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FeedWordPress / 2016.1211
FeedWordPress v2016.1211
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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: 4.7
7 Stable tag: 2016.1211
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, an aggregator site that I used to administer.
24
25 [Planet]: http://www.planetplanet.org/
26
27 FeedWordPress is designed with flexibility, ease of use, and ease of
28 configuration in mind. You'll need a working installation of WordPress (version
29 [3.0] or later), and also FTP or SFTP access to your web host. The ability to
30 create cron jobs on your web host is helpful but not required. You *don't* need
31 to tweak any plain-text configuration files and you *don't* need shell access
32 to your web host to make it work. (Although, I should point out, web hosts that
33 *don't* offer shell access are *bad web hosts*.)
34
35 [WordPress]: http://wordpress.org/
36 [WordPress MU]: http://mu.wordpress.org/
37 [3.0]: http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.0
38
39 == Installation ==
40
41 To use FeedWordPress, you will need:
42
43 * an installed and configured copy of [WordPress][] or [WordPress MU][]
44 (version 3.0 or later).
45
46 * FTP, SFTP or shell access to your web host
47
48 = New Installations =
49
50 1. Download the FeedWordPress installation package and extract the files on
51 your computer.
52
53 2. Create a new directory named `feedwordpress` in the `wp-content/plugins`
54 directory of your WordPress installation. Use an FTP or SFTP client to
55 upload the contents of your FeedWordPress archive to the new directory
56 that you just created on your web host.
57
58 3. Log in to the WordPress Dashboard and activate the FeedWordPress plugin.
59
60 4. Once the plugin is activated, a new **Syndication** section should
61 appear in your WordPress admin menu. Click here to add new syndicated
62 feeds, set up configuration options, and determine how FeedWordPress
63 will check for updates. For help, see the [FeedWordPress Quick Start][]
64 page.
65
66 [FeedWordPress Quick Start]: http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/quick-start
67
68 = Upgrades =
69
70 To *upgrade* an existing installation of FeedWordPress to the most recent
71 release:
72
73 1. Download the FeedWordPress installation package and extract the files on
74 your computer.
75
76 2. Upload the new PHP files to `wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress`,
77 overwriting any existing FeedWordPress files that are there.
78
79 3. Log in to your WordPress administrative interface immediately in order
80 to see whether there are any further tasks that you need to perform
81 to complete the upgrade.
82
83 4. Enjoy your newer and hotter installation of FeedWordPress
84
85 == Using and Customizing FeedWordPress ==
86
87 FeedWordPress has many options which can be accessed through the WordPress
88 Dashboard, and a lot of functionality accessible programmatically through
89 WordPress templates or plugins. For further documentation of the ins and
90 outs, see the documentation at the [FeedWordPress project homepage][].
91
92 [FeedWordPress project homepage]: http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/
93
94 == Changelog ==
95
96 = 2016.1211 =
97
98 * WORDPRESS COMPATIBILITY: Tested with new versions of WordPress up to 4.7.
99
100 * PHP WARNINGS UNDER WP 4.7: Eliminated cause of a PHP warning under WP 4.7
101 "Parameter 1 to FeedWordPressHTTPAuthenticator::set_auth_options expected to be reference"
102 Warnings were due to a change in how http_api_curl hook is sometimes called
103 in WP 4.7; so I changed the signature of the event handling method to avoid
104 the notice. Props to @cogdog, @froomkin, @gwynethllewelyn et al. for flagging
105 the issue and @garymarkfuller for suggesting a preliminary fix to the issue
106 that was fairly similar to the solution I ended up adopting.
107
108 * PHP 7 and PHP Strict Standards compatibility changes: @alexiskulash @daidais
109 and @zoul0813 all sent pull requests through Github to fix some issues from
110 a very old code base that has made its way from PHP 3.x through 5.x to the
111 roll-out of PHP 7. Class methods should now fare better under modern versions
112 of PHP and generate fewer "Deprecated" notices.
113
114 * IMPROVEMENTS TO SCHEDULED AND AUTOMATIC UPDATES: use wp_loaded hook to check
115 for magic URL parameters and to execute updates, to do pageload-based automatic
116 updates, etc. Ensures that anything plugins or themes need to do in init to set
117 up custom post types, taxonomies, etc. will be done before the update_feedwordpress
118 updates are attempted. If you saw posts not getting put into the correct custom
119 post type or custom taxonomies or similar problems when performing scheduled updates,
120 but the problem seemed to go away when you manually performed updates through the
121 wp-admin interface, then you might be able to solve those problems with this update.
122
123 = 2016.0420 =
124
125 * WORDPRESS COMPATIBILITY: Tested with new versions of WordPress up to 4.5.
126
127 * FILTERS AND ADD-ONS: Allow filters and add-ons to filter terms and taxonomy
128 (categories, tags, custom taxonomies, etc.) more thoroughly and more
129 fine-grainedly using syndicated_post_terms_match, syndicated_post_terms_match_{taxonomy},
130 syndicated_post_terms_unfamiliar, syndicated_post_terms_mapping,
131 syndicated_item_feed_terms, and syndicated_item_preset_terms filters.
132
133 * FILTERS AND ADD-ONS: Globals $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta REMOVED.
134 These global variables, originally introduced to allow filters access to
135 information about the source feed in `syndicated_item` filters were
136 deprecated 6+ years ago. If you have any filters or add-ons which still
137 depend on these global variables, you've been using obsolete techniques
138 and you should see about fixing them to access data about the source feed
139 using the SyndicatedPost::link element instead. For documentation, see
140 the FeedWordPress documentation wiki at
141 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedpost> and
142 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedlink>.
143
144 * BUGFIX: Syndication > Diagnostics HTTP diagnostic test widget was broken due to
145 a dumb error on my part. Now fixed.
146
147 * SMALL CODING CHANGES: Lots of small changes to code organization, incorporation
148 of some PHP 5.x coding conventions, etc.
149
150 = 2015.0514 =
151
152 * IMPORTANT SECURITY UPDATE: This version includes two important fixes for
153 potential security vulnerabilities reported to me through support channels.
154
155 The first is a common problem across several plugins due to an ambiguity in
156 the WordPress documentation and a change in the behavior of WordPress's
157 built-in add_query_arg() and remove_query_arg() functions
158 which could, under certain low-probability conditions, allow for potential
159 XSS attack vectors. This fixes issue # 39
160 reported at <https://github.com/radgeek/feedwordpress/issues/39>
161 Thanks to github.com/quassy
162
163 The second is a security vulnerability fixes a security vulnerability that
164 was reported to me privately (thanks to Adrián M. F.) which, under other
165 low-probability conditions, could allow for SQL insertion attacks by
166 a malicious user with access to login credentials, which would compromise
167 data security.
168
169 It is *IMPORTANT* and worth your while to upgrade FeedWordPress as soon as
170 possible in order to eliminate these vulnerabilities. If you have any
171 questions or if there is something blocking you from making the upgrade
172 which you need my help with, don't hesitate to get in touch.
173
174 * ADMIN UI BUGFIX: "Update Now" button in feeds setting pages should now work
175 once again instead of causing a PHP fatal error. See
176 <https://github.com/radgeek/feedwordpress/issues/46>
177
178 * SEVERAL OTHER SMALL BUG FIXES. See <https://github.com/radgeek/feedwordpress/issues/32>
179 <https://github.com/radgeek/feedwordpress/issues/30>
180 <https://github.com/radgeek/feedwordpress/issues/29>
181 etc.
182
183 = 2014.0805 =
184
185 * FILTERS AND ADD-ONS: A number of new hooks for filters and add-ons to
186 further customize the behavior of FWP have been added.
187
188 * COMPATIBILITY/BUGFIX: Many users saw odd characters, especially "n,"
189 appearing in posts in versions of WordPress from 3.6 on, due to a change
190 in when the API expects HTML data for posts to be slashed and when it
191 does not. This has been fixed, so that the junk characters should no
192 longer appear, regardless of your version of WordPress.
193
194 * BUGFIX: A bug preventing FWP from saving categories assigned under
195 Syndication > Categories & Tags has been fixed.
196
197 * BUGFIX: Post-editing related metaboxes should now show up when you edit
198 items of any post type, including custom types, not only normal WordPress
199 posts.
200
201 * BUGFIX: A bug in the admin UI that caused the "Alternative Feeds" /
202 "Find Feeds" box to throw a permissions error has been fixed.
203
204 * BUGFIX: A bug preventing proper mapping of categories and other terms in
205 2013.0504 has been fixed.
206
207 * BUGFIX: A number of small fixes contributed through Github by Flynsarmy
208 should eliminate PHP warnings for many users on several methods that are
209 called as static methods within FeedWordPress.
210
211 = 2013.0504 =
212
213 * BUGFIX: PHP 5.4 compatibility -- includes some more extensive fixes to
214 compatibility issues with PHP 5.4's handling of global variables
215
216 * DIAGNOSTICS: New diagnostics settings added to help track behavior of
217 terms (categories, post tags, etc.) for syndicated posts.
218
219 = 2012.0504 =
220
221 * MODULE REORGANIZATION: Should ensure that all needed submodules will be
222 properly included regardless of whether you are installing from github,
223 from SVN, or from the WordPress plugins page. If you've been getting
224 fatal errors about required modules not being found, this release should
225 hopefully resolve the issue.
226
227 = 2012.0503 =
228
229 * BUGFIX: Works properly again with WordPress installations that use a
230 MySQL table name prefix other than the default `wp_` prefix.
231
232 * BUGFIX: Includes a couple of significant PHP 5.4 compatibility fixes.
233 Now that PHP 5.4 is more widely deployed, Diagnostics will now also
234 show PHP version and some other potentially useful troubleshooting
235 information.
236
237 * ADMIN UI: Better indicates your options when deleting a syndicated post
238 so as to let you know whether it will be Trashed (and thus not
239 resyndicated) or Erased (and thus potentially resyndicated)
240
241 * ADMIN UI: Adds an AJAXy Test Expression button to allow live testing of
242 sample results from expressions in Custom Post Settings.
243
244 = 2012.1218 =
245
246 * WORDPRESS VISUAL EDITOR FIXED. There was an unlisted change in the
247 2012.1212 release which had the effect of disabling the WordPress Visual
248 Editor for all posts syndicated by FeedWordPress. Many users reported
249 this as a bug. It was actually a deliberate decision -- a crappy way to
250 try to deal with a crappy situation. (Many users had previously reported
251 a "bug" in which all the paragraph or line breaks seemed to be stripped
252 out of their syndicated posts; the issue turned out to be that the
253 Visual Editor was stripping out `<p>` and `<br/>` tags on the assumption
254 that the resulting post would be sent through standard WordPress
255 formatting filters. But under default settings, posts syndicated by FWP
256 deliberately bypass WordPress formatting filters.) In any case, this
257 version adopts a more flexible compromise. *If* FeedWordPress is set up
258 to bypass WordPress formatting filters (as it is by default), *then*
259 the Visual Editor will be disabled for syndicated posts (since using it
260 would produce incorrect results). If on the other hand FeedWordPress is
261 set up to expose syndicated posts to WordPress formatting filters (as it
262 usually is for those using the Visual Editor to manually edit posts),
263 then the Visual Editor tab will be re-enabled for syndicated posts.
264
265 * BUG FIX: PERMALINKS REWRITTEN FOR CUSTOM POST TYPES AS WELL AS NORMAL
266 WORDPRESS POSTS. If you had WordPress set up to syndicate incoming posts
267 to a custom post type (under Syndication > Posts & Links), and asked
268 FeedWordPress to make "permalinks point to the original site", then
269 previous versions of FeedWordPress would fail to do the rewriting --
270 permalinks would only be rewritten to point to the original source for
271 normal WordPress posts, not for custom post types. In 2012.1218 this bug
272 has been fixed: all post types will now have permalinks rewritten unless
273 you request for permalinks to point to the local copy on your aggregator
274 site.
275
276 * BUG FIX: ELIMINATES "PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function
277 setting() on a non-object...." Some changes to the in-memory caching of
278 information about feed subscriptions could result in a fatal PHP error
279 in cases where you have de-activated one of your subscriptions, but
280 posts from that subscription were still in the archive. This would
281 normally show up through half-completed feeds or half-completed pages
282 that suddenly broke off in the middle, and displayed or logged an error
283 message like: "PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function setting() on a
284 non-object in {...}/wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress/feedwordpress.php
285 on line 615". This bug has been eliminated, so affected feeds and pages
286 should now render correctly, and the error message should no longer
287 appear.
288
289 * BUG FIX: CATEGORY BOXES IN SYNDICATION > CATEGORIES & TAGS. Some minor
290 bugs in the appearance and animation of category checkboxes (for
291 example, the checkbox used to select categories for syndicated posts on
292 the Syndication > Categories & Tags settings page) have been fixed.
293
294 = 2012.1212 =
295
296 * WORDPRESS 3.5 COMPATIBILITY: This release has been tested for compatibility
297 with new releases of WordPress, up to version 3.5, and any documented
298 compatibility issues have been cleared -- in particular, if you were seeing
299 error pages stating that you don't have permission to access the
300 FeedWordPress Syndication page within the WordPress admin interface, then
301 upgrading to this release should fix the problem.
302
303 As always, if you encounter any compatibility problems after upgrading your
304 version of WordPress and your version of FeedWordPress to the most recent
305 versions, please contact me with as detailed a description as possible of
306 the issue you are encountering, the circumstances you're encountering it
307 under, what you expect to see happening, and what is happening instead.
308
309 * PHP 5.4 COMPATIBILITY: This release has been audited to fix potential
310 problems with deprecation notices or fatal errors under recent versions
311 of PHP. In particular, all uses of run-time pass-by-reference have been
312 eliminated from the code; if you were seeing a fatal error reading
313 "Call-time pass-by-reference has been removed ..." then upgrading to
314 this release should fix the problem.
315
316 * CUSTOMIZATION FRAMEWORK: A great deal of work has been done to make the
317 underlying framework more flexible, so that PHP add-ons can be written
318 to adapt FeedWordPress to handle custom XML vocabularies, expiration of
319 posts under specified conditions, and other custom behavior.
320
321 * BUGFIX: MANUALLY EDITED POST SLUGS NOT OVERWRITTEN. Thanks to a report
322 by Chris Fritz, I've identified some code that causes post slugs for the
323 posts generated by FWP to be rewritten with every update, even if the
324 user has manually updated the slug from within the WordPress editing
325 interface. This has been fixed: FWP will continue to generate new slugs
326 for syndicated posts, but when syndicated posts are updated, they will
327 retain the slug that they had at the time of the update; any manual
328 changes to the post slug should be preserved.
329
330 * USER-AGENT STRING: FeedWordPress now sends a distinctive User-Agent
331 string identifying itself, and noting that it is a feed aggregator.
332
333 * MISCELLANEOUS PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS: A number of changes have been
334 made to try to reduce the intensity and expense in terms of both
335 database performance and web server memory consumption.
336
337 * DIAGNOSTICS IMPROVEMENTS: A number of new and improved diagnostics have
338 been added which should aid in understanding and troubleshooting issues
339 that may arise.
340
341 = 2011.1019 =
342
343 * BUGFIX: "THERE ARE NO HTTP TRANSPORTS AVAILABLE" ERROR FIXED: The initial
344 support for HTTP Basic and Digest authentication in version 2011.1018
345 contained a bug that could cause HTTP requests for feeds or for other
346 WordPress resources to break down if you do not have the PHP curl module
347 installed. This bug has been fixed, and these errors should no longer
348 appear.
349
350 * IMPROVED HTTP AUTHENTICATION SUPPORT: In addition, the HTTP Authentication
351 support in FeedWordPress has been extended, to ensure that Basic
352 authentication is available in many web host configurations, and to allow
353 you to add a username and password for a feed immediately when you
354 subscribe to it.
355
356 = 2011.1018 =
357
358 * HTTP BASIC AND DIGEST AUTHENTICATION SUPPORT: FeedWordPress now offers
359 improved support for syndicating feeds that make use of HTTP Basic or HTTP
360 Digest authentication methods. In order to set up authentication on one of
361 your feeds, just go to its Settings > Feed page, and click on the "Uses
362 Username/Password" link underneath the Feed URL. Enter the username and
363 password for accessing the feed, then select the authentication method. (If
364 you're not sure which method your feed provider uses, try Basic first.)
365 Save Changes, and syndicate away.
366
367 NOTE: HTTP Digest support requires the curl module for PHP. If you are not
368 sure whether this module has been installed, contact your web hosting
369 provider to check.
370
371 * WP 3.3 (BETA) COMPATIBILITY: This version fixes an init-sequence bug that
372 could cause intrusive warning messages or fatal errors in WP 3.3 beta
373 versions.
374
375 * BUGFIX: FIXES LONG DELAYS IN UPDATES SCHEDULES IN LARGE INSTALLATIONS. A
376 performance feature introduced in version 2011.0721 had some flaws in its
377 implementation, which tended to create serious delays (on the order of
378 several hours) in FeedWordPress's attempts to schedule updates for feeds,
379 when users had a very large number of feeds (several dozen or more) in their
380 FeedWordPress installation. This feature has been reconfigured to adjust
381 dynamically to the number of feeds in Syndicated Sources and the frequency
382 with which they are updated. If you've seen a lot of ready-to-update feeds
383 piling up, several hours after they were supposed to get updated, then this
384 upgrade should better ensure that your feeds get updated in a timely fashion.
385
386 * BUGFIX: syndicated_item_guid FILTERS FIXED. Previous versions of
387 FeedWordPress theoretically allowed for filters on the syndicated_item_guid
388 hook, which was intended to filter the globally-unique identifier element
389 (rss:guid or atom:id) -- useful if you need to convince FeedWordPress to use
390 different guids, or to recognize two or more incoming posts as versions of
391 the same post rather than as distinct items. However, while the hook
392 affected the guid stored in the WordPress database, it did not affect the
393 guid used to check whether an incoming feed item had already been syndicated
394 or was a new item -- which greatly limited the practical usefulness of the
395 filter. This bug has been fixed: syndicated_item_guid filters should now
396 properly control not only the final database record, but also the initial
397 uniqueness test applied to posts.
398
399 = 2011.0721 =
400
401 * BUGFIX: SERIOUS BUG CAUSING RARE UNEXPECTED DELETION OF PAGES AND OTHER
402 CONTENT. A bug in the guid-checking code for some rare kinds of guids could
403 cause content in the wp_posts table to seemingly disappear at random after
404 FeedWordPress updates.This most frequently but not exclusively affected
405 static pages. What actually happened is that in these rare cases the
406 existing static page was mistaken for an older version of the new incoming
407 syndicated post, which was then stored as a new revision of the original
408 page. The bug that caused these mistaken identities has been fixed.
409
410 * BUGFIX: UNWANTED AUTOMATIC PAGE-LOAD-BASED UPDATES NO LONGER A NUISANCE.
411 Some users encountered a bug in which FeedWordPress would adopt an automatic
412 page-load-based update method, even if they had requested that it not do
413 so, and that it use a manual or cron job update method instead. The bug
414 causing this has been fixed, and page-load-based updates should no longer
415 trigger unless explicitly turned on.
416
417 * WP 3.2 USER INTERFACE COMPATIBILITY: POST TAGS BOX NOW WORKS AGAIN. The
418 release of WordPress 3.2 caused a breakage in the tags box which prevented
419 you from adding or removing tags under Syndication --> Categories & Tags.
420 (The breakage was the result of an incompatibility introduced by the new
421 release of jQuery.) This breakage has now been fixed, and the tags box
422 should work correctly again.
423
424 * FEED UPDATE SCHEDULING IMPROVEMENTS: UI. The Syndicated Sources table now
425 provides considerably more data to understand update scheduling, when
426 specific scheduling decisions are made because of, e.g., requests from the
427 feed producer.
428
429 * FEED UPDATE SCHEDULING IMPROVEMENTS: ENFORCEABLE "MINIMUM INTERVAL" SETTING
430 TO SPACE OUT UPDATES. Some feeds request specific update schedules, using
431 standard elements such as sy:updateFrequency and rss:ttl. Normally,
432 FeedWordPress respects any scheduling requests that a feed makes -- if it
433 requests a longer gap between polls than what FWP would normally adopt, then
434 FWP slows down to meet the request. If it indicates a shorter gap than what
435 FWP would normally adopt, FWP speeds up and checks that feed for updates
436 more often than it normally would. Now, there should not be any way for user
437 settings to override an explicit slow-down request from the feed producer --
438 if producers indicate a particular update schedule, then polling the feed
439 more frequently than they request is considered abusive behavior. But
440 there's no reason why users should not be able -- if they so desire -- to
441 override speed-up requests, and poll a feed *less* frequently than the
442 indicated update schedule, if the FWP user wants to space update checkins
443 over a longer interval of time. Before, they could not do this: FWP always
444 sped up to meet the indicated update schedule. Now, they can do this, by
445 using the new "Minimum Interval" setting in Syndication --> Feeds &
446 Updates..
447
448 = 2011.0706 =
449
450 * WP 3.2 COMPATIBILITY: ELIMINATES FATAL ERROR "Call to undefined method
451 WP_SimplePie_File::WP_SimplePie_File() in
452 [...]/wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress/feedwordpress.php on line 1841." The
453 latest release of WordPress, version 3.2, has shifted the minimum
454 requirements up to PHP 5.2, and in line with the shift to PHP5 they have
455 rewritten a number of code segments that made use of now-obsolete PHP4
456 idioms. Unfortunately, this caused a fatal error whenever FeedWordPress
457 attempted to make use of the cache, since FWP's caching plugin was written
458 to match the older idiom. FeedWordPress has been updated to follow the new,
459 PHP5 idiom when possible, thus eliminating the fatal error.
460
461 * PERFORMANCE: The handling of queries to determine whether posts had been
462 previously syndicated produced some very slow queries (usually, but not
463 always, involving a scan over the MD5(post_guid) column of the table). The
464 code that prepares MySQL queries for previously-syndicated checks has been
465 revised to eliminate the MD5(post_guid) scan entirely, and to significantly
466 improve performance by eliminating other unnecessary clauses.
467
468 * BUGFIX: NO LONGER DESTROYS STICKY POSTS. Previous versions could destroy
469 (or, more precisely, replace the content of) sticky posts due to some
470 queries mashed together in unexpected ways by WordPress. Version 2011.0706
471 accounts for and eliminates the problem; your sticky posts should be safe
472 once again.
473
474 * BUGFIX: GUIDS CONTAINING MYSQL-ESCAPED CHARACTERS NO LONGER CAUSE DUPLICATE
475 POSTS TO APPEAR. One remaining source of duplicate post issues in 2011.0602
476 was guids that contained characters that needed to be escaped for MySQL,
477 such as single quotes and double quotes. The work-around for handling
478 filtered URIs has now been corrected to ensure that these do not cause
479 duplicate posts.
480
481 = 2011.0602 =
482
483 * WP 3.1.3 COMPAT / BUGFIX: WHITESPACE IN GUIDS NO LONGER PRODUCES DUPLICATE
484 POSTS. The work-around for handling filtered URIs in guid elements has now
485 been extended to handle URIs that were filtered because of leading or
486 trailing whitespace, in addition to URIs that were filtered because of
487 unapproved schemes.
488
489 * WP 3.1.3 COMPAT / BUGFIX: RELATIVE URLS IN GUIDS NO LONGER PRODUCE DUPLICATE
490 POSTS. The work-around for handling filtered URIs in guid elements has now
491 been extended to handle URIs that were altered without being filtered out
492 entirely (most commonly because a scheme was added to a relative URL).
493
494 * BUGFIX: UPDATES TO POST NO LONGER CAUSE DUPLICATE DRAFT VERSION TO APPEAR.
495 Under certain conditions in 2011.0531, an update to an existing post would
496 not be properly applied to the post itself, but rather would appear as a
497 duplicate post with Draft status. This bug has been eliminated, and updates
498 will now be properly inserted as revisions to the existing post.
499
500 = 2011.0531 =
501
502 * WORDPRESS 3.1.3 COMPATIBILITY: DUPLICATE POSTS ISSUE FIXED. Due to
503 internal changes in the way that WordPress handles post guids in the
504 most recent release (3.1.3), many users experienced problems with many
505 duplicate posts appearing in rapid succession. (Specifically, this would
506 happen with any posts using tag: URL guids -- such as all the posts
507 coming from Blogger feeds or feeds from other Google services.) This
508 compatibility release of FeedWordPress eliminates the issue by working
509 around the new restrictions on tag: URLs.
510
511 * NEW AND IMPROVED DIAGNOSTICS: Syndication --> Diagnostics now contains some
512 new diagnostics settings useful for debugging problems with duplicate posts
513 (allowing you to easily view the guid of posts in the WordPress posts
514 database and allowing you to track the SQL used to check for existing
515 versions of a syndicated post).
516
517 = 2011.0512 =
518
519 * DIAGNOSTICS IMPROVEMENTS; "THERE MAY BE A BUG IN FEEDWORDPRESS" CRITICAL
520 ERROR NOTICES ELIMINATED: This version includes some major improvements
521 to the Syndication --> Diagnostics section, which should aid in
522 troubleshooting difficulties with items failing to be imported, posts
523 failing to be properly inserted into the database, or updates failing to
524 be recorded. If you have been encountering critical error / bug notices
525 with a white screen and the message "THERE MAY BE A BUG IN
526 FEEDWORDPRESS," followed by an extraordinarily long dump of mostly
527 incomprehensible diagnostic information, you'll be happy to know that
528 the condition causing these notices has been eliminated. In the few
529 cases where errors may still crop up with database insertions,
530 FeedWordPress will now produce a significantly more manageable and more
531 useful diagnostic message.
532
533 * BUGFIX: NEW POSTS FAILING TO APPEAR IN A CLEANLY-INSTALLED FEEDWORDPRESS
534 SYSTEM. If you encountered a recurring problem with FeedWordPress
535 failing to import new posts, after a clean install of FeedWordPress
536 (i.e., not an upgrade from a previous version), this problem may have
537 been the result of a bug with author-handling which has now been fixed
538 in the 2011.0512 release. (If the problem does *not* go away with the
539 upgrade, this version also includes significant improvements to the
540 Diagnostics system, which will help track down what *is* causing it
541 in your particular case.)
542
543 * PERFORMANCE: New handling of update hashes allows FeedWordPress to avoid
544 a certain kind of infinite loop, caused when two more more different
545 syndicated feeds each carried a version of the same item (for example,
546 because it appeared on two different aggregator feeds that you're
547 syndicating). In previous versions, when this kind of loop cropped up,
548 syndicated posts could pile up an indefinitely large number of revisions
549 -- each revision alternating between the version from each of the two
550 feeds where it appeared -- which would, over time, dramatically inflate
551 the size of the database, and kill the performance of queries on the
552 post table. This issue has been resolved: revisions of the post that
553 have been syndicated once will not be re-syndicated over and over again.
554
555 * AUTHOR LISTS: Lists of authors presented on the Author settings pages
556 should now be easier to scan through, with author names arranged in
557 alphabetical order.
558
559 * FEED ITEM DATE PARSING: More tweaks to make date-time handling more
560 resilient when feeds provide broken or weird values for the timestamps
561 on syndicated items. FWP will now attempt to work around unparseable
562 timezone values.
563
564 * AUTHOR MATCHING: Now attempts to match author names against the WP login
565 name in addition to display_name; when creating user record, also fills
566 in some best-guess values for nickname, firstname and lastname. Also
567 properly picks up Atom 1.0 author/uri data from feed.
568
569 * COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress has been successfully tested for
570 compatibility with recent releases of WordPress, up to version 3.1.2.
571
572 = 2011.0211 =
573
574 * BUGFIX: DUPLICATE POSTS WHEN GUIDS ARE TOO LONG: When feeds included
575 exceptionally long GUIDs, FeedWordPress could occasionally get into
576 a situation where posts with the long GUIDs would be duplicated over
577 and over again with each update (because FWP failed to store the full
578 GUID, due to length constraints in the relevant database tables).
579 Without the full GUID, FWP would not know that the post had already
580 been syndicated once. This bug has been fixed, and should no longer
581 produce duplicate posts.
582
583 * HTTP TIMEOUT SETTING: If you are frequently running into timeout
584 problems with one or more of the feeds you syndicate, FWP now allows you
585 to adjust the timeout for HTTP requests using a global or feed-by-feed
586 setting.
587
588 * HTTP GET PARAMETERS: You can now temporarily or permanently add HTTP
589 GET parameters to a subscription using an interface in Syndication -->
590 Feeds & Updates. This is especially helpful for making quick, short-term
591 changes to a subscription (for example, to pull in all the previous
592 items from a web service, before settling down to pulling in only newly
593 updated items).
594
595 * DIAGNOSTICS SYSTEM: Added several new diagnostics which are useful in
596 troubleshooting, and established a framework for add-on modules to hook
597 in with their own diagnostic messages.
598
599 * UI: Adjusted some internal coding, which should allow for settings
600 pages and add-ons to properly display multiple category pickers on a
601 single settings page.
602
603 * PHP4 COMPATIBILITY TWEAKS: This version makes some tweaks to the handling
604 of object references which should improve compatibility with older
605 versions of PHP. (Although, I should note, web hosts that still force
606 you to run under PHP 4 -- in 2011! -- are *bad web hosts*.)
607
608 * IMPROVED PERFORMANCE: This version eliminates a *major* performance drag
609 that shows up on sites with large numbers of users (due to some poor
610 decisions about where to place a user query, which caused the user table
611 to be scanned frequently when it did not need to be). If you experienced
612 serious problems with CPU load or slow database performance under
613 2010.0905, which kicked in immediately when FWP was loaded and tended
614 to disappear immediately if FWP was de-activated, it is likely that
615 upgrading away from 2010.0905 to the most recent version will resolve
616 your problem.
617
618
619 = 2010.0905 =
620
621 * BUGFIX: CATEGORIES AND TAGS CORRECTLY ASSIGNED IN AUTOMATIC UPDATES.
622 Version 2010.0903 switched over to a new way of assigning categories and
623 tags as part of its support for handling custom taxonomies.
624 Unfortunately, the method that it uses is subjected to some checks of
625 the current user's capabilities, which creates problems for posts that
626 are being inserted into the WordPress database when there *is* no
627 current user logged in (as, for example, when an update is being carried
628 out from a cron job or automatic update). The result was that posts
629 from cron jobs and automatic updates ended up with no Categories and no
630 Tags being assigned. This bug has now been fixed: in 2010.0905, Tags and
631 Categories should be correctly assigned to all posts, regardless of
632 whether they were added from manual updates, cron jobs, or automatic
633 updates.
634
635 = 2010.0903 =
636
637 * WORDPRESS 3 REQUIRED: Please note that this release of FeedWordPress
638 *requires* WordPress 3.0 or later. If you are currently using a 2.x
639 branch of WordPress, you will need to upgrade to WordPress 3 before you
640 can successfully upgrade FeedWordPress.
641
642 * BUGFIX: NO MORE DISAPPEARING "SYNDICATED SOURCES" PANEL; INTERNET
643 EXPLORER UI GLITCH APPARENTLY FIXED: Several users independently
644 reported a problem with FWP 2010.0623 and various versions of IE. A
645 problem with the HTML markup caused IE (but not Firefox or
646 Chrome) to completely hide the Syndicated Sources administration panel
647 (the main list of currently-syndicated sources, and the main location
648 for adding new sources, under the Syndication menu item) when a user
649 added their first syndicated feed. Maddeningly, the glitch seemed to
650 affect some IE users and not others: I was never able to reproduce the
651 problem for myself on my own machines. However, the markup of Syndicated
652 Sources has undergone significant changes and corrections since
653 2010.0623, and two independent sources who had been having this problem
654 confirm that they no longer encounter it with the updated version. For
655 the time being, I am going to declare this bug squashed.
656
657 * BUGFIX: MORE PROTECTION AGAINST FATAL ERRORS FROM PLUGGABLE VERSIONS OF
658 SimplePie: FeedWordPress now takes some precautions that should help to
659 better avoid conflicts for users who have installed pluggable versions
660 of SimplePie for another plugin or theme. (You may not know that you have
661 done this; but if you've been encountering fatal errors indicating that
662 you cannot redeclare class SimplePie, or something along those lines,
663 there is now a better chance that those fatal errors will be eliminated.
664
665 * PERFORMANCE: SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCED MEMORY CONSUMPTION FOR LARGE UPDATES:
666 FeedWordPress is still a memory-hungry little module, especially when
667 you are dealing with very large feeds. However, users should notice a
668 significant reduction in memory overloads, especially if they update a
669 large number of feeds at once.
670
671 * USER INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: Nothing is radically different, but there's
672 been a fair amount of extra spit and polish added, including a convenient
673 new Dashboard widget that may save you a trip to the Syndication menu,
674 a lot of effort to make the relationship between global and feed-by-feed
675 settings more obvious to the user and more easily controllable, to make
676 navigation between settings pages easier, to sand off a few rough edges,
677 and to make other improvements on the margins. I hope you'll like how
678 it looks.
679
680 * ADDING MULTIPLE FEEDS: FeedWordPress now provides a convenient mode for
681 adding multiple feeds at once, using either a copy-and-pasted list, or
682 else an OPML file. Go to Syndication --> Syndicated Sources and check
683 out the two new buttons underneath the New Source input box. When you
684 have to add a number of feeds at once, this can save you considerable
685 time and trouble.
686
687 * IMPROVED HANDLING OF AUTHORS WITH DUPLICATE E-MAIL ADDRESS AND AUTHORS
688 WITH NAMES WRITTEN IN FOREIGN SCRIPTS: WordPress 3 is increasingly picky
689 about what it will accept for new author accounts, and some of the
690 conditions it imposes can cause error conditions that prevent posts from
691 being properly syndicated, or properly attributed, if authors happen to
692 have identical e-mail addresses, or if users are given usernames that are
693 written in non-Western scripts. FeedWordPress now handles these much
694 better, and systematically works to avoid clashes between syndicated
695 authors' account names or in their e-mail addresses, which should result
696 in significantly better results in mapping author names to WordPress
697 user accounts.
698
699 * MAPPING CATEGORIES ON SYNDICATED POSTS TO TAGS NOW BETTER SUPPORTED:
700 In previous versions, the only way for the Categories provided by a
701 syndicated feed to be mapped into Post Tags was to instruct FWP to
702 create new tags, rather than new categories, for unfamiliar categories
703 from the feed. This works fine if you want tags to be the default; but
704 if you want only a *specific* set of tags, there was no way to get them
705 without getting most or all other categories imported as tags. You can
706 now do this by creating a tag (under Posts ==> Post Tags) before
707 importing the post; when the syndicated category matches a pre-existing
708 tag, the incoming post will be tagged with that tag, without creating
709 a local Post Category.
710
711 * REL-TAG MICROFORMAT SUPPORT FOR INLINE TAGS: Syndicated posts that
712 contain inline tags, marked up using the Rel-Tag microformat
713 <http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag>, are now tagged with the tags
714 provided by Rel-Tag format links.
715
716 * MUCH GREATER CONTROL OVER CATEGORY AND TAG MAPPING: This is partly the
717 result of building in support for a potentially endless set of custom
718 taxonomies (see below), but in general there has been a great deal of
719 effort towards giving you more control over how categories and tags
720 provided by the feed are mapped into terms on the local blog. In
721 particular, you can now force FeedWordPress to create only categories
722 from categories and tags provided by the feed; or to create only tags;
723 or to search both categories and tags for a match; or you can simply
724 force it to drop all of the categories provided by the feed and use
725 only categories or tags that you explicitly provide. In addition, you
726 can now also choose whether to override global categories settings with
727 a local, feed-specific setting; or whether to *add together* *both* the
728 global categories and the local feed-specific categories -- depending
729 on whatever your use-case may demand.
730
731 * CUSTOM POST TYPES AND TAXONOMY SUPPORTS: This is mainly for the
732 super-geeky, but if you use other plugins or themes that make
733 significant use of WordPress's support for custom post types and custom
734 taxonomies, you may be pleased to find that FeedWordPress now allows you
735 to feed incoming posts into any custom feed type that you wish, and to
736 map categories and tags from the feed to custom taxonomies as well as
737 to the standard Category and Tag taxonomies.
738
739 * STORING NAMESPACED CUSTOM FEED ELEMENTS IN POST CUSTOM FIELDS: If you
740 would like to use FeedWordPress's support for storing custom meta-data
741 from feed elements in the custom fields for a post (for example, to
742 store geolocation data or iTunes media meta-data), you'll find that it's
743 now much easier for you to access these namespaced elements. You always
744 could access them, but in previous versions you might have to write
745 something ugly like $(/{http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#}lat)
746 just to get at the value of a `<geo:lat>` tag. Now, as long as you use
747 the same mnemonic codes that the feed producer used, you should always
748 be able to write a nice, simple expression like $(/geo:lat) to get the
749 value of a <geo:lat> tag.
750
751 * CUSTOM DIRECTORY STRUCTURE SUPPORT: if you poke at it enough, WordPress
752 is relatively flexible about where it should store admin interface code,
753 uploaded content, plugins, and a number of other things that occupy an
754 important place in the WordPress directory structure. Previous versions
755 of FeedWordPress encountered serious errors or broke entirely when used
756 with directory structures other than the default. This should now be
757 fixed: FWP now supports custom directory structures wherever WordPress
758 allows them to be customized, rather than depending on the default
759 locations. Enjoy your freedom!
760
761 * MANY NEW FILTERS AND API UTILITY FUNCTIONS FOR ADD-ON PROGRAMMERS: There
762 have been too many improvements to list them all in this ChangeLog, but
763 it means that much more power and ease for folks who are customizing
764 FeedWordPress through PHP filters or add-on modules. Fuller
765 documentation will be put up at the Wiki at feedwordpress.radgeek.org
766 soon.
767
768 = 2010.0623 =
769
770 * WORDPRESS 3.0 COMPATIBILITY / AUTHOR MAPPING INTERFACE ISSUES: I
771 resolved a couple of outstanding issues with the author mapping
772 interface (Syndication --> Authors), which were preventing new users
773 from being created correctly and author mapping rules from being set up
774 correctly. These partly had to do with new restrictions on user account
775 creation introduced in WordPress 3.0; anyway, they should now be fixed.
776
777 * MORE EFFICIENT SYNDICATED URL LOOKUPS: Several users noticed that the
778 bug fix introduced in 2010.0528 for compatibility with post-listing
779 plugins caused a lot more queries to the database in order to look up
780 numerical post IDs from the URL provided to the filter. This shouldn't
781 cause any major problems, but it is not as efficient as it could be; the
782 code now takes advantage of a more efficient way of doing things,
783 which usually will not require any additional database queries.
784
785 * SIMPLEPIE FEED UPDATE ISSUES: If you have been having significant
786 problems with getting feeds to update correctly, this may be the result
787 of some bugs in the implementation of SimplePie caching that ships with
788 WordPress (as of version 3.0). (You would most commonly experience this
789 error if you continually saw errors such as "No feed found at <...>" in
790 your updates.) Fortunately, SimplePie allows for a great deal of
791 extensibility and this allows me to work around the problem; these
792 error conditions should now be mostly eliminated when the underlying
793 feed is valid.
794
795 * UI: SHOW INACTIVE SOURCES: When you use the default unsubscribe option
796 -- which turns off the subscription to a feed while preserving the posts
797 from it and the syndication-related meta-data for the feed -- the
798 unsubscribed feed can now easily be viewed in a special "Inactive"
799 section of the Syndicated Sources page. (As a side benefit, if you've
800 accidentally, or only temporarily, turned off the subscription to a
801 feed, it is now much easier to restore the feed to being active, or to
802 delete it permanently, if you prefer.
803
804 * UI: FEED FINDER / SWITCH FEED INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: changes to styling
805 and options for the feed finder / switch feed, which should now make it
806 easier, in some cases, to find alternative feeds, and make interface
807 options more clearly visible.
808
809 * FILTERS: `syndicated_item_published` and `syndicated_item_updated` NOW
810 PROPERLY AFFECT THE DATING OF POSTS. These filters used to affect some
811 date-related settings, but not others -- and, most importantly, not the
812 final date that is set for a post's publication or last-modified date
813 in the WordPress database. Now, they do affect that, as they should.
814 (Filters should receive, and return, a long integer, representing a Unix
815 epoch relative timestamp.)
816
817 * MAGIC URL TO CLEAR THE CACHE: Suppose that you need to clear the feed
818 cache, for whatever reason; suppose, even, that you need to clear it on
819 a regular basis. One way you might do this is by logging into the
820 FeedWordPress administrative interface and going to Syndication -->
821 Performance. Another way you might do it, now, is to simply send an
822 HTTP request to a magic URL provided by FeedWordPress: if your blog is
823 at example.com, the URL would be <http://example.com/?clear_cache=1>
824
825 = 2010.0602 =
826
827 * CATEGORY BOX INTERFACE ELEMENT FIXED FOR WP 3.0: Stylesheet changes
828 between WordPress 2.9.x and the WordPress 3.0 RC caused the Categories
829 box under **Syndication --> Categories & Tags** to malfunction. This
830 has been fixed.
831
832 * LINK CATEGORY SELECTION BOX IN SYNDICATION ==> FEEDS FIXED FOR WP 2.8
833 AND 2.9: A WP 3.0 compatibility change introduced in 2010.0531
834 inadvertently broke the Syndicated Link Category selector under
835 Syndication --> Feeds & Updates in WP 2.8 and WP 2.9, causing the post
836 categories to be displayed in the selector rather than the link
837 categories. This should now be fixed so that the selector will work
838 correctly under both the current versions of WordPress and the 3.0 RC.
839
840 * MORE PERMISSIVE HANDLING OF FEEDS WITH BAD CONTENT-TYPE HEADERS: One of
841 the small advantages that MagpieRSS had over SimplePie is that it was
842 more tolerant about parsing well-formed feeds that the remote web server
843 happened to deliver with weird or incorrect HTTP Content-type headers.
844 In feeds affected by this problem, the new SimplePie parser would simply
845 fail to find a feed, due to its being led astray by the contents of the
846 Content-type header. This version includes an extension to SimplePie's
847 content-type sniffer that offers more permissive handling of the HTTP
848 headers.
849
850 * MORE FULL-TEXT "EXCERPTS" NOW PROPERLY SHORTENED. Version 2010.0528
851 introduced code to control for cases in which elements intended for
852 item summaries are (ill-advisedly) used to carry the full text of posts;
853 past versions of FeedWordPress would simply include the full text of the
854 post in the excerpt field, but newer versions now attempt to detect
855 this condition when it arises and to head it off, by blanking out the
856 excerpt field and filling it with an automatically generated short,
857 plain text excerpt from the full content. This release broadens the
858 test conditions that indicate when an excerpt field is treated as
859 identical to the full text of the post, and should therefore improve
860 the handling of some feeds (such as Google Reader feeds) where the full
861 text of each post was still appearing in the excerpt field.
862
863 * FILTERS: `syndicated_item_published` AND `syndicated_item_updated`
864 FILTERS NOW ALLOW FILTER AUTHORS TO CHANGE POST TIMESTAMPS. You can now
865 use the `syndicated_item_published` and `syndicated_item_updated` filter
866 hooks to write filters or add-ons which directly change the post date
867 and most-recently-updated timestamps on incoming syndicated posts. Props
868 to niska for pointing out where the filters needed to be applied in
869 order to change WordPress's internal timestamps for incoming posts.
870
871 = 2010.0531 =
872
873 * PERMALINK / CUSTOM FIELDS PROBLEM RESOLVED: An issue in 2010.0528 caused
874 some posts to be imported without the proper syndication-related
875 meta-data being attached (thus causing permalinks to point back to the
876 aggregator website rather than to the source website, among other
877 problems). This problem has been resolved (and a fix has been applied
878 which will resolve the problem for any posts affected by this problem,
879 if the original post is recent enough to still be available on the feed).
880
881 * UI: The "Back End" section has been split into two separate sections --
882 "Performance" (dealing with caching, database index, and other
883 performance tweaks), and "Diagnostics" (dealing with debug mode,
884 update logging, and a number of new diagnostic tests which I will be
885 rolling out over the next few releases).
886
887 * Several minor interface bug fixes and PHP warning notices eliminated.
888
889 = 2010.0528 =
890
891 #### Compatibility ####
892
893 * SIMPLEPIE IS NOW USED TO PARSE FEEDS; NO MORE MAGPIERSS UPGRADES NEEDED:
894 One of the biggest changes in this release is that FeedWordPress no
895 longer depends on MagpieRSS to parse feeds, and has switched to the much
896 more up-to-date and flexible SimplePie feed parser, which is included as
897 a standard part of WordPress versions 2.8 and later. Using SimplePie will
898 hopefully allow for better handling of feeds going further, and will
899 allow me greater flexibility in determining how exactly the feed parser
900 will operate. It also means that FeedWordPress no longer requires
901 special upgrades to the WordPress core MagpieRSS files, and should
902 eliminate quite a bit of complexity.
903
904 * MAGPIERSS COMPATIBILITY LAYER FOR EXISTING FILTERS AND ADD-ONS: However,
905 I have also implemented a compatibility layer to ensure that existing
906 filters and add-ons for FeedWordPress which depended on the MagpieRSS
907 data format *should not be broken* by the switch to SimplePie. Going
908 forward, I recommend that new filters and add-ons be written to take
909 advantage of the SimplePie object representations of items, feeds, etc.,
910 rather than the MagpieRSS arrays, but the MagpieRSS arrays will still
911 be available and older filters should continue to work as they have in
912 the past.
913
914 * COMPATIBILITY WITH WORDPRESS 2.9.x and 3.0: This release has been tested
915 for the existing WordPress 2.9.x branch and with the upcoming release of
916 WordPress 3.0. Changes in the user interface JavaScript between WordPress
917 2.8.x and WordPress 2.9 caused the tag box interface element to break in
918 the Syndication --> Categories & Tags settings page; changes in the API
919 functions for adding new authors caused fatal errors under certain
920 conditions in WordPress 3.0. These breakages have been fixed.
921
922 * DROPPED LEGACY SUPPORT FOR WORDPRESS PRIOR TO 2.8: Because SimplePie is
923 not included with versions of WordPress prior to 2.8, I have chosen to
924 drop legacy support for WordPress versions 1.5 through 2.7. If you are
925 using FeedWordPress with a version of WordPress before 2.8, you will
926 have to upgrade your installation of WordPress in order to take
927 advantage of this release.
928
929 * PHP 5.3 COMPATIBILITY: A couple of compatibility issues, which were
930 causing fatal errors amd ugly warnings for users of PHP 5.3,
931 have been eliminated.
932
933 #### Features and Processing ####
934
935 * INTERFACE REORGANIZATION: The interface restructuring, began with
936 Version 2009.0612, has been completed. Catch-all settings pages have
937 been eliminated entirely for pages that cover each aspect of handling
938 a feed: Feeds & Updates, Posts & Links, Authors, Categories & Tags,
939 and Back End handling of the database and diagnostic information.
940 Extensive new interface hooks allow add-on modules to significantly
941 change or extend the FeedWordPress admin interface and workflow.
942
943 * STORING INFORMATION FROM THE FEED IN CUSTOM FIELDS: Many users
944 have written to request the ability to store information from elements
945 in the feed in a custom field on each post. (So that, for example, if
946 post includes a `itunes:duration` element, you could store the contents
947 in a Custom Field called `duration` on the post (for a Theme to access
948 later). The Custom Post Settings under Syndication --> Posts & Links now
949 allow you to access any item or feed tag, using a syntax similar to
950 a much-simplified version of XPath. See Posts & Links settings for
951 details.
952
953 * UPDATE-FREEZING ON MANUALLY EDITED POSTS: FeedWordPress now allows you
954 to mark posts that have been manually edited, so that the changes you
955 make will not be overwritten by later updates from the feed. If you make
956 manual edits to a particular post, just check the "Manual editing"
957 checkbox in order to protect your changes from being overwritten. If you
958 want to block *all* posts from being updated after they are imported
959 for the first time, a new "Updated Posts" setting in Posts & Links
960 allows you to freeze all posts from a particular feed, or all syndicated
961 posts.
962
963 * SETTING: FEED-BY-FEED SETTINGS FOR WHERE PERMALINKS POINT TO: You've
964 always been able to tell FeedWordPress whether permalinks for posts
965 should point to the original source of the story or the local copy. Now
966 you can choose different policies for different feeds, instead of one
967 global policy for all feeds. (Of course, you can still use a global
968 default if you prefer.)
969
970 * SETTING: USER CONTROL OVER TIMING BASIS. You can now determine the
971 schedule on which feeds are considered ready to poll for updates --
972 by default feeds become ready for polling after about 1 hour. You can
973 now increase or decrease the time window under Syndication --> Feeds &
974 Updates. (However, please pay *CAREFUL ATTENTION* to the recommendations
975 and DO NOT set the scheduling lower than 60 minutes unless you are
976 ABSOLUTELY SURE that you have specific permission from webmaster who
977 provides that specific feed to poll more frequently than that. If you
978 set this too low (and about 60 minutes is the polite minimum if you
979 haven't been given a different figure), most webmasters will consider
980 the frequent hits on their server as rude, or even downright abusive.
981
982 * OTHER SETTINGS: New settings also include the ability to stop FWP from
983 resolving relative URLs within syndicated content, and the ability to
984 choose whether FeedWordPress should indicate the comment feed from the
985 original source, or the local comment feed, when providing the comment
986 feed URL for a syndicated post.
987
988 #### Parsing ####
989
990 * BETTER DATE HANDLING -- FEWER FLASHBACKS TO 1969 and 1970: FeedWordPress
991 has made some bugfixes and some improvements in the logic for parsing
992 dates. This should allow FeedWordPress to correctly parse more dates in
993 more feeds; and, in the last resort, when FeedWordPress fails to
994 correctly parse a date, to fall back to a more intelligent default. This
995 should hopefully avoid most or all error conditions that have resulted
996 in articles being erroneously dated to the dawn of the Unix epoch
997 (31 December 1969 or 1 January 1970).
998
999 * FULL-TEXT "EXCERPTS" NOW PROPERLY SHORTENED. Based on a straightforward
1000 reading of the existing RSS specs, it's reasonable for the
1001 rss:description element to be read as a plaintext summary or excerpt for
1002 the item containing the description -- with the full text of the item,
1003 if available, in another, better-suited element, such as the de facto
1004 standard content:encoded extension element. The problem is that uses of
1005 RSS rarely have much to do with anything like a straightforward reading
1006 of the specs. As a result, many actual RSS producers in the wild put the
1007 full text of the article in a description element. But since
1008 FeedWordPress has treated this text as a summary, this produces
1009 aggregated posts with lengthy "excerpts" containing the full text of the
1010 article. This release of FeedWordPress fixes the problem by doing a
1011 little digging before treating rss:description as a summary: if the
1012 description element is used properly as a plain text summary, then
1013 FeedWordPress will take the summary provided by the feed, rather than
1014 recreating its own excerpt from the full text; but if an RSS item has no
1015 full-text element other than description, FeedWordPress will treat the
1016 description element as the full text of the article, and generate a
1017 shortened excerpt automatically from that text.
1018
1019 #### API ####
1020
1021 * TEMPLATE API: new template tags `get_local_permalink()` and
1022 `the_local_permalink()` allow you to access the permalink for a post on
1023 your aggregator site, even when FeedWordPress is rewriting permalinks to
1024 point to the original source site.
1025
1026 * NEW HOOKS FOR ADD-ONS AND FILTERS: I have added a number of new hooks
1027 which allow add-on modules to filter more precisely, gather information
1028 at more points, and to enhance the FeedWordPress admin interface. For
1029 a list of new hooks and documentation, see the FeedWordPress
1030 documentation wiki at
1031 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/add-ons-and-filters>
1032
1033 * FILTER API: A number of new utility methods have been added to the
1034 SyndicatedPost class to make it easier for filters and add-ons to
1035
1036 * FILTER API: Globals $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta DEPRECATED. These
1037 global variables, originally introduced to allow filters access to
1038 information about the source feed in `syndicated_item` filters (which
1039 were passed in through global variables rather than as parameters
1040 because of a bug in WP 1.5 which was then fixed in 1.5.1) have been
1041 DEPRECATED. If you have any filters or add-ons which still depend on
1042 these global variables, you should see about fixing them to access data
1043 about the source feed using the SyndicatedPost::link element instead.
1044 For documentation, see the FeedWordPress documentation wiki at
1045 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedpost> and
1046 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedlink>.
1047
1048 * DIAGNOSTICS: I've included a number of new diagnostic options and
1049 messages, which should allow an experienced user to better investigate
1050 any problems that may crop up.
1051
1052 #### Bug Fixes ####
1053
1054 * BUGFIX: & IN PERMALINKS NO LONGER CAUSING ATOM OR HTML VALIDATION
1055 EFFORTS: Many users reported an issue in which syndicating a feed with
1056 special XML characters in the URLs (& was the most common, since it is
1057 used to separate HTTP GET parameters) would cause the aggregator's
1058 feeds to produce invalid (malformed) XML. This update addresses the
1059 issue in Atom feeds. Unfortunately, it has not been technically possible
1060 to address the problem in RSS 2.0 feeds, due to limitations on
1061 WordPress's internal templates for RSS feeds.
1062
1063 * BUGFIX: BROKEN URLS IN "POPULAR POSTS" AND SIMILAR PLUGINS SHOULD NO
1064 LONGER BE BROKEN. A number of users noticed an issue where plugins and
1065 templates that listed posts in locations outside of the post loop
1066 (for example, "Popular Posts"-style plugins that listed posts in the
1067 sidebar), often produced the wrong URL for post links. (Typically, all
1068 the posts listed would get the same wrong URL.) This should now be
1069 fixed. Thanks to Björn for sending in a quick fix!
1070
1071 * MINOR BUGFIXES: This release includes a number of fixes to minor bugs
1072 and compatibility issues, including: silent failures of the "Syndicate"
1073 button, "Illegal Offset Type" error messages from MagpieRSS, and others.
1074
1075 = 2009.0707 =
1076
1077 * BUGFIX: WORDPRESS 2.8 AJAX COMPATIBILITY ISSUES RESOLVED (blank or
1078 truncated "Syndicated Sites" administration page): Due to changes in the
1079 AJAX interface elements between WordPress 2.7 and WordPress 2.8, several
1080 FeedWordPress users encountered an issue where the front "Syndication"
1081 page in the FeedWordPress administrative interface would come up blank,
1082 without the normal "Syndicated Sites" list and "Update" control, or
1083 sometimes wth the boxes visible but one or both of them truncated, with
1084 only the title bar. This issue should now be resolved: with the new
1085 version of FeedWordPress, the compatibility issue that caused the
1086 disappearance should be eliminated, and if boxes are shown with only
1087 their handle visible, you should once again be able to drop down the
1088 rest of the box by clicking once on its title bar.
1089
1090 * BUGFIX: TAG SETTING WIDGET FIXED. Due to changes in interface elements
1091 between WordPress 2.7 and WordPress 2.8, people using FeedWordPress with
1092 WordPress 2.8 found that the widget for setting tags to be applied to
1093 all syndicated posts, or all syndicated posts from a particular feed,
1094 no longer displayed "Add" and "Remove" buttons for individual tags. This
1095 issue has now been fixed, and the tagging widget should once again work
1096 more or less exactly like the tagging widget for individual posts in the
1097 normal WordPress admin interface.
1098
1099 = 2009.0618 =
1100
1101 * BUGFIX: MYSTERY ERRORS WITH WITH WP_Http_Fsockopen HTTP TRANSPORT
1102 ELIMINATED: Thanks to a combination of a subtle bug in FeedWordPress,
1103 and changes to the HTTP transport code in WordPress, a number of users
1104 encountered an error in which any time they attempted to add a new feed
1105 through the FeedFinder interface, FeedWordPress would fail and display
1106 an HTTP request failure diagnostic message. The subtle bug has been
1107 fixed, and with it, most of these errors should now be eliminated.
1108
1109 Be sure to upgrade your MagpieRSS to the most recent MagpieRSS version
1110 after you have insalled FeedWordPress 2009.0618, or this bug fix will
1111 not take effect.
1112
1113 = 2009.0613 =
1114
1115 * INTERFACE/BUGFIX: WORDPRESS 2.8 CATEGORY BOX FIX. Thanks to a subtle
1116 change in class names between the WordPress 2.7 and 2.8 stylesheets,
1117 category boxes in the FeedWordPress settings interface tended to overflow
1118 and have a lot of messy-looking overlapping text under WordPress 2.8.
1119 This has now been fixed.
1120
1121 * FeedFinder FAILURE DIAGNOSTICS: When FWP's FeedFinder fails to find any
1122 feeds at a given URL (for example, when you are trying to add a
1123 subscription through the administrative interface and you run into an
1124 error message), FeedWordPress now provides more diagnostic information
1125 for the reasons behind the failure. If that helps you, great; if not,
1126 it should help me respond more intelligently to your support request..
1127
1128 = 2009.0612 =
1129
1130 * WORDPRESS 2.8 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress 2009.0612 has been tested for
1131 compatibility with the recent version 2.8 release of WordPress.
1132
1133 * INTERFACE RESTRUCTURING: In order to avoid settings posts from becoming
1134 too crowded, and to modularize and better organize the user interface,
1135 new "Posts" and "Categories & Tags" subpages have been created under the
1136 "Syndication" menu. "Posts" controls settings for individal syndicated
1137 posts (such as publication status, comment and ping status, whether or
1138 not to use the original location of the post as the permalink, whether
1139 or not to expose posts to formatting filters, and so on). "Categories &
1140 Tags" controls settings for assigning new syndicated posts to categories
1141 and tags, such as categories or tags to apply to all syndicated posts,
1142 and how to handle categories that do not yet exist in the WordPress
1143 database. These subpages, like the Authors subpage, handle settings for
1144 the global default level and for individual syndicated feeds.
1145
1146 Corresponding to these new subpages, the old Syndication Settings and
1147 Feed Settings subpages have been cleaned up and simplified, and now only
1148 link to the appropriate subpages for options that can be set in the
1149 Posts, Authors, or Categories & Tags subpages.
1150
1151 * FEATURE: ADD CUSTOM SETTINGS TO EACH SYNDICATED POST: FeedWordPress has
1152 long had an interface for creating custom settings for each syndicated
1153 *feed* which could be retrieved in templates using the `get_feed_meta()`
1154 template function. But it had no feature for adding custom fields to
1155 each individual syndicated *post*. In response to requests from users, I
1156 have added the ability to apply custom fields to each individual
1157 syndicated post, using the new Syndication --> Posts subpage. You can
1158 set up custom fields to be applied to every syndicated post, or custom
1159 fields to be applied to syndicated posts from a particular feed.
1160
1161 * FEATURE: MAGPIERSS VERSION CHECK AND UPGRADE: FeedWordPress will attempt
1162 to determine whether or not you are using the upgraded version of
1163 MagpieRSS that comes packaged with FeedWordPress. If not, it will throw
1164 an error on admin pages, and, if you are a site administrator, it will
1165 give you the option to ignore the error message, or to attempt an
1166 automatic upgrade (using a native file copy). If the file copy fails,
1167 FeedWordPress will offer some guidance on how to perform the upgrade
1168 manually.
1169
1170 * BLANK POSTS PROBLEM NO LONGER OCCURS WITH OLD & BUSTED MAGPIERSS: Due
1171 to the fact that I relied on a content normalization that occurs in my
1172 upgraded version of MagpieRSS, but not in the old & busted version of
1173 MagpieRSS that ships with WordPress, until this version, if you tried to
1174 syndicate an Atom feed without having performed the (*strongly
1175 recommended*) MagpieRSS upgrade, all of the posts would come up with
1176 completely blank contents. That's not because MagpieRSS couldn't read
1177 the data, but rather because the new Magpie version puts that data in a
1178 location where the old version doesn't, and I was only looking in that
1179 newer location. Now it checks for both, meaning that posts will continue
1180 to display their contents even if you don't upgrade MagpieRSS. (But you
1181 **really should** upgrade it, anyway.)
1182
1183 * BUGFIX: RELATIVE URI RESOLUTION FOR POST CONTENT RESTORED. Some time
1184 back, I added support for resolving relative URIs against xml:base on
1185 feeds that support it to the MagpieRSS upgrade in FeedWordPress. Then I
1186 took out code that did the same thing from the main FeedWordPress code.
1187 Of course, the problem is that some people, even though it is clearly
1188 stupid or evil to do so, still include relative URIs for images or links
1189 in posts on feed formats that do *not* adequately support xml:base
1190 (notably, RSS 2.0 feeds). In response to a user request, I have added
1191 this functionality back in, so that MagpieRSS will resolve any relative
1192 URIs that it knows how to resolve using xml:base, and then FeedWordPress
1193 will attempt to resolve any relative URIs that are left over afterwards.
1194
1195 * BUGFIX: INTERFACE OPTION FOR SETTING SYNDICATED POST PUBLICATION STATUS
1196 ON A FEED-BY-FEED BASIS HAS BEEN RESTORED: Due to a version-checking
1197 bug, users of WordPress 2.7.x lost an option from the "Edit a syndicated
1198 feed" interface which allowed them to determine whether newly syndicated
1199 posts should be published immediately, held as "Pending Review," saved
1200 as drafts, or saved as private posts. (The option to change this
1201 setting globally remained in place, but users could no longer set it on
1202 a feed-by-feed basis.) The version-checking bug has been fixed, and the
1203 option has been restored.
1204
1205 * BUGFIX: "ARE YOU SURE?" FATAL ERROR ELIMINATED AND SECURITY IMPROVED:
1206 Under certain circumstances (for example, when users have configured
1207 their browser or proxy not to send HTTP Referer headers, for privacy or
1208 other reasons), many features in the FeedWordPress administrative
1209 interface (such as adding new feeds or changing settings) would hit a
1210 fatal error, displaying only a cryptic message reading "Are you sure?"
1211 and a blank page following it. This problem has been eliminated by
1212 taking advantage of WordPress's nonce functions, which allow the
1213 security check which ran into this error to work properly even without
1214 receiving an HTTP Referer header. (N.B.: WordPress's nonce functions
1215 were first introduced in WordPress 2.0.3. If you're using FeedWordPress
1216 with an older version of WordPress, there's no fix for this problem:
1217 you'll just need to turn Referer headers back on. Sorry.)
1218
1219 * BUGFIX: MANUALLY-ALTERED POST STATUS, COMMENT STATUS, AND PING STATUS NO
1220 LONGER REVERTED BY POST UPDATES: If you manually altered the post status,
1221 comment status, or ping status of a syndicated post from what it was set
1222 to when first syndicated -- for example, if you had a feed that was set
1223 to bring in new posts as "Pending Review," and you then marked some of
1224 the pending posts as "Published" and others as "Unpublished" -- then
1225 in previous versions of FeedWordPress, these manual changes to the
1226 status would be lost -- so that, for example, your Published or Unpublished
1227 articles would revert to Pending Review -- if the source feed made any
1228 upates to the item. This could make the Pending Review feature both
1229 unreliable and also extremely frustrating to work with. The good news is
1230 that this bug has since been fixed: if you manually update the status
1231 of a post, it will no longer be reverted if or when the post is updated.
1232
1233 * BUGFIX: OCCASIONAL FATAL ERROR ON UPDATE ELIMINATED: Under certain
1234 limited conditions (specifically, when both the title and the content of
1235 a post to be updated are empty), an attempt to update the post would
1236 result in a fatal error. This has been fixed.
1237
1238 * INTERFACE: "CONFIGURE SETTINGS" CONVENIENCE LINK ADDED TO CONFIRMATION
1239 MESSAGE WHEN A NEW FEED IS ADDED: When you add a new subscription to
1240 FeedWordPress, the message box that appears to confirm it now includes a
1241 handy link to the feed's settings subpage, so that you can quickly set
1242 up any special settings you may want to set up for the new feed, without
1243 having to hunt through the list of all your other subscriptions to pick
1244 out the new one.
1245
1246 * INTERFACE: SIMPLIFYING AND CLARIFYING AUTOMATIC UPDATES SETTINGS. I have
1247 removed an interval setting for the cronless automatic updates which has
1248 confused many FeedWordPress users. In past versions of FWP, when you
1249 turned on automatic updates, you would be presented with a time interval
1250 setting which controlled how often FeedWordPress would check for feeds
1251 ready to be polled for updates. (That is, it DID NOT control how often
1252 feeds *would be polled*; it controlled how often FeedWordPress would
1253 *check* for feeds that *had become ready to poll*. The schedule on which
1254 feeds became ready for polling was still controlled either by requests
1255 encoded in elements within the feed itself, or else according to an
1256 internal calculation within FeedWordPress, averaging out to about 1 hour,
1257 if the feed did not include any scheduling request elements.) Since many
1258 users very often (and understandably) confused the purpose of this
1259 setting, and since the setting is for a feature that's actually very
1260 unlikely to require any manual control by the user, I have removed the
1261 setting; FeedWordPress now simply uses the default value of checking for
1262 feeds to poll every 10 minutes.
1263
1264 * FEEDFINDER PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT: FeedWordPress's FeedFinder class
1265 now uses `array_unique()` to make sure that it doesn't waste time
1266 repeatedly iterating over and polling the same URI. Props to Camilo
1267 (<http://projects.radgeek.com/2008/12/14/feedwordpress-20081214/#comment-20090122160414>).
1268
1269 = 2008.1214 =
1270
1271 * WORDPRESS 2.7 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress has been tested for
1272 compatibility with the newly released WordPress 2.7. WordPress 2.7 has
1273 deprecated the Snoopy library for HTTP requests, which caused a fatal
1274 error for users who had not installed the MagpieRSS upgrade (or whose
1275 installation of the MagpieRSS upgrade was overwritten by a recent update
1276 of WordPress). FeedWordPress now handles things gracefully when Snoopy
1277 is not immediately available.
1278
1279 * INTERFACE SPIFFED UP: Interface elements have been updated so that
1280 FeedWordPress's management interface fits in more naturally with the
1281 WordPress 2.7 interface (including a new logo and a number of small
1282 interface tweaks).
1283
1284 * BUG WITH TAGS FOR SYNDICATED ARTICLES FIXED: Several users encountered a
1285 bug with the option to add tags to all syndicated posts under
1286 Syndication --> Settings -- if you told FeedWordPress to add more than
1287 one tag to all syndicated posts, instead of doing so correctly, it would
1288 add a *single* tag instead, whose name was composed of the names of all
1289 the tags you asked it to add. This bug was the result of nothing more
1290 dignified than a typographical error on my part. It has now been fixed.
1291
1292 * MORE INFORMATION AVAILABLE WHEN FEEDWORDPRESS CAN'T FIND A FEED: When
1293 you enter a URL for a new syndication source, FeedWordPress uses a
1294 simple feed-finding algorithm (originally based on Mark Pilgrim's
1295 Universal Feed Finder) to try to determine whether the URL is the URL
1296 for a feed, or, if the URL points to an ordinary website rather than to
1297 a feed, whether there is a feed for that website. All well and good, but
1298 if FeedWordPress failed to find a feed, for whatever reason, it would
1299 typically return nothing more than a nasty little note to the effect of
1300 "no feed found," without any explanation of what went wrong.
1301 FeedWordPress now keeps track of error conditions from the HTTP
1302 requests that it uses in the course of looking for the feed, and so may
1303 be able to give you a bit more information about the nature of the
1304 problem if something goes wrong.
1305
1306
1307 = 2008.1105 =
1308
1309 * INTERFACE RESTRUCTURING AND SYNDICATION --> AUTHORS PAGE: As a first
1310 step towards modularizing and better organizing the user interface, a
1311 new "Authors" subpage has been created under the Syndication menu, which
1312 controls settings for syndicated authors, both at the global default
1313 level and at level of individual syndicated feeds.
1314
1315 * BUG RELATED TO THE ATTRIBUTION OF POSTS TO THE WRONG AUTHOR FIXED: Some
1316 users encountered an issue in which posts by different authors on
1317 different blogs -- especially blogs generated by Blogger -- were
1318 mistakenly attributed to a single author. The problem was caused by the
1319 way in which FeedWordPress matches syndicated authors to user accounts
1320 in the WordPress database: normally, if two feeds each list an author
1321 with the same e-mail address, they are counted as being the same person.
1322 Normally this works well, but it creates an issue in cases where
1323 blogging software assigns a single anonymous e-mail address to users who
1324 do not want their real e-mail address published. This is, for example,
1325 what Blogger does (by giving all users a default e-mail address of
1326 <noreply@blogger.com> if they don't want their own e-mail address
1327 listed). FeedWordPress now allows the user to correct for this problem
1328 with a couple of new settings under **Syndication --> Authors**, which
1329 allow users to turn off e-mail based author matching for particular
1330 addresses, or, if desired, to turn it off entirely. By default, e-mail
1331 based author matching is still turned on, but disabled for a list of
1332 known generic e-mail addresses. Right now, the "list" consists entirely
1333 of <noreply@blogger.com>; if you know other addresses that should be
1334 added, please [contact me](http://radgeek.com/contact) to let me know.
1335
1336 Please note that if you have already encountered this issue on your
1337 blog, upgrading FeedWordPress will prevent it from re-occurring in the
1338 future, but you still need to do two other things to fix the existing
1339 problem on your blog.
1340
1341 First, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to
1342 change the existing author mapping rules to re-map a a syndicated
1343 author's name to the proper target account. Go to **Syndication -->
1344 Authors**, select the feed you want to change from the drop-down list,
1345 and then change the settings under the "Syndicated Authors" section.
1346 (You will probably need to select "will be assigned to a new user..." to
1347 create a new user account with the appropriate name.)
1348
1349 Second, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to
1350 re-assign already-syndicated posts that were mis-attributed to the
1351 correct author. You can do that from **Syndication --> Authors** by
1352 using the author re-assignment feature, described below.
1353
1354 * AUTHOR RE-ASSIGNMENT FOR A PARTICULAR FEED: The author settings page
1355 for each syndicated feed, under **Syndication --> Authors**, now
1356 includes an section titled "Fixing mis-matched authors," which provides
1357 an interface for re-assigning or deleting all posts attributed to a
1358 particular author on a particular feed.
1359
1360 * SUPPORT FOR `<atom:source>` ELEMENT IN SYNDICATED FEEDS: Some feeds
1361 (for example, those produced by FeedWordPress) aggregate content from
1362 several different sources, and include information about the original
1363 source of the post in an `<atom:source>` element. A new setting under
1364 **Syndication --> Options** allows you to control what FeedWordPress
1365 will report as the source of posts syndicated from aggregator feeds in
1366 your templates and feeds: you can have FeedWordPress report that the
1367 source of a post is the aggregator feed itself, or you can have it
1368 report that the source of a post is the original source that the
1369 aggregator originally syndicated the post from.
1370
1371 By default, FeedWordPress will report the aggregator, not the original
1372 source, as the source of a syndicated item.
1373
1374 * LOAD BALANCING AND TIME LIMITING FEATURES FOR UPDATES: Some users have
1375 encountered issues due to running up against PHP execution time limits
1376 during the process of updating large syndicated feeds, or a very large
1377 set of syndicated feeds. FeedWordPress now has a feature that allows you
1378 to limit the total amount of time spent updating a feed, through the
1379 "Time limit on updates" setting under **Syndication --> Options**. By
1380 turning on this setting and adjusting the time limit to a low enough
1381 figure to avoid your PHP installation's time-out setting. (PHP execution
1382 time limits are usually in the vicinity of 30 seconds, so an update
1383 time limit of 25 seconds or so should provide plenty of time for updates
1384 while allowing a cushion of time for other, non-update-related functions
1385 to do their work.)
1386
1387 If feed updates are interrupted by the time limit, FeedWordPress uses
1388 some simple load balancing features to make sure that updates to other
1389 feeds will not be blocked by the time-hogging feed, and will also make
1390 sure that when the interrupted update is resumed, FeedWordPress will
1391 skip ahead to resume processing items at the point at which it was
1392 interrupted last time, so that posts further down in the feed will
1393 eventually get processed, and not get blocked by the amount of time it
1394 takes to process the items higher up in the feed.
1395
1396 * `guid` INDEX CREATION BUTTON: FeedWordPress frequently issues queries on
1397 the `guid` column of the WordPress posts database (since it uses post
1398 guid URIs to keep track of which posts it has syndicated). In very large
1399 FeedWordPress installations, you can often significantly improve
1400 performance by creating a database index on the `guid` column, but
1401 normally you would need to poke around with MySQL or a tool like
1402 phpMyAdmin to do this. FeedWordPress can now save you the trouble: to
1403 create an index on the `guid` column, just go to
1404 **Syndication --> Options**, and mash the button at the bottom of the
1405 "Back End" section.
1406
1407 = 2008.1101 =
1408
1409 * INTERFACE BUG THAT PREVENTED ADDING NEW SITES FIXED: The UI reforms in
1410 FWP 2008.1030 unintentionally introduced a bug that prevents clean
1411 installations of FeedWordPress from providing an input box for adding
1412 new feeds to the list of syndicated feeds. This bug has been fixed.
1413
1414 = 2008.1030 =
1415
1416 * WORDPRESS 2.6 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with
1417 WordPress 2.6, and should work more or less seamlessly with the new post
1418 revision system. A bug which caused multiple new revisions to be created
1419 for posts on certain feeds, regardless of whether or not the item had
1420 been updated, has been fixed.
1421
1422 * INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: The user interface has been substantially
1423 restyled to fit in better with the visual style of WordPress 2.5 and
1424 2.6.
1425
1426 * YOUTUBE BUG FIXED: POSTS SYNDICATED THROUGH AN AUTOMATIC UPDATE ARE NO
1427 LONGER STRIPPED OF `<OBJECT>` TAGS AND CERTAIN OTHER HTML ELEMENTS: Due
1428 to the way that some versions of WordPress process posts that are
1429 inserted into the database when no user is logged in, many users
1430 experienced an issue where YouTube videos and other content using the
1431 HTML `<object>` tag would be stripped out of posts that were syndicated
1432 during an automatic update. (Posts that were syndicated through manual
1433 updates from within the WordPress Dashboard were not affected, because
1434 the issue does not arise when an update is executed under a logged-in
1435 administrator's credentials.) This bug has now been fixed; YouTube
1436 videos and other content using `<object>` tags should now appear
1437 properly in syndicated posts, regardless of the way in which the post
1438 was syndicated.
1439
1440 * AJAX BUGS FIXED: Bugs which blocked the normal operation of WordPress
1441 2.5's AJAX interface elements when FeedWordPress was activated have been
1442 fixed.
1443
1444 * TAG SUPPORT: A couple of features have been introduced to take advantage
1445 of the tagging features in WordPress 2.3.x, 2.5.x, and 2.6.x. Now, when
1446 unfamiliar categories are encountered for posts on a feed, you can
1447 choose for FeedWordPress (1) to drop the category; (2) to drop the
1448 category and to filter out any post that does not match at least one
1449 familiar category; (3) to create a new category with that name, or,
1450 now, you can also have FeedWordPress (4) create a new *tag* with that
1451 name. This option can be set site-wide under Syndication --> Options,
1452 or it can be set on a feed-by-feed basis in a feed's Edit screen.
1453
1454 In addition, you can now set particular tags to apply to all incoming
1455 syndicated posts, under Syndication --> Options, or you can set tags
1456 to apply to all incoming syndicated posts from a particular feed in that
1457 feed's Edit screen.
1458
1459 * FORMATTING FILTERS: There is a new option available under Syndication ->
1460 Options which allows users to choose whether or not to expose syndicated
1461 posts to being altered by formatting filters. By default, FeedWordPress
1462 has always protected syndicated posts (which are already in display-ready
1463 HTML when they are syndicated) from being reformatted by formatting
1464 filters. However, this approach means that certain plugins which depend
1465 on formatting filters (for example, to add "Share This" bars or relevant
1466 links to the end of a post) are blocked from working on any syndicated
1467 posts. If you want to use one of these plugins together with
1468 FeedWordPress, you can now do so by changing the "Formatting Filters"
1469 setting from "Protect" to "Expose."
1470
1471 * `<atom:source>` ELEMENTS NOW INCLUDED IN ATOM FEED: Atom 1.0 provides
1472 a standard method for aggregators to indicate information about the original source of
1473 a syndicated post, using the `<atom:source>` element. FeedWordPress now
1474 introduces standard `<atom:source>` elements including the title, homepage, and
1475 feed URI of the source from which a syndicated post was syndicated. Cf.
1476 <http://www.atomenabled.org/developers/syndication/atom-format-spec.php#element.source>
1477
1478 * MODULARIZATION OF CODE: The code for different elements of FeedWordPress
1479 has been broken out into several modules for easier inspection,
1480 documentation, and maintenance of the code.
1481
1482 * VERSIONING SCHEME CHANGED: FeedWordPress's feature set has proven stable
1483 enough that it can now be removed from beta status; a good thing, since
1484 I was very quickly running out of version numbers to use. New releases
1485 of FeedWordPress will have version numbers based on the date of their
1486 release.
1487
1488 = 0.993 =
1489
1490 * WORDPRESS 2.5.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible
1491 with WordPress 2.5.1.
1492
1493 * WORDPRESS 2.5 INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: FeedWordPress's Dashboard
1494 interface has undergone several cosmetic changes that should help it
1495 integrate better with the WordPress Dashboard interface in WordPress
1496 version 2.5.x.
1497
1498 * SYNDICATED POSTS CAN BE MARKED AS "PENDING REVIEW": WordPress 2.3 users
1499 can now take advantage of WordPress's new "Pending Review" features for
1500 incoming syndicated posts. Posts marked as "Pending Review" are not
1501 published immediately, but are marked as ready to be reviewed by an
1502 Administrator or Editor, who can then choose to publish the post or
1503 hold it back. If you want to review syndicated posts from a particular
1504 feed, or from all feeds, before they are posted, then use
1505 Syndication --> Syndicated Sites --> Edit or Syndication --> Options to
1506 change the settings for handling new posts.
1507
1508 * AWARE OF NEW URI FOR del.icio.us FEEDS: Previous releases of
1509 FeedWordPress already automatically split del.icio.us tags up
1510 appropriately appropriately when generating categories. (del.icio.us
1511 feeds smoosh all the tags into a single `<dc:subject>` element,
1512 separated by spaces; FeedWordPress un-smooshes them into multiple
1513 categories by separating them at whitespace.) Unfortunately, del.icio.us
1514 recently broke the existing behavior by changing host names for their
1515 feeds from del.icio.us to feeds.delicious.com. Version 0.993 accounts
1516 for the new host name and un-breaks the tag splitting.
1517
1518 = 0.992 =
1519
1520 * AUTHOR RE-MAPPING: FeedWordPress now offers considerable control over
1521 how author names on a feed are translated into usernames within the
1522 WordPress database. When a post by an unrecognized author comes in,
1523 Administrators can now specify any username as the default username to
1524 assign the post to by setting the option in Syndication --> Options
1525 (formerly FeedWordPress only allowed you to assign such posts to user
1526 #1, the site administrator). Administrators can also create re-mapping
1527 rules for particular feeds (under Syndication --> Syndicated Sites -->
1528 Edit), so that (for example) any posts attributed to "Administrator"
1529 on the feed <http://praxeology.net/blog/feed/> will be assigned to
1530 a user named "Roderick T. Long," rather than a user named
1531 "Administrator." These settings also allow administrators to filter out
1532 posts by particular users, and to control what will happen when
1533 FeedWordPress encounters a post by an unrecognized user on that
1534 particular feed.
1535
1536 * BUG RELATED TO URIS CONTAINING AMPERSAND CHARACTERS FIXED: A bug in
1537 WordPress 2.x's handling of URIs in Blogroll links created problems for
1538 updating any feeds whose URIs included an ampersand character, such as
1539 Google News RSS feeds and other feeds that have multiple parameters
1540 passed through HTTP GET. If you experienced this bug, the most likely
1541 effect was that FeedWordPress simply would not import new posts from a
1542 feed when instructred to do so, returning a "0 new posts" response. In
1543 other cases, it might lead to unpredictable results from feed updates,
1544 such as importing posts which were not contained in the feed being
1545 syndicated, but which did appear elsewhere on the same website. This bug
1546 has, hopefully, been resolved, by correcting for the bug in WordPress.
1547
1548 = 0.991 =
1549
1550 * WORDPRESS MU COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with
1551 recent releases of WordPress MU. Once FeedWordPress is made available
1552 as a plugin, each individual blog can choose to activate FeedWordPress
1553 and syndicate content from its own set of contributors.
1554
1555 * DISPLAY OF MAGPIE WARNINGS: A number of MagpieRSS warnings or error
1556 messages that were displayed when performing an automatic update are
1557 no longer displayed, unless debugging parameters have been explicitly
1558 enabled.
1559
1560 * BUG RELATED TO INTERNATIONAL CHARACTERS IN AUTHOR NAMES FIXED: Due to a
1561 subtle incompatability between the way that FeedWordPress generated new
1562 user information, and the way that WordPress 2.0 and later added new
1563 authors to the database, FeedWordPress might end up creating duplicate
1564 authors, or throwing a critical error message, when it encountered
1565 authors whose names included international characters. This
1566 incompatability has now been fixed; hopefully, authors with
1567 international characters in their names should now be handled properly.
1568
1569 * `<media:content>` BUG IN MAGPIERSS FIXED: A bug in MagpieRSS's handling
1570 of namespaced elements has been fixed. Among other things, this bug
1571 caused items containing a Yahoo MediaRSS `<media:content>` element (such
1572 as many of the feeds produced by wordpress.com) to be represented
1573 incorrectly, with only a capital "A" where the content of the post
1574 should have been. Feeds containing `<media:content>` elements should now
1575 be syndicated correctly.
1576
1577 * update_feedwordpress PARAMETER: You can now use an HTTP GET parameter
1578 (`update_feedwordpress=1`) to request that FeedWordPress poll its feeds
1579 for updates. When used together with a crontab or other means of
1580 scheduling tasks, this means that you can keep your blog automatically
1581 updated on a regular schedule, even if you do not choose to use the
1582 cron-less automatic updates option.
1583
1584 * Some minor interface-related bugs were also fixed.
1585
1586
1587 = 0.99 =
1588
1589 Version 0.99 adds several significant new features, fixes some bugs, and
1590 provides compatability with WordPress 2.2.x and 2.3.x.
1591
1592 * WORDPRESS 2.2 AND 2.3 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be
1593 compatible with WordPress version 2.2 and the upcoming WordPress
1594 version 2.3. In particular, it has been tested extensively against
1595 WordPress 2.2.3 and WordPress 2.3 Release Candidate 1.
1596
1597 * AUTOMATIC UPDATES WITHOUT CRON: FeedWordPress now allows you to
1598 automatically schedule checks for new posts without using external task
1599 scheduling tools such as cron. In order to enable automatic updates, go
1600 to **Syndication --> Options** and set "Check for new posts" to
1601 "automatically." For details, see "Automatic Feed Updates" in
1602 README.text.
1603
1604 An important side-effect of the changes to the update system is that if
1605 you were previously using the cron job and the `update-feeds.php` script
1606 to schedule updates, you need to change your cron set-up. The old
1607 `update-feeds.php` script no longer exists. Instead, if you wish to use
1608 a cron job to guarantee updates on a particular schedule, you should
1609 have the cron job fetch the front page of your blog (for example, by
1610 using `curl http://www.zyx.com/blog/ > /dev/null`) instead of activating
1611 the `update-feeds.php` script. If automatic updates have been enabled,
1612 fetching the front page will automatically trigger the update process.
1613
1614 * INTERFACE REORGANIZATION: All FeedWordPress functions are now located
1615 under a top-level "Syndication" menu in the WordPress Dashboard. To
1616 manage the list of syndicated sites, manually check for new posts on
1617 one or more feeds, or syndicate a new site, you should use the main page
1618 under **Syndication**. To change global settings for FeedWordPress,
1619 you should use **Syndication --> Options**.
1620
1621 * FILE STRUCTURE REORGANIZATION: Due to a combination of changing styles
1622 for FeedWordPress plugins and lingering bugs in the FeedWordPress admin
1623 menu code, the code for FeedWordPress is now contained in two different
1624 PHP files, which should be installed together in a subdirectory of your
1625 plugins directory named `feedwordpress`. (See README.text for
1626 installation and upgrade instructions relating to the change.)
1627
1628 * MULTIPLE CATEGORIES SETTING: Some feeds use non-standard methods to
1629 indicate multiple categories within a single category element. (The most
1630 popular site to do this is del.icio.us, which separates tags with a
1631 space.) FeedWordPress now allows you to set an optional setting, for any
1632 feed which does this, indicating the character or characters used to
1633 divide multiple categories, using a Perl-compatible regular expression.
1634 (In the case of del.icio.us feeds, FeedWordPress will automatically use
1635 \s for the pattern without your having to do any further configuration.)
1636 To turn this setting on, simply use the "Edit" link for the feed that
1637 you want to turn it on for.
1638
1639 * REGULAR EXPRESSION BUG FIXED: Eliminated a minor bug in the regular
1640 expressions for e-mail addresses (used in parsing RSS `author`
1641 elements), which could produce unsightly error messages for some users
1642 parsing RSS 2.0 feeds.
1643
1644 * DATE / UPDATE BUG FIXED: A bug in date handling was eliminated that may
1645 have caused problems if any of (1) WordPress, or (2) PHP, or (3) your
1646 web server, or (4) your MySQL server, has been set to use a different
1647 time zone from the one that any of the others is set to use. If
1648 FeedWordPress has not been properly updating updated posts, or has been
1649 updating posts when there shouldn't be any changes for the update, this
1650 release may solve that problem.
1651
1652 * GOOGLE READER BUGS FIXED: A couple of bugs that made it difficult for
1653 FeedWordPress to interact with Google Reader public feeds have been
1654 fixed. Firstly, if you encountered an error message reading "There was a
1655 problem adding the newsfeed. [SQL: ]" when you tried to add the feed,
1656 the cause of this error has been fixed. Secondly, if you succeeded in
1657 getting FeedWordPress to check a Google Reader feed, only to find that
1658 the title of posts had junk squashed on to the end of them, that bug
1659 has been fixed too. To fix this bug, you must install the newest version
1660 of the optional MagpieRSS upgrade.
1661
1662 * FILTER PARAMETERS: Due to an old, old bug in WordPress 1.5.0 (which was
1663 what was available back when I first wrote the filter interface),
1664 FeedWordPress has traditionally only passed one parameter to
1665 syndicated_item and syndicated_post filters functions -- an array
1666 containing either the Magpie representation of a syndicated item from
1667 the feed, or the database representation of a post about to be inserted
1668 into the WordPress database. If you needed information about the feed
1669 that the item came from, this was accessible only through a pair of
1670 global variables, $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta.
1671
1672 Since it's been a pretty long time since WordPress 1.5.0 was in
1673 widespread usage, I have gone ahead and added an optional second
1674 parameter to the invocation of the syndicated_item and syndicated_post
1675 filters. If you have written a filter for FeedWordPress that uses either
1676 of these hooks, you can now register that filter to accept 2 parameters.
1677 If you do so, the second parameter will be a SyndicatedPost object,
1678 which, among other things, allows you to access information about the
1679 feed from which an item is syndicated using the $post->feed and the
1680 $post->feedmeta elements (where $post is the name of the second
1681 parameter).
1682
1683 NOTE THAT THE OLD GLOBAL VARIABLES ARE STILL AVAILABLE, for the time
1684 being at least, so existing filters will not break with the upgrade.
1685 They should be considered deprecated, however, and may be eliminated in
1686 the future.
1687
1688 * FILTER CHANGE / BUGFIX: the array that is passed as the first argument
1689 syndicated_post filters no longer is no longer backslash-escaped for
1690 MySQL when filters are called. This was originally a bug, or an
1691 oversight; the contents of the array should only be escaped for the
1692 database *after* they have gone through all filters. IF YOU HAVE WRITTEN
1693 ANY syndicated_post FILTERS THAT PRESUME THE OLD BEHAVIOR OF PASSING IN
1694 STRINGS THAT ARE ALREADY BACKSLASH-ESCAPED, UPDATE YOUR FILTERS
1695 ACCORDINGLY.
1696
1697 * OTHER MINOR BUGFIXES AND INTERNAL CHANGES: The internal architecture of
1698 FeedWordPress has been significantly changed to make the code more
1699 modular and clean; hopefully this should help reduce the number of
1700 compatibility updates that are needed, and make them easier and quicker
1701 when they are needed.
1702
1703 = 0.981 =
1704
1705 Version 0.981 is a narrowly targeted bugfix and compatibility release, whose
1706 main purpose is to resolve a major outstanding problem: the incompatibility
1707 between version 0.98 of WordPress and the recently released WordPress 2.1.
1708
1709 * WORDPRESS 2.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress is now compatible with
1710 WordPress 2.1, as well as retaining its existing support for WordPress
1711 2.0 and 1.5. Incompatibilities that resulted in database warnings, fatal
1712 errors, and which prevented FeedWordPress from syndicating new posts,
1713 have been eliminated.
1714
1715 * RSS-FUNCTIONS.PHP RENAMED TO RSS.PHP: if you use the upgraded MagpieRSS
1716 replacement that's included with FeedWordPress, be sure to note that
1717 there are now *two* files to upload from the `OPTIONAL/wp-includes`
1718 subdirectory in order to carry out the upgrade: rss-functions.php and
1719 rss.php. **It is necessary to upload both files**, due to a change in
1720 the file naming scheme in WordPress 2.1, and it is necessary to do so
1721 whether you are using WordPress 2.1 or not. If you only upload the
1722 `rss-functions.php` file as in previous installations you will not have
1723 a working copy of MagpieRSS; the rss.php file contains the actual code.
1724
1725 * DATE BUG AFFECTING SOME PHP INSTALLATIONS RESOLVED: due to a subtle bug
1726 in parse_w3cdtf(), some installations of PHP encountered problems with
1727 FeedWordPress's attempt to date posts, which would cause some new posts
1728 on Atom feeds to be dated as if they had apppeared in 1969 or 1970
1729 (thus, effectively, never appearing on front page at all). This bug in
1730 the date handling should now be fixed.
1731
1732 * PHP <?=...?> SHORT FORM ELIMINATED: some installations of PHP do not
1733 allow the <?=...?> short form for printing PHP values, which was used
1734 extensively in the FeedWordPress interface code. Since this could cause
1735 fatal errors for users with the wrong installation of PHP, the short
1736 form has been replaced with full PHP echo statements, and is no longer
1737 used in FeedWordPress.
1738
1739 * BETTER USER INTERFACE INTEGRATION WITH WORDPRESS 2.x: Some minor changes
1740 have been made to help the FeedWordPress interface pages blend in better
1741 with the user interface when running under WordPress 2.x.
1742
1743 * GLOBAL CATEGORIES BUG RESOLVED: a bug that prevented some users from
1744 setting one or more categories to apply to syndicated posts from all
1745 feeds (using the checkbox interface under Options --> Syndication) has
1746 been resolved.
1747
1748 = 0.98 =
1749
1750 * WORDPRESS 2.0 COMPATIBILITY: This is a narrowly-targeted release to
1751 solve a major outstanding problem. FeedWordPress is now compatible with
1752 both WordPress 1.5 and WordPress 2.0. Incompatibilities that caused
1753 fatal SQL errors, and a more subtle bug with off-kilter counts of posts
1754 under a given category, have been resolved. FeedWordPress tests for
1755 database schema using the global $wp_db_version variable (if null, then
1756 we presume that we're dealing with WordPress 1.5).
1757
1758 NOTE: I have **not** fully tested FeedWordPress with WordPress 2.0.
1759 Further testing may reveal more bugs. However, you should now be able
1760 to get at least basic FeedWordPress functionality up and running.
1761
1762 * AUTHOR MATCHING: FeedWordPress tests several fields to see if it can
1763 identify the author of the post as a user already in the WordPress user
1764 database. In previous versions, it tested the user login, the nickname,
1765 and tested for "aliases" listed in the Profile (see documentation). FWP
1766 now also matches authors on the basis of e-mail address (*if* an e-mail
1767 address is present). This is particularly helpful for formats such as
1768 RSS 2.0, in which authors are primarily identified by e-mail addresses.
1769
1770 = 0.97 =
1771
1772 * INSTALLATION PROCEDURE: Some of the changes between 0.96 and 0.97
1773 require upgrades to the meta-data stored by FeedWordPress to work
1774 properly. Thus, if you are upgrading from 0.96 or earlier to 0.97, most
1775 FeedWordPress operations (including updates and template functions)
1776 WILL BE DISABLED until you run the upgrade procedure. Fortunately,
1777 running the upgrade procedure is easy: just go to either Options -->
1778 Syndication or Links --> Syndicated in the WordPress Dashboard and press
1779 the button.
1780
1781 * FEED FORMAT SUPPORT: Support has been added for the Atom 1.0 IETF
1782 standard. Several other elements are also newly supported
1783 (dcterms:created, dcterms:issued, dcterms:modified, dc:identifier,
1784 proper support for the RSS 2.0 guid element, the RSS 2.0 author element,
1785 the use of Atom author or Dublin Core dc:creator constructs at the feed
1786 level to identify the author of individual items, etc.)
1787
1788 N.B.: full support of several Atom 1.0 features, such as categories
1789 and enclosures, requires you to install the optional rss-functions.php
1790 upgrade in your wp-includes directory.
1791
1792 * BUG FIX: Running `update-feeds.php` from command line or crontab
1793 returned "I don't syndicate..." errors. It turns out that WordPress
1794 sometimes tramples on the internal PHP superglobals that I depended on
1795 to determine whether or not the script was being invoked from the
1796 command line. This has been fixed (the variables are now checked
1797 *before* WordPress can trample them). Note that `update-feeds.php` has
1798 been thoroughly overhauled anyway; see below for details.
1799
1800 * BUG FIX: Duplicate categories or author names. Fixed two bugs that could
1801 create duplicate author and/or category names when the name contained
1802 either (a) certain international characters (causing a mismatch between
1803 MySQL and PHP's handling of lowercasing text), or (b) characters that
1804 have a special meaning in regular expressions (causing MySQL errors when
1805 looking for the author or category due to regexp syntax errors). These
1806 should now be fixed thanks to careful escaping of names that go into
1807 regular expressions and careful matching of lowercasing functions
1808 (comparing results from PHP only to other results from PHP, and results
1809 from MySQL only to other results from MySQL).
1810
1811 * BUG FIX: Items dated December 31, 1969 should appear less often. The
1812 function for parsing W3C date-time format dates that ships with
1813 MagpieRSS can only correctly parse fully-specified dates with a
1814 fully-specified time, but valid W3C date-time format dates may omit the
1815 time, the day of the month, or even the month. Some feeds in the wild
1816 date their items with coarse-grained dates, so the optional
1817 `rss-functions.php` upgrade now includes a more flexible parse_w3cdtf()
1818 function that will work with both coarse-grained and fully-specified
1819 dates. (If parts of the date or the time are omitted, they are filled in
1820 with values based on the current time, so '2005-09-10' will be dated to
1821 the current time on that day; '2004' will be dated to this day and time
1822 one year ago.
1823
1824 N.B.: This fix is only available in the optional `rss-functions.php`
1825 upgrade.
1826
1827 * BUG FIX: Evil use of HTTP GET has been undone. The WordPress interface
1828 is riddled with inappropriate (non-idempotent) uses of HTTP GET queries
1829 (ordinary links that make the server do something with significant
1830 side-effects, such as deleting a post or a link from the database).
1831 FeedWordPress did some of this too, especially in places where it aped
1832 the WordPress interface (e.g. the "Delete" links in Links -->
1833 Syndicated). That's bad business, though. I've changed the interface so
1834 that all the examples of improper side-effects that I can find now
1835 require an HTTP POST to take effect. I think I got pretty much
1836 everything; if there's anything that I missed, let me know.
1837
1838 Further reading: [Sam Ruby 2005-05-06: This Stuff Matters](http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2005/05/06/This-Stuff-Matters)
1839
1840 * BUG FIX: Categories applied by `cats` setting should no longer prevent
1841 category-based filtering from working. In FeedWordPress, you can (1)
1842 apply certain categories to all syndicated posts, or all posts from
1843 a particular feed; and (2) filter out all posts that don't match one
1844 of the categories that are already in the WordPress database (allowing
1845 for simple category-based filtering; just load up WordPress with the
1846 categories you want to accept, and then tell FeedWordPress not to create
1847 new ones). However, the way that (1) and (2) were implemented meant that
1848 you couldn't effectively use them together; once you applied a known
1849 category to all syndicated posts from a particular feed, it meant that
1850 they'd have at least one familiar category (the category or categories
1851 you were applying), and that would get all posts past the filter no
1852 matter what categories they were originally from.
1853
1854 Well, no longer. You can still apply categories to all syndicated posts
1855 (using either Syndication --> Options, or the feed-level settings under
1856 Links --> Syndicated). But these categories are not applied to the post
1857 until *after* it has already passed by the "familiar categories" filter.
1858 So now, if you want, you can do category filtering and *then* apply as
1859 many categories as you please to all and only posts that pass the filter.
1860
1861 * BUG FIX: Other minor typos and HTML gaffes were fixed along the way.
1862
1863 * PERFORMANCE: get_feed_meta() no longer hits the database for information
1864 on every call; it now caches link data in memory, so FeedWordPress only
1865 goes to the database once for each syndicated link. This may
1866 substantially improve performance if your database server resources
1867 are tight and your templates make a lot of use of custom settings from
1868 get_feed_meta().
1869
1870 * API CHANGE: Link ID numbers, rather than RSS URIs, are now used to
1871 identify the feed from which a post is syndicated when you use template
1872 functions such as get_feed_meta(). The practical upshot of this is you
1873 can switch feeds, or change the feed address for a particular syndicated
1874 site, without breaking your templates for all the posts that were
1875 syndicated from the earlier URI.
1876
1877 * API CHANGE: if you have plugins or templates that make use of the
1878 get_feed_meta() function or the $fwp_feedmeta global, note that the
1879 data formerly located under the `uri` and `name` fields is now located
1880 under the `link/uri` field and the `link/name` field, respectively. Note
1881 also that you can access the link ID number for any given feed under the
1882 global $fwp_feedmeta['link/id'] (in plugins) or
1883 get_feed_meta('link/id') (in a template in post contexts).
1884
1885 * FEATURE: the settings for individual feeds can now be edited using a
1886 humane interface (where formerly you had to tweak key-value pairs in the
1887 Link Notes section). To edit settings for a feed, pick the feed that you
1888 want under Links --> Syndicated and click the Edit link.
1889
1890 * FEATURE: The "Unsubscribe" button (formerly "Delete") in Links -->
1891 Syndicated now offers three options for unsubscribing from a feed: (1)
1892 turning off the subscription without deleting the feed data or affecting
1893 posts that were syndicated from the feed (this works by setting the Link
1894 for the feed as "invisible"); (2) deleting the feed data and all of the
1895 posts that were syndicated from the feed; or (3) deleting the feed data
1896 and *keeping* the posts that were syndicated from the feed
1897 setting the Link to "Invisible" (meaning that it will not be displayed
1898 in lists of the site links on the front page, and it won't be checked
1899 for updates; (2) deleting the Link and all of the posts that were
1900 syndicated from its feed; or (3) deleting the feed data but keeping the
1901 posts that were syndicated (which will henceforward be treated as if
1902 they were local rather than syndicated posts). (Note that (1) is usually
1903 the best option for aggregator sites, unless you want to clean up the
1904 results of an error or a test.)
1905
1906 * FEATURE / BUG FIX: If you have been receiving mysterious "I don't
1907 syndicate...", or "(local) HTTP status code was not 200", or "(local)
1908 transport error - could not open socket", or "parse error - not well
1909 formed" errors, then this update may solve your problems, and if it does
1910 *not* solve them, it will at least make the reasons for the problems
1911 easier to understand. That's because I've overhauled the way that
1912 FeedWordPress goes about updating feeds.
1913
1914 If you use the command-line PHP scripting method to run scheduled
1915 updates, then not much should change for you, except for fewer
1916 mysterious errors. If you have done updates by sending periodic HTTP
1917 requests to <http://your-blog.com/path/wp-content/update-feeds.php>,
1918 then the details have changed somewhat; mostly in such a way as to make
1919 things easier on you. See the README file or online documentation on
1920 Staying Current for the details.
1921
1922 * FEATURE: FeedWordPress now features a more sophisticated system for
1923 timed updates. Instead of polling *every* subscribed feed for updates
1924 *each* time `update-feeds.php` is run, FeedWordPress now keeps track of
1925 the last time it polled each feed, and only polls them again after a
1926 certain period of time has passed. The amount of time is normally set
1927 randomly for each feed, in a period between 30 minutes and 2 hours (so
1928 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
1929 directly by the feed, which brings us to ...
1930
1931 * FEATURE: FeedWordPress now respects the settings in the `ttl` and
1932 Syndication Module RSS elements. Feeds with these elements set will not
1933 be polled any more frequently than they indicate with these feeds unless
1934 the user manually forces FeedWordPress to poll the feed (see Links -->
1935 Syndicated --> Edit settings).
1936
1937 = 0.96 =
1938
1939 * FEATURE: support has been added for enclosures in RSS 2.0 and Atom
1940 0.6+ newsfeeds. WordPress already supports adding enclosures to an
1941 item; FeedWordPress merely gets the information on the enclosure
1942 from the feed it is syndicating and plugs that information directly
1943 into the WordPress database so that (among other things) that post
1944 will have its enclosure listed in your blog's RSS 2 newsfeed.
1945
1946 Note that enclosure support requires using the optional MagpieRSS
1947 upgrade (i.e., replacing your `wp-includes/rss-functions.php` with
1948 `OPTIONAL/wp-includes/rss-functions.php` from the FWP archive)
1949
1950 * FEATURE: for completeness's sake, there is now a feed setting,
1951 `hardcode url`, that allows you to set the URI for the front page
1952 of a contributor's website manually (that is, prevent it from being
1953 automatically updated from the feed channel link on each update). To
1954 set the URI manually, put a line like this in the Link Notes section
1955 of a feed:
1956
1957 hardcode url: yes
1958
1959 You can also instruct FeedWordPress to use hardcoded URIs by default
1960 on all feeds using Options --> Syndication
1961
1962 * FEATURE: by default, when FeedWordPress finds new syndicated posts,
1963 it (1) publishes them immediately, (2) turns comments off, and (3)
1964 turns trackback / pingback pings off. You can now alter all three
1965 default behaviors (e.g., to allow pings on syndicated posts, or to
1966 send newly-syndicated posts to the draft pile for moderation) using
1967 Options --> Syndication
1968
1969
1970 = From 0.91 to 0.95 =
1971
1972 * BUG FIX: Fixed an obscure bug in the handling of categories:
1973 categories with trailing whitespace could cause categories with
1974 duplicate names to be created. This no longer happens. While I was
1975 at it I tightened up the operation of
1976 FeedWordPress::lookup_categories() a bit in general.
1977
1978 * FEATURE DEPRECATED: the feed setting `hardcode categories` is now
1979 deprecated in favor of `unknown categories` (see below), which
1980 allows you to strip off any syndication categories not already in
1981 your database using `unknown categories: default` or `unknown
1982 categories: filter`. If you have `hardcode categories: yes` set on a
1983 feed, this will be treated as `unknown categories: default` (i.e.,
1984 no new categories will be added, but if a post doesn't match any of
1985 the categories it will be added in the default category--usually
1986 "Uncategorized" or "General").
1987
1988 * FEATURE: You can now set global defaults as to whether or not
1989 FeedWordPress will update the Link Name and Link Description
1990 settings for feeds automatically from the feed title and feed
1991 tagline. (By default, it does, as it has in past versions.) Whether
1992 this behavior is turned on or off, you can still override the
1993 default behavior using feed settings of `hardcode name: yes`,
1994 `hardcode name: no`, `hardcode description: yes`, or `hardcode
1995 description: no`.
1996
1997 * FEATURE: Users can now provide one or several "aliases" for an
1998 author, just as they can for a category. For example, to make
1999 FeedWordPress treat posts by "Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger" and "Pope
2000 Benedict XVI" as by the same author, edit the user profile for Pope
2001 Benedict XVI and add a line like this to the "User profile" field:
2002
2003 a.k.a.: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
2004
2005 You can add several aliases, each on a line by itself. You can also
2006 add any other text you like to the Profile without interfering with
2007 the aliases.
2008
2009 * FEATURE: Users can now choose how to handle syndicated posts that
2010 are in unfamiliar categories or by unfamiliar authors (i.e.,
2011 categories or authors whose names are not yet in the WordPress
2012 database). By default, FeedWordPress will (as before) create a new
2013 category (or new author) and use it for the current post and any
2014 future posts. This behavior can be changed, either for all feeds or
2015 for one or another particular feed.
2016
2017 There are now three different options for an unfamiliar author: (1)
2018 FeedWordPress can create a new author account and attribute the
2019 syndicated post to the new account; (2) FeedWordPress can attribute
2020 the post to an author if the author's name is familiar, and to a
2021 default author (currently, this means the Site Administrator
2022 account) if it is not; (3) FeedWordPress can drop posts by
2023 unfamiliar authors and syndicate only posts by authors who are
2024 already in the database.
2025
2026 There are, similarly, two different options for an unfamiliar
2027 category: (1) FeedWordPress can create new categories and place the
2028 syndicated post in them; (2) FeedWordPress can drop the unfamiliar
2029 categories and place syndicated posts only in categories that it is
2030 already familiar with. In addition, FeedWordPress 0.95 lets you
2031 choose whether posts that are in *no* familiar categories should be
2032 syndicated (and placed in the default category for the blog) or
2033 simply dropped.
2034
2035 You can set the default behavior for both authors and categories
2036 using the settings in Options --> Syndication. You can also set
2037 different behavior for specific feeds by adding the `unfamiliar
2038 author` and / or `unfamiliar categories` settings to the Link Notes
2039 section of a feed:
2040
2041 unfamiliar author: (create|default|filter)
2042 unfamiliar categories: (create|default|filter)
2043
2044 A setting of `unfamiliar author: create` will make FeedWordPress
2045 create new authors to match unfamiliar author names *for this feed
2046 alone*. A setting of `unfamiliar author: default` will make it
2047 assign posts from unfamiliar authors to the default user account. A
2048 setting of `unfamiliar author: filter` will cause all posts (from
2049 this feed alone) to be dropped unless they are by an author already
2050 listed in the database. Similiarly, `unfamiliar categories: create`
2051 will make FeedWordPress create new categories to match unfamiliar
2052 category names *for this feed alone*; `unfamiliar categories:
2053 default` will cause it to drop any unfamiliar category names; and
2054 `unfamiliar categories: filter` will cause it to *both* drop any
2055 unfamiliar category names *and* to only syndicate posts that are
2056 placed in one or more familiar categories.
2057
2058 These two new features allow users to do some coarse-grained
2059 filtering without having to write a PHP filter. Specifically, they
2060 offer an easy way for you to filter feeds by category or by author.
2061 Suppose, for example, that you only wanted to syndicate posts that
2062 your contributors place in the "Llamas" category. You could do so by
2063 setting up your installation of WordPress so that the only category
2064 in the database is "Llamas," and then use Options --> Syndication to
2065 set "Unfamiliar categories" to "don't create new categories and
2066 don't syndicate posts unless they match at least one familiar
2067 category". Now, when you update, only posts in the "Llamas" category
2068 will be syndicated by FeedWordPress.
2069
2070 Similarly, if you wanted to filter one particular feed so that only
2071 posts by (for example) the author "Earl J. Llama" were syndicated to
2072 your site, you could do so by creating a user account for Earl J.
2073 Llama, then adding the following line to the settings for the feed
2074 in Link Notes:
2075
2076 unfamiliar author: filter
2077
2078 This will cause any posts from this feed that are not authored by
2079 Earl J. Llama to be discarded, and only the posts by Earl J. Llama
2080 will be syndicated. (If the setting is used on one specific feed, it
2081 will not affect how posts from other feeds are syndicated.)
2082
2083 == License ==
2084
2085 The FeedWordPress plugin is copyright © 2005-2010 by Charles Johnson. It uses
2086 code derived or translated from:
2087
2088 - [wp-rss-aggregate.php][] by [Kellan Elliot-McCrea](kellan@protest.net)
2089 - [SimplePie][] feed parser by Ryan Parman, Geoffrey Sneddon, Ryan McCue, et al.
2090 - [MagpieRSS][] feed parser by [Kellan Elliot-McCrea](kellan@protest.net)
2091 - [Ultra-Liberal Feed Finder][] by [Mark Pilgrim](mark@diveintomark.org)
2092 - [WordPress Blog Tool and Publishing Platform](http://wordpress.org/)
2093
2094 according to the terms of the [GNU General Public License][].
2095
2096 This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
2097 the terms of the [GNU General Public License][] as published by the Free
2098 Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any
2099 later version.
2100
2101 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
2102 WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
2103 PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
2104
2105 [wp-rss-aggregate.php]: http://laughingmeme.org/archives/002203.html
2106 [SimplePie]: http://www.simplepie.org/
2107 [MagpieRSS]: http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/
2108 [Ultra-Liberal Feed Finder]: http://diveintomark.org/projects/feed_finder/
2109 [GNU General Public License]: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
2110
2111