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FeedWordPress / 2017.1004
FeedWordPress v2017.1004
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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: 4.8.2
7 Stable tag: 2017.1004
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 = 2017.0913 =
97
98 * PARTIAL FIX FOR 2X DUPLICATE POSTS APPEARING ON DUAL HTTP/HTTPS SITES: Some
99 users reported an issue in which their FeedWordPress sites, which are over
100 both insecure HTTP and over HTTPS, would pick up exactly 2 copies of every
101 post or almost every post from certain feeds, and where the guids for each
102 of the pair of duplicate posts would look exactly alike, except for a
103 difference in the protocol, for example:
104
105 http://www.example.com/?guid=c1cd28da39e8d7babcf6499983aca545
106 https://www.example.com/?guid=c1cd28da39e8d7babcf6499983aca545
107
108 ... where www.example.com is the server that your own copy of FeedWordPress
109 is installed. This release of FeedWordPress normalizes post guid prefixes
110 so as to avoid or limit the scope of this problem.
111
112 * PHP 7 Compatibility: eliminate remaining sources of PHP 7 compatibility-check
113 failures -- remove the use of depreciated mysql_error() function, and make
114 sure all classes make use of __construct() convention for constructors.
115
116 * AVOID "PHP Warning: shell_exec() has been disabled for security reasons in
117 [...]/feedwordpress/feeds-page.php on line 197": FeedWordPress uses the PHP
118 shell_exec() function in a very narrowly limited way for information gathering,
119 trying to find the real path to curl or wget on your system, so that it can
120 give as realistic as possible a recommendation for the sample crontab line
121 displayed in Syndication > Feeds & Updates. Some web hosting environments
122 disable shell_exec for security reasons (since it could in theory be used to
123 do a lot more stuff than the very limited information gathering FWP uses it
124 for); in which case, this part of the code in FeedWordPress could spit out
125 a nasty-looking and potentially worrisome-looking error message. So, now this
126 code is fenced with checks to make sure that shell_exec is available, before
127 FWP attempts to make use of it.
128
129 = 2016.1213 =
130
131 * WORDPRESS BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY FOR VERSIONS [4.5, 4.7]: This change fixes
132 a fatal PHP error (on some web server configurations you'd see the message
133 "Fatal error: require_once(): Failed opening required '[...]/wp-includes/class-wp-feed-cache.php'"
134 on others, you might just see an HTTP 500 Internal Server Error or a blank
135 page) when using FeedWordPress with versions of WordPress before 4.7. A
136 change that I introduced to avoid a code module that had been deprecated in
137 version 4.7 ended up relying on code modules that were only introduced as
138 of version 4.7; so now, instead, FeedWordPress attempts to detect which
139 modules the current version of the WordPress core makes available, and load
140 the right modules depending on your WordPress version.
141
142 In theory, up to this point, FeedWordPress supported any version of
143 WordPress from version 3.0 onward. In practice, version 3.0 was released
144 over 6 years ago, and I can realistically commit only to testing out new
145 releases of FeedWordPress with a few prior versions of WordPress; so I've
146 updated the "Requires at least" field to version 4.5, the first major
147 release issued in 2016. If you've really got to use FeedWordPress with
148 older versions of WordPress, it will probably still work with any moderately
149 modern release of WordPress, but I won't promise to keep it working with
150 releases of WordPress that are more than about a year old.
151
152 = 2016.1211 =
153
154 * WORDPRESS COMPATIBILITY: Tested with new versions of WordPress up to 4.7.
155
156 * PHP WARNINGS UNDER WP 4.7: Eliminated cause of a PHP warning under WP 4.7
157 "Parameter 1 to FeedWordPressHTTPAuthenticator::set_auth_options expected to be reference"
158 Warnings were due to a change in how http_api_curl hook is sometimes called
159 in WP 4.7; so I changed the signature of the event handling method to avoid
160 the notice. Props to @cogdog, @froomkin, @gwynethllewelyn et al. for flagging
161 the issue and @garymarkfuller for suggesting a preliminary fix to the issue
162 that was fairly similar to the solution I ended up adopting.
163
164 * PHP 7 and PHP Strict Standards compatibility changes: @alexiskulash @daidais
165 and @zoul0813 all sent pull requests through Github to fix some issues from
166 a very old code base that has made its way from PHP 3.x through 5.x to the
167 roll-out of PHP 7. Class methods should now fare better under modern versions
168 of PHP and generate fewer "Deprecated" notices.
169
170 * IMPROVEMENTS TO SCHEDULED AND AUTOMATIC UPDATES: use wp_loaded hook to check
171 for magic URL parameters and to execute updates, to do pageload-based automatic
172 updates, etc. Ensures that anything plugins or themes need to do in init to set
173 up custom post types, taxonomies, etc. will be done before the update_feedwordpress
174 updates are attempted. If you saw posts not getting put into the correct custom
175 post type or custom taxonomies or similar problems when performing scheduled updates,
176 but the problem seemed to go away when you manually performed updates through the
177 wp-admin interface, then you might be able to solve those problems with this update.
178
179 = 2016.0420 =
180
181 * WORDPRESS COMPATIBILITY: Tested with new versions of WordPress up to 4.5.
182
183 * FILTERS AND ADD-ONS: Allow filters and add-ons to filter terms and taxonomy
184 (categories, tags, custom taxonomies, etc.) more thoroughly and more
185 fine-grainedly using syndicated_post_terms_match, syndicated_post_terms_match_{taxonomy},
186 syndicated_post_terms_unfamiliar, syndicated_post_terms_mapping,
187 syndicated_item_feed_terms, and syndicated_item_preset_terms filters.
188
189 * FILTERS AND ADD-ONS: Globals $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta REMOVED.
190 These global variables, originally introduced to allow filters access to
191 information about the source feed in `syndicated_item` filters were
192 deprecated 6+ years ago. If you have any filters or add-ons which still
193 depend on these global variables, you've been using obsolete techniques
194 and you should see about fixing them to access data about the source feed
195 using the SyndicatedPost::link element instead. For documentation, see
196 the FeedWordPress documentation wiki at
197 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedpost> and
198 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedlink>.
199
200 * BUGFIX: Syndication > Diagnostics HTTP diagnostic test widget was broken due to
201 a dumb error on my part. Now fixed.
202
203 * SMALL CODING CHANGES: Lots of small changes to code organization, incorporation
204 of some PHP 5.x coding conventions, etc.
205
206 = 2015.0514 =
207
208 * IMPORTANT SECURITY UPDATE: This version includes two important fixes for
209 potential security vulnerabilities reported to me through support channels.
210
211 The first is a common problem across several plugins due to an ambiguity in
212 the WordPress documentation and a change in the behavior of WordPress's
213 built-in add_query_arg() and remove_query_arg() functions
214 which could, under certain low-probability conditions, allow for potential
215 XSS attack vectors. This fixes issue # 39
216 reported at <https://github.com/radgeek/feedwordpress/issues/39>
217 Thanks to github.com/quassy
218
219 The second is a security vulnerability fixes a security vulnerability that
220 was reported to me privately (thanks to Adrián M. F.) which, under other
221 low-probability conditions, could allow for SQL insertion attacks by
222 a malicious user with access to login credentials, which would compromise
223 data security.
224
225 It is *IMPORTANT* and worth your while to upgrade FeedWordPress as soon as
226 possible in order to eliminate these vulnerabilities. If you have any
227 questions or if there is something blocking you from making the upgrade
228 which you need my help with, don't hesitate to get in touch.
229
230 * ADMIN UI BUGFIX: "Update Now" button in feeds setting pages should now work
231 once again instead of causing a PHP fatal error. See
232 <https://github.com/radgeek/feedwordpress/issues/46>
233
234 * SEVERAL OTHER SMALL BUG FIXES. See <https://github.com/radgeek/feedwordpress/issues/32>
235 <https://github.com/radgeek/feedwordpress/issues/30>
236 <https://github.com/radgeek/feedwordpress/issues/29>
237 etc.
238
239 = 2014.0805 =
240
241 * FILTERS AND ADD-ONS: A number of new hooks for filters and add-ons to
242 further customize the behavior of FWP have been added.
243
244 * COMPATIBILITY/BUGFIX: Many users saw odd characters, especially "n,"
245 appearing in posts in versions of WordPress from 3.6 on, due to a change
246 in when the API expects HTML data for posts to be slashed and when it
247 does not. This has been fixed, so that the junk characters should no
248 longer appear, regardless of your version of WordPress.
249
250 * BUGFIX: A bug preventing FWP from saving categories assigned under
251 Syndication > Categories & Tags has been fixed.
252
253 * BUGFIX: Post-editing related metaboxes should now show up when you edit
254 items of any post type, including custom types, not only normal WordPress
255 posts.
256
257 * BUGFIX: A bug in the admin UI that caused the "Alternative Feeds" /
258 "Find Feeds" box to throw a permissions error has been fixed.
259
260 * BUGFIX: A bug preventing proper mapping of categories and other terms in
261 2013.0504 has been fixed.
262
263 * BUGFIX: A number of small fixes contributed through Github by Flynsarmy
264 should eliminate PHP warnings for many users on several methods that are
265 called as static methods within FeedWordPress.
266
267 = 2013.0504 =
268
269 * BUGFIX: PHP 5.4 compatibility -- includes some more extensive fixes to
270 compatibility issues with PHP 5.4's handling of global variables
271
272 * DIAGNOSTICS: New diagnostics settings added to help track behavior of
273 terms (categories, post tags, etc.) for syndicated posts.
274
275 = 2012.0504 =
276
277 * MODULE REORGANIZATION: Should ensure that all needed submodules will be
278 properly included regardless of whether you are installing from github,
279 from SVN, or from the WordPress plugins page. If you've been getting
280 fatal errors about required modules not being found, this release should
281 hopefully resolve the issue.
282
283 = 2012.0503 =
284
285 * BUGFIX: Works properly again with WordPress installations that use a
286 MySQL table name prefix other than the default `wp_` prefix.
287
288 * BUGFIX: Includes a couple of significant PHP 5.4 compatibility fixes.
289 Now that PHP 5.4 is more widely deployed, Diagnostics will now also
290 show PHP version and some other potentially useful troubleshooting
291 information.
292
293 * ADMIN UI: Better indicates your options when deleting a syndicated post
294 so as to let you know whether it will be Trashed (and thus not
295 resyndicated) or Erased (and thus potentially resyndicated)
296
297 * ADMIN UI: Adds an AJAXy Test Expression button to allow live testing of
298 sample results from expressions in Custom Post Settings.
299
300 = 2012.1218 =
301
302 * WORDPRESS VISUAL EDITOR FIXED. There was an unlisted change in the
303 2012.1212 release which had the effect of disabling the WordPress Visual
304 Editor for all posts syndicated by FeedWordPress. Many users reported
305 this as a bug. It was actually a deliberate decision -- a crappy way to
306 try to deal with a crappy situation. (Many users had previously reported
307 a "bug" in which all the paragraph or line breaks seemed to be stripped
308 out of their syndicated posts; the issue turned out to be that the
309 Visual Editor was stripping out `<p>` and `<br/>` tags on the assumption
310 that the resulting post would be sent through standard WordPress
311 formatting filters. But under default settings, posts syndicated by FWP
312 deliberately bypass WordPress formatting filters.) In any case, this
313 version adopts a more flexible compromise. *If* FeedWordPress is set up
314 to bypass WordPress formatting filters (as it is by default), *then*
315 the Visual Editor will be disabled for syndicated posts (since using it
316 would produce incorrect results). If on the other hand FeedWordPress is
317 set up to expose syndicated posts to WordPress formatting filters (as it
318 usually is for those using the Visual Editor to manually edit posts),
319 then the Visual Editor tab will be re-enabled for syndicated posts.
320
321 * BUG FIX: PERMALINKS REWRITTEN FOR CUSTOM POST TYPES AS WELL AS NORMAL
322 WORDPRESS POSTS. If you had WordPress set up to syndicate incoming posts
323 to a custom post type (under Syndication > Posts & Links), and asked
324 FeedWordPress to make "permalinks point to the original site", then
325 previous versions of FeedWordPress would fail to do the rewriting --
326 permalinks would only be rewritten to point to the original source for
327 normal WordPress posts, not for custom post types. In 2012.1218 this bug
328 has been fixed: all post types will now have permalinks rewritten unless
329 you request for permalinks to point to the local copy on your aggregator
330 site.
331
332 * BUG FIX: ELIMINATES "PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function
333 setting() on a non-object...." Some changes to the in-memory caching of
334 information about feed subscriptions could result in a fatal PHP error
335 in cases where you have de-activated one of your subscriptions, but
336 posts from that subscription were still in the archive. This would
337 normally show up through half-completed feeds or half-completed pages
338 that suddenly broke off in the middle, and displayed or logged an error
339 message like: "PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function setting() on a
340 non-object in {...}/wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress/feedwordpress.php
341 on line 615". This bug has been eliminated, so affected feeds and pages
342 should now render correctly, and the error message should no longer
343 appear.
344
345 * BUG FIX: CATEGORY BOXES IN SYNDICATION > CATEGORIES & TAGS. Some minor
346 bugs in the appearance and animation of category checkboxes (for
347 example, the checkbox used to select categories for syndicated posts on
348 the Syndication > Categories & Tags settings page) have been fixed.
349
350 = 2012.1212 =
351
352 * WORDPRESS 3.5 COMPATIBILITY: This release has been tested for compatibility
353 with new releases of WordPress, up to version 3.5, and any documented
354 compatibility issues have been cleared -- in particular, if you were seeing
355 error pages stating that you don't have permission to access the
356 FeedWordPress Syndication page within the WordPress admin interface, then
357 upgrading to this release should fix the problem.
358
359 As always, if you encounter any compatibility problems after upgrading your
360 version of WordPress and your version of FeedWordPress to the most recent
361 versions, please contact me with as detailed a description as possible of
362 the issue you are encountering, the circumstances you're encountering it
363 under, what you expect to see happening, and what is happening instead.
364
365 * PHP 5.4 COMPATIBILITY: This release has been audited to fix potential
366 problems with deprecation notices or fatal errors under recent versions
367 of PHP. In particular, all uses of run-time pass-by-reference have been
368 eliminated from the code; if you were seeing a fatal error reading
369 "Call-time pass-by-reference has been removed ..." then upgrading to
370 this release should fix the problem.
371
372 * CUSTOMIZATION FRAMEWORK: A great deal of work has been done to make the
373 underlying framework more flexible, so that PHP add-ons can be written
374 to adapt FeedWordPress to handle custom XML vocabularies, expiration of
375 posts under specified conditions, and other custom behavior.
376
377 * BUGFIX: MANUALLY EDITED POST SLUGS NOT OVERWRITTEN. Thanks to a report
378 by Chris Fritz, I've identified some code that causes post slugs for the
379 posts generated by FWP to be rewritten with every update, even if the
380 user has manually updated the slug from within the WordPress editing
381 interface. This has been fixed: FWP will continue to generate new slugs
382 for syndicated posts, but when syndicated posts are updated, they will
383 retain the slug that they had at the time of the update; any manual
384 changes to the post slug should be preserved.
385
386 * USER-AGENT STRING: FeedWordPress now sends a distinctive User-Agent
387 string identifying itself, and noting that it is a feed aggregator.
388
389 * MISCELLANEOUS PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS: A number of changes have been
390 made to try to reduce the intensity and expense in terms of both
391 database performance and web server memory consumption.
392
393 * DIAGNOSTICS IMPROVEMENTS: A number of new and improved diagnostics have
394 been added which should aid in understanding and troubleshooting issues
395 that may arise.
396
397 = 2011.1019 =
398
399 * BUGFIX: "THERE ARE NO HTTP TRANSPORTS AVAILABLE" ERROR FIXED: The initial
400 support for HTTP Basic and Digest authentication in version 2011.1018
401 contained a bug that could cause HTTP requests for feeds or for other
402 WordPress resources to break down if you do not have the PHP curl module
403 installed. This bug has been fixed, and these errors should no longer
404 appear.
405
406 * IMPROVED HTTP AUTHENTICATION SUPPORT: In addition, the HTTP Authentication
407 support in FeedWordPress has been extended, to ensure that Basic
408 authentication is available in many web host configurations, and to allow
409 you to add a username and password for a feed immediately when you
410 subscribe to it.
411
412 = 2011.1018 =
413
414 * HTTP BASIC AND DIGEST AUTHENTICATION SUPPORT: FeedWordPress now offers
415 improved support for syndicating feeds that make use of HTTP Basic or HTTP
416 Digest authentication methods. In order to set up authentication on one of
417 your feeds, just go to its Settings > Feed page, and click on the "Uses
418 Username/Password" link underneath the Feed URL. Enter the username and
419 password for accessing the feed, then select the authentication method. (If
420 you're not sure which method your feed provider uses, try Basic first.)
421 Save Changes, and syndicate away.
422
423 NOTE: HTTP Digest support requires the curl module for PHP. If you are not
424 sure whether this module has been installed, contact your web hosting
425 provider to check.
426
427 * WP 3.3 (BETA) COMPATIBILITY: This version fixes an init-sequence bug that
428 could cause intrusive warning messages or fatal errors in WP 3.3 beta
429 versions.
430
431 * BUGFIX: FIXES LONG DELAYS IN UPDATES SCHEDULES IN LARGE INSTALLATIONS. A
432 performance feature introduced in version 2011.0721 had some flaws in its
433 implementation, which tended to create serious delays (on the order of
434 several hours) in FeedWordPress's attempts to schedule updates for feeds,
435 when users had a very large number of feeds (several dozen or more) in their
436 FeedWordPress installation. This feature has been reconfigured to adjust
437 dynamically to the number of feeds in Syndicated Sources and the frequency
438 with which they are updated. If you've seen a lot of ready-to-update feeds
439 piling up, several hours after they were supposed to get updated, then this
440 upgrade should better ensure that your feeds get updated in a timely fashion.
441
442 * BUGFIX: syndicated_item_guid FILTERS FIXED. Previous versions of
443 FeedWordPress theoretically allowed for filters on the syndicated_item_guid
444 hook, which was intended to filter the globally-unique identifier element
445 (rss:guid or atom:id) -- useful if you need to convince FeedWordPress to use
446 different guids, or to recognize two or more incoming posts as versions of
447 the same post rather than as distinct items. However, while the hook
448 affected the guid stored in the WordPress database, it did not affect the
449 guid used to check whether an incoming feed item had already been syndicated
450 or was a new item -- which greatly limited the practical usefulness of the
451 filter. This bug has been fixed: syndicated_item_guid filters should now
452 properly control not only the final database record, but also the initial
453 uniqueness test applied to posts.
454
455 = 2011.0721 =
456
457 * BUGFIX: SERIOUS BUG CAUSING RARE UNEXPECTED DELETION OF PAGES AND OTHER
458 CONTENT. A bug in the guid-checking code for some rare kinds of guids could
459 cause content in the wp_posts table to seemingly disappear at random after
460 FeedWordPress updates.This most frequently but not exclusively affected
461 static pages. What actually happened is that in these rare cases the
462 existing static page was mistaken for an older version of the new incoming
463 syndicated post, which was then stored as a new revision of the original
464 page. The bug that caused these mistaken identities has been fixed.
465
466 * BUGFIX: UNWANTED AUTOMATIC PAGE-LOAD-BASED UPDATES NO LONGER A NUISANCE.
467 Some users encountered a bug in which FeedWordPress would adopt an automatic
468 page-load-based update method, even if they had requested that it not do
469 so, and that it use a manual or cron job update method instead. The bug
470 causing this has been fixed, and page-load-based updates should no longer
471 trigger unless explicitly turned on.
472
473 * WP 3.2 USER INTERFACE COMPATIBILITY: POST TAGS BOX NOW WORKS AGAIN. The
474 release of WordPress 3.2 caused a breakage in the tags box which prevented
475 you from adding or removing tags under Syndication --> Categories & Tags.
476 (The breakage was the result of an incompatibility introduced by the new
477 release of jQuery.) This breakage has now been fixed, and the tags box
478 should work correctly again.
479
480 * FEED UPDATE SCHEDULING IMPROVEMENTS: UI. The Syndicated Sources table now
481 provides considerably more data to understand update scheduling, when
482 specific scheduling decisions are made because of, e.g., requests from the
483 feed producer.
484
485 * FEED UPDATE SCHEDULING IMPROVEMENTS: ENFORCEABLE "MINIMUM INTERVAL" SETTING
486 TO SPACE OUT UPDATES. Some feeds request specific update schedules, using
487 standard elements such as sy:updateFrequency and rss:ttl. Normally,
488 FeedWordPress respects any scheduling requests that a feed makes -- if it
489 requests a longer gap between polls than what FWP would normally adopt, then
490 FWP slows down to meet the request. If it indicates a shorter gap than what
491 FWP would normally adopt, FWP speeds up and checks that feed for updates
492 more often than it normally would. Now, there should not be any way for user
493 settings to override an explicit slow-down request from the feed producer --
494 if producers indicate a particular update schedule, then polling the feed
495 more frequently than they request is considered abusive behavior. But
496 there's no reason why users should not be able -- if they so desire -- to
497 override speed-up requests, and poll a feed *less* frequently than the
498 indicated update schedule, if the FWP user wants to space update checkins
499 over a longer interval of time. Before, they could not do this: FWP always
500 sped up to meet the indicated update schedule. Now, they can do this, by
501 using the new "Minimum Interval" setting in Syndication --> Feeds &
502 Updates..
503
504 = 2011.0706 =
505
506 * WP 3.2 COMPATIBILITY: ELIMINATES FATAL ERROR "Call to undefined method
507 WP_SimplePie_File::WP_SimplePie_File() in
508 [...]/wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress/feedwordpress.php on line 1841." The
509 latest release of WordPress, version 3.2, has shifted the minimum
510 requirements up to PHP 5.2, and in line with the shift to PHP5 they have
511 rewritten a number of code segments that made use of now-obsolete PHP4
512 idioms. Unfortunately, this caused a fatal error whenever FeedWordPress
513 attempted to make use of the cache, since FWP's caching plugin was written
514 to match the older idiom. FeedWordPress has been updated to follow the new,
515 PHP5 idiom when possible, thus eliminating the fatal error.
516
517 * PERFORMANCE: The handling of queries to determine whether posts had been
518 previously syndicated produced some very slow queries (usually, but not
519 always, involving a scan over the MD5(post_guid) column of the table). The
520 code that prepares MySQL queries for previously-syndicated checks has been
521 revised to eliminate the MD5(post_guid) scan entirely, and to significantly
522 improve performance by eliminating other unnecessary clauses.
523
524 * BUGFIX: NO LONGER DESTROYS STICKY POSTS. Previous versions could destroy
525 (or, more precisely, replace the content of) sticky posts due to some
526 queries mashed together in unexpected ways by WordPress. Version 2011.0706
527 accounts for and eliminates the problem; your sticky posts should be safe
528 once again.
529
530 * BUGFIX: GUIDS CONTAINING MYSQL-ESCAPED CHARACTERS NO LONGER CAUSE DUPLICATE
531 POSTS TO APPEAR. One remaining source of duplicate post issues in 2011.0602
532 was guids that contained characters that needed to be escaped for MySQL,
533 such as single quotes and double quotes. The work-around for handling
534 filtered URIs has now been corrected to ensure that these do not cause
535 duplicate posts.
536
537 = 2011.0602 =
538
539 * WP 3.1.3 COMPAT / BUGFIX: WHITESPACE IN GUIDS NO LONGER PRODUCES DUPLICATE
540 POSTS. The work-around for handling filtered URIs in guid elements has now
541 been extended to handle URIs that were filtered because of leading or
542 trailing whitespace, in addition to URIs that were filtered because of
543 unapproved schemes.
544
545 * WP 3.1.3 COMPAT / BUGFIX: RELATIVE URLS IN GUIDS NO LONGER PRODUCE DUPLICATE
546 POSTS. The work-around for handling filtered URIs in guid elements has now
547 been extended to handle URIs that were altered without being filtered out
548 entirely (most commonly because a scheme was added to a relative URL).
549
550 * BUGFIX: UPDATES TO POST NO LONGER CAUSE DUPLICATE DRAFT VERSION TO APPEAR.
551 Under certain conditions in 2011.0531, an update to an existing post would
552 not be properly applied to the post itself, but rather would appear as a
553 duplicate post with Draft status. This bug has been eliminated, and updates
554 will now be properly inserted as revisions to the existing post.
555
556 = 2011.0531 =
557
558 * WORDPRESS 3.1.3 COMPATIBILITY: DUPLICATE POSTS ISSUE FIXED. Due to
559 internal changes in the way that WordPress handles post guids in the
560 most recent release (3.1.3), many users experienced problems with many
561 duplicate posts appearing in rapid succession. (Specifically, this would
562 happen with any posts using tag: URL guids -- such as all the posts
563 coming from Blogger feeds or feeds from other Google services.) This
564 compatibility release of FeedWordPress eliminates the issue by working
565 around the new restrictions on tag: URLs.
566
567 * NEW AND IMPROVED DIAGNOSTICS: Syndication --> Diagnostics now contains some
568 new diagnostics settings useful for debugging problems with duplicate posts
569 (allowing you to easily view the guid of posts in the WordPress posts
570 database and allowing you to track the SQL used to check for existing
571 versions of a syndicated post).
572
573 = 2011.0512 =
574
575 * DIAGNOSTICS IMPROVEMENTS; "THERE MAY BE A BUG IN FEEDWORDPRESS" CRITICAL
576 ERROR NOTICES ELIMINATED: This version includes some major improvements
577 to the Syndication --> Diagnostics section, which should aid in
578 troubleshooting difficulties with items failing to be imported, posts
579 failing to be properly inserted into the database, or updates failing to
580 be recorded. If you have been encountering critical error / bug notices
581 with a white screen and the message "THERE MAY BE A BUG IN
582 FEEDWORDPRESS," followed by an extraordinarily long dump of mostly
583 incomprehensible diagnostic information, you'll be happy to know that
584 the condition causing these notices has been eliminated. In the few
585 cases where errors may still crop up with database insertions,
586 FeedWordPress will now produce a significantly more manageable and more
587 useful diagnostic message.
588
589 * BUGFIX: NEW POSTS FAILING TO APPEAR IN A CLEANLY-INSTALLED FEEDWORDPRESS
590 SYSTEM. If you encountered a recurring problem with FeedWordPress
591 failing to import new posts, after a clean install of FeedWordPress
592 (i.e., not an upgrade from a previous version), this problem may have
593 been the result of a bug with author-handling which has now been fixed
594 in the 2011.0512 release. (If the problem does *not* go away with the
595 upgrade, this version also includes significant improvements to the
596 Diagnostics system, which will help track down what *is* causing it
597 in your particular case.)
598
599 * PERFORMANCE: New handling of update hashes allows FeedWordPress to avoid
600 a certain kind of infinite loop, caused when two more more different
601 syndicated feeds each carried a version of the same item (for example,
602 because it appeared on two different aggregator feeds that you're
603 syndicating). In previous versions, when this kind of loop cropped up,
604 syndicated posts could pile up an indefinitely large number of revisions
605 -- each revision alternating between the version from each of the two
606 feeds where it appeared -- which would, over time, dramatically inflate
607 the size of the database, and kill the performance of queries on the
608 post table. This issue has been resolved: revisions of the post that
609 have been syndicated once will not be re-syndicated over and over again.
610
611 * AUTHOR LISTS: Lists of authors presented on the Author settings pages
612 should now be easier to scan through, with author names arranged in
613 alphabetical order.
614
615 * FEED ITEM DATE PARSING: More tweaks to make date-time handling more
616 resilient when feeds provide broken or weird values for the timestamps
617 on syndicated items. FWP will now attempt to work around unparseable
618 timezone values.
619
620 * AUTHOR MATCHING: Now attempts to match author names against the WP login
621 name in addition to display_name; when creating user record, also fills
622 in some best-guess values for nickname, firstname and lastname. Also
623 properly picks up Atom 1.0 author/uri data from feed.
624
625 * COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress has been successfully tested for
626 compatibility with recent releases of WordPress, up to version 3.1.2.
627
628 = 2011.0211 =
629
630 * BUGFIX: DUPLICATE POSTS WHEN GUIDS ARE TOO LONG: When feeds included
631 exceptionally long GUIDs, FeedWordPress could occasionally get into
632 a situation where posts with the long GUIDs would be duplicated over
633 and over again with each update (because FWP failed to store the full
634 GUID, due to length constraints in the relevant database tables).
635 Without the full GUID, FWP would not know that the post had already
636 been syndicated once. This bug has been fixed, and should no longer
637 produce duplicate posts.
638
639 * HTTP TIMEOUT SETTING: If you are frequently running into timeout
640 problems with one or more of the feeds you syndicate, FWP now allows you
641 to adjust the timeout for HTTP requests using a global or feed-by-feed
642 setting.
643
644 * HTTP GET PARAMETERS: You can now temporarily or permanently add HTTP
645 GET parameters to a subscription using an interface in Syndication -->
646 Feeds & Updates. This is especially helpful for making quick, short-term
647 changes to a subscription (for example, to pull in all the previous
648 items from a web service, before settling down to pulling in only newly
649 updated items).
650
651 * DIAGNOSTICS SYSTEM: Added several new diagnostics which are useful in
652 troubleshooting, and established a framework for add-on modules to hook
653 in with their own diagnostic messages.
654
655 * UI: Adjusted some internal coding, which should allow for settings
656 pages and add-ons to properly display multiple category pickers on a
657 single settings page.
658
659 * PHP4 COMPATIBILITY TWEAKS: This version makes some tweaks to the handling
660 of object references which should improve compatibility with older
661 versions of PHP. (Although, I should note, web hosts that still force
662 you to run under PHP 4 -- in 2011! -- are *bad web hosts*.)
663
664 * IMPROVED PERFORMANCE: This version eliminates a *major* performance drag
665 that shows up on sites with large numbers of users (due to some poor
666 decisions about where to place a user query, which caused the user table
667 to be scanned frequently when it did not need to be). If you experienced
668 serious problems with CPU load or slow database performance under
669 2010.0905, which kicked in immediately when FWP was loaded and tended
670 to disappear immediately if FWP was de-activated, it is likely that
671 upgrading away from 2010.0905 to the most recent version will resolve
672 your problem.
673
674
675 = 2010.0905 =
676
677 * BUGFIX: CATEGORIES AND TAGS CORRECTLY ASSIGNED IN AUTOMATIC UPDATES.
678 Version 2010.0903 switched over to a new way of assigning categories and
679 tags as part of its support for handling custom taxonomies.
680 Unfortunately, the method that it uses is subjected to some checks of
681 the current user's capabilities, which creates problems for posts that
682 are being inserted into the WordPress database when there *is* no
683 current user logged in (as, for example, when an update is being carried
684 out from a cron job or automatic update). The result was that posts
685 from cron jobs and automatic updates ended up with no Categories and no
686 Tags being assigned. This bug has now been fixed: in 2010.0905, Tags and
687 Categories should be correctly assigned to all posts, regardless of
688 whether they were added from manual updates, cron jobs, or automatic
689 updates.
690
691 = 2010.0903 =
692
693 * WORDPRESS 3 REQUIRED: Please note that this release of FeedWordPress
694 *requires* WordPress 3.0 or later. If you are currently using a 2.x
695 branch of WordPress, you will need to upgrade to WordPress 3 before you
696 can successfully upgrade FeedWordPress.
697
698 * BUGFIX: NO MORE DISAPPEARING "SYNDICATED SOURCES" PANEL; INTERNET
699 EXPLORER UI GLITCH APPARENTLY FIXED: Several users independently
700 reported a problem with FWP 2010.0623 and various versions of IE. A
701 problem with the HTML markup caused IE (but not Firefox or
702 Chrome) to completely hide the Syndicated Sources administration panel
703 (the main list of currently-syndicated sources, and the main location
704 for adding new sources, under the Syndication menu item) when a user
705 added their first syndicated feed. Maddeningly, the glitch seemed to
706 affect some IE users and not others: I was never able to reproduce the
707 problem for myself on my own machines. However, the markup of Syndicated
708 Sources has undergone significant changes and corrections since
709 2010.0623, and two independent sources who had been having this problem
710 confirm that they no longer encounter it with the updated version. For
711 the time being, I am going to declare this bug squashed.
712
713 * BUGFIX: MORE PROTECTION AGAINST FATAL ERRORS FROM PLUGGABLE VERSIONS OF
714 SimplePie: FeedWordPress now takes some precautions that should help to
715 better avoid conflicts for users who have installed pluggable versions
716 of SimplePie for another plugin or theme. (You may not know that you have
717 done this; but if you've been encountering fatal errors indicating that
718 you cannot redeclare class SimplePie, or something along those lines,
719 there is now a better chance that those fatal errors will be eliminated.
720
721 * PERFORMANCE: SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCED MEMORY CONSUMPTION FOR LARGE UPDATES:
722 FeedWordPress is still a memory-hungry little module, especially when
723 you are dealing with very large feeds. However, users should notice a
724 significant reduction in memory overloads, especially if they update a
725 large number of feeds at once.
726
727 * USER INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: Nothing is radically different, but there's
728 been a fair amount of extra spit and polish added, including a convenient
729 new Dashboard widget that may save you a trip to the Syndication menu,
730 a lot of effort to make the relationship between global and feed-by-feed
731 settings more obvious to the user and more easily controllable, to make
732 navigation between settings pages easier, to sand off a few rough edges,
733 and to make other improvements on the margins. I hope you'll like how
734 it looks.
735
736 * ADDING MULTIPLE FEEDS: FeedWordPress now provides a convenient mode for
737 adding multiple feeds at once, using either a copy-and-pasted list, or
738 else an OPML file. Go to Syndication --> Syndicated Sources and check
739 out the two new buttons underneath the New Source input box. When you
740 have to add a number of feeds at once, this can save you considerable
741 time and trouble.
742
743 * IMPROVED HANDLING OF AUTHORS WITH DUPLICATE E-MAIL ADDRESS AND AUTHORS
744 WITH NAMES WRITTEN IN FOREIGN SCRIPTS: WordPress 3 is increasingly picky
745 about what it will accept for new author accounts, and some of the
746 conditions it imposes can cause error conditions that prevent posts from
747 being properly syndicated, or properly attributed, if authors happen to
748 have identical e-mail addresses, or if users are given usernames that are
749 written in non-Western scripts. FeedWordPress now handles these much
750 better, and systematically works to avoid clashes between syndicated
751 authors' account names or in their e-mail addresses, which should result
752 in significantly better results in mapping author names to WordPress
753 user accounts.
754
755 * MAPPING CATEGORIES ON SYNDICATED POSTS TO TAGS NOW BETTER SUPPORTED:
756 In previous versions, the only way for the Categories provided by a
757 syndicated feed to be mapped into Post Tags was to instruct FWP to
758 create new tags, rather than new categories, for unfamiliar categories
759 from the feed. This works fine if you want tags to be the default; but
760 if you want only a *specific* set of tags, there was no way to get them
761 without getting most or all other categories imported as tags. You can
762 now do this by creating a tag (under Posts ==> Post Tags) before
763 importing the post; when the syndicated category matches a pre-existing
764 tag, the incoming post will be tagged with that tag, without creating
765 a local Post Category.
766
767 * REL-TAG MICROFORMAT SUPPORT FOR INLINE TAGS: Syndicated posts that
768 contain inline tags, marked up using the Rel-Tag microformat
769 <http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag>, are now tagged with the tags
770 provided by Rel-Tag format links.
771
772 * MUCH GREATER CONTROL OVER CATEGORY AND TAG MAPPING: This is partly the
773 result of building in support for a potentially endless set of custom
774 taxonomies (see below), but in general there has been a great deal of
775 effort towards giving you more control over how categories and tags
776 provided by the feed are mapped into terms on the local blog. In
777 particular, you can now force FeedWordPress to create only categories
778 from categories and tags provided by the feed; or to create only tags;
779 or to search both categories and tags for a match; or you can simply
780 force it to drop all of the categories provided by the feed and use
781 only categories or tags that you explicitly provide. In addition, you
782 can now also choose whether to override global categories settings with
783 a local, feed-specific setting; or whether to *add together* *both* the
784 global categories and the local feed-specific categories -- depending
785 on whatever your use-case may demand.
786
787 * CUSTOM POST TYPES AND TAXONOMY SUPPORTS: This is mainly for the
788 super-geeky, but if you use other plugins or themes that make
789 significant use of WordPress's support for custom post types and custom
790 taxonomies, you may be pleased to find that FeedWordPress now allows you
791 to feed incoming posts into any custom feed type that you wish, and to
792 map categories and tags from the feed to custom taxonomies as well as
793 to the standard Category and Tag taxonomies.
794
795 * STORING NAMESPACED CUSTOM FEED ELEMENTS IN POST CUSTOM FIELDS: If you
796 would like to use FeedWordPress's support for storing custom meta-data
797 from feed elements in the custom fields for a post (for example, to
798 store geolocation data or iTunes media meta-data), you'll find that it's
799 now much easier for you to access these namespaced elements. You always
800 could access them, but in previous versions you might have to write
801 something ugly like $(/{http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#}lat)
802 just to get at the value of a `<geo:lat>` tag. Now, as long as you use
803 the same mnemonic codes that the feed producer used, you should always
804 be able to write a nice, simple expression like $(/geo:lat) to get the
805 value of a <geo:lat> tag.
806
807 * CUSTOM DIRECTORY STRUCTURE SUPPORT: if you poke at it enough, WordPress
808 is relatively flexible about where it should store admin interface code,
809 uploaded content, plugins, and a number of other things that occupy an
810 important place in the WordPress directory structure. Previous versions
811 of FeedWordPress encountered serious errors or broke entirely when used
812 with directory structures other than the default. This should now be
813 fixed: FWP now supports custom directory structures wherever WordPress
814 allows them to be customized, rather than depending on the default
815 locations. Enjoy your freedom!
816
817 * MANY NEW FILTERS AND API UTILITY FUNCTIONS FOR ADD-ON PROGRAMMERS: There
818 have been too many improvements to list them all in this ChangeLog, but
819 it means that much more power and ease for folks who are customizing
820 FeedWordPress through PHP filters or add-on modules. Fuller
821 documentation will be put up at the Wiki at feedwordpress.radgeek.org
822 soon.
823
824 = 2010.0623 =
825
826 * WORDPRESS 3.0 COMPATIBILITY / AUTHOR MAPPING INTERFACE ISSUES: I
827 resolved a couple of outstanding issues with the author mapping
828 interface (Syndication --> Authors), which were preventing new users
829 from being created correctly and author mapping rules from being set up
830 correctly. These partly had to do with new restrictions on user account
831 creation introduced in WordPress 3.0; anyway, they should now be fixed.
832
833 * MORE EFFICIENT SYNDICATED URL LOOKUPS: Several users noticed that the
834 bug fix introduced in 2010.0528 for compatibility with post-listing
835 plugins caused a lot more queries to the database in order to look up
836 numerical post IDs from the URL provided to the filter. This shouldn't
837 cause any major problems, but it is not as efficient as it could be; the
838 code now takes advantage of a more efficient way of doing things,
839 which usually will not require any additional database queries.
840
841 * SIMPLEPIE FEED UPDATE ISSUES: If you have been having significant
842 problems with getting feeds to update correctly, this may be the result
843 of some bugs in the implementation of SimplePie caching that ships with
844 WordPress (as of version 3.0). (You would most commonly experience this
845 error if you continually saw errors such as "No feed found at <...>" in
846 your updates.) Fortunately, SimplePie allows for a great deal of
847 extensibility and this allows me to work around the problem; these
848 error conditions should now be mostly eliminated when the underlying
849 feed is valid.
850
851 * UI: SHOW INACTIVE SOURCES: When you use the default unsubscribe option
852 -- which turns off the subscription to a feed while preserving the posts
853 from it and the syndication-related meta-data for the feed -- the
854 unsubscribed feed can now easily be viewed in a special "Inactive"
855 section of the Syndicated Sources page. (As a side benefit, if you've
856 accidentally, or only temporarily, turned off the subscription to a
857 feed, it is now much easier to restore the feed to being active, or to
858 delete it permanently, if you prefer.
859
860 * UI: FEED FINDER / SWITCH FEED INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: changes to styling
861 and options for the feed finder / switch feed, which should now make it
862 easier, in some cases, to find alternative feeds, and make interface
863 options more clearly visible.
864
865 * FILTERS: `syndicated_item_published` and `syndicated_item_updated` NOW
866 PROPERLY AFFECT THE DATING OF POSTS. These filters used to affect some
867 date-related settings, but not others -- and, most importantly, not the
868 final date that is set for a post's publication or last-modified date
869 in the WordPress database. Now, they do affect that, as they should.
870 (Filters should receive, and return, a long integer, representing a Unix
871 epoch relative timestamp.)
872
873 * MAGIC URL TO CLEAR THE CACHE: Suppose that you need to clear the feed
874 cache, for whatever reason; suppose, even, that you need to clear it on
875 a regular basis. One way you might do this is by logging into the
876 FeedWordPress administrative interface and going to Syndication -->
877 Performance. Another way you might do it, now, is to simply send an
878 HTTP request to a magic URL provided by FeedWordPress: if your blog is
879 at example.com, the URL would be <http://example.com/?clear_cache=1>
880
881 = 2010.0602 =
882
883 * CATEGORY BOX INTERFACE ELEMENT FIXED FOR WP 3.0: Stylesheet changes
884 between WordPress 2.9.x and the WordPress 3.0 RC caused the Categories
885 box under **Syndication --> Categories & Tags** to malfunction. This
886 has been fixed.
887
888 * LINK CATEGORY SELECTION BOX IN SYNDICATION ==> FEEDS FIXED FOR WP 2.8
889 AND 2.9: A WP 3.0 compatibility change introduced in 2010.0531
890 inadvertently broke the Syndicated Link Category selector under
891 Syndication --> Feeds & Updates in WP 2.8 and WP 2.9, causing the post
892 categories to be displayed in the selector rather than the link
893 categories. This should now be fixed so that the selector will work
894 correctly under both the current versions of WordPress and the 3.0 RC.
895
896 * MORE PERMISSIVE HANDLING OF FEEDS WITH BAD CONTENT-TYPE HEADERS: One of
897 the small advantages that MagpieRSS had over SimplePie is that it was
898 more tolerant about parsing well-formed feeds that the remote web server
899 happened to deliver with weird or incorrect HTTP Content-type headers.
900 In feeds affected by this problem, the new SimplePie parser would simply
901 fail to find a feed, due to its being led astray by the contents of the
902 Content-type header. This version includes an extension to SimplePie's
903 content-type sniffer that offers more permissive handling of the HTTP
904 headers.
905
906 * MORE FULL-TEXT "EXCERPTS" NOW PROPERLY SHORTENED. Version 2010.0528
907 introduced code to control for cases in which elements intended for
908 item summaries are (ill-advisedly) used to carry the full text of posts;
909 past versions of FeedWordPress would simply include the full text of the
910 post in the excerpt field, but newer versions now attempt to detect
911 this condition when it arises and to head it off, by blanking out the
912 excerpt field and filling it with an automatically generated short,
913 plain text excerpt from the full content. This release broadens the
914 test conditions that indicate when an excerpt field is treated as
915 identical to the full text of the post, and should therefore improve
916 the handling of some feeds (such as Google Reader feeds) where the full
917 text of each post was still appearing in the excerpt field.
918
919 * FILTERS: `syndicated_item_published` AND `syndicated_item_updated`
920 FILTERS NOW ALLOW FILTER AUTHORS TO CHANGE POST TIMESTAMPS. You can now
921 use the `syndicated_item_published` and `syndicated_item_updated` filter
922 hooks to write filters or add-ons which directly change the post date
923 and most-recently-updated timestamps on incoming syndicated posts. Props
924 to niska for pointing out where the filters needed to be applied in
925 order to change WordPress's internal timestamps for incoming posts.
926
927 = 2010.0531 =
928
929 * PERMALINK / CUSTOM FIELDS PROBLEM RESOLVED: An issue in 2010.0528 caused
930 some posts to be imported without the proper syndication-related
931 meta-data being attached (thus causing permalinks to point back to the
932 aggregator website rather than to the source website, among other
933 problems). This problem has been resolved (and a fix has been applied
934 which will resolve the problem for any posts affected by this problem,
935 if the original post is recent enough to still be available on the feed).
936
937 * UI: The "Back End" section has been split into two separate sections --
938 "Performance" (dealing with caching, database index, and other
939 performance tweaks), and "Diagnostics" (dealing with debug mode,
940 update logging, and a number of new diagnostic tests which I will be
941 rolling out over the next few releases).
942
943 * Several minor interface bug fixes and PHP warning notices eliminated.
944
945 = 2010.0528 =
946
947 #### Compatibility ####
948
949 * SIMPLEPIE IS NOW USED TO PARSE FEEDS; NO MORE MAGPIERSS UPGRADES NEEDED:
950 One of the biggest changes in this release is that FeedWordPress no
951 longer depends on MagpieRSS to parse feeds, and has switched to the much
952 more up-to-date and flexible SimplePie feed parser, which is included as
953 a standard part of WordPress versions 2.8 and later. Using SimplePie will
954 hopefully allow for better handling of feeds going further, and will
955 allow me greater flexibility in determining how exactly the feed parser
956 will operate. It also means that FeedWordPress no longer requires
957 special upgrades to the WordPress core MagpieRSS files, and should
958 eliminate quite a bit of complexity.
959
960 * MAGPIERSS COMPATIBILITY LAYER FOR EXISTING FILTERS AND ADD-ONS: However,
961 I have also implemented a compatibility layer to ensure that existing
962 filters and add-ons for FeedWordPress which depended on the MagpieRSS
963 data format *should not be broken* by the switch to SimplePie. Going
964 forward, I recommend that new filters and add-ons be written to take
965 advantage of the SimplePie object representations of items, feeds, etc.,
966 rather than the MagpieRSS arrays, but the MagpieRSS arrays will still
967 be available and older filters should continue to work as they have in
968 the past.
969
970 * COMPATIBILITY WITH WORDPRESS 2.9.x and 3.0: This release has been tested
971 for the existing WordPress 2.9.x branch and with the upcoming release of
972 WordPress 3.0. Changes in the user interface JavaScript between WordPress
973 2.8.x and WordPress 2.9 caused the tag box interface element to break in
974 the Syndication --> Categories & Tags settings page; changes in the API
975 functions for adding new authors caused fatal errors under certain
976 conditions in WordPress 3.0. These breakages have been fixed.
977
978 * DROPPED LEGACY SUPPORT FOR WORDPRESS PRIOR TO 2.8: Because SimplePie is
979 not included with versions of WordPress prior to 2.8, I have chosen to
980 drop legacy support for WordPress versions 1.5 through 2.7. If you are
981 using FeedWordPress with a version of WordPress before 2.8, you will
982 have to upgrade your installation of WordPress in order to take
983 advantage of this release.
984
985 * PHP 5.3 COMPATIBILITY: A couple of compatibility issues, which were
986 causing fatal errors amd ugly warnings for users of PHP 5.3,
987 have been eliminated.
988
989 #### Features and Processing ####
990
991 * INTERFACE REORGANIZATION: The interface restructuring, began with
992 Version 2009.0612, has been completed. Catch-all settings pages have
993 been eliminated entirely for pages that cover each aspect of handling
994 a feed: Feeds & Updates, Posts & Links, Authors, Categories & Tags,
995 and Back End handling of the database and diagnostic information.
996 Extensive new interface hooks allow add-on modules to significantly
997 change or extend the FeedWordPress admin interface and workflow.
998
999 * STORING INFORMATION FROM THE FEED IN CUSTOM FIELDS: Many users
1000 have written to request the ability to store information from elements
1001 in the feed in a custom field on each post. (So that, for example, if
1002 post includes a `itunes:duration` element, you could store the contents
1003 in a Custom Field called `duration` on the post (for a Theme to access
1004 later). The Custom Post Settings under Syndication --> Posts & Links now
1005 allow you to access any item or feed tag, using a syntax similar to
1006 a much-simplified version of XPath. See Posts & Links settings for
1007 details.
1008
1009 * UPDATE-FREEZING ON MANUALLY EDITED POSTS: FeedWordPress now allows you
1010 to mark posts that have been manually edited, so that the changes you
1011 make will not be overwritten by later updates from the feed. If you make
1012 manual edits to a particular post, just check the "Manual editing"
1013 checkbox in order to protect your changes from being overwritten. If you
1014 want to block *all* posts from being updated after they are imported
1015 for the first time, a new "Updated Posts" setting in Posts & Links
1016 allows you to freeze all posts from a particular feed, or all syndicated
1017 posts.
1018
1019 * SETTING: FEED-BY-FEED SETTINGS FOR WHERE PERMALINKS POINT TO: You've
1020 always been able to tell FeedWordPress whether permalinks for posts
1021 should point to the original source of the story or the local copy. Now
1022 you can choose different policies for different feeds, instead of one
1023 global policy for all feeds. (Of course, you can still use a global
1024 default if you prefer.)
1025
1026 * SETTING: USER CONTROL OVER TIMING BASIS. You can now determine the
1027 schedule on which feeds are considered ready to poll for updates --
1028 by default feeds become ready for polling after about 1 hour. You can
1029 now increase or decrease the time window under Syndication --> Feeds &
1030 Updates. (However, please pay *CAREFUL ATTENTION* to the recommendations
1031 and DO NOT set the scheduling lower than 60 minutes unless you are
1032 ABSOLUTELY SURE that you have specific permission from webmaster who
1033 provides that specific feed to poll more frequently than that. If you
1034 set this too low (and about 60 minutes is the polite minimum if you
1035 haven't been given a different figure), most webmasters will consider
1036 the frequent hits on their server as rude, or even downright abusive.
1037
1038 * OTHER SETTINGS: New settings also include the ability to stop FWP from
1039 resolving relative URLs within syndicated content, and the ability to
1040 choose whether FeedWordPress should indicate the comment feed from the
1041 original source, or the local comment feed, when providing the comment
1042 feed URL for a syndicated post.
1043
1044 #### Parsing ####
1045
1046 * BETTER DATE HANDLING -- FEWER FLASHBACKS TO 1969 and 1970: FeedWordPress
1047 has made some bugfixes and some improvements in the logic for parsing
1048 dates. This should allow FeedWordPress to correctly parse more dates in
1049 more feeds; and, in the last resort, when FeedWordPress fails to
1050 correctly parse a date, to fall back to a more intelligent default. This
1051 should hopefully avoid most or all error conditions that have resulted
1052 in articles being erroneously dated to the dawn of the Unix epoch
1053 (31 December 1969 or 1 January 1970).
1054
1055 * FULL-TEXT "EXCERPTS" NOW PROPERLY SHORTENED. Based on a straightforward
1056 reading of the existing RSS specs, it's reasonable for the
1057 rss:description element to be read as a plaintext summary or excerpt for
1058 the item containing the description -- with the full text of the item,
1059 if available, in another, better-suited element, such as the de facto
1060 standard content:encoded extension element. The problem is that uses of
1061 RSS rarely have much to do with anything like a straightforward reading
1062 of the specs. As a result, many actual RSS producers in the wild put the
1063 full text of the article in a description element. But since
1064 FeedWordPress has treated this text as a summary, this produces
1065 aggregated posts with lengthy "excerpts" containing the full text of the
1066 article. This release of FeedWordPress fixes the problem by doing a
1067 little digging before treating rss:description as a summary: if the
1068 description element is used properly as a plain text summary, then
1069 FeedWordPress will take the summary provided by the feed, rather than
1070 recreating its own excerpt from the full text; but if an RSS item has no
1071 full-text element other than description, FeedWordPress will treat the
1072 description element as the full text of the article, and generate a
1073 shortened excerpt automatically from that text.
1074
1075 #### API ####
1076
1077 * TEMPLATE API: new template tags `get_local_permalink()` and
1078 `the_local_permalink()` allow you to access the permalink for a post on
1079 your aggregator site, even when FeedWordPress is rewriting permalinks to
1080 point to the original source site.
1081
1082 * NEW HOOKS FOR ADD-ONS AND FILTERS: I have added a number of new hooks
1083 which allow add-on modules to filter more precisely, gather information
1084 at more points, and to enhance the FeedWordPress admin interface. For
1085 a list of new hooks and documentation, see the FeedWordPress
1086 documentation wiki at
1087 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/add-ons-and-filters>
1088
1089 * FILTER API: A number of new utility methods have been added to the
1090 SyndicatedPost class to make it easier for filters and add-ons to
1091
1092 * FILTER API: Globals $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta DEPRECATED. These
1093 global variables, originally introduced to allow filters access to
1094 information about the source feed in `syndicated_item` filters (which
1095 were passed in through global variables rather than as parameters
1096 because of a bug in WP 1.5 which was then fixed in 1.5.1) have been
1097 DEPRECATED. If you have any filters or add-ons which still depend on
1098 these global variables, you should see about fixing them to access data
1099 about the source feed using the SyndicatedPost::link element instead.
1100 For documentation, see the FeedWordPress documentation wiki at
1101 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedpost> and
1102 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedlink>.
1103
1104 * DIAGNOSTICS: I've included a number of new diagnostic options and
1105 messages, which should allow an experienced user to better investigate
1106 any problems that may crop up.
1107
1108 #### Bug Fixes ####
1109
1110 * BUGFIX: & IN PERMALINKS NO LONGER CAUSING ATOM OR HTML VALIDATION
1111 EFFORTS: Many users reported an issue in which syndicating a feed with
1112 special XML characters in the URLs (& was the most common, since it is
1113 used to separate HTTP GET parameters) would cause the aggregator's
1114 feeds to produce invalid (malformed) XML. This update addresses the
1115 issue in Atom feeds. Unfortunately, it has not been technically possible
1116 to address the problem in RSS 2.0 feeds, due to limitations on
1117 WordPress's internal templates for RSS feeds.
1118
1119 * BUGFIX: BROKEN URLS IN "POPULAR POSTS" AND SIMILAR PLUGINS SHOULD NO
1120 LONGER BE BROKEN. A number of users noticed an issue where plugins and
1121 templates that listed posts in locations outside of the post loop
1122 (for example, "Popular Posts"-style plugins that listed posts in the
1123 sidebar), often produced the wrong URL for post links. (Typically, all
1124 the posts listed would get the same wrong URL.) This should now be
1125 fixed. Thanks to Björn for sending in a quick fix!
1126
1127 * MINOR BUGFIXES: This release includes a number of fixes to minor bugs
1128 and compatibility issues, including: silent failures of the "Syndicate"
1129 button, "Illegal Offset Type" error messages from MagpieRSS, and others.
1130
1131 = 2009.0707 =
1132
1133 * BUGFIX: WORDPRESS 2.8 AJAX COMPATIBILITY ISSUES RESOLVED (blank or
1134 truncated "Syndicated Sites" administration page): Due to changes in the
1135 AJAX interface elements between WordPress 2.7 and WordPress 2.8, several
1136 FeedWordPress users encountered an issue where the front "Syndication"
1137 page in the FeedWordPress administrative interface would come up blank,
1138 without the normal "Syndicated Sites" list and "Update" control, or
1139 sometimes wth the boxes visible but one or both of them truncated, with
1140 only the title bar. This issue should now be resolved: with the new
1141 version of FeedWordPress, the compatibility issue that caused the
1142 disappearance should be eliminated, and if boxes are shown with only
1143 their handle visible, you should once again be able to drop down the
1144 rest of the box by clicking once on its title bar.
1145
1146 * BUGFIX: TAG SETTING WIDGET FIXED. Due to changes in interface elements
1147 between WordPress 2.7 and WordPress 2.8, people using FeedWordPress with
1148 WordPress 2.8 found that the widget for setting tags to be applied to
1149 all syndicated posts, or all syndicated posts from a particular feed,
1150 no longer displayed "Add" and "Remove" buttons for individual tags. This
1151 issue has now been fixed, and the tagging widget should once again work
1152 more or less exactly like the tagging widget for individual posts in the
1153 normal WordPress admin interface.
1154
1155 = 2009.0618 =
1156
1157 * BUGFIX: MYSTERY ERRORS WITH WITH WP_Http_Fsockopen HTTP TRANSPORT
1158 ELIMINATED: Thanks to a combination of a subtle bug in FeedWordPress,
1159 and changes to the HTTP transport code in WordPress, a number of users
1160 encountered an error in which any time they attempted to add a new feed
1161 through the FeedFinder interface, FeedWordPress would fail and display
1162 an HTTP request failure diagnostic message. The subtle bug has been
1163 fixed, and with it, most of these errors should now be eliminated.
1164
1165 Be sure to upgrade your MagpieRSS to the most recent MagpieRSS version
1166 after you have insalled FeedWordPress 2009.0618, or this bug fix will
1167 not take effect.
1168
1169 = 2009.0613 =
1170
1171 * INTERFACE/BUGFIX: WORDPRESS 2.8 CATEGORY BOX FIX. Thanks to a subtle
1172 change in class names between the WordPress 2.7 and 2.8 stylesheets,
1173 category boxes in the FeedWordPress settings interface tended to overflow
1174 and have a lot of messy-looking overlapping text under WordPress 2.8.
1175 This has now been fixed.
1176
1177 * FeedFinder FAILURE DIAGNOSTICS: When FWP's FeedFinder fails to find any
1178 feeds at a given URL (for example, when you are trying to add a
1179 subscription through the administrative interface and you run into an
1180 error message), FeedWordPress now provides more diagnostic information
1181 for the reasons behind the failure. If that helps you, great; if not,
1182 it should help me respond more intelligently to your support request..
1183
1184 = 2009.0612 =
1185
1186 * WORDPRESS 2.8 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress 2009.0612 has been tested for
1187 compatibility with the recent version 2.8 release of WordPress.
1188
1189 * INTERFACE RESTRUCTURING: In order to avoid settings posts from becoming
1190 too crowded, and to modularize and better organize the user interface,
1191 new "Posts" and "Categories & Tags" subpages have been created under the
1192 "Syndication" menu. "Posts" controls settings for individal syndicated
1193 posts (such as publication status, comment and ping status, whether or
1194 not to use the original location of the post as the permalink, whether
1195 or not to expose posts to formatting filters, and so on). "Categories &
1196 Tags" controls settings for assigning new syndicated posts to categories
1197 and tags, such as categories or tags to apply to all syndicated posts,
1198 and how to handle categories that do not yet exist in the WordPress
1199 database. These subpages, like the Authors subpage, handle settings for
1200 the global default level and for individual syndicated feeds.
1201
1202 Corresponding to these new subpages, the old Syndication Settings and
1203 Feed Settings subpages have been cleaned up and simplified, and now only
1204 link to the appropriate subpages for options that can be set in the
1205 Posts, Authors, or Categories & Tags subpages.
1206
1207 * FEATURE: ADD CUSTOM SETTINGS TO EACH SYNDICATED POST: FeedWordPress has
1208 long had an interface for creating custom settings for each syndicated
1209 *feed* which could be retrieved in templates using the `get_feed_meta()`
1210 template function. But it had no feature for adding custom fields to
1211 each individual syndicated *post*. In response to requests from users, I
1212 have added the ability to apply custom fields to each individual
1213 syndicated post, using the new Syndication --> Posts subpage. You can
1214 set up custom fields to be applied to every syndicated post, or custom
1215 fields to be applied to syndicated posts from a particular feed.
1216
1217 * FEATURE: MAGPIERSS VERSION CHECK AND UPGRADE: FeedWordPress will attempt
1218 to determine whether or not you are using the upgraded version of
1219 MagpieRSS that comes packaged with FeedWordPress. If not, it will throw
1220 an error on admin pages, and, if you are a site administrator, it will
1221 give you the option to ignore the error message, or to attempt an
1222 automatic upgrade (using a native file copy). If the file copy fails,
1223 FeedWordPress will offer some guidance on how to perform the upgrade
1224 manually.
1225
1226 * BLANK POSTS PROBLEM NO LONGER OCCURS WITH OLD & BUSTED MAGPIERSS: Due
1227 to the fact that I relied on a content normalization that occurs in my
1228 upgraded version of MagpieRSS, but not in the old & busted version of
1229 MagpieRSS that ships with WordPress, until this version, if you tried to
1230 syndicate an Atom feed without having performed the (*strongly
1231 recommended*) MagpieRSS upgrade, all of the posts would come up with
1232 completely blank contents. That's not because MagpieRSS couldn't read
1233 the data, but rather because the new Magpie version puts that data in a
1234 location where the old version doesn't, and I was only looking in that
1235 newer location. Now it checks for both, meaning that posts will continue
1236 to display their contents even if you don't upgrade MagpieRSS. (But you
1237 **really should** upgrade it, anyway.)
1238
1239 * BUGFIX: RELATIVE URI RESOLUTION FOR POST CONTENT RESTORED. Some time
1240 back, I added support for resolving relative URIs against xml:base on
1241 feeds that support it to the MagpieRSS upgrade in FeedWordPress. Then I
1242 took out code that did the same thing from the main FeedWordPress code.
1243 Of course, the problem is that some people, even though it is clearly
1244 stupid or evil to do so, still include relative URIs for images or links
1245 in posts on feed formats that do *not* adequately support xml:base
1246 (notably, RSS 2.0 feeds). In response to a user request, I have added
1247 this functionality back in, so that MagpieRSS will resolve any relative
1248 URIs that it knows how to resolve using xml:base, and then FeedWordPress
1249 will attempt to resolve any relative URIs that are left over afterwards.
1250
1251 * BUGFIX: INTERFACE OPTION FOR SETTING SYNDICATED POST PUBLICATION STATUS
1252 ON A FEED-BY-FEED BASIS HAS BEEN RESTORED: Due to a version-checking
1253 bug, users of WordPress 2.7.x lost an option from the "Edit a syndicated
1254 feed" interface which allowed them to determine whether newly syndicated
1255 posts should be published immediately, held as "Pending Review," saved
1256 as drafts, or saved as private posts. (The option to change this
1257 setting globally remained in place, but users could no longer set it on
1258 a feed-by-feed basis.) The version-checking bug has been fixed, and the
1259 option has been restored.
1260
1261 * BUGFIX: "ARE YOU SURE?" FATAL ERROR ELIMINATED AND SECURITY IMPROVED:
1262 Under certain circumstances (for example, when users have configured
1263 their browser or proxy not to send HTTP Referer headers, for privacy or
1264 other reasons), many features in the FeedWordPress administrative
1265 interface (such as adding new feeds or changing settings) would hit a
1266 fatal error, displaying only a cryptic message reading "Are you sure?"
1267 and a blank page following it. This problem has been eliminated by
1268 taking advantage of WordPress's nonce functions, which allow the
1269 security check which ran into this error to work properly even without
1270 receiving an HTTP Referer header. (N.B.: WordPress's nonce functions
1271 were first introduced in WordPress 2.0.3. If you're using FeedWordPress
1272 with an older version of WordPress, there's no fix for this problem:
1273 you'll just need to turn Referer headers back on. Sorry.)
1274
1275 * BUGFIX: MANUALLY-ALTERED POST STATUS, COMMENT STATUS, AND PING STATUS NO
1276 LONGER REVERTED BY POST UPDATES: If you manually altered the post status,
1277 comment status, or ping status of a syndicated post from what it was set
1278 to when first syndicated -- for example, if you had a feed that was set
1279 to bring in new posts as "Pending Review," and you then marked some of
1280 the pending posts as "Published" and others as "Unpublished" -- then
1281 in previous versions of FeedWordPress, these manual changes to the
1282 status would be lost -- so that, for example, your Published or Unpublished
1283 articles would revert to Pending Review -- if the source feed made any
1284 upates to the item. This could make the Pending Review feature both
1285 unreliable and also extremely frustrating to work with. The good news is
1286 that this bug has since been fixed: if you manually update the status
1287 of a post, it will no longer be reverted if or when the post is updated.
1288
1289 * BUGFIX: OCCASIONAL FATAL ERROR ON UPDATE ELIMINATED: Under certain
1290 limited conditions (specifically, when both the title and the content of
1291 a post to be updated are empty), an attempt to update the post would
1292 result in a fatal error. This has been fixed.
1293
1294 * INTERFACE: "CONFIGURE SETTINGS" CONVENIENCE LINK ADDED TO CONFIRMATION
1295 MESSAGE WHEN A NEW FEED IS ADDED: When you add a new subscription to
1296 FeedWordPress, the message box that appears to confirm it now includes a
1297 handy link to the feed's settings subpage, so that you can quickly set
1298 up any special settings you may want to set up for the new feed, without
1299 having to hunt through the list of all your other subscriptions to pick
1300 out the new one.
1301
1302 * INTERFACE: SIMPLIFYING AND CLARIFYING AUTOMATIC UPDATES SETTINGS. I have
1303 removed an interval setting for the cronless automatic updates which has
1304 confused many FeedWordPress users. In past versions of FWP, when you
1305 turned on automatic updates, you would be presented with a time interval
1306 setting which controlled how often FeedWordPress would check for feeds
1307 ready to be polled for updates. (That is, it DID NOT control how often
1308 feeds *would be polled*; it controlled how often FeedWordPress would
1309 *check* for feeds that *had become ready to poll*. The schedule on which
1310 feeds became ready for polling was still controlled either by requests
1311 encoded in elements within the feed itself, or else according to an
1312 internal calculation within FeedWordPress, averaging out to about 1 hour,
1313 if the feed did not include any scheduling request elements.) Since many
1314 users very often (and understandably) confused the purpose of this
1315 setting, and since the setting is for a feature that's actually very
1316 unlikely to require any manual control by the user, I have removed the
1317 setting; FeedWordPress now simply uses the default value of checking for
1318 feeds to poll every 10 minutes.
1319
1320 * FEEDFINDER PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT: FeedWordPress's FeedFinder class
1321 now uses `array_unique()` to make sure that it doesn't waste time
1322 repeatedly iterating over and polling the same URI. Props to Camilo
1323 (<http://projects.radgeek.com/2008/12/14/feedwordpress-20081214/#comment-20090122160414>).
1324
1325 = 2008.1214 =
1326
1327 * WORDPRESS 2.7 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress has been tested for
1328 compatibility with the newly released WordPress 2.7. WordPress 2.7 has
1329 deprecated the Snoopy library for HTTP requests, which caused a fatal
1330 error for users who had not installed the MagpieRSS upgrade (or whose
1331 installation of the MagpieRSS upgrade was overwritten by a recent update
1332 of WordPress). FeedWordPress now handles things gracefully when Snoopy
1333 is not immediately available.
1334
1335 * INTERFACE SPIFFED UP: Interface elements have been updated so that
1336 FeedWordPress's management interface fits in more naturally with the
1337 WordPress 2.7 interface (including a new logo and a number of small
1338 interface tweaks).
1339
1340 * BUG WITH TAGS FOR SYNDICATED ARTICLES FIXED: Several users encountered a
1341 bug with the option to add tags to all syndicated posts under
1342 Syndication --> Settings -- if you told FeedWordPress to add more than
1343 one tag to all syndicated posts, instead of doing so correctly, it would
1344 add a *single* tag instead, whose name was composed of the names of all
1345 the tags you asked it to add. This bug was the result of nothing more
1346 dignified than a typographical error on my part. It has now been fixed.
1347
1348 * MORE INFORMATION AVAILABLE WHEN FEEDWORDPRESS CAN'T FIND A FEED: When
1349 you enter a URL for a new syndication source, FeedWordPress uses a
1350 simple feed-finding algorithm (originally based on Mark Pilgrim's
1351 Universal Feed Finder) to try to determine whether the URL is the URL
1352 for a feed, or, if the URL points to an ordinary website rather than to
1353 a feed, whether there is a feed for that website. All well and good, but
1354 if FeedWordPress failed to find a feed, for whatever reason, it would
1355 typically return nothing more than a nasty little note to the effect of
1356 "no feed found," without any explanation of what went wrong.
1357 FeedWordPress now keeps track of error conditions from the HTTP
1358 requests that it uses in the course of looking for the feed, and so may
1359 be able to give you a bit more information about the nature of the
1360 problem if something goes wrong.
1361
1362
1363 = 2008.1105 =
1364
1365 * INTERFACE RESTRUCTURING AND SYNDICATION --> AUTHORS PAGE: As a first
1366 step towards modularizing and better organizing the user interface, a
1367 new "Authors" subpage has been created under the Syndication menu, which
1368 controls settings for syndicated authors, both at the global default
1369 level and at level of individual syndicated feeds.
1370
1371 * BUG RELATED TO THE ATTRIBUTION OF POSTS TO THE WRONG AUTHOR FIXED: Some
1372 users encountered an issue in which posts by different authors on
1373 different blogs -- especially blogs generated by Blogger -- were
1374 mistakenly attributed to a single author. The problem was caused by the
1375 way in which FeedWordPress matches syndicated authors to user accounts
1376 in the WordPress database: normally, if two feeds each list an author
1377 with the same e-mail address, they are counted as being the same person.
1378 Normally this works well, but it creates an issue in cases where
1379 blogging software assigns a single anonymous e-mail address to users who
1380 do not want their real e-mail address published. This is, for example,
1381 what Blogger does (by giving all users a default e-mail address of
1382 <noreply@blogger.com> if they don't want their own e-mail address
1383 listed). FeedWordPress now allows the user to correct for this problem
1384 with a couple of new settings under **Syndication --> Authors**, which
1385 allow users to turn off e-mail based author matching for particular
1386 addresses, or, if desired, to turn it off entirely. By default, e-mail
1387 based author matching is still turned on, but disabled for a list of
1388 known generic e-mail addresses. Right now, the "list" consists entirely
1389 of <noreply@blogger.com>; if you know other addresses that should be
1390 added, please [contact me](http://radgeek.com/contact) to let me know.
1391
1392 Please note that if you have already encountered this issue on your
1393 blog, upgrading FeedWordPress will prevent it from re-occurring in the
1394 future, but you still need to do two other things to fix the existing
1395 problem on your blog.
1396
1397 First, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to
1398 change the existing author mapping rules to re-map a a syndicated
1399 author's name to the proper target account. Go to **Syndication -->
1400 Authors**, select the feed you want to change from the drop-down list,
1401 and then change the settings under the "Syndicated Authors" section.
1402 (You will probably need to select "will be assigned to a new user..." to
1403 create a new user account with the appropriate name.)
1404
1405 Second, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to
1406 re-assign already-syndicated posts that were mis-attributed to the
1407 correct author. You can do that from **Syndication --> Authors** by
1408 using the author re-assignment feature, described below.
1409
1410 * AUTHOR RE-ASSIGNMENT FOR A PARTICULAR FEED: The author settings page
1411 for each syndicated feed, under **Syndication --> Authors**, now
1412 includes an section titled "Fixing mis-matched authors," which provides
1413 an interface for re-assigning or deleting all posts attributed to a
1414 particular author on a particular feed.
1415
1416 * SUPPORT FOR `<atom:source>` ELEMENT IN SYNDICATED FEEDS: Some feeds
1417 (for example, those produced by FeedWordPress) aggregate content from
1418 several different sources, and include information about the original
1419 source of the post in an `<atom:source>` element. A new setting under
1420 **Syndication --> Options** allows you to control what FeedWordPress
1421 will report as the source of posts syndicated from aggregator feeds in
1422 your templates and feeds: you can have FeedWordPress report that the
1423 source of a post is the aggregator feed itself, or you can have it
1424 report that the source of a post is the original source that the
1425 aggregator originally syndicated the post from.
1426
1427 By default, FeedWordPress will report the aggregator, not the original
1428 source, as the source of a syndicated item.
1429
1430 * LOAD BALANCING AND TIME LIMITING FEATURES FOR UPDATES: Some users have
1431 encountered issues due to running up against PHP execution time limits
1432 during the process of updating large syndicated feeds, or a very large
1433 set of syndicated feeds. FeedWordPress now has a feature that allows you
1434 to limit the total amount of time spent updating a feed, through the
1435 "Time limit on updates" setting under **Syndication --> Options**. By
1436 turning on this setting and adjusting the time limit to a low enough
1437 figure to avoid your PHP installation's time-out setting. (PHP execution
1438 time limits are usually in the vicinity of 30 seconds, so an update
1439 time limit of 25 seconds or so should provide plenty of time for updates
1440 while allowing a cushion of time for other, non-update-related functions
1441 to do their work.)
1442
1443 If feed updates are interrupted by the time limit, FeedWordPress uses
1444 some simple load balancing features to make sure that updates to other
1445 feeds will not be blocked by the time-hogging feed, and will also make
1446 sure that when the interrupted update is resumed, FeedWordPress will
1447 skip ahead to resume processing items at the point at which it was
1448 interrupted last time, so that posts further down in the feed will
1449 eventually get processed, and not get blocked by the amount of time it
1450 takes to process the items higher up in the feed.
1451
1452 * `guid` INDEX CREATION BUTTON: FeedWordPress frequently issues queries on
1453 the `guid` column of the WordPress posts database (since it uses post
1454 guid URIs to keep track of which posts it has syndicated). In very large
1455 FeedWordPress installations, you can often significantly improve
1456 performance by creating a database index on the `guid` column, but
1457 normally you would need to poke around with MySQL or a tool like
1458 phpMyAdmin to do this. FeedWordPress can now save you the trouble: to
1459 create an index on the `guid` column, just go to
1460 **Syndication --> Options**, and mash the button at the bottom of the
1461 "Back End" section.
1462
1463 = 2008.1101 =
1464
1465 * INTERFACE BUG THAT PREVENTED ADDING NEW SITES FIXED: The UI reforms in
1466 FWP 2008.1030 unintentionally introduced a bug that prevents clean
1467 installations of FeedWordPress from providing an input box for adding
1468 new feeds to the list of syndicated feeds. This bug has been fixed.
1469
1470 = 2008.1030 =
1471
1472 * WORDPRESS 2.6 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with
1473 WordPress 2.6, and should work more or less seamlessly with the new post
1474 revision system. A bug which caused multiple new revisions to be created
1475 for posts on certain feeds, regardless of whether or not the item had
1476 been updated, has been fixed.
1477
1478 * INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: The user interface has been substantially
1479 restyled to fit in better with the visual style of WordPress 2.5 and
1480 2.6.
1481
1482 * YOUTUBE BUG FIXED: POSTS SYNDICATED THROUGH AN AUTOMATIC UPDATE ARE NO
1483 LONGER STRIPPED OF `<OBJECT>` TAGS AND CERTAIN OTHER HTML ELEMENTS: Due
1484 to the way that some versions of WordPress process posts that are
1485 inserted into the database when no user is logged in, many users
1486 experienced an issue where YouTube videos and other content using the
1487 HTML `<object>` tag would be stripped out of posts that were syndicated
1488 during an automatic update. (Posts that were syndicated through manual
1489 updates from within the WordPress Dashboard were not affected, because
1490 the issue does not arise when an update is executed under a logged-in
1491 administrator's credentials.) This bug has now been fixed; YouTube
1492 videos and other content using `<object>` tags should now appear
1493 properly in syndicated posts, regardless of the way in which the post
1494 was syndicated.
1495
1496 * AJAX BUGS FIXED: Bugs which blocked the normal operation of WordPress
1497 2.5's AJAX interface elements when FeedWordPress was activated have been
1498 fixed.
1499
1500 * TAG SUPPORT: A couple of features have been introduced to take advantage
1501 of the tagging features in WordPress 2.3.x, 2.5.x, and 2.6.x. Now, when
1502 unfamiliar categories are encountered for posts on a feed, you can
1503 choose for FeedWordPress (1) to drop the category; (2) to drop the
1504 category and to filter out any post that does not match at least one
1505 familiar category; (3) to create a new category with that name, or,
1506 now, you can also have FeedWordPress (4) create a new *tag* with that
1507 name. This option can be set site-wide under Syndication --> Options,
1508 or it can be set on a feed-by-feed basis in a feed's Edit screen.
1509
1510 In addition, you can now set particular tags to apply to all incoming
1511 syndicated posts, under Syndication --> Options, or you can set tags
1512 to apply to all incoming syndicated posts from a particular feed in that
1513 feed's Edit screen.
1514
1515 * FORMATTING FILTERS: There is a new option available under Syndication ->
1516 Options which allows users to choose whether or not to expose syndicated
1517 posts to being altered by formatting filters. By default, FeedWordPress
1518 has always protected syndicated posts (which are already in display-ready
1519 HTML when they are syndicated) from being reformatted by formatting
1520 filters. However, this approach means that certain plugins which depend
1521 on formatting filters (for example, to add "Share This" bars or relevant
1522 links to the end of a post) are blocked from working on any syndicated
1523 posts. If you want to use one of these plugins together with
1524 FeedWordPress, you can now do so by changing the "Formatting Filters"
1525 setting from "Protect" to "Expose."
1526
1527 * `<atom:source>` ELEMENTS NOW INCLUDED IN ATOM FEED: Atom 1.0 provides
1528 a standard method for aggregators to indicate information about the original source of
1529 a syndicated post, using the `<atom:source>` element. FeedWordPress now
1530 introduces standard `<atom:source>` elements including the title, homepage, and
1531 feed URI of the source from which a syndicated post was syndicated. Cf.
1532 <http://www.atomenabled.org/developers/syndication/atom-format-spec.php#element.source>
1533
1534 * MODULARIZATION OF CODE: The code for different elements of FeedWordPress
1535 has been broken out into several modules for easier inspection,
1536 documentation, and maintenance of the code.
1537
1538 * VERSIONING SCHEME CHANGED: FeedWordPress's feature set has proven stable
1539 enough that it can now be removed from beta status; a good thing, since
1540 I was very quickly running out of version numbers to use. New releases
1541 of FeedWordPress will have version numbers based on the date of their
1542 release.
1543
1544 = 0.993 =
1545
1546 * WORDPRESS 2.5.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible
1547 with WordPress 2.5.1.
1548
1549 * WORDPRESS 2.5 INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: FeedWordPress's Dashboard
1550 interface has undergone several cosmetic changes that should help it
1551 integrate better with the WordPress Dashboard interface in WordPress
1552 version 2.5.x.
1553
1554 * SYNDICATED POSTS CAN BE MARKED AS "PENDING REVIEW": WordPress 2.3 users
1555 can now take advantage of WordPress's new "Pending Review" features for
1556 incoming syndicated posts. Posts marked as "Pending Review" are not
1557 published immediately, but are marked as ready to be reviewed by an
1558 Administrator or Editor, who can then choose to publish the post or
1559 hold it back. If you want to review syndicated posts from a particular
1560 feed, or from all feeds, before they are posted, then use
1561 Syndication --> Syndicated Sites --> Edit or Syndication --> Options to
1562 change the settings for handling new posts.
1563
1564 * AWARE OF NEW URI FOR del.icio.us FEEDS: Previous releases of
1565 FeedWordPress already automatically split del.icio.us tags up
1566 appropriately appropriately when generating categories. (del.icio.us
1567 feeds smoosh all the tags into a single `<dc:subject>` element,
1568 separated by spaces; FeedWordPress un-smooshes them into multiple
1569 categories by separating them at whitespace.) Unfortunately, del.icio.us
1570 recently broke the existing behavior by changing host names for their
1571 feeds from del.icio.us to feeds.delicious.com. Version 0.993 accounts
1572 for the new host name and un-breaks the tag splitting.
1573
1574 = 0.992 =
1575
1576 * AUTHOR RE-MAPPING: FeedWordPress now offers considerable control over
1577 how author names on a feed are translated into usernames within the
1578 WordPress database. When a post by an unrecognized author comes in,
1579 Administrators can now specify any username as the default username to
1580 assign the post to by setting the option in Syndication --> Options
1581 (formerly FeedWordPress only allowed you to assign such posts to user
1582 #1, the site administrator). Administrators can also create re-mapping
1583 rules for particular feeds (under Syndication --> Syndicated Sites -->
1584 Edit), so that (for example) any posts attributed to "Administrator"
1585 on the feed <http://praxeology.net/blog/feed/> will be assigned to
1586 a user named "Roderick T. Long," rather than a user named
1587 "Administrator." These settings also allow administrators to filter out
1588 posts by particular users, and to control what will happen when
1589 FeedWordPress encounters a post by an unrecognized user on that
1590 particular feed.
1591
1592 * BUG RELATED TO URIS CONTAINING AMPERSAND CHARACTERS FIXED: A bug in
1593 WordPress 2.x's handling of URIs in Blogroll links created problems for
1594 updating any feeds whose URIs included an ampersand character, such as
1595 Google News RSS feeds and other feeds that have multiple parameters
1596 passed through HTTP GET. If you experienced this bug, the most likely
1597 effect was that FeedWordPress simply would not import new posts from a
1598 feed when instructred to do so, returning a "0 new posts" response. In
1599 other cases, it might lead to unpredictable results from feed updates,
1600 such as importing posts which were not contained in the feed being
1601 syndicated, but which did appear elsewhere on the same website. This bug
1602 has, hopefully, been resolved, by correcting for the bug in WordPress.
1603
1604 = 0.991 =
1605
1606 * WORDPRESS MU COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with
1607 recent releases of WordPress MU. Once FeedWordPress is made available
1608 as a plugin, each individual blog can choose to activate FeedWordPress
1609 and syndicate content from its own set of contributors.
1610
1611 * DISPLAY OF MAGPIE WARNINGS: A number of MagpieRSS warnings or error
1612 messages that were displayed when performing an automatic update are
1613 no longer displayed, unless debugging parameters have been explicitly
1614 enabled.
1615
1616 * BUG RELATED TO INTERNATIONAL CHARACTERS IN AUTHOR NAMES FIXED: Due to a
1617 subtle incompatability between the way that FeedWordPress generated new
1618 user information, and the way that WordPress 2.0 and later added new
1619 authors to the database, FeedWordPress might end up creating duplicate
1620 authors, or throwing a critical error message, when it encountered
1621 authors whose names included international characters. This
1622 incompatability has now been fixed; hopefully, authors with
1623 international characters in their names should now be handled properly.
1624
1625 * `<media:content>` BUG IN MAGPIERSS FIXED: A bug in MagpieRSS's handling
1626 of namespaced elements has been fixed. Among other things, this bug
1627 caused items containing a Yahoo MediaRSS `<media:content>` element (such
1628 as many of the feeds produced by wordpress.com) to be represented
1629 incorrectly, with only a capital "A" where the content of the post
1630 should have been. Feeds containing `<media:content>` elements should now
1631 be syndicated correctly.
1632
1633 * update_feedwordpress PARAMETER: You can now use an HTTP GET parameter
1634 (`update_feedwordpress=1`) to request that FeedWordPress poll its feeds
1635 for updates. When used together with a crontab or other means of
1636 scheduling tasks, this means that you can keep your blog automatically
1637 updated on a regular schedule, even if you do not choose to use the
1638 cron-less automatic updates option.
1639
1640 * Some minor interface-related bugs were also fixed.
1641
1642
1643 = 0.99 =
1644
1645 Version 0.99 adds several significant new features, fixes some bugs, and
1646 provides compatability with WordPress 2.2.x and 2.3.x.
1647
1648 * WORDPRESS 2.2 AND 2.3 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be
1649 compatible with WordPress version 2.2 and the upcoming WordPress
1650 version 2.3. In particular, it has been tested extensively against
1651 WordPress 2.2.3 and WordPress 2.3 Release Candidate 1.
1652
1653 * AUTOMATIC UPDATES WITHOUT CRON: FeedWordPress now allows you to
1654 automatically schedule checks for new posts without using external task
1655 scheduling tools such as cron. In order to enable automatic updates, go
1656 to **Syndication --> Options** and set "Check for new posts" to
1657 "automatically." For details, see "Automatic Feed Updates" in
1658 README.text.
1659
1660 An important side-effect of the changes to the update system is that if
1661 you were previously using the cron job and the `update-feeds.php` script
1662 to schedule updates, you need to change your cron set-up. The old
1663 `update-feeds.php` script no longer exists. Instead, if you wish to use
1664 a cron job to guarantee updates on a particular schedule, you should
1665 have the cron job fetch the front page of your blog (for example, by
1666 using `curl http://www.zyx.com/blog/ > /dev/null`) instead of activating
1667 the `update-feeds.php` script. If automatic updates have been enabled,
1668 fetching the front page will automatically trigger the update process.
1669
1670 * INTERFACE REORGANIZATION: All FeedWordPress functions are now located
1671 under a top-level "Syndication" menu in the WordPress Dashboard. To
1672 manage the list of syndicated sites, manually check for new posts on
1673 one or more feeds, or syndicate a new site, you should use the main page
1674 under **Syndication**. To change global settings for FeedWordPress,
1675 you should use **Syndication --> Options**.
1676
1677 * FILE STRUCTURE REORGANIZATION: Due to a combination of changing styles
1678 for FeedWordPress plugins and lingering bugs in the FeedWordPress admin
1679 menu code, the code for FeedWordPress is now contained in two different
1680 PHP files, which should be installed together in a subdirectory of your
1681 plugins directory named `feedwordpress`. (See README.text for
1682 installation and upgrade instructions relating to the change.)
1683
1684 * MULTIPLE CATEGORIES SETTING: Some feeds use non-standard methods to
1685 indicate multiple categories within a single category element. (The most
1686 popular site to do this is del.icio.us, which separates tags with a
1687 space.) FeedWordPress now allows you to set an optional setting, for any
1688 feed which does this, indicating the character or characters used to
1689 divide multiple categories, using a Perl-compatible regular expression.
1690 (In the case of del.icio.us feeds, FeedWordPress will automatically use
1691 \s for the pattern without your having to do any further configuration.)
1692 To turn this setting on, simply use the "Edit" link for the feed that
1693 you want to turn it on for.
1694
1695 * REGULAR EXPRESSION BUG FIXED: Eliminated a minor bug in the regular
1696 expressions for e-mail addresses (used in parsing RSS `author`
1697 elements), which could produce unsightly error messages for some users
1698 parsing RSS 2.0 feeds.
1699
1700 * DATE / UPDATE BUG FIXED: A bug in date handling was eliminated that may
1701 have caused problems if any of (1) WordPress, or (2) PHP, or (3) your
1702 web server, or (4) your MySQL server, has been set to use a different
1703 time zone from the one that any of the others is set to use. If
1704 FeedWordPress has not been properly updating updated posts, or has been
1705 updating posts when there shouldn't be any changes for the update, this
1706 release may solve that problem.
1707
1708 * GOOGLE READER BUGS FIXED: A couple of bugs that made it difficult for
1709 FeedWordPress to interact with Google Reader public feeds have been
1710 fixed. Firstly, if you encountered an error message reading "There was a
1711 problem adding the newsfeed. [SQL: ]" when you tried to add the feed,
1712 the cause of this error has been fixed. Secondly, if you succeeded in
1713 getting FeedWordPress to check a Google Reader feed, only to find that
1714 the title of posts had junk squashed on to the end of them, that bug
1715 has been fixed too. To fix this bug, you must install the newest version
1716 of the optional MagpieRSS upgrade.
1717
1718 * FILTER PARAMETERS: Due to an old, old bug in WordPress 1.5.0 (which was
1719 what was available back when I first wrote the filter interface),
1720 FeedWordPress has traditionally only passed one parameter to
1721 syndicated_item and syndicated_post filters functions -- an array
1722 containing either the Magpie representation of a syndicated item from
1723 the feed, or the database representation of a post about to be inserted
1724 into the WordPress database. If you needed information about the feed
1725 that the item came from, this was accessible only through a pair of
1726 global variables, $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta.
1727
1728 Since it's been a pretty long time since WordPress 1.5.0 was in
1729 widespread usage, I have gone ahead and added an optional second
1730 parameter to the invocation of the syndicated_item and syndicated_post
1731 filters. If you have written a filter for FeedWordPress that uses either
1732 of these hooks, you can now register that filter to accept 2 parameters.
1733 If you do so, the second parameter will be a SyndicatedPost object,
1734 which, among other things, allows you to access information about the
1735 feed from which an item is syndicated using the $post->feed and the
1736 $post->feedmeta elements (where $post is the name of the second
1737 parameter).
1738
1739 NOTE THAT THE OLD GLOBAL VARIABLES ARE STILL AVAILABLE, for the time
1740 being at least, so existing filters will not break with the upgrade.
1741 They should be considered deprecated, however, and may be eliminated in
1742 the future.
1743
1744 * FILTER CHANGE / BUGFIX: the array that is passed as the first argument
1745 syndicated_post filters no longer is no longer backslash-escaped for
1746 MySQL when filters are called. This was originally a bug, or an
1747 oversight; the contents of the array should only be escaped for the
1748 database *after* they have gone through all filters. IF YOU HAVE WRITTEN
1749 ANY syndicated_post FILTERS THAT PRESUME THE OLD BEHAVIOR OF PASSING IN
1750 STRINGS THAT ARE ALREADY BACKSLASH-ESCAPED, UPDATE YOUR FILTERS
1751 ACCORDINGLY.
1752
1753 * OTHER MINOR BUGFIXES AND INTERNAL CHANGES: The internal architecture of
1754 FeedWordPress has been significantly changed to make the code more
1755 modular and clean; hopefully this should help reduce the number of
1756 compatibility updates that are needed, and make them easier and quicker
1757 when they are needed.
1758
1759 = 0.981 =
1760
1761 Version 0.981 is a narrowly targeted bugfix and compatibility release, whose
1762 main purpose is to resolve a major outstanding problem: the incompatibility
1763 between version 0.98 of WordPress and the recently released WordPress 2.1.
1764
1765 * WORDPRESS 2.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress is now compatible with
1766 WordPress 2.1, as well as retaining its existing support for WordPress
1767 2.0 and 1.5. Incompatibilities that resulted in database warnings, fatal
1768 errors, and which prevented FeedWordPress from syndicating new posts,
1769 have been eliminated.
1770
1771 * RSS-FUNCTIONS.PHP RENAMED TO RSS.PHP: if you use the upgraded MagpieRSS
1772 replacement that's included with FeedWordPress, be sure to note that
1773 there are now *two* files to upload from the `OPTIONAL/wp-includes`
1774 subdirectory in order to carry out the upgrade: rss-functions.php and
1775 rss.php. **It is necessary to upload both files**, due to a change in
1776 the file naming scheme in WordPress 2.1, and it is necessary to do so
1777 whether you are using WordPress 2.1 or not. If you only upload the
1778 `rss-functions.php` file as in previous installations you will not have
1779 a working copy of MagpieRSS; the rss.php file contains the actual code.
1780
1781 * DATE BUG AFFECTING SOME PHP INSTALLATIONS RESOLVED: due to a subtle bug
1782 in parse_w3cdtf(), some installations of PHP encountered problems with
1783 FeedWordPress's attempt to date posts, which would cause some new posts
1784 on Atom feeds to be dated as if they had apppeared in 1969 or 1970
1785 (thus, effectively, never appearing on front page at all). This bug in
1786 the date handling should now be fixed.
1787
1788 * PHP <?=...?> SHORT FORM ELIMINATED: some installations of PHP do not
1789 allow the <?=...?> short form for printing PHP values, which was used
1790 extensively in the FeedWordPress interface code. Since this could cause
1791 fatal errors for users with the wrong installation of PHP, the short
1792 form has been replaced with full PHP echo statements, and is no longer
1793 used in FeedWordPress.
1794
1795 * BETTER USER INTERFACE INTEGRATION WITH WORDPRESS 2.x: Some minor changes
1796 have been made to help the FeedWordPress interface pages blend in better
1797 with the user interface when running under WordPress 2.x.
1798
1799 * GLOBAL CATEGORIES BUG RESOLVED: a bug that prevented some users from
1800 setting one or more categories to apply to syndicated posts from all
1801 feeds (using the checkbox interface under Options --> Syndication) has
1802 been resolved.
1803
1804 = 0.98 =
1805
1806 * WORDPRESS 2.0 COMPATIBILITY: This is a narrowly-targeted release to
1807 solve a major outstanding problem. FeedWordPress is now compatible with
1808 both WordPress 1.5 and WordPress 2.0. Incompatibilities that caused
1809 fatal SQL errors, and a more subtle bug with off-kilter counts of posts
1810 under a given category, have been resolved. FeedWordPress tests for
1811 database schema using the global $wp_db_version variable (if null, then
1812 we presume that we're dealing with WordPress 1.5).
1813
1814 NOTE: I have **not** fully tested FeedWordPress with WordPress 2.0.
1815 Further testing may reveal more bugs. However, you should now be able
1816 to get at least basic FeedWordPress functionality up and running.
1817
1818 * AUTHOR MATCHING: FeedWordPress tests several fields to see if it can
1819 identify the author of the post as a user already in the WordPress user
1820 database. In previous versions, it tested the user login, the nickname,
1821 and tested for "aliases" listed in the Profile (see documentation). FWP
1822 now also matches authors on the basis of e-mail address (*if* an e-mail
1823 address is present). This is particularly helpful for formats such as
1824 RSS 2.0, in which authors are primarily identified by e-mail addresses.
1825
1826 = 0.97 =
1827
1828 * INSTALLATION PROCEDURE: Some of the changes between 0.96 and 0.97
1829 require upgrades to the meta-data stored by FeedWordPress to work
1830 properly. Thus, if you are upgrading from 0.96 or earlier to 0.97, most
1831 FeedWordPress operations (including updates and template functions)
1832 WILL BE DISABLED until you run the upgrade procedure. Fortunately,
1833 running the upgrade procedure is easy: just go to either Options -->
1834 Syndication or Links --> Syndicated in the WordPress Dashboard and press
1835 the button.
1836
1837 * FEED FORMAT SUPPORT: Support has been added for the Atom 1.0 IETF
1838 standard. Several other elements are also newly supported
1839 (dcterms:created, dcterms:issued, dcterms:modified, dc:identifier,
1840 proper support for the RSS 2.0 guid element, the RSS 2.0 author element,
1841 the use of Atom author or Dublin Core dc:creator constructs at the feed
1842 level to identify the author of individual items, etc.)
1843
1844 N.B.: full support of several Atom 1.0 features, such as categories
1845 and enclosures, requires you to install the optional rss-functions.php
1846 upgrade in your wp-includes directory.
1847
1848 * BUG FIX: Running `update-feeds.php` from command line or crontab
1849 returned "I don't syndicate..." errors. It turns out that WordPress
1850 sometimes tramples on the internal PHP superglobals that I depended on
1851 to determine whether or not the script was being invoked from the
1852 command line. This has been fixed (the variables are now checked
1853 *before* WordPress can trample them). Note that `update-feeds.php` has
1854 been thoroughly overhauled anyway; see below for details.
1855
1856 * BUG FIX: Duplicate categories or author names. Fixed two bugs that could
1857 create duplicate author and/or category names when the name contained
1858 either (a) certain international characters (causing a mismatch between
1859 MySQL and PHP's handling of lowercasing text), or (b) characters that
1860 have a special meaning in regular expressions (causing MySQL errors when
1861 looking for the author or category due to regexp syntax errors). These
1862 should now be fixed thanks to careful escaping of names that go into
1863 regular expressions and careful matching of lowercasing functions
1864 (comparing results from PHP only to other results from PHP, and results
1865 from MySQL only to other results from MySQL).
1866
1867 * BUG FIX: Items dated December 31, 1969 should appear less often. The
1868 function for parsing W3C date-time format dates that ships with
1869 MagpieRSS can only correctly parse fully-specified dates with a
1870 fully-specified time, but valid W3C date-time format dates may omit the
1871 time, the day of the month, or even the month. Some feeds in the wild
1872 date their items with coarse-grained dates, so the optional
1873 `rss-functions.php` upgrade now includes a more flexible parse_w3cdtf()
1874 function that will work with both coarse-grained and fully-specified
1875 dates. (If parts of the date or the time are omitted, they are filled in
1876 with values based on the current time, so '2005-09-10' will be dated to
1877 the current time on that day; '2004' will be dated to this day and time
1878 one year ago.
1879
1880 N.B.: This fix is only available in the optional `rss-functions.php`
1881 upgrade.
1882
1883 * BUG FIX: Evil use of HTTP GET has been undone. The WordPress interface
1884 is riddled with inappropriate (non-idempotent) uses of HTTP GET queries
1885 (ordinary links that make the server do something with significant
1886 side-effects, such as deleting a post or a link from the database).
1887 FeedWordPress did some of this too, especially in places where it aped
1888 the WordPress interface (e.g. the "Delete" links in Links -->
1889 Syndicated). That's bad business, though. I've changed the interface so
1890 that all the examples of improper side-effects that I can find now
1891 require an HTTP POST to take effect. I think I got pretty much
1892 everything; if there's anything that I missed, let me know.
1893
1894 Further reading: [Sam Ruby 2005-05-06: This Stuff Matters](http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2005/05/06/This-Stuff-Matters)
1895
1896 * BUG FIX: Categories applied by `cats` setting should no longer prevent
1897 category-based filtering from working. In FeedWordPress, you can (1)
1898 apply certain categories to all syndicated posts, or all posts from
1899 a particular feed; and (2) filter out all posts that don't match one
1900 of the categories that are already in the WordPress database (allowing
1901 for simple category-based filtering; just load up WordPress with the
1902 categories you want to accept, and then tell FeedWordPress not to create
1903 new ones). However, the way that (1) and (2) were implemented meant that
1904 you couldn't effectively use them together; once you applied a known
1905 category to all syndicated posts from a particular feed, it meant that
1906 they'd have at least one familiar category (the category or categories
1907 you were applying), and that would get all posts past the filter no
1908 matter what categories they were originally from.
1909
1910 Well, no longer. You can still apply categories to all syndicated posts
1911 (using either Syndication --> Options, or the feed-level settings under
1912 Links --> Syndicated). But these categories are not applied to the post
1913 until *after* it has already passed by the "familiar categories" filter.
1914 So now, if you want, you can do category filtering and *then* apply as
1915 many categories as you please to all and only posts that pass the filter.
1916
1917 * BUG FIX: Other minor typos and HTML gaffes were fixed along the way.
1918
1919 * PERFORMANCE: get_feed_meta() no longer hits the database for information
1920 on every call; it now caches link data in memory, so FeedWordPress only
1921 goes to the database once for each syndicated link. This may
1922 substantially improve performance if your database server resources
1923 are tight and your templates make a lot of use of custom settings from
1924 get_feed_meta().
1925
1926 * API CHANGE: Link ID numbers, rather than RSS URIs, are now used to
1927 identify the feed from which a post is syndicated when you use template
1928 functions such as get_feed_meta(). The practical upshot of this is you
1929 can switch feeds, or change the feed address for a particular syndicated
1930 site, without breaking your templates for all the posts that were
1931 syndicated from the earlier URI.
1932
1933 * API CHANGE: if you have plugins or templates that make use of the
1934 get_feed_meta() function or the $fwp_feedmeta global, note that the
1935 data formerly located under the `uri` and `name` fields is now located
1936 under the `link/uri` field and the `link/name` field, respectively. Note
1937 also that you can access the link ID number for any given feed under the
1938 global $fwp_feedmeta['link/id'] (in plugins) or
1939 get_feed_meta('link/id') (in a template in post contexts).
1940
1941 * FEATURE: the settings for individual feeds can now be edited using a
1942 humane interface (where formerly you had to tweak key-value pairs in the
1943 Link Notes section). To edit settings for a feed, pick the feed that you
1944 want under Links --> Syndicated and click the Edit link.
1945
1946 * FEATURE: The "Unsubscribe" button (formerly "Delete") in Links -->
1947 Syndicated now offers three options for unsubscribing from a feed: (1)
1948 turning off the subscription without deleting the feed data or affecting
1949 posts that were syndicated from the feed (this works by setting the Link
1950 for the feed as "invisible"); (2) deleting the feed data and all of the
1951 posts that were syndicated from the feed; or (3) deleting the feed data
1952 and *keeping* the posts that were syndicated from the feed
1953 setting the Link to "Invisible" (meaning that it will not be displayed
1954 in lists of the site links on the front page, and it won't be checked
1955 for updates; (2) deleting the Link and all of the posts that were
1956 syndicated from its feed; or (3) deleting the feed data but keeping the
1957 posts that were syndicated (which will henceforward be treated as if
1958 they were local rather than syndicated posts). (Note that (1) is usually
1959 the best option for aggregator sites, unless you want to clean up the
1960 results of an error or a test.)
1961
1962 * FEATURE / BUG FIX: If you have been receiving mysterious "I don't
1963 syndicate...", or "(local) HTTP status code was not 200", or "(local)
1964 transport error - could not open socket", or "parse error - not well
1965 formed" errors, then this update may solve your problems, and if it does
1966 *not* solve them, it will at least make the reasons for the problems
1967 easier to understand. That's because I've overhauled the way that
1968 FeedWordPress goes about updating feeds.
1969
1970 If you use the command-line PHP scripting method to run scheduled
1971 updates, then not much should change for you, except for fewer
1972 mysterious errors. If you have done updates by sending periodic HTTP
1973 requests to <http://your-blog.com/path/wp-content/update-feeds.php>,
1974 then the details have changed somewhat; mostly in such a way as to make
1975 things easier on you. See the README file or online documentation on
1976 Staying Current for the details.
1977
1978 * FEATURE: FeedWordPress now features a more sophisticated system for
1979 timed updates. Instead of polling *every* subscribed feed for updates
1980 *each* time `update-feeds.php` is run, FeedWordPress now keeps track of
1981 the last time it polled each feed, and only polls them again after a
1982 certain period of time has passed. The amount of time is normally set
1983 randomly for each feed, in a period between 30 minutes and 2 hours (so
1984 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
1985 directly by the feed, which brings us to ...
1986
1987 * FEATURE: FeedWordPress now respects the settings in the `ttl` and
1988 Syndication Module RSS elements. Feeds with these elements set will not
1989 be polled any more frequently than they indicate with these feeds unless
1990 the user manually forces FeedWordPress to poll the feed (see Links -->
1991 Syndicated --> Edit settings).
1992
1993 = 0.96 =
1994
1995 * FEATURE: support has been added for enclosures in RSS 2.0 and Atom
1996 0.6+ newsfeeds. WordPress already supports adding enclosures to an
1997 item; FeedWordPress merely gets the information on the enclosure
1998 from the feed it is syndicating and plugs that information directly
1999 into the WordPress database so that (among other things) that post
2000 will have its enclosure listed in your blog's RSS 2 newsfeed.
2001
2002 Note that enclosure support requires using the optional MagpieRSS
2003 upgrade (i.e., replacing your `wp-includes/rss-functions.php` with
2004 `OPTIONAL/wp-includes/rss-functions.php` from the FWP archive)
2005
2006 * FEATURE: for completeness's sake, there is now a feed setting,
2007 `hardcode url`, that allows you to set the URI for the front page
2008 of a contributor's website manually (that is, prevent it from being
2009 automatically updated from the feed channel link on each update). To
2010 set the URI manually, put a line like this in the Link Notes section
2011 of a feed:
2012
2013 hardcode url: yes
2014
2015 You can also instruct FeedWordPress to use hardcoded URIs by default
2016 on all feeds using Options --> Syndication
2017
2018 * FEATURE: by default, when FeedWordPress finds new syndicated posts,
2019 it (1) publishes them immediately, (2) turns comments off, and (3)
2020 turns trackback / pingback pings off. You can now alter all three
2021 default behaviors (e.g., to allow pings on syndicated posts, or to
2022 send newly-syndicated posts to the draft pile for moderation) using
2023 Options --> Syndication
2024
2025
2026 = From 0.91 to 0.95 =
2027
2028 * BUG FIX: Fixed an obscure bug in the handling of categories:
2029 categories with trailing whitespace could cause categories with
2030 duplicate names to be created. This no longer happens. While I was
2031 at it I tightened up the operation of
2032 FeedWordPress::lookup_categories() a bit in general.
2033
2034 * FEATURE DEPRECATED: the feed setting `hardcode categories` is now
2035 deprecated in favor of `unknown categories` (see below), which
2036 allows you to strip off any syndication categories not already in
2037 your database using `unknown categories: default` or `unknown
2038 categories: filter`. If you have `hardcode categories: yes` set on a
2039 feed, this will be treated as `unknown categories: default` (i.e.,
2040 no new categories will be added, but if a post doesn't match any of
2041 the categories it will be added in the default category--usually
2042 "Uncategorized" or "General").
2043
2044 * FEATURE: You can now set global defaults as to whether or not
2045 FeedWordPress will update the Link Name and Link Description
2046 settings for feeds automatically from the feed title and feed
2047 tagline. (By default, it does, as it has in past versions.) Whether
2048 this behavior is turned on or off, you can still override the
2049 default behavior using feed settings of `hardcode name: yes`,
2050 `hardcode name: no`, `hardcode description: yes`, or `hardcode
2051 description: no`.
2052
2053 * FEATURE: Users can now provide one or several "aliases" for an
2054 author, just as they can for a category. For example, to make
2055 FeedWordPress treat posts by "Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger" and "Pope
2056 Benedict XVI" as by the same author, edit the user profile for Pope
2057 Benedict XVI and add a line like this to the "User profile" field:
2058
2059 a.k.a.: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
2060
2061 You can add several aliases, each on a line by itself. You can also
2062 add any other text you like to the Profile without interfering with
2063 the aliases.
2064
2065 * FEATURE: Users can now choose how to handle syndicated posts that
2066 are in unfamiliar categories or by unfamiliar authors (i.e.,
2067 categories or authors whose names are not yet in the WordPress
2068 database). By default, FeedWordPress will (as before) create a new
2069 category (or new author) and use it for the current post and any
2070 future posts. This behavior can be changed, either for all feeds or
2071 for one or another particular feed.
2072
2073 There are now three different options for an unfamiliar author: (1)
2074 FeedWordPress can create a new author account and attribute the
2075 syndicated post to the new account; (2) FeedWordPress can attribute
2076 the post to an author if the author's name is familiar, and to a
2077 default author (currently, this means the Site Administrator
2078 account) if it is not; (3) FeedWordPress can drop posts by
2079 unfamiliar authors and syndicate only posts by authors who are
2080 already in the database.
2081
2082 There are, similarly, two different options for an unfamiliar
2083 category: (1) FeedWordPress can create new categories and place the
2084 syndicated post in them; (2) FeedWordPress can drop the unfamiliar
2085 categories and place syndicated posts only in categories that it is
2086 already familiar with. In addition, FeedWordPress 0.95 lets you
2087 choose whether posts that are in *no* familiar categories should be
2088 syndicated (and placed in the default category for the blog) or
2089 simply dropped.
2090
2091 You can set the default behavior for both authors and categories
2092 using the settings in Options --> Syndication. You can also set
2093 different behavior for specific feeds by adding the `unfamiliar
2094 author` and / or `unfamiliar categories` settings to the Link Notes
2095 section of a feed:
2096
2097 unfamiliar author: (create|default|filter)
2098 unfamiliar categories: (create|default|filter)
2099
2100 A setting of `unfamiliar author: create` will make FeedWordPress
2101 create new authors to match unfamiliar author names *for this feed
2102 alone*. A setting of `unfamiliar author: default` will make it
2103 assign posts from unfamiliar authors to the default user account. A
2104 setting of `unfamiliar author: filter` will cause all posts (from
2105 this feed alone) to be dropped unless they are by an author already
2106 listed in the database. Similiarly, `unfamiliar categories: create`
2107 will make FeedWordPress create new categories to match unfamiliar
2108 category names *for this feed alone*; `unfamiliar categories:
2109 default` will cause it to drop any unfamiliar category names; and
2110 `unfamiliar categories: filter` will cause it to *both* drop any
2111 unfamiliar category names *and* to only syndicate posts that are
2112 placed in one or more familiar categories.
2113
2114 These two new features allow users to do some coarse-grained
2115 filtering without having to write a PHP filter. Specifically, they
2116 offer an easy way for you to filter feeds by category or by author.
2117 Suppose, for example, that you only wanted to syndicate posts that
2118 your contributors place in the "Llamas" category. You could do so by
2119 setting up your installation of WordPress so that the only category
2120 in the database is "Llamas," and then use Options --> Syndication to
2121 set "Unfamiliar categories" to "don't create new categories and
2122 don't syndicate posts unless they match at least one familiar
2123 category". Now, when you update, only posts in the "Llamas" category
2124 will be syndicated by FeedWordPress.
2125
2126 Similarly, if you wanted to filter one particular feed so that only
2127 posts by (for example) the author "Earl J. Llama" were syndicated to
2128 your site, you could do so by creating a user account for Earl J.
2129 Llama, then adding the following line to the settings for the feed
2130 in Link Notes:
2131
2132 unfamiliar author: filter
2133
2134 This will cause any posts from this feed that are not authored by
2135 Earl J. Llama to be discarded, and only the posts by Earl J. Llama
2136 will be syndicated. (If the setting is used on one specific feed, it
2137 will not affect how posts from other feeds are syndicated.)
2138
2139 == License ==
2140
2141 The FeedWordPress plugin is copyright © 2005-2010 by Charles Johnson. It uses
2142 code derived or translated from:
2143
2144 - [wp-rss-aggregate.php][] by [Kellan Elliot-McCrea](kellan@protest.net)
2145 - [SimplePie][] feed parser by Ryan Parman, Geoffrey Sneddon, Ryan McCue, et al.
2146 - [MagpieRSS][] feed parser by [Kellan Elliot-McCrea](kellan@protest.net)
2147 - [Ultra-Liberal Feed Finder][] by [Mark Pilgrim](mark@diveintomark.org)
2148 - [WordPress Blog Tool and Publishing Platform](http://wordpress.org/)
2149
2150 according to the terms of the [GNU General Public License][].
2151
2152 This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
2153 the terms of the [GNU General Public License][] as published by the Free
2154 Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any
2155 later version.
2156
2157 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
2158 WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
2159 PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
2160
2161 [wp-rss-aggregate.php]: http://laughingmeme.org/archives/002203.html
2162 [SimplePie]: http://www.simplepie.org/
2163 [MagpieRSS]: http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/
2164 [Ultra-Liberal Feed Finder]: http://diveintomark.org/projects/feed_finder/
2165 [GNU General Public License]: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
2166
2167