OF AUTHORS WITH DUPLICATE E-MAIL ADDRESS AND AUTHORS
569 WITH NAMES WRITTEN IN FOREIGN SCRIPTS: WordPress 3 is increasingly picky
570 about what it will accept for new author accounts, and some of the
571 conditions it imposes can cause error conditions that prevent posts from
572 being properly syndicated, or properly attributed, if authors happen to
573 have identical e-mail addresses, or if users are given usernames that are
574 written in non-Western scripts. FeedWordPress now handles these much
575 better, and systematically works to avoid clashes between syndicated
576 authors' account names or in their e-mail addresses, which should result
577 in significantly better results in mapping author names to WordPress
578 user accounts.
579
580 * MAPPING CATEGORIES ON SYNDICATED POSTS TO TAGS NOW BETTER SUPPORTED:
581 In previous versions, the only way for the Categories provided by a
582 syndicated feed to be mapped into Post Tags was to instruct FWP to
583 create new tags, rather than new categories, for unfamiliar categories
584 from the feed. This works fine if you want tags to be the default; but
585 if you want only a *specific* set of tags, there was no way to get them
586 without getting most or all other categories imported as tags. You can
587 now do this by creating a tag (under Posts ==> Post Tags) before
588 importing the post; when the syndicated category matches a pre-existing
589 tag, the incoming post will be tagged with that tag, without creating
590 a local Post Category.
591
592 * REL-TAG MICROFORMAT SUPPORT FOR INLINE TAGS: Syndicated posts that
593 contain inline tags, marked up using the Rel-Tag microformat
594 <http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag>, are now tagged with the tags
595 provided by Rel-Tag format links.
596
597 * MUCH GREATER CONTROL OVER CATEGORY AND TAG MAPPING: This is partly the
598 result of building in support for a potentially endless set of custom
599 taxonomies (see below), but in general there has been a great deal of
600 effort towards giving you more control over how categories and tags
601 provided by the feed are mapped into terms on the local blog. In
602 particular, you can now force FeedWordPress to create only categories
603 from categories and tags provided by the feed; or to create only tags;
604 or to search both categories and tags for a match; or you can simply
605 force it to drop all of the categories provided by the feed and use
606 only categories or tags that you explicitly provide. In addition, you
607 can now also choose whether to override global categories settings with
608 a local, feed-specific setting; or whether to *add together* *both* the
609 global categories and the local feed-specific categories -- depending
610 on whatever your use-case may demand.
611
612 * CUSTOM POST TYPES AND TAXONOMY SUPPORTS: This is mainly for the
613 super-geeky, but if you use other plugins or themes that make
614 significant use of WordPress's support for custom post types and custom
615 taxonomies, you may be pleased to find that FeedWordPress now allows you
616 to feed incoming posts into any custom feed type that you wish, and to
617 map categories and tags from the feed to custom taxonomies as well as
618 to the standard Category and Tag taxonomies.
619
620 * STORING NAMESPACED CUSTOM FEED ELEMENTS IN POST CUSTOM FIELDS: If you
621 would like to use FeedWordPress's support for storing custom meta-data
622 from feed elements in the custom fields for a post (for example, to
623 store geolocation data or iTunes media meta-data), you'll find that it's
624 now much easier for you to access these namespaced elements. You always
625 could access them, but in previous versions you might have to write
626 something ugly like $(/{http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#}lat)
627 just to get at the value of a `<geo:lat>` tag. Now, as long as you use
628 the same mnemonic codes that the feed producer used, you should always
629 be able to write a nice, simple expression like $(/geo:lat) to get the
630 value of a <geo:lat> tag.
631
632 * CUSTOM DIRECTORY STRUCTURE SUPPORT: if you poke at it enough, WordPress
633 is relatively flexible about where it should store admin interface code,
634 uploaded content, plugins, and a number of other things that occupy an
635 important place in the WordPress directory structure. Previous versions
636 of FeedWordPress encountered serious errors or broke entirely when used
637 with directory structures other than the default. This should now be
638 fixed: FWP now supports custom directory structures wherever WordPress
639 allows them to be customized, rather than depending on the default
640 locations. Enjoy your freedom!
641
642 * MANY NEW FILTERS AND API UTILITY FUNCTIONS FOR ADD-ON PROGRAMMERS: There
643 have been too many improvements to list them all in this ChangeLog, but
644 it means that much more power and ease for folks who are customizing
645 FeedWordPress through PHP filters or add-on modules. Fuller
646 documentation will be put up at the Wiki at feedwordpress.radgeek.org
647 soon.
648
649 = 2010.0623 =
650
651 * WORDPRESS 3.0 COMPATIBILITY / AUTHOR MAPPING INTERFACE ISSUES: I
652 resolved a couple of outstanding issues with the author mapping
653 interface (Syndication --> Authors), which were preventing new users
654 from being created correctly and author mapping rules from being set up
655 correctly. These partly had to do with new restrictions on user account
656 creation introduced in WordPress 3.0; anyway, they should now be fixed.
657
658 * MORE EFFICIENT SYNDICATED URL LOOKUPS: Several users noticed that the
659 bug fix introduced in 2010.0528 for compatibility with post-listing
660 plugins caused a lot more queries to the database in order to look up
661 numerical post IDs from the URL provided to the filter. This shouldn't
662 cause any major problems, but it is not as efficient as it could be; the
663 code now takes advantage of a more efficient way of doing things,
664 which usually will not require any additional database queries.
665
666 * SIMPLEPIE FEED UPDATE ISSUES: If you have been having significant
667 problems with getting feeds to update correctly, this may be the result
668 of some bugs in the implementation of SimplePie caching that ships with
669 WordPress (as of version 3.0). (You would most commonly experience this
670 error if you continually saw errors such as "No feed found at <...>" in
671 your updates.) Fortunately, SimplePie allows for a great deal of
672 extensibility and this allows me to work around the problem; these
673 error conditions should now be mostly eliminated when the underlying
674 feed is valid.
675
676 * UI: SHOW INACTIVE SOURCES: When you use the default unsubscribe option
677 -- which turns off the subscription to a feed while preserving the posts
678 from it and the syndication-related meta-data for the feed -- the
679 unsubscribed feed can now easily be viewed in a special "Inactive"
680 section of the Syndicated Sources page. (As a side benefit, if you've
681 accidentally, or only temporarily, turned off the subscription to a
682 feed, it is now much easier to restore the feed to being active, or to
683 delete it permanently, if you prefer.
684
685 * UI: FEED FINDER / SWITCH FEED INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: changes to styling
686 and options for the feed finder / switch feed, which should now make it
687 easier, in some cases, to find alternative feeds, and make interface
688 options more clearly visible.
689
690 * FILTERS: `syndicated_item_published` and `syndicated_item_updated` NOW
691 PROPERLY AFFECT THE DATING OF POSTS. These filters used to affect some
692 date-related settings, but not others -- and, most importantly, not the
693 final date that is set for a post's publication or last-modified date
694 in the WordPress database. Now, they do affect that, as they should.
695 (Filters should receive, and return, a long integer, representing a Unix
696 epoch relative timestamp.)
697
698 * MAGIC URL TO CLEAR THE CACHE: Suppose that you need to clear the feed
699 cache, for whatever reason; suppose, even, that you need to clear it on
700 a regular basis. One way you might do this is by logging into the
701 FeedWordPress administrative interface and going to Syndication -->
702 Performance. Another way you might do it, now, is to simply send an
703 HTTP request to a magic URL provided by FeedWordPress: if your blog is
704 at example.com, the URL would be <http://example.com/?clear_cache=1>
705
706 = 2010.0602 =
707
708 * CATEGORY BOX INTERFACE ELEMENT FIXED FOR WP 3.0: Stylesheet changes
709 between WordPress 2.9.x and the WordPress 3.0 RC caused the Categories
710 box under **Syndication --> Categories & Tags** to malfunction. This
711 has been fixed.
712
713 * LINK CATEGORY SELECTION BOX IN SYNDICATION ==> FEEDS FIXED FOR WP 2.8
714 AND 2.9: A WP 3.0 compatibility change introduced in 2010.0531
715 inadvertently broke the Syndicated Link Category selector under
716 Syndication --> Feeds & Updates in WP 2.8 and WP 2.9, causing the post
717 categories to be displayed in the selector rather than the link
718 categories. This should now be fixed so that the selector will work
719 correctly under both the current versions of WordPress and the 3.0 RC.
720
721 * MORE PERMISSIVE HANDLING OF FEEDS WITH BAD CONTENT-TYPE HEADERS: One of
722 the small advantages that MagpieRSS had over SimplePie is that it was
723 more tolerant about parsing well-formed feeds that the remote web server
724 happened to deliver with weird or incorrect HTTP Content-type headers.
725 In feeds affected by this problem, the new SimplePie parser would simply
726 fail to find a feed, due to its being led astray by the contents of the
727 Content-type header. This version includes an extension to SimplePie's
728 content-type sniffer that offers more permissive handling of the HTTP
729 headers.
730
731 * MORE FULL-TEXT "EXCERPTS" NOW PROPERLY SHORTENED. Version 2010.0528
732 introduced code to control for cases in which elements intended for
733 item summaries are (ill-advisedly) used to carry the full text of posts;
734 past versions of FeedWordPress would simply include the full text of the
735 post in the excerpt field, but newer versions now attempt to detect
736 this condition when it arises and to head it off, by blanking out the
737 excerpt field and filling it with an automatically generated short,
738 plain text excerpt from the full content. This release broadens the
739 test conditions that indicate when an excerpt field is treated as
740 identical to the full text of the post, and should therefore improve
741 the handling of some feeds (such as Google Reader feeds) where the full
742 text of each post was still appearing in the excerpt field.
743
744 * FILTERS: `syndicated_item_published` AND `syndicated_item_updated`
745 FILTERS NOW ALLOW FILTER AUTHORS TO CHANGE POST TIMESTAMPS. You can now
746 use the `syndicated_item_published` and `syndicated_item_updated` filter
747 hooks to write filters or add-ons which directly change the post date
748 and most-recently-updated timestamps on incoming syndicated posts. Props
749 to niska for pointing out where the filters needed to be applied in
750 order to change WordPress's internal timestamps for incoming posts.
751
752 = 2010.0531 =
753
754 * PERMALINK / CUSTOM FIELDS PROBLEM RESOLVED: An issue in 2010.0528 caused
755 some posts to be imported without the proper syndication-related
756 meta-data being attached (thus causing permalinks to point back to the
757 aggregator website rather than to the source website, among other
758 problems). This problem has been resolved (and a fix has been applied
759 which will resolve the problem for any posts affected by this problem,
760 if the original post is recent enough to still be available on the feed).
761
762 * UI: The "Back End" section has been split into two separate sections --
763 "Performance" (dealing with caching, database index, and other
764 performance tweaks), and "Diagnostics" (dealing with debug mode,
765 update logging, and a number of new diagnostic tests which I will be
766 rolling out over the next few releases).
767
768 * Several minor interface bug fixes and PHP warning notices eliminated.
769
770 = 2010.0528 =
771
772 #### Compatibility ####
773
774 * SIMPLEPIE IS NOW USED TO PARSE FEEDS; NO MORE MAGPIERSS UPGRADES NEEDED:
775 One of the biggest changes in this release is that FeedWordPress no
776 longer depends on MagpieRSS to parse feeds, and has switched to the much
777 more up-to-date and flexible SimplePie feed parser, which is included as
778 a standard part of WordPress versions 2.8 and later. Using SimplePie will
779 hopefully allow for better handling of feeds going further, and will
780 allow me greater flexibility in determining how exactly the feed parser
781 will operate. It also means that FeedWordPress no longer requires
782 special upgrades to the WordPress core MagpieRSS files, and should
783 eliminate quite a bit of complexity.
784
785 * MAGPIERSS COMPATIBILITY LAYER FOR EXISTING FILTERS AND ADD-ONS: However,
786 I have also implemented a compatibility layer to ensure that existing
787 filters and add-ons for FeedWordPress which depended on the MagpieRSS
788 data format *should not be broken* by the switch to SimplePie. Going
789 forward, I recommend that new filters and add-ons be written to take
790 advantage of the SimplePie object representations of items, feeds, etc.,
791 rather than the MagpieRSS arrays, but the MagpieRSS arrays will still
792 be available and older filters should continue to work as they have in
793 the past.
794
795 * COMPATIBILITY WITH WORDPRESS 2.9.x and 3.0: This release has been tested
796 for the existing WordPress 2.9.x branch and with the upcoming release of
797 WordPress 3.0. Changes in the user interface JavaScript between WordPress
798 2.8.x and WordPress 2.9 caused the tag box interface element to break in
799 the Syndication --> Categories & Tags settings page; changes in the API
800 functions for adding new authors caused fatal errors under certain
801 conditions in WordPress 3.0. These breakages have been fixed.
802
803 * DROPPED LEGACY SUPPORT FOR WORDPRESS PRIOR TO 2.8: Because SimplePie is
804 not included with versions of WordPress prior to 2.8, I have chosen to
805 drop legacy support for WordPress versions 1.5 through 2.7. If you are
806 using FeedWordPress with a version of WordPress before 2.8, you will
807 have to upgrade your installation of WordPress in order to take
808 advantage of this release.
809
810 * PHP 5.3 COMPATIBILITY: A couple of compatibility issues, which were
811 causing fatal errors amd ugly warnings for users of PHP 5.3,
812 have been eliminated.
813
814 #### Features and Processing ####
815
816 * INTERFACE REORGANIZATION: The interface restructuring, began with
817 Version 2009.0612, has been completed. Catch-all settings pages have
818 been eliminated entirely for pages that cover each aspect of handling
819 a feed: Feeds & Updates, Posts & Links, Authors, Categories & Tags,
820 and Back End handling of the database and diagnostic information.
821 Extensive new interface hooks allow add-on modules to significantly
822 change or extend the FeedWordPress admin interface and workflow.
823
824 * STORING INFORMATION FROM THE FEED IN CUSTOM FIELDS: Many users
825 have written to request the ability to store information from elements
826 in the feed in a custom field on each post. (So that, for example, if
827 post includes a `itunes:duration` element, you could store the contents
828 in a Custom Field called `duration` on the post (for a Theme to access
829 later). The Custom Post Settings under Syndication --> Posts & Links now
830 allow you to access any item or feed tag, using a syntax similar to
831 a much-simplified version of XPath. See Posts & Links settings for
832 details.
833
834 * UPDATE-FREEZING ON MANUALLY EDITED POSTS: FeedWordPress now allows you
835 to mark posts that have been manually edited, so that the changes you
836 make will not be overwritten by later updates from the feed. If you make
837 manual edits to a particular post, just check the "Manual editing"
838 checkbox in order to protect your changes from being overwritten. If you
839 want to block *all* posts from being updated after they are imported
840 for the first time, a new "Updated Posts" setting in Posts & Links
841 allows you to freeze all posts from a particular feed, or all syndicated
842 posts.
843
844 * SETTING: FEED-BY-FEED SETTINGS FOR WHERE PERMALINKS POINT TO: You've
845 always been able to tell FeedWordPress whether permalinks for posts
846 should point to the original source of the story or the local copy. Now
847 you can choose different policies for different feeds, instead of one
848 global policy for all feeds. (Of course, you can still use a global
849 default if you prefer.)
850
851 * SETTING: USER CONTROL OVER TIMING BASIS. You can now determine the
852 schedule on which feeds are considered ready to poll for updates --
853 by default feeds become ready for polling after about 1 hour. You can
854 now increase or decrease the time window under Syndication --> Feeds &
855 Updates. (However, please pay *CAREFUL ATTENTION* to the recommendations
856 and DO NOT set the scheduling lower than 60 minutes unless you are
857 ABSOLUTELY SURE that you have specific permission from webmaster who
858 provides that specific feed to poll more frequently than that. If you
859 set this too low (and about 60 minutes is the polite minimum if you
860 haven't been given a different figure), most webmasters will consider
861 the frequent hits on their server as rude, or even downright abusive.
862
863 * OTHER SETTINGS: New settings also include the ability to stop FWP from
864 resolving relative URLs within syndicated content, and the ability to
865 choose whether FeedWordPress should indicate the comment feed from the
866 original source, or the local comment feed, when providing the comment
867 feed URL for a syndicated post.
868
869 #### Parsing ####
870
871 * BETTER DATE HANDLING -- FEWER FLASHBACKS TO 1969 and 1970: FeedWordPress
872 has made some bugfixes and some improvements in the logic for parsing
873 dates. This should allow FeedWordPress to correctly parse more dates in
874 more feeds; and, in the last resort, when FeedWordPress fails to
875 correctly parse a date, to fall back to a more intelligent default. This
876 should hopefully avoid most or all error conditions that have resulted
877 in articles being erroneously dated to the dawn of the Unix epoch
878 (31 December 1969 or 1 January 1970).
879
880 * FULL-TEXT "EXCERPTS" NOW PROPERLY SHORTENED. Based on a straightforward
881 reading of the existing RSS specs, it's reasonable for the
882 rss:description element to be read as a plaintext summary or excerpt for
883 the item containing the description -- with the full text of the item,
884 if available, in another, better-suited element, such as the de facto
885 standard content:encoded extension element. The problem is that uses of
886 RSS rarely have much to do with anything like a straightforward reading
887 of the specs. As a result, many actual RSS producers in the wild put the
888 full text of the article in a description element. But since
889 FeedWordPress has treated this text as a summary, this produces
890 aggregated posts with lengthy "excerpts" containing the full text of the
891 article. This release of FeedWordPress fixes the problem by doing a
892 little digging before treating rss:description as a summary: if the
893 description element is used properly as a plain text summary, then
894 FeedWordPress will take the summary provided by the feed, rather than
895 recreating its own excerpt from the full text; but if an RSS item has no
896 full-text element other than description, FeedWordPress will treat the
897 description element as the full text of the article, and generate a
898 shortened excerpt automatically from that text.
899
900 #### API ####
901
902 * TEMPLATE API: new template tags `get_local_permalink()` and
903 `the_local_permalink()` allow you to access the permalink for a post on
904 your aggregator site, even when FeedWordPress is rewriting permalinks to
905 point to the original source site.
906
907 * NEW HOOKS FOR ADD-ONS AND FILTERS: I have added a number of new hooks
908 which allow add-on modules to filter more precisely, gather information
909 at more points, and to enhance the FeedWordPress admin interface. For
910 a list of new hooks and documentation, see the FeedWordPress
911 documentation wiki at
912 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/add-ons-and-filters>
913
914 * FILTER API: A number of new utility methods have been added to the
915 SyndicatedPost class to make it easier for filters and add-ons to
916
917 * FILTER API: Globals $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta DEPRECATED. These
918 global variables, originally introduced to allow filters access to
919 information about the source feed in `syndicated_item` filters (which
920 were passed in through global variables rather than as parameters
921 because of a bug in WP 1.5 which was then fixed in 1.5.1) have been
922 DEPRECATED. If you have any filters or add-ons which still depend on
923 these global variables, you should see about fixing them to access data
924 about the source feed using the SyndicatedPost::link element instead.
925 For documentation, see the FeedWordPress documentation wiki at
926 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedpost> and
927 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedlink>.
928
929 * DIAGNOSTICS: I've included a number of new diagnostic options and
930 messages, which should allow an experienced user to better investigate
931 any problems that may crop up.
932
933 #### Bug Fixes ####
934
935 * BUGFIX: & IN PERMALINKS NO LONGER CAUSING ATOM OR HTML VALIDATION
936 EFFORTS: Many users reported an issue in which syndicating a feed with
937 special XML characters in the URLs (& was the most common, since it is
938 used to separate HTTP GET parameters) would cause the aggregator's
939 feeds to produce invalid (malformed) XML. This update addresses the
940 issue in Atom feeds. Unfortunately, it has not been technically possible
941 to address the problem in RSS 2.0 feeds, due to limitations on
942 WordPress's internal templates for RSS feeds.
943
944 * BUGFIX: BROKEN URLS IN "POPULAR POSTS" AND SIMILAR PLUGINS SHOULD NO
945 LONGER BE BROKEN. A number of users noticed an issue where plugins and
946 templates that listed posts in locations outside of the post loop
947 (for example, "Popular Posts"-style plugins that listed posts in the
948 sidebar), often produced the wrong URL for post links. (Typically, all
949 the posts listed would get the same wrong URL.) This should now be
950 fixed. Thanks to Björn for sending in a quick fix!
951
952 * MINOR BUGFIXES: This release includes a number of fixes to minor bugs
953 and compatibility issues, including: silent failures of the "Syndicate"
954 button, "Illegal Offset Type" error messages from MagpieRSS, and others.
955
956 = 2009.0707 =
957
958 * BUGFIX: WORDPRESS 2.8 AJAX COMPATIBILITY ISSUES RESOLVED (blank or
959 truncated "Syndicated Sites" administration page): Due to changes in the
960 AJAX interface elements between WordPress 2.7 and WordPress 2.8, several
961 FeedWordPress users encountered an issue where the front "Syndication"
962 page in the FeedWordPress administrative interface would come up blank,
963 without the normal "Syndicated Sites" list and "Update" control, or
964 sometimes wth the boxes visible but one or both of them truncated, with
965 only the title bar. This issue should now be resolved: with the new
966 version of FeedWordPress, the compatibility issue that caused the
967 disappearance should be eliminated, and if boxes are shown with only
968 their handle visible, you should once again be able to drop down the
969 rest of the box by clicking once on its title bar.
970
971 * BUGFIX: TAG SETTING WIDGET FIXED. Due to changes in interface elements
972 between WordPress 2.7 and WordPress 2.8, people using FeedWordPress with
973 WordPress 2.8 found that the widget for setting tags to be applied to
974 all syndicated posts, or all syndicated posts from a particular feed,
975 no longer displayed "Add" and "Remove" buttons for individual tags. This
976 issue has now been fixed, and the tagging widget should once again work
977 more or less exactly like the tagging widget for individual posts in the
978 normal WordPress admin interface.
979
980 = 2009.0618 =
981
982 * BUGFIX: MYSTERY ERRORS WITH WITH WP_Http_Fsockopen HTTP TRANSPORT
983 ELIMINATED: Thanks to a combination of a subtle bug in FeedWordPress,
984 and changes to the HTTP transport code in WordPress, a number of users
985 encountered an error in which any time they attempted to add a new feed
986 through the FeedFinder interface, FeedWordPress would fail and display
987 an HTTP request failure diagnostic message. The subtle bug has been
988 fixed, and with it, most of these errors should now be eliminated.
989
990 Be sure to upgrade your MagpieRSS to the most recent MagpieRSS version
991 after you have insalled FeedWordPress 2009.0618, or this bug fix will
992 not take effect.
993
994 = 2009.0613 =
995
996 * INTERFACE/BUGFIX: WORDPRESS 2.8 CATEGORY BOX FIX. Thanks to a subtle
997 change in class names between the WordPress 2.7 and 2.8 stylesheets,
998 category boxes in the FeedWordPress settings interface tended to overflow
999 and have a lot of messy-looking overlapping text under WordPress 2.8.
1000 This has now been fixed.
1001
1002 * FeedFinder FAILURE DIAGNOSTICS: When FWP's FeedFinder fails to find any
1003 feeds at a given URL (for example, when you are trying to add a
1004 subscription through the administrative interface and you run into an
1005 error message), FeedWordPress now provides more diagnostic information
1006 for the reasons behind the failure. If that helps you, great; if not,
1007 it should help me respond more intelligently to your support request..
1008
1009 = 2009.0612 =
1010
1011 * WORDPRESS 2.8 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress 2009.0612 has been tested for
1012 compatibility with the recent version 2.8 release of WordPress.
1013
1014 * INTERFACE RESTRUCTURING: In order to avoid settings posts from becoming
1015 too crowded, and to modularize and better organize the user interface,
1016 new "Posts" and "Categories & Tags" subpages have been created under the
1017 "Syndication" menu. "Posts" controls settings for individal syndicated
1018 posts (such as publication status, comment and ping status, whether or
1019 not to use the original location of the post as the permalink, whether
1020 or not to expose posts to formatting filters, and so on). "Categories &
1021 Tags" controls settings for assigning new syndicated posts to categories
1022 and tags, such as categories or tags to apply to all syndicated posts,
1023 and how to handle categories that do not yet exist in the WordPress
1024 database. These subpages, like the Authors subpage, handle settings for
1025 the global default level and for individual syndicated feeds.
1026
1027 Corresponding to these new subpages, the old Syndication Settings and
1028 Feed Settings subpages have been cleaned up and simplified, and now only
1029 link to the appropriate subpages for options that can be set in the
1030 Posts, Authors, or Categories & Tags subpages.
1031
1032 * FEATURE: ADD CUSTOM SETTINGS TO EACH SYNDICATED POST: FeedWordPress has
1033 long had an interface for creating custom settings for each syndicated
1034 *feed* which could be retrieved in templates using the `get_feed_meta()`
1035 template function. But it had no feature for adding custom fields to
1036 each individual syndicated *post*. In response to requests from users, I
1037 have added the ability to apply custom fields to each individual
1038 syndicated post, using the new Syndication --> Posts subpage. You can
1039 set up custom fields to be applied to every syndicated post, or custom
1040 fields to be applied to syndicated posts from a particular feed.
1041
1042 * FEATURE: MAGPIERSS VERSION CHECK AND UPGRADE: FeedWordPress will attempt
1043 to determine whether or not you are using the upgraded version of
1044 MagpieRSS that comes packaged with FeedWordPress. If not, it will throw
1045 an error on admin pages, and, if you are a site administrator, it will
1046 give you the option to ignore the error message, or to attempt an
1047 automatic upgrade (using a native file copy). If the file copy fails,
1048 FeedWordPress will offer some guidance on how to perform the upgrade
1049 manually.
1050
1051 * BLANK POSTS PROBLEM NO LONGER OCCURS WITH OLD & BUSTED MAGPIERSS: Due
1052 to the fact that I relied on a content normalization that occurs in my
1053 upgraded version of MagpieRSS, but not in the old & busted version of
1054 MagpieRSS that ships with WordPress, until this version, if you tried to
1055 syndicate an Atom feed without having performed the (*strongly
1056 recommended*) MagpieRSS upgrade, all of the posts would come up with
1057 completely blank contents. That's not because MagpieRSS couldn't read
1058 the data, but rather because the new Magpie version puts that data in a
1059 location where the old version doesn't, and I was only looking in that
1060 newer location. Now it checks for both, meaning that posts will continue
1061 to display their contents even if you don't upgrade MagpieRSS. (But you
1062 **really should** upgrade it, anyway.)
1063
1064 * BUGFIX: RELATIVE URI RESOLUTION FOR POST CONTENT RESTORED. Some time
1065 back, I added support for resolving relative URIs against xml:base on
1066 feeds that support it to the MagpieRSS upgrade in FeedWordPress. Then I
1067 took out code that did the same thing from the main FeedWordPress code.
1068 Of course, the problem is that some people, even though it is clearly
1069 stupid or evil to do so, still include relative URIs for images or links
1070 in posts on feed formats that do *not* adequately support xml:base
1071 (notably, RSS 2.0 feeds). In response to a user request, I have added
1072 this functionality back in, so that MagpieRSS will resolve any relative
1073 URIs that it knows how to resolve using xml:base, and then FeedWordPress
1074 will attempt to resolve any relative URIs that are left over afterwards.
1075
1076 * BUGFIX: INTERFACE OPTION FOR SETTING SYNDICATED POST PUBLICATION STATUS
1077 ON A FEED-BY-FEED BASIS HAS BEEN RESTORED: Due to a version-checking
1078 bug, users of WordPress 2.7.x lost an option from the "Edit a syndicated
1079 feed" interface which allowed them to determine whether newly syndicated
1080 posts should be published immediately, held as "Pending Review," saved
1081 as drafts, or saved as private posts. (The option to change this
1082 setting globally remained in place, but users could no longer set it on
1083 a feed-by-feed basis.) The version-checking bug has been fixed, and the
1084 option has been restored.
1085
1086 * BUGFIX: "ARE YOU SURE?" FATAL ERROR ELIMINATED AND SECURITY IMPROVED:
1087 Under certain circumstances (for example, when users have configured
1088 their browser or proxy not to send HTTP Referer headers, for privacy or
1089 other reasons), many features in the FeedWordPress administrative
1090 interface (such as adding new feeds or changing settings) would hit a
1091 fatal error, displaying only a cryptic message reading "Are you sure?"
1092 and a blank page following it. This problem has been eliminated by
1093 taking advantage of WordPress's nonce functions, which allow the
1094 security check which ran into this error to work properly even without
1095 receiving an HTTP Referer header. (N.B.: WordPress's nonce functions
1096 were first introduced in WordPress 2.0.3. If you're using FeedWordPress
1097 with an older version of WordPress, there's no fix for this problem:
1098 you'll just need to turn Referer headers back on. Sorry.)
1099
1100 * BUGFIX: MANUALLY-ALTERED POST STATUS, COMMENT STATUS, AND PING STATUS NO
1101 LONGER REVERTED BY POST UPDATES: If you manually altered the post status,
1102 comment status, or ping status of a syndicated post from what it was set
1103 to when first syndicated -- for example, if you had a feed that was set
1104 to bring in new posts as "Pending Review," and you then marked some of
1105 the pending posts as "Published" and others as "Unpublished" -- then
1106 in previous versions of FeedWordPress, these manual changes to the
1107 status would be lost -- so that, for example, your Published or Unpublished
1108 articles would revert to Pending Review -- if the source feed made any
1109 upates to the item. This could make the Pending Review feature both
1110 unreliable and also extremely frustrating to work with. The good news is
1111 that this bug has since been fixed: if you manually update the status
1112 of a post, it will no longer be reverted if or when the post is updated.
1113
1114 * BUGFIX: OCCASIONAL FATAL ERROR ON UPDATE ELIMINATED: Under certain
1115 limited conditions (specifically, when both the title and the content of
1116 a post to be updated are empty), an attempt to update the post would
1117 result in a fatal error. This has been fixed.
1118
1119 * INTERFACE: "CONFIGURE SETTINGS" CONVENIENCE LINK ADDED TO CONFIRMATION
1120 MESSAGE WHEN A NEW FEED IS ADDED: When you add a new subscription to
1121 FeedWordPress, the message box that appears to confirm it now includes a
1122 handy link to the feed's settings subpage, so that you can quickly set
1123 up any special settings you may want to set up for the new feed, without
1124 having to hunt through the list of all your other subscriptions to pick
1125 out the new one.
1126
1127 * INTERFACE: SIMPLIFYING AND CLARIFYING AUTOMATIC UPDATES SETTINGS. I have
1128 removed an interval setting for the cronless automatic updates which has
1129 confused many FeedWordPress users. In past versions of FWP, when you
1130 turned on automatic updates, you would be presented with a time interval
1131 setting which controlled how often FeedWordPress would check for feeds
1132 ready to be polled for updates. (That is, it DID NOT control how often
1133 feeds *would be polled*; it controlled how often FeedWordPress would
1134 *check* for feeds that *had become ready to poll*. The schedule on which
1135 feeds became ready for polling was still controlled either by requests
1136 encoded in elements within the feed itself, or else according to an
1137 internal calculation within FeedWordPress, averaging out to about 1 hour,
1138 if the feed did not include any scheduling request elements.) Since many
1139 users very often (and understandably) confused the purpose of this
1140 setting, and since the setting is for a feature that's actually very
1141 unlikely to require any manual control by the user, I have removed the
1142 setting; FeedWordPress now simply uses the default value of checking for
1143 feeds to poll every 10 minutes.
1144
1145 * FEEDFINDER PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT: FeedWordPress's FeedFinder class
1146 now uses `array_unique()` to make sure that it doesn't waste time
1147 repeatedly iterating over and polling the same URI. Props to Camilo
1148 (<http://projects.radgeek.com/2008/12/14/feedwordpress-20081214/#comment-20090122160414>).
1149
1150 = 2008.1214 =
1151
1152 * WORDPRESS 2.7 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress has been tested for
1153 compatibility with the newly released WordPress 2.7. WordPress 2.7 has
1154 deprecated the Snoopy library for HTTP requests, which caused a fatal
1155 error for users who had not installed the MagpieRSS upgrade (or whose
1156 installation of the MagpieRSS upgrade was overwritten by a recent update
1157 of WordPress). FeedWordPress now handles things gracefully when Snoopy
1158 is not immediately available.
1159
1160 * INTERFACE SPIFFED UP: Interface elements have been updated so that
1161 FeedWordPress's management interface fits in more naturally with the
1162 WordPress 2.7 interface (including a new logo and a number of small
1163 interface tweaks).
1164
1165 * BUG WITH TAGS FOR SYNDICATED ARTICLES FIXED: Several users encountered a
1166 bug with the option to add tags to all syndicated posts under
1167 Syndication --> Settings -- if you told FeedWordPress to add more than
1168 one tag to all syndicated posts, instead of doing so correctly, it would
1169 add a *single* tag instead, whose name was composed of the names of all
1170 the tags you asked it to add. This bug was the result of nothing more
1171 dignified than a typographical error on my part. It has now been fixed.
1172
1173 * MORE INFORMATION AVAILABLE WHEN FEEDWORDPRESS CAN'T FIND A FEED: When
1174 you enter a URL for a new syndication source, FeedWordPress uses a
1175 simple feed-finding algorithm (originally based on Mark Pilgrim's
1176 Universal Feed Finder) to try to determine whether the URL is the URL
1177 for a feed, or, if the URL points to an ordinary website rather than to
1178 a feed, whether there is a feed for that website. All well and good, but
1179 if FeedWordPress failed to find a feed, for whatever reason, it would
1180 typically return nothing more than a nasty little note to the effect of
1181 "no feed found," without any explanation of what went wrong.
1182 FeedWordPress now keeps track of error conditions from the HTTP
1183 requests that it uses in the course of looking for the feed, and so may
1184 be able to give you a bit more information about the nature of the
1185 problem if something goes wrong.
1186
1187
1188 = 2008.1105 =
1189
1190 * INTERFACE RESTRUCTURING AND SYNDICATION --> AUTHORS PAGE: As a first
1191 step towards modularizing and better organizing the user interface, a
1192 new "Authors" subpage has been created under the Syndication menu, which
1193 controls settings for syndicated authors, both at the global default
1194 level and at level of individual syndicated feeds.
1195
1196 * BUG RELATED TO THE ATTRIBUTION OF POSTS TO THE WRONG AUTHOR FIXED: Some
1197 users encountered an issue in which posts by different authors on
1198 different blogs -- especially blogs generated by Blogger -- were
1199 mistakenly attributed to a single author. The problem was caused by the
1200 way in which FeedWordPress matches syndicated authors to user accounts
1201 in the WordPress database: normally, if two feeds each list an author
1202 with the same e-mail address, they are counted as being the same person.
1203 Normally this works well, but it creates an issue in cases where
1204 blogging software assigns a single anonymous e-mail address to users who
1205 do not want their real e-mail address published. This is, for example,
1206 what Blogger does (by giving all users a default e-mail address of
1207 <noreply@blogger.com> if they don't want their own e-mail address
1208 listed). FeedWordPress now allows the user to correct for this problem
1209 with a couple of new settings under **Syndication --> Authors**, which
1210 allow users to turn off e-mail based author matching for particular
1211 addresses, or, if desired, to turn it off entirely. By default, e-mail
1212 based author matching is still turned on, but disabled for a list of
1213 known generic e-mail addresses. Right now, the "list" consists entirely
1214 of <noreply@blogger.com>; if you know other addresses that should be
1215 added, please [contact me](http://radgeek.com/contact) to let me know.
1216
1217 Please note that if you have already encountered this issue on your
1218 blog, upgrading FeedWordPress will prevent it from re-occurring in the
1219 future, but you still need to do two other things to fix the existing
1220 problem on your blog.
1221
1222 First, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to
1223 change the existing author mapping rules to re-map a a syndicated
1224 author's name to the proper target account. Go to **Syndication -->
1225 Authors**, select the feed you want to change from the drop-down list,
1226 and then change the settings under the "Syndicated Authors" section.
1227 (You will probably need to select "will be assigned to a new user..." to
1228 create a new user account with the appropriate name.)
1229
1230 Second, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to
1231 re-assign already-syndicated posts that were mis-attributed to the
1232 correct author. You can do that from **Syndication --> Authors** by
1233 using the author re-assignment feature, described below.
1234
1235 * AUTHOR RE-ASSIGNMENT FOR A PARTICULAR FEED: The author settings page
1236 for each syndicated feed, under **Syndication --> Authors**, now
1237 includes an section titled "Fixing mis-matched authors," which provides
1238 an interface for re-assigning or deleting all posts attributed to a
1239 particular author on a particular feed.
1240
1241 * SUPPORT FOR `<atom:source>` ELEMENT IN SYNDICATED FEEDS: Some feeds
1242 (for example, those produced by FeedWordPress) aggregate content from
1243 several different sources, and include information about the original
1244 source of the post in an `<atom:source>` element. A new setting under
1245 **Syndication --> Options** allows you to control what FeedWordPress
1246 will report as the source of posts syndicated from aggregator feeds in
1247 your templates and feeds: you can have FeedWordPress report that the
1248 source of a post is the aggregator feed itself, or you can have it
1249 report that the source of a post is the original source that the
1250 aggregator originally syndicated the post from.
1251
1252 By default, FeedWordPress will report the aggregator, not the original
1253 source, as the source of a syndicated item.
1254
1255 * LOAD BALANCING AND TIME LIMITING FEATURES FOR UPDATES: Some users have
1256 encountered issues due to running up against PHP execution time limits
1257 during the process of updating large syndicated feeds, or a very large
1258 set of syndicated feeds. FeedWordPress now has a feature that allows you
1259 to limit the total amount of time spent updating a feed, through the
1260 "Time limit on updates" setting under **Syndication --> Options**. By
1261 turning on this setting and adjusting the time limit to a low enough
1262 figure to avoid your PHP installation's time-out setting. (PHP execution
1263 time limits are usually in the vicinity of 30 seconds, so an update
1264 time limit of 25 seconds or so should provide plenty of time for updates
1265 while allowing a cushion of time for other, non-update-related functions
1266 to do their work.)
1267
1268 If feed updates are interrupted by the time limit, FeedWordPress uses
1269 some simple load balancing features to make sure that updates to other
1270 feeds will not be blocked by the time-hogging feed, and will also make
1271 sure that when the interrupted update is resumed, FeedWordPress will
1272 skip ahead to resume processing items at the point at which it was
1273 interrupted last time, so that posts further down in the feed will
1274 eventually get processed, and not get blocked by the amount of time it
1275 takes to process the items higher up in the feed.
1276
1277 * `guid` INDEX CREATION BUTTON: FeedWordPress frequently issues queries on
1278 the `guid` column of the WordPress posts database (since it uses post
1279 guid URIs to keep track of which posts it has syndicated). In very large
1280 FeedWordPress installations, you can often significantly improve
1281 performance by creating a database index on the `guid` column, but
1282 normally you would need to poke around with MySQL or a tool like
1283 phpMyAdmin to do this. FeedWordPress can now save you the trouble: to
1284 create an index on the `guid` column, just go to
1285 **Syndication --> Options**, and mash the button at the bottom of the
1286 "Back End" section.
1287
1288 = 2008.1101 =
1289
1290 * INTERFACE BUG THAT PREVENTED ADDING NEW SITES FIXED: The UI reforms in
1291 FWP 2008.1030 unintentionally introduced a bug that prevents clean
1292 installations of FeedWordPress from providing an input box for adding
1293 new feeds to the list of syndicated feeds. This bug has been fixed.
1294
1295 = 2008.1030 =
1296
1297 * WORDPRESS 2.6 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with
1298 WordPress 2.6, and should work more or less seamlessly with the new post
1299 revision system. A bug which caused multiple new revisions to be created
1300 for posts on certain feeds, regardless of whether or not the item had
1301 been updated, has been fixed.
1302
1303 * INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: The user interface has been substantially
1304 restyled to fit in better with the visual style of WordPress 2.5 and
1305 2.6.
1306
1307 * YOUTUBE BUG FIXED: POSTS SYNDICATED THROUGH AN AUTOMATIC UPDATE ARE NO
1308 LONGER STRIPPED OF `<OBJECT>` TAGS AND CERTAIN OTHER HTML ELEMENTS: Due
1309 to the way that some versions of WordPress process posts that are
1310 inserted into the database when no user is logged in, many users
1311 experienced an issue where YouTube videos and other content using the
1312 HTML `<object>` tag would be stripped out of posts that were syndicated
1313 during an automatic update. (Posts that were syndicated through manual
1314 updates from within the WordPress Dashboard were not affected, because
1315 the issue does not arise when an update is executed under a logged-in
1316 administrator's credentials.) This bug has now been fixed; YouTube
1317 videos and other content using `<object>` tags should now appear
1318 properly in syndicated posts, regardless of the way in which the post
1319 was syndicated.
1320
1321 * AJAX BUGS FIXED: Bugs which blocked the normal operation of WordPress
1322 2.5's AJAX interface elements when FeedWordPress was activated have been
1323 fixed.
1324
1325 * TAG SUPPORT: A couple of features have been introduced to take advantage
1326 of the tagging features in WordPress 2.3.x, 2.5.x, and 2.6.x. Now, when
1327 unfamiliar categories are encountered for posts on a feed, you can
1328 choose for FeedWordPress (1) to drop the category; (2) to drop the
1329 category and to filter out any post that does not match at least one
1330 familiar category; (3) to create a new category with that name, or,
1331 now, you can also have FeedWordPress (4) create a new *tag* with that
1332 name. This option can be set site-wide under Syndication --> Options,
1333 or it can be set on a feed-by-feed basis in a feed's Edit screen.
1334
1335 In addition, you can now set particular tags to apply to all incoming
1336 syndicated posts, under Syndication --> Options, or you can set tags
1337 to apply to all incoming syndicated posts from a particular feed in that
1338 feed's Edit screen.
1339
1340 * FORMATTING FILTERS: There is a new option available under Syndication ->
1341 Options which allows users to choose whether or not to expose syndicated
1342 posts to being altered by formatting filters. By default, FeedWordPress
1343 has always protected syndicated posts (which are already in display-ready
1344 HTML when they are syndicated) from being reformatted by formatting
1345 filters. However, this approach means that certain plugins which depend
1346 on formatting filters (for example, to add "Share This" bars or relevant
1347 links to the end of a post) are blocked from working on any syndicated
1348 posts. If you want to use one of these plugins together with
1349 FeedWordPress, you can now do so by changing the "Formatting Filters"
1350 setting from "Protect" to "Expose."
1351
1352 * `<atom:source>` ELEMENTS NOW INCLUDED IN ATOM FEED: Atom 1.0 provides
1353 a standard method for aggregators to indicate information about the original source of
1354 a syndicated post, using the `<atom:source>` element. FeedWordPress now
1355 introduces standard `<atom:source>` elements including the title, homepage, and
1356 feed URI of the source from which a syndicated post was syndicated. Cf.
1357 <http://www.atomenabled.org/developers/syndication/atom-format-spec.php#element.source>
1358
1359 * MODULARIZATION OF CODE: The code for different elements of FeedWordPress
1360 has been broken out into several modules for easier inspection,
1361 documentation, and maintenance of the code.
1362
1363 * VERSIONING SCHEME CHANGED: FeedWordPress's feature set has proven stable
1364 enough that it can now be removed from beta status; a good thing, since
1365 I was very quickly running out of version numbers to use. New releases
1366 of FeedWordPress will have version numbers based on the date of their
1367 release.
1368
1369 = 0.993 =
1370
1371 * WORDPRESS 2.5.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible
1372 with WordPress 2.5.1.
1373
1374 * WORDPRESS 2.5 INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: FeedWordPress's Dashboard
1375 interface has undergone several cosmetic changes that should help it
1376 integrate better with the WordPress Dashboard interface in WordPress
1377 version 2.5.x.
1378
1379 * SYNDICATED POSTS CAN BE MARKED AS "PENDING REVIEW": WordPress 2.3 users
1380 can now take advantage of WordPress's new "Pending Review" features for
1381 incoming syndicated posts. Posts marked as "Pending Review" are not
1382 published immediately, but are marked as ready to be reviewed by an
1383 Administrator or Editor, who can then choose to publish the post or
1384 hold it back. If you want to review syndicated posts from a particular
1385 feed, or from all feeds, before they are posted, then use
1386 Syndication --> Syndicated Sites --> Edit or Syndication --> Options to
1387 change the settings for handling new posts.
1388
1389 * AWARE OF NEW URI FOR del.icio.us FEEDS: Previous releases of
1390 FeedWordPress already automatically split del.icio.us tags up
1391 appropriately appropriately when generating categories. (del.icio.us
1392 feeds smoosh all the tags into a single `<dc:subject>` element,
1393 separated by spaces; FeedWordPress un-smooshes them into multiple
1394 categories by separating them at whitespace.) Unfortunately, del.icio.us
1395 recently broke the existing behavior by changing host names for their
1396 feeds from del.icio.us to feeds.delicious.com. Version 0.993 accounts
1397 for the new host name and un-breaks the tag splitting.
1398
1399 = 0.992 =
1400
1401 * AUTHOR RE-MAPPING: FeedWordPress now offers considerable control over
1402 how author names on a feed are translated into usernames within the
1403 WordPress database. When a post by an unrecognized author comes in,
1404 Administrators can now specify any username as the default username to
1405 assign the post to by setting the option in Syndication --> Options
1406 (formerly FeedWordPress only allowed you to assign such posts to user
1407 #1, the site administrator). Administrators can also create re-mapping
1408 rules for particular feeds (under Syndication --> Syndicated Sites -->
1409 Edit), so that (for example) any posts attributed to "Administrator"
1410 on the feed <http://praxeology.net/blog/feed/> will be assigned to
1411 a user named "Roderick T. Long," rather than a user named
1412 "Administrator." These settings also allow administrators to filter out
1413 posts by particular users, and to control what will happen when
1414 FeedWordPress encounters a post by an unrecognized user on that
1415 particular feed.
1416
1417 * BUG RELATED TO URIS CONTAINING AMPERSAND CHARACTERS FIXED: A bug in
1418 WordPress 2.x's handling of URIs in Blogroll links created problems for
1419 updating any feeds whose URIs included an ampersand character, such as
1420 Google News RSS feeds and other feeds that have multiple parameters
1421 passed through HTTP GET. If you experienced this bug, the most likely
1422 effect was that FeedWordPress simply would not import new posts from a
1423 feed when instructred to do so, returning a "0 new posts" response. In
1424 other cases, it might lead to unpredictable results from feed updates,
1425 such as importing posts which were not contained in the feed being
1426 syndicated, but which did appear elsewhere on the same website. This bug
1427 has, hopefully, been resolved, by correcting for the bug in WordPress.
1428
1429 = 0.991 =
1430
1431 * WORDPRESS MU COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with
1432 recent releases of WordPress MU. Once FeedWordPress is made available
1433 as a plugin, each individual blog can choose to activate FeedWordPress
1434 and syndicate content from its own set of contributors.
1435
1436 * DISPLAY OF MAGPIE WARNINGS: A number of MagpieRSS warnings or error
1437 messages that were displayed when performing an automatic update are
1438 no longer displayed, unless debugging parameters have been explicitly
1439 enabled.
1440
1441 * BUG RELATED TO INTERNATIONAL CHARACTERS IN AUTHOR NAMES FIXED: Due to a
1442 subtle incompatability between the way that FeedWordPress generated new
1443 user information, and the way that WordPress 2.0 and later added new
1444 authors to the database, FeedWordPress might end up creating duplicate
1445 authors, or throwing a critical error message, when it encountered
1446 authors whose names included international characters. This
1447 incompatability has now been fixed; hopefully, authors with
1448 international characters in their names should now be handled properly.
1449
1450 * `<media:content>` BUG IN MAGPIERSS FIXED: A bug in MagpieRSS's handling
1451 of namespaced elements has been fixed. Among other things, this bug
1452 caused items containing a Yahoo MediaRSS `<media:content>` element (such
1453 as many of the feeds produced by wordpress.com) to be represented
1454 incorrectly, with only a capital "A" where the content of the post
1455 should have been. Feeds containing `<media:content>` elements should now
1456 be syndicated correctly.
1457
1458 * update_feedwordpress PARAMETER: You can now use an HTTP GET parameter
1459 (`update_feedwordpress=1`) to request that FeedWordPress poll its feeds
1460 for updates. When used together with a crontab or other means of
1461 scheduling tasks, this means that you can keep your blog automatically
1462 updated on a regular schedule, even if you do not choose to use the
1463 cron-less automatic updates option.
1464
1465 * Some minor interface-related bugs were also fixed.
1466
1467
1468 = 0.99 =
1469
1470 Version 0.99 adds several significant new features, fixes some bugs, and
1471 provides compatability with WordPress 2.2.x and 2.3.x.
1472
1473 * WORDPRESS 2.2 AND 2.3 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be
1474 compatible with WordPress version 2.2 and the upcoming WordPress
1475 version 2.3. In particular, it has been tested extensively against
1476 WordPress 2.2.3 and WordPress 2.3 Release Candidate 1.
1477
1478 * AUTOMATIC UPDATES WITHOUT CRON: FeedWordPress now allows you to
1479 automatically schedule checks for new posts without using external task
1480 scheduling tools such as cron. In order to enable automatic updates, go
1481 to **Syndication --> Options** and set "Check for new posts" to
1482 "automatically." For details, see "Automatic Feed Updates" in
1483 README.text.
1484
1485 An important side-effect of the changes to the update system is that if
1486 you were previously using the cron job and the `update-feeds.php` script
1487 to schedule updates, you need to change your cron set-up. The old
1488 `update-feeds.php` script no longer exists. Instead, if you wish to use
1489 a cron job to guarantee updates on a particular schedule, you should
1490 have the cron job fetch the front page of your blog (for example, by
1491 using `curl http://www.zyx.com/blog/ > /dev/null`) instead of activating
1492 the `update-feeds.php` script. If automatic updates have been enabled,
1493 fetching the front page will automatically trigger the update process.
1494
1495 * INTERFACE REORGANIZATION: All FeedWordPress functions are now located
1496 under a top-level "Syndication" menu in the WordPress Dashboard. To
1497 manage the list of syndicated sites, manually check for new posts on
1498 one or more feeds, or syndicate a new site, you should use the main page
1499 under **Syndication**. To change global settings for FeedWordPress,
1500 you should use **Syndication --> Options**.
1501
1502 * FILE STRUCTURE REORGANIZATION: Due to a combination of changing styles
1503 for FeedWordPress plugins and lingering bugs in the FeedWordPress admin
1504 menu code, the code for FeedWordPress is now contained in two different
1505 PHP files, which should be installed together in a subdirectory of your
1506 plugins directory named `feedwordpress`. (See README.text for
1507 installation and upgrade instructions relating to the change.)
1508
1509 * MULTIPLE CATEGORIES SETTING: Some feeds use non-standard methods to
1510 indicate multiple categories within a single category element. (The most
1511 popular site to do this is del.icio.us, which separates tags with a
1512 space.) FeedWordPress now allows you to set an optional setting, for any
1513 feed which does this, indicating the character or characters used to
1514 divide multiple categories, using a Perl-compatible regular expression.
1515 (In the case of del.icio.us feeds, FeedWordPress will automatically use
1516 \s for the pattern without your having to do any further configuration.)
1517 To turn this setting on, simply use the "Edit" link for the feed that
1518 you want to turn it on for.
1519
1520 * REGULAR EXPRESSION BUG FIXED: Eliminated a minor bug in the regular
1521 expressions for e-mail addresses (used in parsing RSS `author`
1522 elements), which could produce unsightly error messages for some users
1523 parsing RSS 2.0 feeds.
1524
1525 * DATE / UPDATE BUG FIXED: A bug in date handling was eliminated that may
1526 have caused problems if any of (1) WordPress, or (2) PHP, or (3) your
1527 web server, or (4) your MySQL server, has been set to use a different
1528 time zone from the one that any of the others is set to use. If
1529 FeedWordPress has not been properly updating updated posts, or has been
1530 updating posts when there shouldn't be any changes for the update, this
1531 release may solve that problem.
1532
1533 * GOOGLE READER BUGS FIXED: A couple of bugs that made it difficult for
1534 FeedWordPress to interact with Google Reader public feeds have been
1535 fixed. Firstly, if you encountered an error message reading "There was a
1536 problem adding the newsfeed. [SQL: ]" when you tried to add the feed,
1537 the cause of this error has been fixed. Secondly, if you succeeded in
1538 getting FeedWordPress to check a Google Reader feed, only to find that
1539 the title of posts had junk squashed on to the end of them, that bug
1540 has been fixed too. To fix this bug, you must install the newest version
1541 of the optional MagpieRSS upgrade.
1542
1543 * FILTER PARAMETERS: Due to an old, old bug in WordPress 1.5.0 (which was
1544 what was available back when I first wrote the filter interface),
1545 FeedWordPress has traditionally only passed one parameter to
1546 syndicated_item and syndicated_post filters functions -- an array
1547 containing either the Magpie representation of a syndicated item from
1548 the feed, or the database representation of a post about to be inserted
1549 into the WordPress database. If you needed information about the feed
1550 that the item came from, this was accessible only through a pair of
1551 global variables, $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta.
1552
1553 Since it's been a pretty long time since WordPress 1.5.0 was in
1554 widespread usage, I have gone ahead and added an optional second
1555 parameter to the invocation of the syndicated_item and syndicated_post
1556 filters. If you have written a filter for FeedWordPress that uses either
1557 of these hooks, you can now register that filter to accept 2 parameters.
1558 If you do so, the second parameter will be a SyndicatedPost object,
1559 which, among other things, allows you to access information about the
1560 feed from which an item is syndicated using the $post->feed and the
1561 $post->feedmeta elements (where $post is the name of the second
1562 parameter).
1563
1564 NOTE THAT THE OLD GLOBAL VARIABLES ARE STILL AVAILABLE, for the time
1565 being at least, so existing filters will not break with the upgrade.
1566 They should be considered deprecated, however, and may be eliminated in
1567 the future.
1568
1569 * FILTER CHANGE / BUGFIX: the array that is passed as the first argument
1570 syndicated_post filters no longer is no longer backslash-escaped for
1571 MySQL when filters are called. This was originally a bug, or an
1572 oversight; the contents of the array should only be escaped for the
1573 database *after* they have gone through all filters. IF YOU HAVE WRITTEN
1574 ANY syndicated_post FILTERS THAT PRESUME THE OLD BEHAVIOR OF PASSING IN
1575 STRINGS THAT ARE ALREADY BACKSLASH-ESCAPED, UPDATE YOUR FILTERS
1576 ACCORDINGLY.
1577
1578 * OTHER MINOR BUGFIXES AND INTERNAL CHANGES: The internal architecture of
1579 FeedWordPress has been significantly changed to make the code more
1580 modular and clean; hopefully this should help reduce the number of
1581 compatibility updates that are needed, and make them easier and quicker
1582 when they are needed.
1583
1584 = 0.981 =
1585
1586 Version 0.981 is a narrowly targeted bugfix and compatibility release, whose
1587 main purpose is to resolve a major outstanding problem: the incompatibility
1588 between version 0.98 of WordPress and the recently released WordPress 2.1.
1589
1590 * WORDPRESS 2.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress is now compatible with
1591 WordPress 2.1, as well as retaining its existing support for WordPress
1592 2.0 and 1.5. Incompatibilities that resulted in database warnings, fatal
1593 errors, and which prevented FeedWordPress from syndicating new posts,
1594 have been eliminated.
1595
1596 * RSS-FUNCTIONS.PHP RENAMED TO RSS.PHP: if you use the upgraded MagpieRSS
1597 replacement that's included with FeedWordPress, be sure to note that
1598 there are now *two* files to upload from the `OPTIONAL/wp-includes`
1599 subdirectory in order to carry out the upgrade: rss-functions.php and
1600 rss.php. **It is necessary to upload both files**, due to a change in
1601 the file naming scheme in WordPress 2.1, and it is necessary to do so
1602 whether you are using WordPress 2.1 or not. If you only upload the
1603 `rss-functions.php` file as in previous installations you will not have
1604 a working copy of MagpieRSS; the rss.php file contains the actual code.
1605
1606 * DATE BUG AFFECTING SOME PHP INSTALLATIONS RESOLVED: due to a subtle bug
1607 in parse_w3cdtf(), some installations of PHP encountered problems with
1608 FeedWordPress's attempt to date posts, which would cause some new posts
1609 on Atom feeds to be dated as if they had apppeared in 1969 or 1970
1610 (thus, effectively, never appearing on front page at all). This bug in
1611 the date handling should now be fixed.
1612
1613 * PHP <?=...?> SHORT FORM ELIMINATED: some installations of PHP do not
1614 allow the <?=...?> short form for printing PHP values, which was used
1615 extensively in the FeedWordPress interface code. Since this could cause
1616 fatal errors for users with the wrong installation of PHP, the short
1617 form has been replaced with full PHP echo statements, and is no longer
1618 used in FeedWordPress.
1619
1620 * BETTER USER INTERFACE INTEGRATION WITH WORDPRESS 2.x: Some minor changes
1621 have been made to help the FeedWordPress interface pages blend in better
1622 with the user interface when running under WordPress 2.x.
1623
1624 * GLOBAL CATEGORIES BUG RESOLVED: a bug that prevented some users from
1625 setting one or more categories to apply to syndicated posts from all
1626 feeds (using the checkbox interface under Options --> Syndication) has
1627 been resolved.
1628
1629 = 0.98 =
1630
1631 * WORDPRESS 2.0 COMPATIBILITY: This is a narrowly-targeted release to
1632 solve a major outstanding problem. FeedWordPress is now compatible with
1633 both WordPress 1.5 and WordPress 2.0. Incompatibilities that caused
1634 fatal SQL errors, and a more subtle bug with off-kilter counts of posts
1635 under a given category, have been resolved. FeedWordPress tests for
1636 database schema using the global $wp_db_version variable (if null, then
1637 we presume that we're dealing with WordPress 1.5).
1638
1639 NOTE: I have **not** fully tested FeedWordPress with WordPress 2.0.
1640 Further testing may reveal more bugs. However, you should now be able
1641 to get at least basic FeedWordPress functionality up and running.
1642
1643 * AUTHOR MATCHING: FeedWordPress tests several fields to see if it can
1644 identify the author of the post as a user already in the WordPress user
1645 database. In previous versions, it tested the user login, the nickname,
1646 and tested for "aliases" listed in the Profile (see documentation). FWP
1647 now also matches authors on the basis of e-mail address (*if* an e-mail
1648 address is present). This is particularly helpful for formats such as
1649 RSS 2.0, in which authors are primarily identified by e-mail addresses.
1650
1651 = 0.97 =
1652
1653 * INSTALLATION PROCEDURE: Some of the changes between 0.96 and 0.97
1654 require upgrades to the meta-data stored by FeedWordPress to work
1655 properly. Thus, if you are upgrading from 0.96 or earlier to 0.97, most
1656 FeedWordPress operations (including updates and template functions)
1657 WILL BE DISABLED until you run the upgrade procedure. Fortunately,
1658 running the upgrade procedure is easy: just go to either Options -->
1659 Syndication or Links --> Syndicated in the WordPress Dashboard and press
1660 the button.
1661
1662 * FEED FORMAT SUPPORT: Support has been added for the Atom 1.0 IETF
1663 standard. Several other elements are also newly supported
1664 (dcterms:created, dcterms:issued, dcterms:modified, dc:identifier,
1665 proper support for the RSS 2.0 guid element, the RSS 2.0 author element,
1666 the use of Atom author or Dublin Core dc:creator constructs at the feed
1667 level to identify the author of individual items, etc.)
1668
1669 N.B.: full support of several Atom 1.0 features, such as categories
1670 and enclosures, requires you to install the optional rss-functions.php
1671 upgrade in your wp-includes directory.
1672
1673 * BUG FIX: Running `update-feeds.php` from command line or crontab
1674 returned "I don't syndicate..." errors. It turns out that WordPress
1675 sometimes tramples on the internal PHP superglobals that I depended on
1676 to determine whether or not the script was being invoked from the
1677 command line. This has been fixed (the variables are now checked
1678 *before* WordPress can trample them). Note that `update-feeds.php` has
1679 been thoroughly overhauled anyway; see below for details.
1680
1681 * BUG FIX: Duplicate categories or author names. Fixed two bugs that could
1682 create duplicate author and/or category names when the name contained
1683 either (a) certain international characters (causing a mismatch between
1684 MySQL and PHP's handling of lowercasing text), or (b) characters that
1685 have a special meaning in regular expressions (causing MySQL errors when
1686 looking for the author or category due to regexp syntax errors). These
1687 should now be fixed thanks to careful escaping of names that go into
1688 regular expressions and careful matching of lowercasing functions
1689 (comparing results from PHP only to other results from PHP, and results
1690 from MySQL only to other results from MySQL).
1691
1692 * BUG FIX: Items dated December 31, 1969 should appear less often. The
1693 function for parsing W3C date-time format dates that ships with
1694 MagpieRSS can only correctly parse fully-specified dates with a
1695 fully-specified time, but valid W3C date-time format dates may omit the
1696 time, the day of the month, or even the month. Some feeds in the wild
1697 date their items with coarse-grained dates, so the optional
1698 `rss-functions.php` upgrade now includes a more flexible parse_w3cdtf()
1699 function that will work with both coarse-grained and fully-specified
1700 dates. (If parts of the date or the time are omitted, they are filled in
1701 with values based on the current time, so '2005-09-10' will be dated to
1702 the current time on that day; '2004' will be dated to this day and time
1703 one year ago.
1704
1705 N.B.: This fix is only available in the optional `rss-functions.php`
1706 upgrade.
1707
1708 * BUG FIX: Evil use of HTTP GET has been undone. The WordPress interface
1709 is riddled with inappropriate (non-idempotent) uses of HTTP GET queries
1710 (ordinary links that make the server do something with significant
1711 side-effects, such as deleting a post or a link from the database).
1712 FeedWordPress did some of this too, especially in places where it aped
1713 the WordPress interface (e.g. the "Delete" links in Links -->
1714 Syndicated). That's bad business, though. I've changed the interface so
1715 that all the examples of improper side-effects that I can find now
1716 require an HTTP POST to take effect. I think I got pretty much
1717 everything; if there's anything that I missed, let me know.
1718
1719 Further reading: [Sam Ruby 2005-05-06: This Stuff Matters](http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2005/05/06/This-Stuff-Matters)
1720
1721 * BUG FIX: Categories applied by `cats` setting should no longer prevent
1722 category-based filtering from working. In FeedWordPress, you can (1)
1723 apply certain categories to all syndicated posts, or all posts from
1724 a particular feed; and (2) filter out all posts that don't match one
1725 of the categories that are already in the WordPress database (allowing
1726 for simple category-based filtering; just load up WordPress with the
1727 categories you want to accept, and then tell FeedWordPress not to create
1728 new ones). However, the way that (1) and (2) were implemented meant that
1729 you couldn't effectively use them together; once you applied a known
1730 category to all syndicated posts from a particular feed, it meant that
1731 they'd have at least one familiar category (the category or categories
1732 you were applying), and that would get all posts past the filter no
1733 matter what categories they were originally from.
1734
1735 Well, no longer. You can still apply categories to all syndicated posts
1736 (using either Syndication --> Options, or the feed-level settings under
1737 Links --> Syndicated). But these categories are not applied to the post
1738 until *after* it has already passed by the "familiar categories" filter.
1739 So now, if you want, you can do category filtering and *then* apply as
1740 many categories as you please to all and only posts that pass the filter.
1741
1742 * BUG FIX: Other minor typos and HTML gaffes were fixed along the way.
1743
1744 * PERFORMANCE: get_feed_meta() no longer hits the database for information
1745 on every call; it now caches link data in memory, so FeedWordPress only
1746 goes to the database once for each syndicated link. This may
1747 substantially improve performance if your database server resources
1748 are tight and your templates make a lot of use of custom settings from
1749 get_feed_meta().
1750
1751 * API CHANGE: Link ID numbers, rather than RSS URIs, are now used to
1752 identify the feed from which a post is syndicated when you use template
1753 functions such as get_feed_meta(). The practical upshot of this is you
1754 can switch feeds, or change the feed address for a particular syndicated
1755 site, without breaking your templates for all the posts that were
1756 syndicated from the earlier URI.
1757
1758 * API CHANGE: if you have plugins or templates that make use of the
1759 get_feed_meta() function or the $fwp_feedmeta global, note that the
1760 data formerly located under the `uri` and `name` fields is now located
1761 under the `link/uri` field and the `link/name` field, respectively. Note
1762 also that you can access the link ID number for any given feed under the
1763 global $fwp_feedmeta['link/id'] (in plugins) or
1764 get_feed_meta('link/id') (in a template in post contexts).
1765
1766 * FEATURE: the settings for individual feeds can now be edited using a
1767 humane interface (where formerly you had to tweak key-value pairs in the
1768 Link Notes section). To edit settings for a feed, pick the feed that you
1769 want under Links --> Syndicated and click the Edit link.
1770
1771 * FEATURE: The "Unsubscribe" button (formerly "Delete") in Links -->
1772 Syndicated now offers three options for unsubscribing from a feed: (1)
1773 turning off the subscription without deleting the feed data or affecting
1774 posts that were syndicated from the feed (this works by setting the Link
1775 for the feed as "invisible"); (2) deleting the feed data and all of the
1776 posts that were syndicated from the feed; or (3) deleting the feed data
1777 and *keeping* the posts that were syndicated from the feed
1778 setting the Link to "Invisible" (meaning that it will not be displayed
1779 in lists of the site links on the front page, and it won't be checked
1780 for updates; (2) deleting the Link and all of the posts that were
1781 syndicated from its feed; or (3) deleting the feed data but keeping the
1782 posts that were syndicated (which will henceforward be treated as if
1783 they were local rather than syndicated posts). (Note that (1) is usually
1784 the best option for aggregator sites, unless you want to clean up the
1785 results of an error or a test.)
1786
1787 * FEATURE / BUG FIX: If you have been receiving mysterious "I don't
1788 syndicate...", or "(local) HTTP status code was not 200", or "(local)
1789 transport error - could not open socket", or "parse error - not well
1790 formed" errors, then this update may solve your problems, and if it does
1791 *not* solve them, it will at least make the reasons for the problems
1792 easier to understand. That's because I've overhauled the way that
1793 FeedWordPress goes about updating feeds.
1794
1795 If you use the command-line PHP scripting method to run scheduled
1796 updates, then not much should change for you, except for fewer
1797 mysterious errors. If you have done updates by sending periodic HTTP
1798 requests to <http://your-blog.com/path/wp-content/update-feeds.php>,
1799 then the details have changed somewhat; mostly in such a way as to make
1800 things easier on you. See the README file or online documentation on
1801 Staying Current for the details.
1802
1803 * FEATURE: FeedWordPress now features a more sophisticated system for
1804 timed updates. Instead of polling *every* subscribed feed for updates
1805 *each* time `update-feeds.php` is run, FeedWordPress now keeps track of
1806 the last time it polled each feed, and only polls them again after a
1807 certain period of time has passed. The amount of time is normally set
1808 randomly for each feed, in a period between 30 minutes and 2 hours (so
1809 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
1810 directly by the feed, which brings us to ...
1811
1812 * FEATURE: FeedWordPress now respects the settings in the `ttl` and
1813 Syndication Module RSS elements. Feeds with these elements set will not
1814 be polled any more frequently than they indicate with these feeds unless
1815 the user manually forces FeedWordPress to poll the feed (see Links -->
1816 Syndicated --> Edit settings).
1817
1818 = 0.96 =
1819
1820 * FEATURE: support has been added for enclosures in RSS 2.0 and Atom
1821 0.6+ newsfeeds. WordPress already supports adding enclosures to an
1822 item; FeedWordPress merely gets the information on the enclosure
1823 from the feed it is syndicating and plugs that information directly
1824 into the WordPress database so that (among other things) that post
1825 will have its enclosure listed in your blog's RSS 2 newsfeed.
1826
1827 Note that enclosure support requires using the optional MagpieRSS
1828 upgrade (i.e., replacing your `wp-includes/rss-functions.php` with
1829 `OPTIONAL/wp-includes/rss-functions.php` from the FWP archive)
1830
1831 * FEATURE: for completeness's sake, there is now a feed setting,
1832 `hardcode url`, that allows you to set the URI for the front page
1833 of a contributor's website manually (that is, prevent it from being
1834 automatically updated from the feed channel link on each update). To
1835 set the URI manually, put a line like this in the Link Notes section
1836 of a feed:
1837
1838 hardcode url: yes
1839
1840 You can also instruct FeedWordPress to use hardcoded URIs by default
1841 on all feeds using Options --> Syndication
1842
1843 * FEATURE: by default, when FeedWordPress finds new syndicated posts,
1844 it (1) publishes them immediately, (2) turns comments off, and (3)
1845 turns trackback / pingback pings off. You can now alter all three
1846 default behaviors (e.g., to allow pings on syndicated posts, or to
1847 send newly-syndicated posts to the draft pile for moderation) using
1848 Options --> Syndication
1849
1850
1851 = From 0.91 to 0.95 =
1852
1853 * BUG FIX: Fixed an obscure bug in the handling of categories:
1854 categories with trailing whitespace could cause categories with
1855 duplicate names to be created. This no longer happens. While I was
1856 at it I tightened up the operation of
1857 FeedWordPress::lookup_categories() a bit in general.
1858
1859 * FEATURE DEPRECATED: the feed setting `hardcode categories` is now
1860 deprecated in favor of `unknown categories` (see below), which
1861 allows you to strip off any syndication categories not already in
1862 your database using `unknown categories: default` or `unknown
1863 categories: filter`. If you have `hardcode categories: yes` set on a
1864 feed, this will be treated as `unknown categories: default` (i.e.,
1865 no new categories will be added, but if a post doesn't match any of
1866 the categories it will be added in the default category--usually
1867 "Uncategorized" or "General").
1868
1869 * FEATURE: You can now set global defaults as to whether or not
1870 FeedWordPress will update the Link Name and Link Description
1871 settings for feeds automatically from the feed title and feed
1872 tagline. (By default, it does, as it has in past versions.) Whether
1873 this behavior is turned on or off, you can still override the
1874 default behavior using feed settings of `hardcode name: yes`,
1875 `hardcode name: no`, `hardcode description: yes`, or `hardcode
1876 description: no`.
1877
1878 * FEATURE: Users can now provide one or several "aliases" for an
1879 author, just as they can for a category. For example, to make
1880 FeedWordPress treat posts by "Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger" and "Pope
1881 Benedict XVI" as by the same author, edit the user profile for Pope
1882 Benedict XVI and add a line like this to the "User profile" field:
1883
1884 a.k.a.: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
1885
1886 You can add several aliases, each on a line by itself. You can also
1887 add any other text you like to the Profile without interfering with
1888 the aliases.
1889
1890 * FEATURE: Users can now choose how to handle syndicated posts that
1891 are in unfamiliar categories or by unfamiliar authors (i.e.,
1892 categories or authors whose names are not yet in the WordPress
1893 database). By default, FeedWordPress will (as before) create a new
1894 category (or new author) and use it for the current post and any
1895 future posts. This behavior can be changed, either for all feeds or
1896 for one or another particular feed.
1897
1898 There are now three different options for an unfamiliar author: (1)
1899 FeedWordPress can create a new author account and attribute the
1900 syndicated post to the new account; (2) FeedWordPress can attribute
1901 the post to an author if the author's name is familiar, and to a
1902 default author (currently, this means the Site Administrator
1903 account) if it is not; (3) FeedWordPress can drop posts by
1904 unfamiliar authors and syndicate only posts by authors who are
1905 already in the database.
1906
1907 There are, similarly, two different options for an unfamiliar
1908 category: (1) FeedWordPress can create new categories and place the
1909 syndicated post in them; (2) FeedWordPress can drop the unfamiliar
1910 categories and place syndicated posts only in categories that it is
1911 already familiar with. In addition, FeedWordPress 0.95 lets you
1912 choose whether posts that are in *no* familiar categories should be
1913 syndicated (and placed in the default category for the blog) or
1914 simply dropped.
1915
1916 You can set the default behavior for both authors and categories
1917 using the settings in Options --> Syndication. You can also set
1918 different behavior for specific feeds by adding the `unfamiliar
1919 author` and / or `unfamiliar categories` settings to the Link Notes
1920 section of a feed:
1921
1922 unfamiliar author: (create|default|filter)
1923 unfamiliar categories: (create|default|filter)
1924
1925 A setting of `unfamiliar author: create` will make FeedWordPress
1926 create new authors to match unfamiliar author names *for this feed
1927 alone*. A setting of `unfamiliar author: default` will make it
1928 assign posts from unfamiliar authors to the default user account. A
1929 setting of `unfamiliar author: filter` will cause all posts (from
1930 this feed alone) to be dropped unless they are by an author already
1931 listed in the database. Similiarly, `unfamiliar categories: create`
1932 will make FeedWordPress create new categories to match unfamiliar
1933 category names *for this feed alone*; `unfamiliar categories:
1934 default` will cause it to drop any unfamiliar category names; and
1935 `unfamiliar categories: filter` will cause it to *both* drop any
1936 unfamiliar category names *and* to only syndicate posts that are
1937 placed in one or more familiar categories.
1938
1939 These two new features allow users to do some coarse-grained
1940 filtering without having to write a PHP filter. Specifically, they
1941 offer an easy way for you to filter feeds by category or by author.
1942 Suppose, for example, that you only wanted to syndicate posts that
1943 your contributors place in the "Llamas" category. You could do so by
1944 setting up your installation of WordPress so that the only category
1945 in the database is "Llamas," and then use Options --> Syndication to
1946 set "Unfamiliar categories" to "don't create new categories and
1947 don't syndicate posts unless they match at least one familiar
1948 category". Now, when you update, only posts in the "Llamas" category
1949 will be syndicated by FeedWordPress.
1950
1951 Similarly, if you wanted to filter one particular feed so that only
1952 posts by (for example) the author "Earl J. Llama" were syndicated to
1953 your site, you could do so by creating a user account for Earl J.
1954 Llama, then adding the following line to the settings for the feed
1955 in Link Notes:
1956
1957 unfamiliar author: filter
1958
1959 This will cause any posts from this feed that are not authored by
1960 Earl J. Llama to be discarded, and only the posts by Earl J. Llama
1961 will be syndicated. (If the setting is used on one specific feed, it
1962 will not affect how posts from other feeds are syndicated.)
1963
1964 == License ==
1965
1966 The FeedWordPress plugin is copyright © 2005-2010 by Charles Johnson. It uses
1967 code derived or translated from:
1968
1969 - [wp-rss-aggregate.php][] by [Kellan Elliot-McCrea](kellan@protest.net)
1970 - [SimplePie][] feed parser by Ryan Parman, Geoffrey Sneddon, Ryan McCue, et al.
1971 - [MagpieRSS][] feed parser by [Kellan Elliot-McCrea](kellan@protest.net)
1972 - [Ultra-Liberal Feed Finder][] by [Mark Pilgrim](mark@diveintomark.org)
1973 - [WordPress Blog Tool and Publishing Platform](http://wordpress.org/)
1974
1975 according to the terms of the [GNU General Public License][].
1976
1977 This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
1978 the terms of the [GNU General Public License][] as published by the Free
1979 Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any
1980 later version.
1981
1982 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
1983 WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
1984 PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
1985
1986 [wp-rss-aggregate.php]: http://laughingmeme.org/archives/002203.html
1987 [SimplePie]: http://www.simplepie.org/
1988 [MagpieRSS]: http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/
1989 [Ultra-Liberal Feed Finder]: http://diveintomark.org/projects/feed_finder/
1990 [GNU General Public License]: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
1991
1992