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FeedWordPress / 2016.1213
FeedWordPress v2016.1213
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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: 4.5
6 Tested up to: 4.7
7 Stable tag: 2016.1213
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 = 2016.1213 =
97
98 * WORDPRSS BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY FOR VERSIONS [4.5, 4.7]: This change fixes
99 a fatal PHP error (on some web server configurations you'd see the message
100 "Fatal error: require_once(): Failed opening required '[...]/wp-includes/class-wp-feed-cache.php'"
101 on others, you might just see an HTTP 500 Internal Server Error or a blank
102 page) when using FeedWordPress with versions of WordPress before 4.7. A
103 change that I introduced to avoid a code module that had been deprecated in
104 version 4.7 ended up relying on code modules that were only introduced as
105 of version 4.7; so now, instead, FeedWordPress attempts to detect which
106 modules the current version of the WordPress core makes available, and load
107 the right modules depending on your WordPress version.
108
109 In theory, up to this point, FeedWordPress supported any version of
110 WordPress from version 3.0 onward. In practice, version 3.0 was released
111 over 6 years ago, and I can realistically commit only to testing out new
112 releases of FeedWordPress with a few prior versions of WordPress; so I've
113 updated the "Requires at least" field to version 4.5, the first major
114 release issued in 2016. If you've really got to use FeedWordPress with
115 older versions of WordPress, it will probably still work with any moderately
116 modern release of WordPress, but I won't promise to keep it working with
117 releases of WordPress that are more than about a year old.
118
119 = 2016.1211 =
120
121 * WORDPRESS COMPATIBILITY: Tested with new versions of WordPress up to 4.7.
122
123 * PHP WARNINGS UNDER WP 4.7: Eliminated cause of a PHP warning under WP 4.7
124 "Parameter 1 to FeedWordPressHTTPAuthenticator::set_auth_options expected to be reference"
125 Warnings were due to a change in how http_api_curl hook is sometimes called
126 in WP 4.7; so I changed the signature of the event handling method to avoid
127 the notice. Props to @cogdog, @froomkin, @gwynethllewelyn et al. for flagging
128 the issue and @garymarkfuller for suggesting a preliminary fix to the issue
129 that was fairly similar to the solution I ended up adopting.
130
131 * PHP 7 and PHP Strict Standards compatibility changes: @alexiskulash @daidais
132 and @zoul0813 all sent pull requests through Github to fix some issues from
133 a very old code base that has made its way from PHP 3.x through 5.x to the
134 roll-out of PHP 7. Class methods should now fare better under modern versions
135 of PHP and generate fewer "Deprecated" notices.
136
137 * IMPROVEMENTS TO SCHEDULED AND AUTOMATIC UPDATES: use wp_loaded hook to check
138 for magic URL parameters and to execute updates, to do pageload-based automatic
139 updates, etc. Ensures that anything plugins or themes need to do in init to set
140 up custom post types, taxonomies, etc. will be done before the update_feedwordpress
141 updates are attempted. If you saw posts not getting put into the correct custom
142 post type or custom taxonomies or similar problems when performing scheduled updates,
143 but the problem seemed to go away when you manually performed updates through the
144 wp-admin interface, then you might be able to solve those problems with this update.
145
146 = 2016.0420 =
147
148 * WORDPRESS COMPATIBILITY: Tested with new versions of WordPress up to 4.5.
149
150 * FILTERS AND ADD-ONS: Allow filters and add-ons to filter terms and taxonomy
151 (categories, tags, custom taxonomies, etc.) more thoroughly and more
152 fine-grainedly using syndicated_post_terms_match, syndicated_post_terms_match_{taxonomy},
153 syndicated_post_terms_unfamiliar, syndicated_post_terms_mapping,
154 syndicated_item_feed_terms, and syndicated_item_preset_terms filters.
155
156 * FILTERS AND ADD-ONS: Globals $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta REMOVED.
157 These global variables, originally introduced to allow filters access to
158 information about the source feed in `syndicated_item` filters were
159 deprecated 6+ years ago. If you have any filters or add-ons which still
160 depend on these global variables, you've been using obsolete techniques
161 and you should see about fixing them to access data about the source feed
162 using the SyndicatedPost::link element instead. For documentation, see
163 the FeedWordPress documentation wiki at
164 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedpost> and
165 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedlink>.
166
167 * BUGFIX: Syndication > Diagnostics HTTP diagnostic test widget was broken due to
168 a dumb error on my part. Now fixed.
169
170 * SMALL CODING CHANGES: Lots of small changes to code organization, incorporation
171 of some PHP 5.x coding conventions, etc.
172
173 = 2015.0514 =
174
175 * IMPORTANT SECURITY UPDATE: This version includes two important fixes for
176 potential security vulnerabilities reported to me through support channels.
177
178 The first is a common problem across several plugins due to an ambiguity in
179 the WordPress documentation and a change in the behavior of WordPress's
180 built-in add_query_arg() and remove_query_arg() functions
181 which could, under certain low-probability conditions, allow for potential
182 XSS attack vectors. This fixes issue # 39
183 reported at <https://github.com/radgeek/feedwordpress/issues/39>
184 Thanks to github.com/quassy
185
186 The second is a security vulnerability fixes a security vulnerability that
187 was reported to me privately (thanks to Adrián M. F.) which, under other
188 low-probability conditions, could allow for SQL insertion attacks by
189 a malicious user with access to login credentials, which would compromise
190 data security.
191
192 It is *IMPORTANT* and worth your while to upgrade FeedWordPress as soon as
193 possible in order to eliminate these vulnerabilities. If you have any
194 questions or if there is something blocking you from making the upgrade
195 which you need my help with, don't hesitate to get in touch.
196
197 * ADMIN UI BUGFIX: "Update Now" button in feeds setting pages should now work
198 once again instead of causing a PHP fatal error. See
199 <https://github.com/radgeek/feedwordpress/issues/46>
200
201 * SEVERAL OTHER SMALL BUG FIXES. See <https://github.com/radgeek/feedwordpress/issues/32>
202 <https://github.com/radgeek/feedwordpress/issues/30>
203 <https://github.com/radgeek/feedwordpress/issues/29>
204 etc.
205
206 = 2014.0805 =
207
208 * FILTERS AND ADD-ONS: A number of new hooks for filters and add-ons to
209 further customize the behavior of FWP have been added.
210
211 * COMPATIBILITY/BUGFIX: Many users saw odd characters, especially "n,"
212 appearing in posts in versions of WordPress from 3.6 on, due to a change
213 in when the API expects HTML data for posts to be slashed and when it
214 does not. This has been fixed, so that the junk characters should no
215 longer appear, regardless of your version of WordPress.
216
217 * BUGFIX: A bug preventing FWP from saving categories assigned under
218 Syndication > Categories & Tags has been fixed.
219
220 * BUGFIX: Post-editing related metaboxes should now show up when you edit
221 items of any post type, including custom types, not only normal WordPress
222 posts.
223
224 * BUGFIX: A bug in the admin UI that caused the "Alternative Feeds" /
225 "Find Feeds" box to throw a permissions error has been fixed.
226
227 * BUGFIX: A bug preventing proper mapping of categories and other terms in
228 2013.0504 has been fixed.
229
230 * BUGFIX: A number of small fixes contributed through Github by Flynsarmy
231 should eliminate PHP warnings for many users on several methods that are
232 called as static methods within FeedWordPress.
233
234 = 2013.0504 =
235
236 * BUGFIX: PHP 5.4 compatibility -- includes some more extensive fixes to
237 compatibility issues with PHP 5.4's handling of global variables
238
239 * DIAGNOSTICS: New diagnostics settings added to help track behavior of
240 terms (categories, post tags, etc.) for syndicated posts.
241
242 = 2012.0504 =
243
244 * MODULE REORGANIZATION: Should ensure that all needed submodules will be
245 properly included regardless of whether you are installing from github,
246 from SVN, or from the WordPress plugins page. If you've been getting
247 fatal errors about required modules not being found, this release should
248 hopefully resolve the issue.
249
250 = 2012.0503 =
251
252 * BUGFIX: Works properly again with WordPress installations that use a
253 MySQL table name prefix other than the default `wp_` prefix.
254
255 * BUGFIX: Includes a couple of significant PHP 5.4 compatibility fixes.
256 Now that PHP 5.4 is more widely deployed, Diagnostics will now also
257 show PHP version and some other potentially useful troubleshooting
258 information.
259
260 * ADMIN UI: Better indicates your options when deleting a syndicated post
261 so as to let you know whether it will be Trashed (and thus not
262 resyndicated) or Erased (and thus potentially resyndicated)
263
264 * ADMIN UI: Adds an AJAXy Test Expression button to allow live testing of
265 sample results from expressions in Custom Post Settings.
266
267 = 2012.1218 =
268
269 * WORDPRESS VISUAL EDITOR FIXED. There was an unlisted change in the
270 2012.1212 release which had the effect of disabling the WordPress Visual
271 Editor for all posts syndicated by FeedWordPress. Many users reported
272 this as a bug. It was actually a deliberate decision -- a crappy way to
273 try to deal with a crappy situation. (Many users had previously reported
274 a "bug" in which all the paragraph or line breaks seemed to be stripped
275 out of their syndicated posts; the issue turned out to be that the
276 Visual Editor was stripping out `<p>` and `<br/>` tags on the assumption
277 that the resulting post would be sent through standard WordPress
278 formatting filters. But under default settings, posts syndicated by FWP
279 deliberately bypass WordPress formatting filters.) In any case, this
280 version adopts a more flexible compromise. *If* FeedWordPress is set up
281 to bypass WordPress formatting filters (as it is by default), *then*
282 the Visual Editor will be disabled for syndicated posts (since using it
283 would produce incorrect results). If on the other hand FeedWordPress is
284 set up to expose syndicated posts to WordPress formatting filters (as it
285 usually is for those using the Visual Editor to manually edit posts),
286 then the Visual Editor tab will be re-enabled for syndicated posts.
287
288 * BUG FIX: PERMALINKS REWRITTEN FOR CUSTOM POST TYPES AS WELL AS NORMAL
289 WORDPRESS POSTS. If you had WordPress set up to syndicate incoming posts
290 to a custom post type (under Syndication > Posts & Links), and asked
291 FeedWordPress to make "permalinks point to the original site", then
292 previous versions of FeedWordPress would fail to do the rewriting --
293 permalinks would only be rewritten to point to the original source for
294 normal WordPress posts, not for custom post types. In 2012.1218 this bug
295 has been fixed: all post types will now have permalinks rewritten unless
296 you request for permalinks to point to the local copy on your aggregator
297 site.
298
299 * BUG FIX: ELIMINATES "PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function
300 setting() on a non-object...." Some changes to the in-memory caching of
301 information about feed subscriptions could result in a fatal PHP error
302 in cases where you have de-activated one of your subscriptions, but
303 posts from that subscription were still in the archive. This would
304 normally show up through half-completed feeds or half-completed pages
305 that suddenly broke off in the middle, and displayed or logged an error
306 message like: "PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function setting() on a
307 non-object in {...}/wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress/feedwordpress.php
308 on line 615". This bug has been eliminated, so affected feeds and pages
309 should now render correctly, and the error message should no longer
310 appear.
311
312 * BUG FIX: CATEGORY BOXES IN SYNDICATION > CATEGORIES & TAGS. Some minor
313 bugs in the appearance and animation of category checkboxes (for
314 example, the checkbox used to select categories for syndicated posts on
315 the Syndication > Categories & Tags settings page) have been fixed.
316
317 = 2012.1212 =
318
319 * WORDPRESS 3.5 COMPATIBILITY: This release has been tested for compatibility
320 with new releases of WordPress, up to version 3.5, and any documented
321 compatibility issues have been cleared -- in particular, if you were seeing
322 error pages stating that you don't have permission to access the
323 FeedWordPress Syndication page within the WordPress admin interface, then
324 upgrading to this release should fix the problem.
325
326 As always, if you encounter any compatibility problems after upgrading your
327 version of WordPress and your version of FeedWordPress to the most recent
328 versions, please contact me with as detailed a description as possible of
329 the issue you are encountering, the circumstances you're encountering it
330 under, what you expect to see happening, and what is happening instead.
331
332 * PHP 5.4 COMPATIBILITY: This release has been audited to fix potential
333 problems with deprecation notices or fatal errors under recent versions
334 of PHP. In particular, all uses of run-time pass-by-reference have been
335 eliminated from the code; if you were seeing a fatal error reading
336 "Call-time pass-by-reference has been removed ..." then upgrading to
337 this release should fix the problem.
338
339 * CUSTOMIZATION FRAMEWORK: A great deal of work has been done to make the
340 underlying framework more flexible, so that PHP add-ons can be written
341 to adapt FeedWordPress to handle custom XML vocabularies, expiration of
342 posts under specified conditions, and other custom behavior.
343
344 * BUGFIX: MANUALLY EDITED POST SLUGS NOT OVERWRITTEN. Thanks to a report
345 by Chris Fritz, I've identified some code that causes post slugs for the
346 posts generated by FWP to be rewritten with every update, even if the
347 user has manually updated the slug from within the WordPress editing
348 interface. This has been fixed: FWP will continue to generate new slugs
349 for syndicated posts, but when syndicated posts are updated, they will
350 retain the slug that they had at the time of the update; any manual
351 changes to the post slug should be preserved.
352
353 * USER-AGENT STRING: FeedWordPress now sends a distinctive User-Agent
354 string identifying itself, and noting that it is a feed aggregator.
355
356 * MISCELLANEOUS PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS: A number of changes have been
357 made to try to reduce the intensity and expense in terms of both
358 database performance and web server memory consumption.
359
360 * DIAGNOSTICS IMPROVEMENTS: A number of new and improved diagnostics have
361 been added which should aid in understanding and troubleshooting issues
362 that may arise.
363
364 = 2011.1019 =
365
366 * BUGFIX: "THERE ARE NO HTTP TRANSPORTS AVAILABLE" ERROR FIXED: The initial
367 support for HTTP Basic and Digest authentication in version 2011.1018
368 contained a bug that could cause HTTP requests for feeds or for other
369 WordPress resources to break down if you do not have the PHP curl module
370 installed. This bug has been fixed, and these errors should no longer
371 appear.
372
373 * IMPROVED HTTP AUTHENTICATION SUPPORT: In addition, the HTTP Authentication
374 support in FeedWordPress has been extended, to ensure that Basic
375 authentication is available in many web host configurations, and to allow
376 you to add a username and password for a feed immediately when you
377 subscribe to it.
378
379 = 2011.1018 =
380
381 * HTTP BASIC AND DIGEST AUTHENTICATION SUPPORT: FeedWordPress now offers
382 improved support for syndicating feeds that make use of HTTP Basic or HTTP
383 Digest authentication methods. In order to set up authentication on one of
384 your feeds, just go to its Settings > Feed page, and click on the "Uses
385 Username/Password" link underneath the Feed URL. Enter the username and
386 password for accessing the feed, then select the authentication method. (If
387 you're not sure which method your feed provider uses, try Basic first.)
388 Save Changes, and syndicate away.
389
390 NOTE: HTTP Digest support requires the curl module for PHP. If you are not
391 sure whether this module has been installed, contact your web hosting
392 provider to check.
393
394 * WP 3.3 (BETA) COMPATIBILITY: This version fixes an init-sequence bug that
395 could cause intrusive warning messages or fatal errors in WP 3.3 beta
396 versions.
397
398 * BUGFIX: FIXES LONG DELAYS IN UPDATES SCHEDULES IN LARGE INSTALLATIONS. A
399 performance feature introduced in version 2011.0721 had some flaws in its
400 implementation, which tended to create serious delays (on the order of
401 several hours) in FeedWordPress's attempts to schedule updates for feeds,
402 when users had a very large number of feeds (several dozen or more) in their
403 FeedWordPress installation. This feature has been reconfigured to adjust
404 dynamically to the number of feeds in Syndicated Sources and the frequency
405 with which they are updated. If you've seen a lot of ready-to-update feeds
406 piling up, several hours after they were supposed to get updated, then this
407 upgrade should better ensure that your feeds get updated in a timely fashion.
408
409 * BUGFIX: syndicated_item_guid FILTERS FIXED. Previous versions of
410 FeedWordPress theoretically allowed for filters on the syndicated_item_guid
411 hook, which was intended to filter the globally-unique identifier element
412 (rss:guid or atom:id) -- useful if you need to convince FeedWordPress to use
413 different guids, or to recognize two or more incoming posts as versions of
414 the same post rather than as distinct items. However, while the hook
415 affected the guid stored in the WordPress database, it did not affect the
416 guid used to check whether an incoming feed item had already been syndicated
417 or was a new item -- which greatly limited the practical usefulness of the
418 filter. This bug has been fixed: syndicated_item_guid filters should now
419 properly control not only the final database record, but also the initial
420 uniqueness test applied to posts.
421
422 = 2011.0721 =
423
424 * BUGFIX: SERIOUS BUG CAUSING RARE UNEXPECTED DELETION OF PAGES AND OTHER
425 CONTENT. A bug in the guid-checking code for some rare kinds of guids could
426 cause content in the wp_posts table to seemingly disappear at random after
427 FeedWordPress updates.This most frequently but not exclusively affected
428 static pages. What actually happened is that in these rare cases the
429 existing static page was mistaken for an older version of the new incoming
430 syndicated post, which was then stored as a new revision of the original
431 page. The bug that caused these mistaken identities has been fixed.
432
433 * BUGFIX: UNWANTED AUTOMATIC PAGE-LOAD-BASED UPDATES NO LONGER A NUISANCE.
434 Some users encountered a bug in which FeedWordPress would adopt an automatic
435 page-load-based update method, even if they had requested that it not do
436 so, and that it use a manual or cron job update method instead. The bug
437 causing this has been fixed, and page-load-based updates should no longer
438 trigger unless explicitly turned on.
439
440 * WP 3.2 USER INTERFACE COMPATIBILITY: POST TAGS BOX NOW WORKS AGAIN. The
441 release of WordPress 3.2 caused a breakage in the tags box which prevented
442 you from adding or removing tags under Syndication --> Categories & Tags.
443 (The breakage was the result of an incompatibility introduced by the new
444 release of jQuery.) This breakage has now been fixed, and the tags box
445 should work correctly again.
446
447 * FEED UPDATE SCHEDULING IMPROVEMENTS: UI. The Syndicated Sources table now
448 provides considerably more data to understand update scheduling, when
449 specific scheduling decisions are made because of, e.g., requests from the
450 feed producer.
451
452 * FEED UPDATE SCHEDULING IMPROVEMENTS: ENFORCEABLE "MINIMUM INTERVAL" SETTING
453 TO SPACE OUT UPDATES. Some feeds request specific update schedules, using
454 standard elements such as sy:updateFrequency and rss:ttl. Normally,
455 FeedWordPress respects any scheduling requests that a feed makes -- if it
456 requests a longer gap between polls than what FWP would normally adopt, then
457 FWP slows down to meet the request. If it indicates a shorter gap than what
458 FWP would normally adopt, FWP speeds up and checks that feed for updates
459 more often than it normally would. Now, there should not be any way for user
460 settings to override an explicit slow-down request from the feed producer --
461 if producers indicate a particular update schedule, then polling the feed
462 more frequently than they request is considered abusive behavior. But
463 there's no reason why users should not be able -- if they so desire -- to
464 override speed-up requests, and poll a feed *less* frequently than the
465 indicated update schedule, if the FWP user wants to space update checkins
466 over a longer interval of time. Before, they could not do this: FWP always
467 sped up to meet the indicated update schedule. Now, they can do this, by
468 using the new "Minimum Interval" setting in Syndication --> Feeds &
469 Updates..
470
471 = 2011.0706 =
472
473 * WP 3.2 COMPATIBILITY: ELIMINATES FATAL ERROR "Call to undefined method
474 WP_SimplePie_File::WP_SimplePie_File() in
475 [...]/wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress/feedwordpress.php on line 1841." The
476 latest release of WordPress, version 3.2, has shifted the minimum
477 requirements up to PHP 5.2, and in line with the shift to PHP5 they have
478 rewritten a number of code segments that made use of now-obsolete PHP4
479 idioms. Unfortunately, this caused a fatal error whenever FeedWordPress
480 attempted to make use of the cache, since FWP's caching plugin was written
481 to match the older idiom. FeedWordPress has been updated to follow the new,
482 PHP5 idiom when possible, thus eliminating the fatal error.
483
484 * PERFORMANCE: The handling of queries to determine whether posts had been
485 previously syndicated produced some very slow queries (usually, but not
486 always, involving a scan over the MD5(post_guid) column of the table). The
487 code that prepares MySQL queries for previously-syndicated checks has been
488 revised to eliminate the MD5(post_guid) scan entirely, and to significantly
489 improve performance by eliminating other unnecessary clauses.
490
491 * BUGFIX: NO LONGER DESTROYS STICKY POSTS. Previous versions could destroy
492 (or, more precisely, replace the content of) sticky posts due to some
493 queries mashed together in unexpected ways by WordPress. Version 2011.0706
494 accounts for and eliminates the problem; your sticky posts should be safe
495 once again.
496
497 * BUGFIX: GUIDS CONTAINING MYSQL-ESCAPED CHARACTERS NO LONGER CAUSE DUPLICATE
498 POSTS TO APPEAR. One remaining source of duplicate post issues in 2011.0602
499 was guids that contained characters that needed to be escaped for MySQL,
500 such as single quotes and double quotes. The work-around for handling
501 filtered URIs has now been corrected to ensure that these do not cause
502 duplicate posts.
503
504 = 2011.0602 =
505
506 * WP 3.1.3 COMPAT / BUGFIX: WHITESPACE IN GUIDS NO LONGER PRODUCES DUPLICATE
507 POSTS. The work-around for handling filtered URIs in guid elements has now
508 been extended to handle URIs that were filtered because of leading or
509 trailing whitespace, in addition to URIs that were filtered because of
510 unapproved schemes.
511
512 * WP 3.1.3 COMPAT / BUGFIX: RELATIVE URLS IN GUIDS NO LONGER PRODUCE DUPLICATE
513 POSTS. The work-around for handling filtered URIs in guid elements has now
514 been extended to handle URIs that were altered without being filtered out
515 entirely (most commonly because a scheme was added to a relative URL).
516
517 * BUGFIX: UPDATES TO POST NO LONGER CAUSE DUPLICATE DRAFT VERSION TO APPEAR.
518 Under certain conditions in 2011.0531, an update to an existing post would
519 not be properly applied to the post itself, but rather would appear as a
520 duplicate post with Draft status. This bug has been eliminated, and updates
521 will now be properly inserted as revisions to the existing post.
522
523 = 2011.0531 =
524
525 * WORDPRESS 3.1.3 COMPATIBILITY: DUPLICATE POSTS ISSUE FIXED. Due to
526 internal changes in the way that WordPress handles post guids in the
527 most recent release (3.1.3), many users experienced problems with many
528 duplicate posts appearing in rapid succession. (Specifically, this would
529 happen with any posts using tag: URL guids -- such as all the posts
530 coming from Blogger feeds or feeds from other Google services.) This
531 compatibility release of FeedWordPress eliminates the issue by working
532 around the new restrictions on tag: URLs.
533
534 * NEW AND IMPROVED DIAGNOSTICS: Syndication --> Diagnostics now contains some
535 new diagnostics settings useful for debugging problems with duplicate posts
536 (allowing you to easily view the guid of posts in the WordPress posts
537 database and allowing you to track the SQL used to check for existing
538 versions of a syndicated post).
539
540 = 2011.0512 =
541
542 * DIAGNOSTICS IMPROVEMENTS; "THERE MAY BE A BUG IN FEEDWORDPRESS" CRITICAL
543 ERROR NOTICES ELIMINATED: This version includes some major improvements
544 to the Syndication --> Diagnostics section, which should aid in
545 troubleshooting difficulties with items failing to be imported, posts
546 failing to be properly inserted into the database, or updates failing to
547 be recorded. If you have been encountering critical error / bug notices
548 with a white screen and the message "THERE MAY BE A BUG IN
549 FEEDWORDPRESS," followed by an extraordinarily long dump of mostly
550 incomprehensible diagnostic information, you'll be happy to know that
551 the condition causing these notices has been eliminated. In the few
552 cases where errors may still crop up with database insertions,
553 FeedWordPress will now produce a significantly more manageable and more
554 useful diagnostic message.
555
556 * BUGFIX: NEW POSTS FAILING TO APPEAR IN A CLEANLY-INSTALLED FEEDWORDPRESS
557 SYSTEM. If you encountered a recurring problem with FeedWordPress
558 failing to import new posts, after a clean install of FeedWordPress
559 (i.e., not an upgrade from a previous version), this problem may have
560 been the result of a bug with author-handling which has now been fixed
561 in the 2011.0512 release. (If the problem does *not* go away with the
562 upgrade, this version also includes significant improvements to the
563 Diagnostics system, which will help track down what *is* causing it
564 in your particular case.)
565
566 * PERFORMANCE: New handling of update hashes allows FeedWordPress to avoid
567 a certain kind of infinite loop, caused when two more more different
568 syndicated feeds each carried a version of the same item (for example,
569 because it appeared on two different aggregator feeds that you're
570 syndicating). In previous versions, when this kind of loop cropped up,
571 syndicated posts could pile up an indefinitely large number of revisions
572 -- each revision alternating between the version from each of the two
573 feeds where it appeared -- which would, over time, dramatically inflate
574 the size of the database, and kill the performance of queries on the
575 post table. This issue has been resolved: revisions of the post that
576 have been syndicated once will not be re-syndicated over and over again.
577
578 * AUTHOR LISTS: Lists of authors presented on the Author settings pages
579 should now be easier to scan through, with author names arranged in
580 alphabetical order.
581
582 * FEED ITEM DATE PARSING: More tweaks to make date-time handling more
583 resilient when feeds provide broken or weird values for the timestamps
584 on syndicated items. FWP will now attempt to work around unparseable
585 timezone values.
586
587 * AUTHOR MATCHING: Now attempts to match author names against the WP login
588 name in addition to display_name; when creating user record, also fills
589 in some best-guess values for nickname, firstname and lastname. Also
590 properly picks up Atom 1.0 author/uri data from feed.
591
592 * COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress has been successfully tested for
593 compatibility with recent releases of WordPress, up to version 3.1.2.
594
595 = 2011.0211 =
596
597 * BUGFIX: DUPLICATE POSTS WHEN GUIDS ARE TOO LONG: When feeds included
598 exceptionally long GUIDs, FeedWordPress could occasionally get into
599 a situation where posts with the long GUIDs would be duplicated over
600 and over again with each update (because FWP failed to store the full
601 GUID, due to length constraints in the relevant database tables).
602 Without the full GUID, FWP would not know that the post had already
603 been syndicated once. This bug has been fixed, and should no longer
604 produce duplicate posts.
605
606 * HTTP TIMEOUT SETTING: If you are frequently running into timeout
607 problems with one or more of the feeds you syndicate, FWP now allows you
608 to adjust the timeout for HTTP requests using a global or feed-by-feed
609 setting.
610
611 * HTTP GET PARAMETERS: You can now temporarily or permanently add HTTP
612 GET parameters to a subscription using an interface in Syndication -->
613 Feeds & Updates. This is especially helpful for making quick, short-term
614 changes to a subscription (for example, to pull in all the previous
615 items from a web service, before settling down to pulling in only newly
616 updated items).
617
618 * DIAGNOSTICS SYSTEM: Added several new diagnostics which are useful in
619 troubleshooting, and established a framework for add-on modules to hook
620 in with their own diagnostic messages.
621
622 * UI: Adjusted some internal coding, which should allow for settings
623 pages and add-ons to properly display multiple category pickers on a
624 single settings page.
625
626 * PHP4 COMPATIBILITY TWEAKS: This version makes some tweaks to the handling
627 of object references which should improve compatibility with older
628 versions of PHP. (Although, I should note, web hosts that still force
629 you to run under PHP 4 -- in 2011! -- are *bad web hosts*.)
630
631 * IMPROVED PERFORMANCE: This version eliminates a *major* performance drag
632 that shows up on sites with large numbers of users (due to some poor
633 decisions about where to place a user query, which caused the user table
634 to be scanned frequently when it did not need to be). If you experienced
635 serious problems with CPU load or slow database performance under
636 2010.0905, which kicked in immediately when FWP was loaded and tended
637 to disappear immediately if FWP was de-activated, it is likely that
638 upgrading away from 2010.0905 to the most recent version will resolve
639 your problem.
640
641
642 = 2010.0905 =
643
644 * BUGFIX: CATEGORIES AND TAGS CORRECTLY ASSIGNED IN AUTOMATIC UPDATES.
645 Version 2010.0903 switched over to a new way of assigning categories and
646 tags as part of its support for handling custom taxonomies.
647 Unfortunately, the method that it uses is subjected to some checks of
648 the current user's capabilities, which creates problems for posts that
649 are being inserted into the WordPress database when there *is* no
650 current user logged in (as, for example, when an update is being carried
651 out from a cron job or automatic update). The result was that posts
652 from cron jobs and automatic updates ended up with no Categories and no
653 Tags being assigned. This bug has now been fixed: in 2010.0905, Tags and
654 Categories should be correctly assigned to all posts, regardless of
655 whether they were added from manual updates, cron jobs, or automatic
656 updates.
657
658 = 2010.0903 =
659
660 * WORDPRESS 3 REQUIRED: Please note that this release of FeedWordPress
661 *requires* WordPress 3.0 or later. If you are currently using a 2.x
662 branch of WordPress, you will need to upgrade to WordPress 3 before you
663 can successfully upgrade FeedWordPress.
664
665 * BUGFIX: NO MORE DISAPPEARING "SYNDICATED SOURCES" PANEL; INTERNET
666 EXPLORER UI GLITCH APPARENTLY FIXED: Several users independently
667 reported a problem with FWP 2010.0623 and various versions of IE. A
668 problem with the HTML markup caused IE (but not Firefox or
669 Chrome) to completely hide the Syndicated Sources administration panel
670 (the main list of currently-syndicated sources, and the main location
671 for adding new sources, under the Syndication menu item) when a user
672 added their first syndicated feed. Maddeningly, the glitch seemed to
673 affect some IE users and not others: I was never able to reproduce the
674 problem for myself on my own machines. However, the markup of Syndicated
675 Sources has undergone significant changes and corrections since
676 2010.0623, and two independent sources who had been having this problem
677 confirm that they no longer encounter it with the updated version. For
678 the time being, I am going to declare this bug squashed.
679
680 * BUGFIX: MORE PROTECTION AGAINST FATAL ERRORS FROM PLUGGABLE VERSIONS OF
681 SimplePie: FeedWordPress now takes some precautions that should help to
682 better avoid conflicts for users who have installed pluggable versions
683 of SimplePie for another plugin or theme. (You may not know that you have
684 done this; but if you've been encountering fatal errors indicating that
685 you cannot redeclare class SimplePie, or something along those lines,
686 there is now a better chance that those fatal errors will be eliminated.
687
688 * PERFORMANCE: SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCED MEMORY CONSUMPTION FOR LARGE UPDATES:
689 FeedWordPress is still a memory-hungry little module, especially when
690 you are dealing with very large feeds. However, users should notice a
691 significant reduction in memory overloads, especially if they update a
692 large number of feeds at once.
693
694 * USER INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: Nothing is radically different, but there's
695 been a fair amount of extra spit and polish added, including a convenient
696 new Dashboard widget that may save you a trip to the Syndication menu,
697 a lot of effort to make the relationship between global and feed-by-feed
698 settings more obvious to the user and more easily controllable, to make
699 navigation between settings pages easier, to sand off a few rough edges,
700 and to make other improvements on the margins. I hope you'll like how
701 it looks.
702
703 * ADDING MULTIPLE FEEDS: FeedWordPress now provides a convenient mode for
704 adding multiple feeds at once, using either a copy-and-pasted list, or
705 else an OPML file. Go to Syndication --> Syndicated Sources and check
706 out the two new buttons underneath the New Source input box. When you
707 have to add a number of feeds at once, this can save you considerable
708 time and trouble.
709
710 * IMPROVED HANDLING OF AUTHORS WITH DUPLICATE E-MAIL ADDRESS AND AUTHORS
711 WITH NAMES WRITTEN IN FOREIGN SCRIPTS: WordPress 3 is increasingly picky
712 about what it will accept for new author accounts, and some of the
713 conditions it imposes can cause error conditions that prevent posts from
714 being properly syndicated, or properly attributed, if authors happen to
715 have identical e-mail addresses, or if users are given usernames that are
716 written in non-Western scripts. FeedWordPress now handles these much
717 better, and systematically works to avoid clashes between syndicated
718 authors' account names or in their e-mail addresses, which should result
719 in significantly better results in mapping author names to WordPress
720 user accounts.
721
722 * MAPPING CATEGORIES ON SYNDICATED POSTS TO TAGS NOW BETTER SUPPORTED:
723 In previous versions, the only way for the Categories provided by a
724 syndicated feed to be mapped into Post Tags was to instruct FWP to
725 create new tags, rather than new categories, for unfamiliar categories
726 from the feed. This works fine if you want tags to be the default; but
727 if you want only a *specific* set of tags, there was no way to get them
728 without getting most or all other categories imported as tags. You can
729 now do this by creating a tag (under Posts ==> Post Tags) before
730 importing the post; when the syndicated category matches a pre-existing
731 tag, the incoming post will be tagged with that tag, without creating
732 a local Post Category.
733
734 * REL-TAG MICROFORMAT SUPPORT FOR INLINE TAGS: Syndicated posts that
735 contain inline tags, marked up using the Rel-Tag microformat
736 <http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag>, are now tagged with the tags
737 provided by Rel-Tag format links.
738
739 * MUCH GREATER CONTROL OVER CATEGORY AND TAG MAPPING: This is partly the
740 result of building in support for a potentially endless set of custom
741 taxonomies (see below), but in general there has been a great deal of
742 effort towards giving you more control over how categories and tags
743 provided by the feed are mapped into terms on the local blog. In
744 particular, you can now force FeedWordPress to create only categories
745 from categories and tags provided by the feed; or to create only tags;
746 or to search both categories and tags for a match; or you can simply
747 force it to drop all of the categories provided by the feed and use
748 only categories or tags that you explicitly provide. In addition, you
749 can now also choose whether to override global categories settings with
750 a local, feed-specific setting; or whether to *add together* *both* the
751 global categories and the local feed-specific categories -- depending
752 on whatever your use-case may demand.
753
754 * CUSTOM POST TYPES AND TAXONOMY SUPPORTS: This is mainly for the
755 super-geeky, but if you use other plugins or themes that make
756 significant use of WordPress's support for custom post types and custom
757 taxonomies, you may be pleased to find that FeedWordPress now allows you
758 to feed incoming posts into any custom feed type that you wish, and to
759 map categories and tags from the feed to custom taxonomies as well as
760 to the standard Category and Tag taxonomies.
761
762 * STORING NAMESPACED CUSTOM FEED ELEMENTS IN POST CUSTOM FIELDS: If you
763 would like to use FeedWordPress's support for storing custom meta-data
764 from feed elements in the custom fields for a post (for example, to
765 store geolocation data or iTunes media meta-data), you'll find that it's
766 now much easier for you to access these namespaced elements. You always
767 could access them, but in previous versions you might have to write
768 something ugly like $(/{http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#}lat)
769 just to get at the value of a `<geo:lat>` tag. Now, as long as you use
770 the same mnemonic codes that the feed producer used, you should always
771 be able to write a nice, simple expression like $(/geo:lat) to get the
772 value of a <geo:lat> tag.
773
774 * CUSTOM DIRECTORY STRUCTURE SUPPORT: if you poke at it enough, WordPress
775 is relatively flexible about where it should store admin interface code,
776 uploaded content, plugins, and a number of other things that occupy an
777 important place in the WordPress directory structure. Previous versions
778 of FeedWordPress encountered serious errors or broke entirely when used
779 with directory structures other than the default. This should now be
780 fixed: FWP now supports custom directory structures wherever WordPress
781 allows them to be customized, rather than depending on the default
782 locations. Enjoy your freedom!
783
784 * MANY NEW FILTERS AND API UTILITY FUNCTIONS FOR ADD-ON PROGRAMMERS: There
785 have been too many improvements to list them all in this ChangeLog, but
786 it means that much more power and ease for folks who are customizing
787 FeedWordPress through PHP filters or add-on modules. Fuller
788 documentation will be put up at the Wiki at feedwordpress.radgeek.org
789 soon.
790
791 = 2010.0623 =
792
793 * WORDPRESS 3.0 COMPATIBILITY / AUTHOR MAPPING INTERFACE ISSUES: I
794 resolved a couple of outstanding issues with the author mapping
795 interface (Syndication --> Authors), which were preventing new users
796 from being created correctly and author mapping rules from being set up
797 correctly. These partly had to do with new restrictions on user account
798 creation introduced in WordPress 3.0; anyway, they should now be fixed.
799
800 * MORE EFFICIENT SYNDICATED URL LOOKUPS: Several users noticed that the
801 bug fix introduced in 2010.0528 for compatibility with post-listing
802 plugins caused a lot more queries to the database in order to look up
803 numerical post IDs from the URL provided to the filter. This shouldn't
804 cause any major problems, but it is not as efficient as it could be; the
805 code now takes advantage of a more efficient way of doing things,
806 which usually will not require any additional database queries.
807
808 * SIMPLEPIE FEED UPDATE ISSUES: If you have been having significant
809 problems with getting feeds to update correctly, this may be the result
810 of some bugs in the implementation of SimplePie caching that ships with
811 WordPress (as of version 3.0). (You would most commonly experience this
812 error if you continually saw errors such as "No feed found at <...>" in
813 your updates.) Fortunately, SimplePie allows for a great deal of
814 extensibility and this allows me to work around the problem; these
815 error conditions should now be mostly eliminated when the underlying
816 feed is valid.
817
818 * UI: SHOW INACTIVE SOURCES: When you use the default unsubscribe option
819 -- which turns off the subscription to a feed while preserving the posts
820 from it and the syndication-related meta-data for the feed -- the
821 unsubscribed feed can now easily be viewed in a special "Inactive"
822 section of the Syndicated Sources page. (As a side benefit, if you've
823 accidentally, or only temporarily, turned off the subscription to a
824 feed, it is now much easier to restore the feed to being active, or to
825 delete it permanently, if you prefer.
826
827 * UI: FEED FINDER / SWITCH FEED INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: changes to styling
828 and options for the feed finder / switch feed, which should now make it
829 easier, in some cases, to find alternative feeds, and make interface
830 options more clearly visible.
831
832 * FILTERS: `syndicated_item_published` and `syndicated_item_updated` NOW
833 PROPERLY AFFECT THE DATING OF POSTS. These filters used to affect some
834 date-related settings, but not others -- and, most importantly, not the
835 final date that is set for a post's publication or last-modified date
836 in the WordPress database. Now, they do affect that, as they should.
837 (Filters should receive, and return, a long integer, representing a Unix
838 epoch relative timestamp.)
839
840 * MAGIC URL TO CLEAR THE CACHE: Suppose that you need to clear the feed
841 cache, for whatever reason; suppose, even, that you need to clear it on
842 a regular basis. One way you might do this is by logging into the
843 FeedWordPress administrative interface and going to Syndication -->
844 Performance. Another way you might do it, now, is to simply send an
845 HTTP request to a magic URL provided by FeedWordPress: if your blog is
846 at example.com, the URL would be <http://example.com/?clear_cache=1>
847
848 = 2010.0602 =
849
850 * CATEGORY BOX INTERFACE ELEMENT FIXED FOR WP 3.0: Stylesheet changes
851 between WordPress 2.9.x and the WordPress 3.0 RC caused the Categories
852 box under **Syndication --> Categories & Tags** to malfunction. This
853 has been fixed.
854
855 * LINK CATEGORY SELECTION BOX IN SYNDICATION ==> FEEDS FIXED FOR WP 2.8
856 AND 2.9: A WP 3.0 compatibility change introduced in 2010.0531
857 inadvertently broke the Syndicated Link Category selector under
858 Syndication --> Feeds & Updates in WP 2.8 and WP 2.9, causing the post
859 categories to be displayed in the selector rather than the link
860 categories. This should now be fixed so that the selector will work
861 correctly under both the current versions of WordPress and the 3.0 RC.
862
863 * MORE PERMISSIVE HANDLING OF FEEDS WITH BAD CONTENT-TYPE HEADERS: One of
864 the small advantages that MagpieRSS had over SimplePie is that it was
865 more tolerant about parsing well-formed feeds that the remote web server
866 happened to deliver with weird or incorrect HTTP Content-type headers.
867 In feeds affected by this problem, the new SimplePie parser would simply
868 fail to find a feed, due to its being led astray by the contents of the
869 Content-type header. This version includes an extension to SimplePie's
870 content-type sniffer that offers more permissive handling of the HTTP
871 headers.
872
873 * MORE FULL-TEXT "EXCERPTS" NOW PROPERLY SHORTENED. Version 2010.0528
874 introduced code to control for cases in which elements intended for
875 item summaries are (ill-advisedly) used to carry the full text of posts;
876 past versions of FeedWordPress would simply include the full text of the
877 post in the excerpt field, but newer versions now attempt to detect
878 this condition when it arises and to head it off, by blanking out the
879 excerpt field and filling it with an automatically generated short,
880 plain text excerpt from the full content. This release broadens the
881 test conditions that indicate when an excerpt field is treated as
882 identical to the full text of the post, and should therefore improve
883 the handling of some feeds (such as Google Reader feeds) where the full
884 text of each post was still appearing in the excerpt field.
885
886 * FILTERS: `syndicated_item_published` AND `syndicated_item_updated`
887 FILTERS NOW ALLOW FILTER AUTHORS TO CHANGE POST TIMESTAMPS. You can now
888 use the `syndicated_item_published` and `syndicated_item_updated` filter
889 hooks to write filters or add-ons which directly change the post date
890 and most-recently-updated timestamps on incoming syndicated posts. Props
891 to niska for pointing out where the filters needed to be applied in
892 order to change WordPress's internal timestamps for incoming posts.
893
894 = 2010.0531 =
895
896 * PERMALINK / CUSTOM FIELDS PROBLEM RESOLVED: An issue in 2010.0528 caused
897 some posts to be imported without the proper syndication-related
898 meta-data being attached (thus causing permalinks to point back to the
899 aggregator website rather than to the source website, among other
900 problems). This problem has been resolved (and a fix has been applied
901 which will resolve the problem for any posts affected by this problem,
902 if the original post is recent enough to still be available on the feed).
903
904 * UI: The "Back End" section has been split into two separate sections --
905 "Performance" (dealing with caching, database index, and other
906 performance tweaks), and "Diagnostics" (dealing with debug mode,
907 update logging, and a number of new diagnostic tests which I will be
908 rolling out over the next few releases).
909
910 * Several minor interface bug fixes and PHP warning notices eliminated.
911
912 = 2010.0528 =
913
914 #### Compatibility ####
915
916 * SIMPLEPIE IS NOW USED TO PARSE FEEDS; NO MORE MAGPIERSS UPGRADES NEEDED:
917 One of the biggest changes in this release is that FeedWordPress no
918 longer depends on MagpieRSS to parse feeds, and has switched to the much
919 more up-to-date and flexible SimplePie feed parser, which is included as
920 a standard part of WordPress versions 2.8 and later. Using SimplePie will
921 hopefully allow for better handling of feeds going further, and will
922 allow me greater flexibility in determining how exactly the feed parser
923 will operate. It also means that FeedWordPress no longer requires
924 special upgrades to the WordPress core MagpieRSS files, and should
925 eliminate quite a bit of complexity.
926
927 * MAGPIERSS COMPATIBILITY LAYER FOR EXISTING FILTERS AND ADD-ONS: However,
928 I have also implemented a compatibility layer to ensure that existing
929 filters and add-ons for FeedWordPress which depended on the MagpieRSS
930 data format *should not be broken* by the switch to SimplePie. Going
931 forward, I recommend that new filters and add-ons be written to take
932 advantage of the SimplePie object representations of items, feeds, etc.,
933 rather than the MagpieRSS arrays, but the MagpieRSS arrays will still
934 be available and older filters should continue to work as they have in
935 the past.
936
937 * COMPATIBILITY WITH WORDPRESS 2.9.x and 3.0: This release has been tested
938 for the existing WordPress 2.9.x branch and with the upcoming release of
939 WordPress 3.0. Changes in the user interface JavaScript between WordPress
940 2.8.x and WordPress 2.9 caused the tag box interface element to break in
941 the Syndication --> Categories & Tags settings page; changes in the API
942 functions for adding new authors caused fatal errors under certain
943 conditions in WordPress 3.0. These breakages have been fixed.
944
945 * DROPPED LEGACY SUPPORT FOR WORDPRESS PRIOR TO 2.8: Because SimplePie is
946 not included with versions of WordPress prior to 2.8, I have chosen to
947 drop legacy support for WordPress versions 1.5 through 2.7. If you are
948 using FeedWordPress with a version of WordPress before 2.8, you will
949 have to upgrade your installation of WordPress in order to take
950 advantage of this release.
951
952 * PHP 5.3 COMPATIBILITY: A couple of compatibility issues, which were
953 causing fatal errors amd ugly warnings for users of PHP 5.3,
954 have been eliminated.
955
956 #### Features and Processing ####
957
958 * INTERFACE REORGANIZATION: The interface restructuring, began with
959 Version 2009.0612, has been completed. Catch-all settings pages have
960 been eliminated entirely for pages that cover each aspect of handling
961 a feed: Feeds & Updates, Posts & Links, Authors, Categories & Tags,
962 and Back End handling of the database and diagnostic information.
963 Extensive new interface hooks allow add-on modules to significantly
964 change or extend the FeedWordPress admin interface and workflow.
965
966 * STORING INFORMATION FROM THE FEED IN CUSTOM FIELDS: Many users
967 have written to request the ability to store information from elements
968 in the feed in a custom field on each post. (So that, for example, if
969 post includes a `itunes:duration` element, you could store the contents
970 in a Custom Field called `duration` on the post (for a Theme to access
971 later). The Custom Post Settings under Syndication --> Posts & Links now
972 allow you to access any item or feed tag, using a syntax similar to
973 a much-simplified version of XPath. See Posts & Links settings for
974 details.
975
976 * UPDATE-FREEZING ON MANUALLY EDITED POSTS: FeedWordPress now allows you
977 to mark posts that have been manually edited, so that the changes you
978 make will not be overwritten by later updates from the feed. If you make
979 manual edits to a particular post, just check the "Manual editing"
980 checkbox in order to protect your changes from being overwritten. If you
981 want to block *all* posts from being updated after they are imported
982 for the first time, a new "Updated Posts" setting in Posts & Links
983 allows you to freeze all posts from a particular feed, or all syndicated
984 posts.
985
986 * SETTING: FEED-BY-FEED SETTINGS FOR WHERE PERMALINKS POINT TO: You've
987 always been able to tell FeedWordPress whether permalinks for posts
988 should point to the original source of the story or the local copy. Now
989 you can choose different policies for different feeds, instead of one
990 global policy for all feeds. (Of course, you can still use a global
991 default if you prefer.)
992
993 * SETTING: USER CONTROL OVER TIMING BASIS. You can now determine the
994 schedule on which feeds are considered ready to poll for updates --
995 by default feeds become ready for polling after about 1 hour. You can
996 now increase or decrease the time window under Syndication --> Feeds &
997 Updates. (However, please pay *CAREFUL ATTENTION* to the recommendations
998 and DO NOT set the scheduling lower than 60 minutes unless you are
999 ABSOLUTELY SURE that you have specific permission from webmaster who
1000 provides that specific feed to poll more frequently than that. If you
1001 set this too low (and about 60 minutes is the polite minimum if you
1002 haven't been given a different figure), most webmasters will consider
1003 the frequent hits on their server as rude, or even downright abusive.
1004
1005 * OTHER SETTINGS: New settings also include the ability to stop FWP from
1006 resolving relative URLs within syndicated content, and the ability to
1007 choose whether FeedWordPress should indicate the comment feed from the
1008 original source, or the local comment feed, when providing the comment
1009 feed URL for a syndicated post.
1010
1011 #### Parsing ####
1012
1013 * BETTER DATE HANDLING -- FEWER FLASHBACKS TO 1969 and 1970: FeedWordPress
1014 has made some bugfixes and some improvements in the logic for parsing
1015 dates. This should allow FeedWordPress to correctly parse more dates in
1016 more feeds; and, in the last resort, when FeedWordPress fails to
1017 correctly parse a date, to fall back to a more intelligent default. This
1018 should hopefully avoid most or all error conditions that have resulted
1019 in articles being erroneously dated to the dawn of the Unix epoch
1020 (31 December 1969 or 1 January 1970).
1021
1022 * FULL-TEXT "EXCERPTS" NOW PROPERLY SHORTENED. Based on a straightforward
1023 reading of the existing RSS specs, it's reasonable for the
1024 rss:description element to be read as a plaintext summary or excerpt for
1025 the item containing the description -- with the full text of the item,
1026 if available, in another, better-suited element, such as the de facto
1027 standard content:encoded extension element. The problem is that uses of
1028 RSS rarely have much to do with anything like a straightforward reading
1029 of the specs. As a result, many actual RSS producers in the wild put the
1030 full text of the article in a description element. But since
1031 FeedWordPress has treated this text as a summary, this produces
1032 aggregated posts with lengthy "excerpts" containing the full text of the
1033 article. This release of FeedWordPress fixes the problem by doing a
1034 little digging before treating rss:description as a summary: if the
1035 description element is used properly as a plain text summary, then
1036 FeedWordPress will take the summary provided by the feed, rather than
1037 recreating its own excerpt from the full text; but if an RSS item has no
1038 full-text element other than description, FeedWordPress will treat the
1039 description element as the full text of the article, and generate a
1040 shortened excerpt automatically from that text.
1041
1042 #### API ####
1043
1044 * TEMPLATE API: new template tags `get_local_permalink()` and
1045 `the_local_permalink()` allow you to access the permalink for a post on
1046 your aggregator site, even when FeedWordPress is rewriting permalinks to
1047 point to the original source site.
1048
1049 * NEW HOOKS FOR ADD-ONS AND FILTERS: I have added a number of new hooks
1050 which allow add-on modules to filter more precisely, gather information
1051 at more points, and to enhance the FeedWordPress admin interface. For
1052 a list of new hooks and documentation, see the FeedWordPress
1053 documentation wiki at
1054 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/add-ons-and-filters>
1055
1056 * FILTER API: A number of new utility methods have been added to the
1057 SyndicatedPost class to make it easier for filters and add-ons to
1058
1059 * FILTER API: Globals $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta DEPRECATED. These
1060 global variables, originally introduced to allow filters access to
1061 information about the source feed in `syndicated_item` filters (which
1062 were passed in through global variables rather than as parameters
1063 because of a bug in WP 1.5 which was then fixed in 1.5.1) have been
1064 DEPRECATED. If you have any filters or add-ons which still depend on
1065 these global variables, you should see about fixing them to access data
1066 about the source feed using the SyndicatedPost::link element instead.
1067 For documentation, see the FeedWordPress documentation wiki at
1068 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedpost> and
1069 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedlink>.
1070
1071 * DIAGNOSTICS: I've included a number of new diagnostic options and
1072 messages, which should allow an experienced user to better investigate
1073 any problems that may crop up.
1074
1075 #### Bug Fixes ####
1076
1077 * BUGFIX: & IN PERMALINKS NO LONGER CAUSING ATOM OR HTML VALIDATION
1078 EFFORTS: Many users reported an issue in which syndicating a feed with
1079 special XML characters in the URLs (& was the most common, since it is
1080 used to separate HTTP GET parameters) would cause the aggregator's
1081 feeds to produce invalid (malformed) XML. This update addresses the
1082 issue in Atom feeds. Unfortunately, it has not been technically possible
1083 to address the problem in RSS 2.0 feeds, due to limitations on
1084 WordPress's internal templates for RSS feeds.
1085
1086 * BUGFIX: BROKEN URLS IN "POPULAR POSTS" AND SIMILAR PLUGINS SHOULD NO
1087 LONGER BE BROKEN. A number of users noticed an issue where plugins and
1088 templates that listed posts in locations outside of the post loop
1089 (for example, "Popular Posts"-style plugins that listed posts in the
1090 sidebar), often produced the wrong URL for post links. (Typically, all
1091 the posts listed would get the same wrong URL.) This should now be
1092 fixed. Thanks to Björn for sending in a quick fix!
1093
1094 * MINOR BUGFIXES: This release includes a number of fixes to minor bugs
1095 and compatibility issues, including: silent failures of the "Syndicate"
1096 button, "Illegal Offset Type" error messages from MagpieRSS, and others.
1097
1098 = 2009.0707 =
1099
1100 * BUGFIX: WORDPRESS 2.8 AJAX COMPATIBILITY ISSUES RESOLVED (blank or
1101 truncated "Syndicated Sites" administration page): Due to changes in the
1102 AJAX interface elements between WordPress 2.7 and WordPress 2.8, several
1103 FeedWordPress users encountered an issue where the front "Syndication"
1104 page in the FeedWordPress administrative interface would come up blank,
1105 without the normal "Syndicated Sites" list and "Update" control, or
1106 sometimes wth the boxes visible but one or both of them truncated, with
1107 only the title bar. This issue should now be resolved: with the new
1108 version of FeedWordPress, the compatibility issue that caused the
1109 disappearance should be eliminated, and if boxes are shown with only
1110 their handle visible, you should once again be able to drop down the
1111 rest of the box by clicking once on its title bar.
1112
1113 * BUGFIX: TAG SETTING WIDGET FIXED. Due to changes in interface elements
1114 between WordPress 2.7 and WordPress 2.8, people using FeedWordPress with
1115 WordPress 2.8 found that the widget for setting tags to be applied to
1116 all syndicated posts, or all syndicated posts from a particular feed,
1117 no longer displayed "Add" and "Remove" buttons for individual tags. This
1118 issue has now been fixed, and the tagging widget should once again work
1119 more or less exactly like the tagging widget for individual posts in the
1120 normal WordPress admin interface.
1121
1122 = 2009.0618 =
1123
1124 * BUGFIX: MYSTERY ERRORS WITH WITH WP_Http_Fsockopen HTTP TRANSPORT
1125 ELIMINATED: Thanks to a combination of a subtle bug in FeedWordPress,
1126 and changes to the HTTP transport code in WordPress, a number of users
1127 encountered an error in which any time they attempted to add a new feed
1128 through the FeedFinder interface, FeedWordPress would fail and display
1129 an HTTP request failure diagnostic message. The subtle bug has been
1130 fixed, and with it, most of these errors should now be eliminated.
1131
1132 Be sure to upgrade your MagpieRSS to the most recent MagpieRSS version
1133 after you have insalled FeedWordPress 2009.0618, or this bug fix will
1134 not take effect.
1135
1136 = 2009.0613 =
1137
1138 * INTERFACE/BUGFIX: WORDPRESS 2.8 CATEGORY BOX FIX. Thanks to a subtle
1139 change in class names between the WordPress 2.7 and 2.8 stylesheets,
1140 category boxes in the FeedWordPress settings interface tended to overflow
1141 and have a lot of messy-looking overlapping text under WordPress 2.8.
1142 This has now been fixed.
1143
1144 * FeedFinder FAILURE DIAGNOSTICS: When FWP's FeedFinder fails to find any
1145 feeds at a given URL (for example, when you are trying to add a
1146 subscription through the administrative interface and you run into an
1147 error message), FeedWordPress now provides more diagnostic information
1148 for the reasons behind the failure. If that helps you, great; if not,
1149 it should help me respond more intelligently to your support request..
1150
1151 = 2009.0612 =
1152
1153 * WORDPRESS 2.8 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress 2009.0612 has been tested for
1154 compatibility with the recent version 2.8 release of WordPress.
1155
1156 * INTERFACE RESTRUCTURING: In order to avoid settings posts from becoming
1157 too crowded, and to modularize and better organize the user interface,
1158 new "Posts" and "Categories & Tags" subpages have been created under the
1159 "Syndication" menu. "Posts" controls settings for individal syndicated
1160 posts (such as publication status, comment and ping status, whether or
1161 not to use the original location of the post as the permalink, whether
1162 or not to expose posts to formatting filters, and so on). "Categories &
1163 Tags" controls settings for assigning new syndicated posts to categories
1164 and tags, such as categories or tags to apply to all syndicated posts,
1165 and how to handle categories that do not yet exist in the WordPress
1166 database. These subpages, like the Authors subpage, handle settings for
1167 the global default level and for individual syndicated feeds.
1168
1169 Corresponding to these new subpages, the old Syndication Settings and
1170 Feed Settings subpages have been cleaned up and simplified, and now only
1171 link to the appropriate subpages for options that can be set in the
1172 Posts, Authors, or Categories & Tags subpages.
1173
1174 * FEATURE: ADD CUSTOM SETTINGS TO EACH SYNDICATED POST: FeedWordPress has
1175 long had an interface for creating custom settings for each syndicated
1176 *feed* which could be retrieved in templates using the `get_feed_meta()`
1177 template function. But it had no feature for adding custom fields to
1178 each individual syndicated *post*. In response to requests from users, I
1179 have added the ability to apply custom fields to each individual
1180 syndicated post, using the new Syndication --> Posts subpage. You can
1181 set up custom fields to be applied to every syndicated post, or custom
1182 fields to be applied to syndicated posts from a particular feed.
1183
1184 * FEATURE: MAGPIERSS VERSION CHECK AND UPGRADE: FeedWordPress will attempt
1185 to determine whether or not you are using the upgraded version of
1186 MagpieRSS that comes packaged with FeedWordPress. If not, it will throw
1187 an error on admin pages, and, if you are a site administrator, it will
1188 give you the option to ignore the error message, or to attempt an
1189 automatic upgrade (using a native file copy). If the file copy fails,
1190 FeedWordPress will offer some guidance on how to perform the upgrade
1191 manually.
1192
1193 * BLANK POSTS PROBLEM NO LONGER OCCURS WITH OLD & BUSTED MAGPIERSS: Due
1194 to the fact that I relied on a content normalization that occurs in my
1195 upgraded version of MagpieRSS, but not in the old & busted version of
1196 MagpieRSS that ships with WordPress, until this version, if you tried to
1197 syndicate an Atom feed without having performed the (*strongly
1198 recommended*) MagpieRSS upgrade, all of the posts would come up with
1199 completely blank contents. That's not because MagpieRSS couldn't read
1200 the data, but rather because the new Magpie version puts that data in a
1201 location where the old version doesn't, and I was only looking in that
1202 newer location. Now it checks for both, meaning that posts will continue
1203 to display their contents even if you don't upgrade MagpieRSS. (But you
1204 **really should** upgrade it, anyway.)
1205
1206 * BUGFIX: RELATIVE URI RESOLUTION FOR POST CONTENT RESTORED. Some time
1207 back, I added support for resolving relative URIs against xml:base on
1208 feeds that support it to the MagpieRSS upgrade in FeedWordPress. Then I
1209 took out code that did the same thing from the main FeedWordPress code.
1210 Of course, the problem is that some people, even though it is clearly
1211 stupid or evil to do so, still include relative URIs for images or links
1212 in posts on feed formats that do *not* adequately support xml:base
1213 (notably, RSS 2.0 feeds). In response to a user request, I have added
1214 this functionality back in, so that MagpieRSS will resolve any relative
1215 URIs that it knows how to resolve using xml:base, and then FeedWordPress
1216 will attempt to resolve any relative URIs that are left over afterwards.
1217
1218 * BUGFIX: INTERFACE OPTION FOR SETTING SYNDICATED POST PUBLICATION STATUS
1219 ON A FEED-BY-FEED BASIS HAS BEEN RESTORED: Due to a version-checking
1220 bug, users of WordPress 2.7.x lost an option from the "Edit a syndicated
1221 feed" interface which allowed them to determine whether newly syndicated
1222 posts should be published immediately, held as "Pending Review," saved
1223 as drafts, or saved as private posts. (The option to change this
1224 setting globally remained in place, but users could no longer set it on
1225 a feed-by-feed basis.) The version-checking bug has been fixed, and the
1226 option has been restored.
1227
1228 * BUGFIX: "ARE YOU SURE?" FATAL ERROR ELIMINATED AND SECURITY IMPROVED:
1229 Under certain circumstances (for example, when users have configured
1230 their browser or proxy not to send HTTP Referer headers, for privacy or
1231 other reasons), many features in the FeedWordPress administrative
1232 interface (such as adding new feeds or changing settings) would hit a
1233 fatal error, displaying only a cryptic message reading "Are you sure?"
1234 and a blank page following it. This problem has been eliminated by
1235 taking advantage of WordPress's nonce functions, which allow the
1236 security check which ran into this error to work properly even without
1237 receiving an HTTP Referer header. (N.B.: WordPress's nonce functions
1238 were first introduced in WordPress 2.0.3. If you're using FeedWordPress
1239 with an older version of WordPress, there's no fix for this problem:
1240 you'll just need to turn Referer headers back on. Sorry.)
1241
1242 * BUGFIX: MANUALLY-ALTERED POST STATUS, COMMENT STATUS, AND PING STATUS NO
1243 LONGER REVERTED BY POST UPDATES: If you manually altered the post status,
1244 comment status, or ping status of a syndicated post from what it was set
1245 to when first syndicated -- for example, if you had a feed that was set
1246 to bring in new posts as "Pending Review," and you then marked some of
1247 the pending posts as "Published" and others as "Unpublished" -- then
1248 in previous versions of FeedWordPress, these manual changes to the
1249 status would be lost -- so that, for example, your Published or Unpublished
1250 articles would revert to Pending Review -- if the source feed made any
1251 upates to the item. This could make the Pending Review feature both
1252 unreliable and also extremely frustrating to work with. The good news is
1253 that this bug has since been fixed: if you manually update the status
1254 of a post, it will no longer be reverted if or when the post is updated.
1255
1256 * BUGFIX: OCCASIONAL FATAL ERROR ON UPDATE ELIMINATED: Under certain
1257 limited conditions (specifically, when both the title and the content of
1258 a post to be updated are empty), an attempt to update the post would
1259 result in a fatal error. This has been fixed.
1260
1261 * INTERFACE: "CONFIGURE SETTINGS" CONVENIENCE LINK ADDED TO CONFIRMATION
1262 MESSAGE WHEN A NEW FEED IS ADDED: When you add a new subscription to
1263 FeedWordPress, the message box that appears to confirm it now includes a
1264 handy link to the feed's settings subpage, so that you can quickly set
1265 up any special settings you may want to set up for the new feed, without
1266 having to hunt through the list of all your other subscriptions to pick
1267 out the new one.
1268
1269 * INTERFACE: SIMPLIFYING AND CLARIFYING AUTOMATIC UPDATES SETTINGS. I have
1270 removed an interval setting for the cronless automatic updates which has
1271 confused many FeedWordPress users. In past versions of FWP, when you
1272 turned on automatic updates, you would be presented with a time interval
1273 setting which controlled how often FeedWordPress would check for feeds
1274 ready to be polled for updates. (That is, it DID NOT control how often
1275 feeds *would be polled*; it controlled how often FeedWordPress would
1276 *check* for feeds that *had become ready to poll*. The schedule on which
1277 feeds became ready for polling was still controlled either by requests
1278 encoded in elements within the feed itself, or else according to an
1279 internal calculation within FeedWordPress, averaging out to about 1 hour,
1280 if the feed did not include any scheduling request elements.) Since many
1281 users very often (and understandably) confused the purpose of this
1282 setting, and since the setting is for a feature that's actually very
1283 unlikely to require any manual control by the user, I have removed the
1284 setting; FeedWordPress now simply uses the default value of checking for
1285 feeds to poll every 10 minutes.
1286
1287 * FEEDFINDER PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT: FeedWordPress's FeedFinder class
1288 now uses `array_unique()` to make sure that it doesn't waste time
1289 repeatedly iterating over and polling the same URI. Props to Camilo
1290 (<http://projects.radgeek.com/2008/12/14/feedwordpress-20081214/#comment-20090122160414>).
1291
1292 = 2008.1214 =
1293
1294 * WORDPRESS 2.7 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress has been tested for
1295 compatibility with the newly released WordPress 2.7. WordPress 2.7 has
1296 deprecated the Snoopy library for HTTP requests, which caused a fatal
1297 error for users who had not installed the MagpieRSS upgrade (or whose
1298 installation of the MagpieRSS upgrade was overwritten by a recent update
1299 of WordPress). FeedWordPress now handles things gracefully when Snoopy
1300 is not immediately available.
1301
1302 * INTERFACE SPIFFED UP: Interface elements have been updated so that
1303 FeedWordPress's management interface fits in more naturally with the
1304 WordPress 2.7 interface (including a new logo and a number of small
1305 interface tweaks).
1306
1307 * BUG WITH TAGS FOR SYNDICATED ARTICLES FIXED: Several users encountered a
1308 bug with the option to add tags to all syndicated posts under
1309 Syndication --> Settings -- if you told FeedWordPress to add more than
1310 one tag to all syndicated posts, instead of doing so correctly, it would
1311 add a *single* tag instead, whose name was composed of the names of all
1312 the tags you asked it to add. This bug was the result of nothing more
1313 dignified than a typographical error on my part. It has now been fixed.
1314
1315 * MORE INFORMATION AVAILABLE WHEN FEEDWORDPRESS CAN'T FIND A FEED: When
1316 you enter a URL for a new syndication source, FeedWordPress uses a
1317 simple feed-finding algorithm (originally based on Mark Pilgrim's
1318 Universal Feed Finder) to try to determine whether the URL is the URL
1319 for a feed, or, if the URL points to an ordinary website rather than to
1320 a feed, whether there is a feed for that website. All well and good, but
1321 if FeedWordPress failed to find a feed, for whatever reason, it would
1322 typically return nothing more than a nasty little note to the effect of
1323 "no feed found," without any explanation of what went wrong.
1324 FeedWordPress now keeps track of error conditions from the HTTP
1325 requests that it uses in the course of looking for the feed, and so may
1326 be able to give you a bit more information about the nature of the
1327 problem if something goes wrong.
1328
1329
1330 = 2008.1105 =
1331
1332 * INTERFACE RESTRUCTURING AND SYNDICATION --> AUTHORS PAGE: As a first
1333 step towards modularizing and better organizing the user interface, a
1334 new "Authors" subpage has been created under the Syndication menu, which
1335 controls settings for syndicated authors, both at the global default
1336 level and at level of individual syndicated feeds.
1337
1338 * BUG RELATED TO THE ATTRIBUTION OF POSTS TO THE WRONG AUTHOR FIXED: Some
1339 users encountered an issue in which posts by different authors on
1340 different blogs -- especially blogs generated by Blogger -- were
1341 mistakenly attributed to a single author. The problem was caused by the
1342 way in which FeedWordPress matches syndicated authors to user accounts
1343 in the WordPress database: normally, if two feeds each list an author
1344 with the same e-mail address, they are counted as being the same person.
1345 Normally this works well, but it creates an issue in cases where
1346 blogging software assigns a single anonymous e-mail address to users who
1347 do not want their real e-mail address published. This is, for example,
1348 what Blogger does (by giving all users a default e-mail address of
1349 <noreply@blogger.com> if they don't want their own e-mail address
1350 listed). FeedWordPress now allows the user to correct for this problem
1351 with a couple of new settings under **Syndication --> Authors**, which
1352 allow users to turn off e-mail based author matching for particular
1353 addresses, or, if desired, to turn it off entirely. By default, e-mail
1354 based author matching is still turned on, but disabled for a list of
1355 known generic e-mail addresses. Right now, the "list" consists entirely
1356 of <noreply@blogger.com>; if you know other addresses that should be
1357 added, please [contact me](http://radgeek.com/contact) to let me know.
1358
1359 Please note that if you have already encountered this issue on your
1360 blog, upgrading FeedWordPress will prevent it from re-occurring in the
1361 future, but you still need to do two other things to fix the existing
1362 problem on your blog.
1363
1364 First, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to
1365 change the existing author mapping rules to re-map a a syndicated
1366 author's name to the proper target account. Go to **Syndication -->
1367 Authors**, select the feed you want to change from the drop-down list,
1368 and then change the settings under the "Syndicated Authors" section.
1369 (You will probably need to select "will be assigned to a new user..." to
1370 create a new user account with the appropriate name.)
1371
1372 Second, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to
1373 re-assign already-syndicated posts that were mis-attributed to the
1374 correct author. You can do that from **Syndication --> Authors** by
1375 using the author re-assignment feature, described below.
1376
1377 * AUTHOR RE-ASSIGNMENT FOR A PARTICULAR FEED: The author settings page
1378 for each syndicated feed, under **Syndication --> Authors**, now
1379 includes an section titled "Fixing mis-matched authors," which provides
1380 an interface for re-assigning or deleting all posts attributed to a
1381 particular author on a particular feed.
1382
1383 * SUPPORT FOR `<atom:source>` ELEMENT IN SYNDICATED FEEDS: Some feeds
1384 (for example, those produced by FeedWordPress) aggregate content from
1385 several different sources, and include information about the original
1386 source of the post in an `<atom:source>` element. A new setting under
1387 **Syndication --> Options** allows you to control what FeedWordPress
1388 will report as the source of posts syndicated from aggregator feeds in
1389 your templates and feeds: you can have FeedWordPress report that the
1390 source of a post is the aggregator feed itself, or you can have it
1391 report that the source of a post is the original source that the
1392 aggregator originally syndicated the post from.
1393
1394 By default, FeedWordPress will report the aggregator, not the original
1395 source, as the source of a syndicated item.
1396
1397 * LOAD BALANCING AND TIME LIMITING FEATURES FOR UPDATES: Some users have
1398 encountered issues due to running up against PHP execution time limits
1399 during the process of updating large syndicated feeds, or a very large
1400 set of syndicated feeds. FeedWordPress now has a feature that allows you
1401 to limit the total amount of time spent updating a feed, through the
1402 "Time limit on updates" setting under **Syndication --> Options**. By
1403 turning on this setting and adjusting the time limit to a low enough
1404 figure to avoid your PHP installation's time-out setting. (PHP execution
1405 time limits are usually in the vicinity of 30 seconds, so an update
1406 time limit of 25 seconds or so should provide plenty of time for updates
1407 while allowing a cushion of time for other, non-update-related functions
1408 to do their work.)
1409
1410 If feed updates are interrupted by the time limit, FeedWordPress uses
1411 some simple load balancing features to make sure that updates to other
1412 feeds will not be blocked by the time-hogging feed, and will also make
1413 sure that when the interrupted update is resumed, FeedWordPress will
1414 skip ahead to resume processing items at the point at which it was
1415 interrupted last time, so that posts further down in the feed will
1416 eventually get processed, and not get blocked by the amount of time it
1417 takes to process the items higher up in the feed.
1418
1419 * `guid` INDEX CREATION BUTTON: FeedWordPress frequently issues queries on
1420 the `guid` column of the WordPress posts database (since it uses post
1421 guid URIs to keep track of which posts it has syndicated). In very large
1422 FeedWordPress installations, you can often significantly improve
1423 performance by creating a database index on the `guid` column, but
1424 normally you would need to poke around with MySQL or a tool like
1425 phpMyAdmin to do this. FeedWordPress can now save you the trouble: to
1426 create an index on the `guid` column, just go to
1427 **Syndication --> Options**, and mash the button at the bottom of the
1428 "Back End" section.
1429
1430 = 2008.1101 =
1431
1432 * INTERFACE BUG THAT PREVENTED ADDING NEW SITES FIXED: The UI reforms in
1433 FWP 2008.1030 unintentionally introduced a bug that prevents clean
1434 installations of FeedWordPress from providing an input box for adding
1435 new feeds to the list of syndicated feeds. This bug has been fixed.
1436
1437 = 2008.1030 =
1438
1439 * WORDPRESS 2.6 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with
1440 WordPress 2.6, and should work more or less seamlessly with the new post
1441 revision system. A bug which caused multiple new revisions to be created
1442 for posts on certain feeds, regardless of whether or not the item had
1443 been updated, has been fixed.
1444
1445 * INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: The user interface has been substantially
1446 restyled to fit in better with the visual style of WordPress 2.5 and
1447 2.6.
1448
1449 * YOUTUBE BUG FIXED: POSTS SYNDICATED THROUGH AN AUTOMATIC UPDATE ARE NO
1450 LONGER STRIPPED OF `<OBJECT>` TAGS AND CERTAIN OTHER HTML ELEMENTS: Due
1451 to the way that some versions of WordPress process posts that are
1452 inserted into the database when no user is logged in, many users
1453 experienced an issue where YouTube videos and other content using the
1454 HTML `<object>` tag would be stripped out of posts that were syndicated
1455 during an automatic update. (Posts that were syndicated through manual
1456 updates from within the WordPress Dashboard were not affected, because
1457 the issue does not arise when an update is executed under a logged-in
1458 administrator's credentials.) This bug has now been fixed; YouTube
1459 videos and other content using `<object>` tags should now appear
1460 properly in syndicated posts, regardless of the way in which the post
1461 was syndicated.
1462
1463 * AJAX BUGS FIXED: Bugs which blocked the normal operation of WordPress
1464 2.5's AJAX interface elements when FeedWordPress was activated have been
1465 fixed.
1466
1467 * TAG SUPPORT: A couple of features have been introduced to take advantage
1468 of the tagging features in WordPress 2.3.x, 2.5.x, and 2.6.x. Now, when
1469 unfamiliar categories are encountered for posts on a feed, you can
1470 choose for FeedWordPress (1) to drop the category; (2) to drop the
1471 category and to filter out any post that does not match at least one
1472 familiar category; (3) to create a new category with that name, or,
1473 now, you can also have FeedWordPress (4) create a new *tag* with that
1474 name. This option can be set site-wide under Syndication --> Options,
1475 or it can be set on a feed-by-feed basis in a feed's Edit screen.
1476
1477 In addition, you can now set particular tags to apply to all incoming
1478 syndicated posts, under Syndication --> Options, or you can set tags
1479 to apply to all incoming syndicated posts from a particular feed in that
1480 feed's Edit screen.
1481
1482 * FORMATTING FILTERS: There is a new option available under Syndication ->
1483 Options which allows users to choose whether or not to expose syndicated
1484 posts to being altered by formatting filters. By default, FeedWordPress
1485 has always protected syndicated posts (which are already in display-ready
1486 HTML when they are syndicated) from being reformatted by formatting
1487 filters. However, this approach means that certain plugins which depend
1488 on formatting filters (for example, to add "Share This" bars or relevant
1489 links to the end of a post) are blocked from working on any syndicated
1490 posts. If you want to use one of these plugins together with
1491 FeedWordPress, you can now do so by changing the "Formatting Filters"
1492 setting from "Protect" to "Expose."
1493
1494 * `<atom:source>` ELEMENTS NOW INCLUDED IN ATOM FEED: Atom 1.0 provides
1495 a standard method for aggregators to indicate information about the original source of
1496 a syndicated post, using the `<atom:source>` element. FeedWordPress now
1497 introduces standard `<atom:source>` elements including the title, homepage, and
1498 feed URI of the source from which a syndicated post was syndicated. Cf.
1499 <http://www.atomenabled.org/developers/syndication/atom-format-spec.php#element.source>
1500
1501 * MODULARIZATION OF CODE: The code for different elements of FeedWordPress
1502 has been broken out into several modules for easier inspection,
1503 documentation, and maintenance of the code.
1504
1505 * VERSIONING SCHEME CHANGED: FeedWordPress's feature set has proven stable
1506 enough that it can now be removed from beta status; a good thing, since
1507 I was very quickly running out of version numbers to use. New releases
1508 of FeedWordPress will have version numbers based on the date of their
1509 release.
1510
1511 = 0.993 =
1512
1513 * WORDPRESS 2.5.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible
1514 with WordPress 2.5.1.
1515
1516 * WORDPRESS 2.5 INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: FeedWordPress's Dashboard
1517 interface has undergone several cosmetic changes that should help it
1518 integrate better with the WordPress Dashboard interface in WordPress
1519 version 2.5.x.
1520
1521 * SYNDICATED POSTS CAN BE MARKED AS "PENDING REVIEW": WordPress 2.3 users
1522 can now take advantage of WordPress's new "Pending Review" features for
1523 incoming syndicated posts. Posts marked as "Pending Review" are not
1524 published immediately, but are marked as ready to be reviewed by an
1525 Administrator or Editor, who can then choose to publish the post or
1526 hold it back. If you want to review syndicated posts from a particular
1527 feed, or from all feeds, before they are posted, then use
1528 Syndication --> Syndicated Sites --> Edit or Syndication --> Options to
1529 change the settings for handling new posts.
1530
1531 * AWARE OF NEW URI FOR del.icio.us FEEDS: Previous releases of
1532 FeedWordPress already automatically split del.icio.us tags up
1533 appropriately appropriately when generating categories. (del.icio.us
1534 feeds smoosh all the tags into a single `<dc:subject>` element,
1535 separated by spaces; FeedWordPress un-smooshes them into multiple
1536 categories by separating them at whitespace.) Unfortunately, del.icio.us
1537 recently broke the existing behavior by changing host names for their
1538 feeds from del.icio.us to feeds.delicious.com. Version 0.993 accounts
1539 for the new host name and un-breaks the tag splitting.
1540
1541 = 0.992 =
1542
1543 * AUTHOR RE-MAPPING: FeedWordPress now offers considerable control over
1544 how author names on a feed are translated into usernames within the
1545 WordPress database. When a post by an unrecognized author comes in,
1546 Administrators can now specify any username as the default username to
1547 assign the post to by setting the option in Syndication --> Options
1548 (formerly FeedWordPress only allowed you to assign such posts to user
1549 #1, the site administrator). Administrators can also create re-mapping
1550 rules for particular feeds (under Syndication --> Syndicated Sites -->
1551 Edit), so that (for example) any posts attributed to "Administrator"
1552 on the feed <http://praxeology.net/blog/feed/> will be assigned to
1553 a user named "Roderick T. Long," rather than a user named
1554 "Administrator." These settings also allow administrators to filter out
1555 posts by particular users, and to control what will happen when
1556 FeedWordPress encounters a post by an unrecognized user on that
1557 particular feed.
1558
1559 * BUG RELATED TO URIS CONTAINING AMPERSAND CHARACTERS FIXED: A bug in
1560 WordPress 2.x's handling of URIs in Blogroll links created problems for
1561 updating any feeds whose URIs included an ampersand character, such as
1562 Google News RSS feeds and other feeds that have multiple parameters
1563 passed through HTTP GET. If you experienced this bug, the most likely
1564 effect was that FeedWordPress simply would not import new posts from a
1565 feed when instructred to do so, returning a "0 new posts" response. In
1566 other cases, it might lead to unpredictable results from feed updates,
1567 such as importing posts which were not contained in the feed being
1568 syndicated, but which did appear elsewhere on the same website. This bug
1569 has, hopefully, been resolved, by correcting for the bug in WordPress.
1570
1571 = 0.991 =
1572
1573 * WORDPRESS MU COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with
1574 recent releases of WordPress MU. Once FeedWordPress is made available
1575 as a plugin, each individual blog can choose to activate FeedWordPress
1576 and syndicate content from its own set of contributors.
1577
1578 * DISPLAY OF MAGPIE WARNINGS: A number of MagpieRSS warnings or error
1579 messages that were displayed when performing an automatic update are
1580 no longer displayed, unless debugging parameters have been explicitly
1581 enabled.
1582
1583 * BUG RELATED TO INTERNATIONAL CHARACTERS IN AUTHOR NAMES FIXED: Due to a
1584 subtle incompatability between the way that FeedWordPress generated new
1585 user information, and the way that WordPress 2.0 and later added new
1586 authors to the database, FeedWordPress might end up creating duplicate
1587 authors, or throwing a critical error message, when it encountered
1588 authors whose names included international characters. This
1589 incompatability has now been fixed; hopefully, authors with
1590 international characters in their names should now be handled properly.
1591
1592 * `<media:content>` BUG IN MAGPIERSS FIXED: A bug in MagpieRSS's handling
1593 of namespaced elements has been fixed. Among other things, this bug
1594 caused items containing a Yahoo MediaRSS `<media:content>` element (such
1595 as many of the feeds produced by wordpress.com) to be represented
1596 incorrectly, with only a capital "A" where the content of the post
1597 should have been. Feeds containing `<media:content>` elements should now
1598 be syndicated correctly.
1599
1600 * update_feedwordpress PARAMETER: You can now use an HTTP GET parameter
1601 (`update_feedwordpress=1`) to request that FeedWordPress poll its feeds
1602 for updates. When used together with a crontab or other means of
1603 scheduling tasks, this means that you can keep your blog automatically
1604 updated on a regular schedule, even if you do not choose to use the
1605 cron-less automatic updates option.
1606
1607 * Some minor interface-related bugs were also fixed.
1608
1609
1610 = 0.99 =
1611
1612 Version 0.99 adds several significant new features, fixes some bugs, and
1613 provides compatability with WordPress 2.2.x and 2.3.x.
1614
1615 * WORDPRESS 2.2 AND 2.3 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be
1616 compatible with WordPress version 2.2 and the upcoming WordPress
1617 version 2.3. In particular, it has been tested extensively against
1618 WordPress 2.2.3 and WordPress 2.3 Release Candidate 1.
1619
1620 * AUTOMATIC UPDATES WITHOUT CRON: FeedWordPress now allows you to
1621 automatically schedule checks for new posts without using external task
1622 scheduling tools such as cron. In order to enable automatic updates, go
1623 to **Syndication --> Options** and set "Check for new posts" to
1624 "automatically." For details, see "Automatic Feed Updates" in
1625 README.text.
1626
1627 An important side-effect of the changes to the update system is that if
1628 you were previously using the cron job and the `update-feeds.php` script
1629 to schedule updates, you need to change your cron set-up. The old
1630 `update-feeds.php` script no longer exists. Instead, if you wish to use
1631 a cron job to guarantee updates on a particular schedule, you should
1632 have the cron job fetch the front page of your blog (for example, by
1633 using `curl http://www.zyx.com/blog/ > /dev/null`) instead of activating
1634 the `update-feeds.php` script. If automatic updates have been enabled,
1635 fetching the front page will automatically trigger the update process.
1636
1637 * INTERFACE REORGANIZATION: All FeedWordPress functions are now located
1638 under a top-level "Syndication" menu in the WordPress Dashboard. To
1639 manage the list of syndicated sites, manually check for new posts on
1640 one or more feeds, or syndicate a new site, you should use the main page
1641 under **Syndication**. To change global settings for FeedWordPress,
1642 you should use **Syndication --> Options**.
1643
1644 * FILE STRUCTURE REORGANIZATION: Due to a combination of changing styles
1645 for FeedWordPress plugins and lingering bugs in the FeedWordPress admin
1646 menu code, the code for FeedWordPress is now contained in two different
1647 PHP files, which should be installed together in a subdirectory of your
1648 plugins directory named `feedwordpress`. (See README.text for
1649 installation and upgrade instructions relating to the change.)
1650
1651 * MULTIPLE CATEGORIES SETTING: Some feeds use non-standard methods to
1652 indicate multiple categories within a single category element. (The most
1653 popular site to do this is del.icio.us, which separates tags with a
1654 space.) FeedWordPress now allows you to set an optional setting, for any
1655 feed which does this, indicating the character or characters used to
1656 divide multiple categories, using a Perl-compatible regular expression.
1657 (In the case of del.icio.us feeds, FeedWordPress will automatically use
1658 \s for the pattern without your having to do any further configuration.)
1659 To turn this setting on, simply use the "Edit" link for the feed that
1660 you want to turn it on for.
1661
1662 * REGULAR EXPRESSION BUG FIXED: Eliminated a minor bug in the regular
1663 expressions for e-mail addresses (used in parsing RSS `author`
1664 elements), which could produce unsightly error messages for some users
1665 parsing RSS 2.0 feeds.
1666
1667 * DATE / UPDATE BUG FIXED: A bug in date handling was eliminated that may
1668 have caused problems if any of (1) WordPress, or (2) PHP, or (3) your
1669 web server, or (4) your MySQL server, has been set to use a different
1670 time zone from the one that any of the others is set to use. If
1671 FeedWordPress has not been properly updating updated posts, or has been
1672 updating posts when there shouldn't be any changes for the update, this
1673 release may solve that problem.
1674
1675 * GOOGLE READER BUGS FIXED: A couple of bugs that made it difficult for
1676 FeedWordPress to interact with Google Reader public feeds have been
1677 fixed. Firstly, if you encountered an error message reading "There was a
1678 problem adding the newsfeed. [SQL: ]" when you tried to add the feed,
1679 the cause of this error has been fixed. Secondly, if you succeeded in
1680 getting FeedWordPress to check a Google Reader feed, only to find that
1681 the title of posts had junk squashed on to the end of them, that bug
1682 has been fixed too. To fix this bug, you must install the newest version
1683 of the optional MagpieRSS upgrade.
1684
1685 * FILTER PARAMETERS: Due to an old, old bug in WordPress 1.5.0 (which was
1686 what was available back when I first wrote the filter interface),
1687 FeedWordPress has traditionally only passed one parameter to
1688 syndicated_item and syndicated_post filters functions -- an array
1689 containing either the Magpie representation of a syndicated item from
1690 the feed, or the database representation of a post about to be inserted
1691 into the WordPress database. If you needed information about the feed
1692 that the item came from, this was accessible only through a pair of
1693 global variables, $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta.
1694
1695 Since it's been a pretty long time since WordPress 1.5.0 was in
1696 widespread usage, I have gone ahead and added an optional second
1697 parameter to the invocation of the syndicated_item and syndicated_post
1698 filters. If you have written a filter for FeedWordPress that uses either
1699 of these hooks, you can now register that filter to accept 2 parameters.
1700 If you do so, the second parameter will be a SyndicatedPost object,
1701 which, among other things, allows you to access information about the
1702 feed from which an item is syndicated using the $post->feed and the
1703 $post->feedmeta elements (where $post is the name of the second
1704 parameter).
1705
1706 NOTE THAT THE OLD GLOBAL VARIABLES ARE STILL AVAILABLE, for the time
1707 being at least, so existing filters will not break with the upgrade.
1708 They should be considered deprecated, however, and may be eliminated in
1709 the future.
1710
1711 * FILTER CHANGE / BUGFIX: the array that is passed as the first argument
1712 syndicated_post filters no longer is no longer backslash-escaped for
1713 MySQL when filters are called. This was originally a bug, or an
1714 oversight; the contents of the array should only be escaped for the
1715 database *after* they have gone through all filters. IF YOU HAVE WRITTEN
1716 ANY syndicated_post FILTERS THAT PRESUME THE OLD BEHAVIOR OF PASSING IN
1717 STRINGS THAT ARE ALREADY BACKSLASH-ESCAPED, UPDATE YOUR FILTERS
1718 ACCORDINGLY.
1719
1720 * OTHER MINOR BUGFIXES AND INTERNAL CHANGES: The internal architecture of
1721 FeedWordPress has been significantly changed to make the code more
1722 modular and clean; hopefully this should help reduce the number of
1723 compatibility updates that are needed, and make them easier and quicker
1724 when they are needed.
1725
1726 = 0.981 =
1727
1728 Version 0.981 is a narrowly targeted bugfix and compatibility release, whose
1729 main purpose is to resolve a major outstanding problem: the incompatibility
1730 between version 0.98 of WordPress and the recently released WordPress 2.1.
1731
1732 * WORDPRESS 2.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress is now compatible with
1733 WordPress 2.1, as well as retaining its existing support for WordPress
1734 2.0 and 1.5. Incompatibilities that resulted in database warnings, fatal
1735 errors, and which prevented FeedWordPress from syndicating new posts,
1736 have been eliminated.
1737
1738 * RSS-FUNCTIONS.PHP RENAMED TO RSS.PHP: if you use the upgraded MagpieRSS
1739 replacement that's included with FeedWordPress, be sure to note that
1740 there are now *two* files to upload from the `OPTIONAL/wp-includes`
1741 subdirectory in order to carry out the upgrade: rss-functions.php and
1742 rss.php. **It is necessary to upload both files**, due to a change in
1743 the file naming scheme in WordPress 2.1, and it is necessary to do so
1744 whether you are using WordPress 2.1 or not. If you only upload the
1745 `rss-functions.php` file as in previous installations you will not have
1746 a working copy of MagpieRSS; the rss.php file contains the actual code.
1747
1748 * DATE BUG AFFECTING SOME PHP INSTALLATIONS RESOLVED: due to a subtle bug
1749 in parse_w3cdtf(), some installations of PHP encountered problems with
1750 FeedWordPress's attempt to date posts, which would cause some new posts
1751 on Atom feeds to be dated as if they had apppeared in 1969 or 1970
1752 (thus, effectively, never appearing on front page at all). This bug in
1753 the date handling should now be fixed.
1754
1755 * PHP <?=...?> SHORT FORM ELIMINATED: some installations of PHP do not
1756 allow the <?=...?> short form for printing PHP values, which was used
1757 extensively in the FeedWordPress interface code. Since this could cause
1758 fatal errors for users with the wrong installation of PHP, the short
1759 form has been replaced with full PHP echo statements, and is no longer
1760 used in FeedWordPress.
1761
1762 * BETTER USER INTERFACE INTEGRATION WITH WORDPRESS 2.x: Some minor changes
1763 have been made to help the FeedWordPress interface pages blend in better
1764 with the user interface when running under WordPress 2.x.
1765
1766 * GLOBAL CATEGORIES BUG RESOLVED: a bug that prevented some users from
1767 setting one or more categories to apply to syndicated posts from all
1768 feeds (using the checkbox interface under Options --> Syndication) has
1769 been resolved.
1770
1771 = 0.98 =
1772
1773 * WORDPRESS 2.0 COMPATIBILITY: This is a narrowly-targeted release to
1774 solve a major outstanding problem. FeedWordPress is now compatible with
1775 both WordPress 1.5 and WordPress 2.0. Incompatibilities that caused
1776 fatal SQL errors, and a more subtle bug with off-kilter counts of posts
1777 under a given category, have been resolved. FeedWordPress tests for
1778 database schema using the global $wp_db_version variable (if null, then
1779 we presume that we're dealing with WordPress 1.5).
1780
1781 NOTE: I have **not** fully tested FeedWordPress with WordPress 2.0.
1782 Further testing may reveal more bugs. However, you should now be able
1783 to get at least basic FeedWordPress functionality up and running.
1784
1785 * AUTHOR MATCHING: FeedWordPress tests several fields to see if it can
1786 identify the author of the post as a user already in the WordPress user
1787 database. In previous versions, it tested the user login, the nickname,
1788 and tested for "aliases" listed in the Profile (see documentation). FWP
1789 now also matches authors on the basis of e-mail address (*if* an e-mail
1790 address is present). This is particularly helpful for formats such as
1791 RSS 2.0, in which authors are primarily identified by e-mail addresses.
1792
1793 = 0.97 =
1794
1795 * INSTALLATION PROCEDURE: Some of the changes between 0.96 and 0.97
1796 require upgrades to the meta-data stored by FeedWordPress to work
1797 properly. Thus, if you are upgrading from 0.96 or earlier to 0.97, most
1798 FeedWordPress operations (including updates and template functions)
1799 WILL BE DISABLED until you run the upgrade procedure. Fortunately,
1800 running the upgrade procedure is easy: just go to either Options -->
1801 Syndication or Links --> Syndicated in the WordPress Dashboard and press
1802 the button.
1803
1804 * FEED FORMAT SUPPORT: Support has been added for the Atom 1.0 IETF
1805 standard. Several other elements are also newly supported
1806 (dcterms:created, dcterms:issued, dcterms:modified, dc:identifier,
1807 proper support for the RSS 2.0 guid element, the RSS 2.0 author element,
1808 the use of Atom author or Dublin Core dc:creator constructs at the feed
1809 level to identify the author of individual items, etc.)
1810
1811 N.B.: full support of several Atom 1.0 features, such as categories
1812 and enclosures, requires you to install the optional rss-functions.php
1813 upgrade in your wp-includes directory.
1814
1815 * BUG FIX: Running `update-feeds.php` from command line or crontab
1816 returned "I don't syndicate..." errors. It turns out that WordPress
1817 sometimes tramples on the internal PHP superglobals that I depended on
1818 to determine whether or not the script was being invoked from the
1819 command line. This has been fixed (the variables are now checked
1820 *before* WordPress can trample them). Note that `update-feeds.php` has
1821 been thoroughly overhauled anyway; see below for details.
1822
1823 * BUG FIX: Duplicate categories or author names. Fixed two bugs that could
1824 create duplicate author and/or category names when the name contained
1825 either (a) certain international characters (causing a mismatch between
1826 MySQL and PHP's handling of lowercasing text), or (b) characters that
1827 have a special meaning in regular expressions (causing MySQL errors when
1828 looking for the author or category due to regexp syntax errors). These
1829 should now be fixed thanks to careful escaping of names that go into
1830 regular expressions and careful matching of lowercasing functions
1831 (comparing results from PHP only to other results from PHP, and results
1832 from MySQL only to other results from MySQL).
1833
1834 * BUG FIX: Items dated December 31, 1969 should appear less often. The
1835 function for parsing W3C date-time format dates that ships with
1836 MagpieRSS can only correctly parse fully-specified dates with a
1837 fully-specified time, but valid W3C date-time format dates may omit the
1838 time, the day of the month, or even the month. Some feeds in the wild
1839 date their items with coarse-grained dates, so the optional
1840 `rss-functions.php` upgrade now includes a more flexible parse_w3cdtf()
1841 function that will work with both coarse-grained and fully-specified
1842 dates. (If parts of the date or the time are omitted, they are filled in
1843 with values based on the current time, so '2005-09-10' will be dated to
1844 the current time on that day; '2004' will be dated to this day and time
1845 one year ago.
1846
1847 N.B.: This fix is only available in the optional `rss-functions.php`
1848 upgrade.
1849
1850 * BUG FIX: Evil use of HTTP GET has been undone. The WordPress interface
1851 is riddled with inappropriate (non-idempotent) uses of HTTP GET queries
1852 (ordinary links that make the server do something with significant
1853 side-effects, such as deleting a post or a link from the database).
1854 FeedWordPress did some of this too, especially in places where it aped
1855 the WordPress interface (e.g. the "Delete" links in Links -->
1856 Syndicated). That's bad business, though. I've changed the interface so
1857 that all the examples of improper side-effects that I can find now
1858 require an HTTP POST to take effect. I think I got pretty much
1859 everything; if there's anything that I missed, let me know.
1860
1861 Further reading: [Sam Ruby 2005-05-06: This Stuff Matters](http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2005/05/06/This-Stuff-Matters)
1862
1863 * BUG FIX: Categories applied by `cats` setting should no longer prevent
1864 category-based filtering from working. In FeedWordPress, you can (1)
1865 apply certain categories to all syndicated posts, or all posts from
1866 a particular feed; and (2) filter out all posts that don't match one
1867 of the categories that are already in the WordPress database (allowing
1868 for simple category-based filtering; just load up WordPress with the
1869 categories you want to accept, and then tell FeedWordPress not to create
1870 new ones). However, the way that (1) and (2) were implemented meant that
1871 you couldn't effectively use them together; once you applied a known
1872 category to all syndicated posts from a particular feed, it meant that
1873 they'd have at least one familiar category (the category or categories
1874 you were applying), and that would get all posts past the filter no
1875 matter what categories they were originally from.
1876
1877 Well, no longer. You can still apply categories to all syndicated posts
1878 (using either Syndication --> Options, or the feed-level settings under
1879 Links --> Syndicated). But these categories are not applied to the post
1880 until *after* it has already passed by the "familiar categories" filter.
1881 So now, if you want, you can do category filtering and *then* apply as
1882 many categories as you please to all and only posts that pass the filter.
1883
1884 * BUG FIX: Other minor typos and HTML gaffes were fixed along the way.
1885
1886 * PERFORMANCE: get_feed_meta() no longer hits the database for information
1887 on every call; it now caches link data in memory, so FeedWordPress only
1888 goes to the database once for each syndicated link. This may
1889 substantially improve performance if your database server resources
1890 are tight and your templates make a lot of use of custom settings from
1891 get_feed_meta().
1892
1893 * API CHANGE: Link ID numbers, rather than RSS URIs, are now used to
1894 identify the feed from which a post is syndicated when you use template
1895 functions such as get_feed_meta(). The practical upshot of this is you
1896 can switch feeds, or change the feed address for a particular syndicated
1897 site, without breaking your templates for all the posts that were
1898 syndicated from the earlier URI.
1899
1900 * API CHANGE: if you have plugins or templates that make use of the
1901 get_feed_meta() function or the $fwp_feedmeta global, note that the
1902 data formerly located under the `uri` and `name` fields is now located
1903 under the `link/uri` field and the `link/name` field, respectively. Note
1904 also that you can access the link ID number for any given feed under the
1905 global $fwp_feedmeta['link/id'] (in plugins) or
1906 get_feed_meta('link/id') (in a template in post contexts).
1907
1908 * FEATURE: the settings for individual feeds can now be edited using a
1909 humane interface (where formerly you had to tweak key-value pairs in the
1910 Link Notes section). To edit settings for a feed, pick the feed that you
1911 want under Links --> Syndicated and click the Edit link.
1912
1913 * FEATURE: The "Unsubscribe" button (formerly "Delete") in Links -->
1914 Syndicated now offers three options for unsubscribing from a feed: (1)
1915 turning off the subscription without deleting the feed data or affecting
1916 posts that were syndicated from the feed (this works by setting the Link
1917 for the feed as "invisible"); (2) deleting the feed data and all of the
1918 posts that were syndicated from the feed; or (3) deleting the feed data
1919 and *keeping* the posts that were syndicated from the feed
1920 setting the Link to "Invisible" (meaning that it will not be displayed
1921 in lists of the site links on the front page, and it won't be checked
1922 for updates; (2) deleting the Link and all of the posts that were
1923 syndicated from its feed; or (3) deleting the feed data but keeping the
1924 posts that were syndicated (which will henceforward be treated as if
1925 they were local rather than syndicated posts). (Note that (1) is usually
1926 the best option for aggregator sites, unless you want to clean up the
1927 results of an error or a test.)
1928
1929 * FEATURE / BUG FIX: If you have been receiving mysterious "I don't
1930 syndicate...", or "(local) HTTP status code was not 200", or "(local)
1931 transport error - could not open socket", or "parse error - not well
1932 formed" errors, then this update may solve your problems, and if it does
1933 *not* solve them, it will at least make the reasons for the problems
1934 easier to understand. That's because I've overhauled the way that
1935 FeedWordPress goes about updating feeds.
1936
1937 If you use the command-line PHP scripting method to run scheduled
1938 updates, then not much should change for you, except for fewer
1939 mysterious errors. If you have done updates by sending periodic HTTP
1940 requests to <http://your-blog.com/path/wp-content/update-feeds.php>,
1941 then the details have changed somewhat; mostly in such a way as to make
1942 things easier on you. See the README file or online documentation on
1943 Staying Current for the details.
1944
1945 * FEATURE: FeedWordPress now features a more sophisticated system for
1946 timed updates. Instead of polling *every* subscribed feed for updates
1947 *each* time `update-feeds.php` is run, FeedWordPress now keeps track of
1948 the last time it polled each feed, and only polls them again after a
1949 certain period of time has passed. The amount of time is normally set
1950 randomly for each feed, in a period between 30 minutes and 2 hours (so
1951 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
1952 directly by the feed, which brings us to ...
1953
1954 * FEATURE: FeedWordPress now respects the settings in the `ttl` and
1955 Syndication Module RSS elements. Feeds with these elements set will not
1956 be polled any more frequently than they indicate with these feeds unless
1957 the user manually forces FeedWordPress to poll the feed (see Links -->
1958 Syndicated --> Edit settings).
1959
1960 = 0.96 =
1961
1962 * FEATURE: support has been added for enclosures in RSS 2.0 and Atom
1963 0.6+ newsfeeds. WordPress already supports adding enclosures to an
1964 item; FeedWordPress merely gets the information on the enclosure
1965 from the feed it is syndicating and plugs that information directly
1966 into the WordPress database so that (among other things) that post
1967 will have its enclosure listed in your blog's RSS 2 newsfeed.
1968
1969 Note that enclosure support requires using the optional MagpieRSS
1970 upgrade (i.e., replacing your `wp-includes/rss-functions.php` with
1971 `OPTIONAL/wp-includes/rss-functions.php` from the FWP archive)
1972
1973 * FEATURE: for completeness's sake, there is now a feed setting,
1974 `hardcode url`, that allows you to set the URI for the front page
1975 of a contributor's website manually (that is, prevent it from being
1976 automatically updated from the feed channel link on each update). To
1977 set the URI manually, put a line like this in the Link Notes section
1978 of a feed:
1979
1980 hardcode url: yes
1981
1982 You can also instruct FeedWordPress to use hardcoded URIs by default
1983 on all feeds using Options --> Syndication
1984
1985 * FEATURE: by default, when FeedWordPress finds new syndicated posts,
1986 it (1) publishes them immediately, (2) turns comments off, and (3)
1987 turns trackback / pingback pings off. You can now alter all three
1988 default behaviors (e.g., to allow pings on syndicated posts, or to
1989 send newly-syndicated posts to the draft pile for moderation) using
1990 Options --> Syndication
1991
1992
1993 = From 0.91 to 0.95 =
1994
1995 * BUG FIX: Fixed an obscure bug in the handling of categories:
1996 categories with trailing whitespace could cause categories with
1997 duplicate names to be created. This no longer happens. While I was
1998 at it I tightened up the operation of
1999 FeedWordPress::lookup_categories() a bit in general.
2000
2001 * FEATURE DEPRECATED: the feed setting `hardcode categories` is now
2002 deprecated in favor of `unknown categories` (see below), which
2003 allows you to strip off any syndication categories not already in
2004 your database using `unknown categories: default` or `unknown
2005 categories: filter`. If you have `hardcode categories: yes` set on a
2006 feed, this will be treated as `unknown categories: default` (i.e.,
2007 no new categories will be added, but if a post doesn't match any of
2008 the categories it will be added in the default category--usually
2009 "Uncategorized" or "General").
2010
2011 * FEATURE: You can now set global defaults as to whether or not
2012 FeedWordPress will update the Link Name and Link Description
2013 settings for feeds automatically from the feed title and feed
2014 tagline. (By default, it does, as it has in past versions.) Whether
2015 this behavior is turned on or off, you can still override the
2016 default behavior using feed settings of `hardcode name: yes`,
2017 `hardcode name: no`, `hardcode description: yes`, or `hardcode
2018 description: no`.
2019
2020 * FEATURE: Users can now provide one or several "aliases" for an
2021 author, just as they can for a category. For example, to make
2022 FeedWordPress treat posts by "Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger" and "Pope
2023 Benedict XVI" as by the same author, edit the user profile for Pope
2024 Benedict XVI and add a line like this to the "User profile" field:
2025
2026 a.k.a.: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
2027
2028 You can add several aliases, each on a line by itself. You can also
2029 add any other text you like to the Profile without interfering with
2030 the aliases.
2031
2032 * FEATURE: Users can now choose how to handle syndicated posts that
2033 are in unfamiliar categories or by unfamiliar authors (i.e.,
2034 categories or authors whose names are not yet in the WordPress
2035 database). By default, FeedWordPress will (as before) create a new
2036 category (or new author) and use it for the current post and any
2037 future posts. This behavior can be changed, either for all feeds or
2038 for one or another particular feed.
2039
2040 There are now three different options for an unfamiliar author: (1)
2041 FeedWordPress can create a new author account and attribute the
2042 syndicated post to the new account; (2) FeedWordPress can attribute
2043 the post to an author if the author's name is familiar, and to a
2044 default author (currently, this means the Site Administrator
2045 account) if it is not; (3) FeedWordPress can drop posts by
2046 unfamiliar authors and syndicate only posts by authors who are
2047 already in the database.
2048
2049 There are, similarly, two different options for an unfamiliar
2050 category: (1) FeedWordPress can create new categories and place the
2051 syndicated post in them; (2) FeedWordPress can drop the unfamiliar
2052 categories and place syndicated posts only in categories that it is
2053 already familiar with. In addition, FeedWordPress 0.95 lets you
2054 choose whether posts that are in *no* familiar categories should be
2055 syndicated (and placed in the default category for the blog) or
2056 simply dropped.
2057
2058 You can set the default behavior for both authors and categories
2059 using the settings in Options --> Syndication. You can also set
2060 different behavior for specific feeds by adding the `unfamiliar
2061 author` and / or `unfamiliar categories` settings to the Link Notes
2062 section of a feed:
2063
2064 unfamiliar author: (create|default|filter)
2065 unfamiliar categories: (create|default|filter)
2066
2067 A setting of `unfamiliar author: create` will make FeedWordPress
2068 create new authors to match unfamiliar author names *for this feed
2069 alone*. A setting of `unfamiliar author: default` will make it
2070 assign posts from unfamiliar authors to the default user account. A
2071 setting of `unfamiliar author: filter` will cause all posts (from
2072 this feed alone) to be dropped unless they are by an author already
2073 listed in the database. Similiarly, `unfamiliar categories: create`
2074 will make FeedWordPress create new categories to match unfamiliar
2075 category names *for this feed alone*; `unfamiliar categories:
2076 default` will cause it to drop any unfamiliar category names; and
2077 `unfamiliar categories: filter` will cause it to *both* drop any
2078 unfamiliar category names *and* to only syndicate posts that are
2079 placed in one or more familiar categories.
2080
2081 These two new features allow users to do some coarse-grained
2082 filtering without having to write a PHP filter. Specifically, they
2083 offer an easy way for you to filter feeds by category or by author.
2084 Suppose, for example, that you only wanted to syndicate posts that
2085 your contributors place in the "Llamas" category. You could do so by
2086 setting up your installation of WordPress so that the only category
2087 in the database is "Llamas," and then use Options --> Syndication to
2088 set "Unfamiliar categories" to "don't create new categories and
2089 don't syndicate posts unless they match at least one familiar
2090 category". Now, when you update, only posts in the "Llamas" category
2091 will be syndicated by FeedWordPress.
2092
2093 Similarly, if you wanted to filter one particular feed so that only
2094 posts by (for example) the author "Earl J. Llama" were syndicated to
2095 your site, you could do so by creating a user account for Earl J.
2096 Llama, then adding the following line to the settings for the feed
2097 in Link Notes:
2098
2099 unfamiliar author: filter
2100
2101 This will cause any posts from this feed that are not authored by
2102 Earl J. Llama to be discarded, and only the posts by Earl J. Llama
2103 will be syndicated. (If the setting is used on one specific feed, it
2104 will not affect how posts from other feeds are syndicated.)
2105
2106 == License ==
2107
2108 The FeedWordPress plugin is copyright © 2005-2010 by Charles Johnson. It uses
2109 code derived or translated from:
2110
2111 - [wp-rss-aggregate.php][] by [Kellan Elliot-McCrea](kellan@protest.net)
2112 - [SimplePie][] feed parser by Ryan Parman, Geoffrey Sneddon, Ryan McCue, et al.
2113 - [MagpieRSS][] feed parser by [Kellan Elliot-McCrea](kellan@protest.net)
2114 - [Ultra-Liberal Feed Finder][] by [Mark Pilgrim](mark@diveintomark.org)
2115 - [WordPress Blog Tool and Publishing Platform](http://wordpress.org/)
2116
2117 according to the terms of the [GNU General Public License][].
2118
2119 This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
2120 the terms of the [GNU General Public License][] as published by the Free
2121 Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any
2122 later version.
2123
2124 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
2125 WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
2126 PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
2127
2128 [wp-rss-aggregate.php]: http://laughingmeme.org/archives/002203.html
2129 [SimplePie]: http://www.simplepie.org/
2130 [MagpieRSS]: http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/
2131 [Ultra-Liberal Feed Finder]: http://diveintomark.org/projects/feed_finder/
2132 [GNU General Public License]: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
2133
2134