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FeedWordPress / 2020.0118
FeedWordPress v2020.0118
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1 === FeedWordPress ===
2 Contributors: C. Johnson
3 Donate link: http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/donate/
4 Tags: syndication, aggregation, feed, atom, rss
5 Requires at least: 4.5
6 Tested up to: 5.3.2
7 Stable tag: 2020.0118
8 License: GPLv2 or later
9 License URI: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html
10
11 FeedWordPress syndicates content from feeds you choose into your WordPress weblog.
12
13 == Description ==
14
15 * Author: [C. Johnson](http://feedback.radgeek.com/contact)
16 * Project URI: <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/>
17 * License: GPL 2. See License below for copyright jots and tittles.
18
19 FeedWordPress is an Atom/RSS aggregator for WordPress. It syndicates content from feeds that you choose into your WordPress weblog, and then the content it syndicates appears as a series of special posts in your WordPress posts database. If you syndicate several feeds then you can use WordPress's posts database and templating engine as the back-end of an aggregation ("planet") website. It was developed, originally, as a utility/hobby project, because I needed a more flexible replacement for [Planet][] for aggregator sites that I administered.
20
21 [Planet]: http://www.planetplanet.org/
22
23 FeedWordPress is designed with flexibility, ease of use, and ease of configuration in mind. You'll need a working installation of WordPress (version [4.5][] or later), and it helps to have SFTP or FTP access to your web host. The ability to create cron jobs on your web host is helpful but not required.
24
25 [WordPress]: https://wordpress.org/
26 [4.5]: http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_4.5
27
28 == Installation ==
29
30 To use FeedWordPress, you will need:
31
32 * an installed and configured copy of [WordPress](https://wordpress.org/) (version 4.5 or later).
33
34 * the ability to install new plugins on your site using either WordPress's Plugins Repository, SFTP, FTP or shell access to your web host
35
36 = New Installations =
37
38 1. Download the FeedWordPress installation package and extract the files on your computer.
39
40 2. Create a new directory named `feedwordpress` in the `wp-content/plugins` directory of your WordPress installation. Use an FTP or SFTP client to upload the contents of your FeedWordPress archive to the new directory that you just created on your web host.
41
42 3. Log in to the WordPress Dashboard and activate the FeedWordPress plugin.
43
44 4. Once the plugin is activated, a new **Syndication** section should appear in your WordPress admin menu. Click here to add new syndicated feeds, set up configuration options, and determine how FeedWordPress will check for updates. For help, see the [FeedWordPress Quick Start][] page.
45
46 [FeedWordPress Quick Start]: http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/quick-start
47
48 = Upgrades =
49
50 To *upgrade* an existing installation of FeedWordPress to the most recent release:
51
52 1. Download the FeedWordPress installation package and extract the files on your computer.
53
54 2. Upload the new PHP files to `wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress`, overwriting any existing FeedWordPress files that are there.
55
56 3. Log in to your WordPress administrative interface immediately in order to see whether there are any further tasks that you need to perform to complete the upgrade.
57
58 4. Enjoy your newer and hotter installation of FeedWordPress
59
60 == Using and Customizing FeedWordPress ==
61
62 FeedWordPress has many options which can be accessed through the WordPress Dashboard, and a lot of functionality accessible programmatically through WordPress templates or plugins. For further documentation of the ins and outs, see the documentation at the [FeedWordPress project homepage][].
63
64 [FeedWordPress project homepage]: http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/
65
66 == Changelog ==
67
68 = 2017.1020 =
69
70 * ADD BOILERPLATE / CREDITS FEATURE AVAILABLE IN POSTS & LINKS SETTINGS PANEL. I have added a new settings panel to the off-the-shelf features of FeedWordPress, under Syndication > Posts & Links (or under the Posts settings page for any individual feed), which allows you to define boilerplate text that should appear in connection with every syndicated post, or with every post syndicated from a particular feed. So, for example, if you want each syndicated post to include a byline reading "This is a syndicated post, reprinted from (LINK TO ORIGINAL SOURCE WEBSITE).", you could set up this byline from within the FeedWordPress settings interface, by going to the Boilerplate / Credits panel, and adding a line to appear BEFORE the CONTENT of each syndicated post, using the text and shortcode "This is a syndicated post, reprinted from [source]." For those of you who have corresponded with me about this feature before, you may be familiar with it from the long-standing "experimental" add-on, FWP+: Add Attribution; I've decided that it's been enough years, and I've had enough requests, that the Add Attribution feature may as well be included in the main FeedWordPress code.
71
72 Back when FeedWordPress was first created, the assumption was that a well-behaved aggregator would include boilerplate text to indicate the source of syndicated posts, but that the best way to do this was to provide a set of syndication-specific template tags so that the administrator setting up the site could edit their Theme template files with constructs like:
73
74 <?php if (is_syndicated()) : ?>
75 <p class="byline">This post by <?php the_author(); ?> originally
76 appeared at <a href="<?php the_syndication_source_link(); ?>"><?php
77 the_syndication_source(); ?></a>.</p>
78 <?php else : ?>
79 <p class="byline">By <?php the_author(); ?>.</p>
80 <?php endif; ?>
81
82 You can still do this, of course, and for maximum expressive power and flexibility, it is certainly the best way to do it. Template Tags are documented here: <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/templates/> However, (1) it requires writing PHP code, which not everyone is comfortable doing; and (2) it requires altering template files within your Theme, which is not always possible, especially given the increasing role that prepackaged commercial themes have come to play in the WordPress ecosystem. So, now, you can get some basic features for adding boilerplate text and attribution credits even without touching your template files, and without having to add custom add-ons for FeedWordPress. Enjoy!
83
84 * MINOR CODE MODERNIZATION, PHP 7.1 COMPATIBILITY AND BUG FIXES. This project is now 12+ years old (good lord), and there are still some places where code was written at a time when PHP was a very different language from what it is now. Props to @david-robinson-practiceweb for pointing out and sending a pull request to fix some instances where obsolete PHP reference notation (`&$q` on parameters and so on) created a compatibility problem for PHP 7.1. Props to an email correspondent for pointing out a place in SyndicatedPost where excerpts should be generated from post content using encoding-aware mb_substr(), instead of naively running them through substr(). I've begun making some efforts throughout to begin auditing some of the creakiest old code in the project, to update what needs updating and improve documentation throughout.
85
86 = 2017.0913 =
87
88 * PARTIAL FIX FOR 2X DUPLICATE POSTS APPEARING ON DUAL HTTP/HTTPS SITES: Some users reported an issue in which their FeedWordPress sites, which are over both insecure HTTP and over HTTPS, would pick up exactly 2 copies of every post or almost every post from certain feeds, and where the guids for each of the pair of duplicate posts would look exactly alike, except for a difference in the protocol, for example:
89
90 http://www.example.com/?guid=c1cd28da39e8d7babcf6499983aca545
91 https://www.example.com/?guid=c1cd28da39e8d7babcf6499983aca545
92
93 ... where www.example.com is the server that your own copy of FeedWordPress is installed. This release of FeedWordPress normalizes post guid prefixes so as to avoid or limit the scope of this problem.
94
95 * PHP 7 Compatibility: eliminate remaining sources of PHP 7 compatibility-check failures -- remove the use of depreciated mysql_error() function, and make sure all classes make use of __construct() convention for constructors.
96
97 * AVOID "PHP Warning: shell_exec() has been disabled for security reasons in [...]/feedwordpress/feeds-page.php on line 197": FeedWordPress uses the PHP shell_exec() function in a very narrowly limited way for information gathering, trying to find the real path to curl or wget on your system, so that it can give as realistic as possible a recommendation for the sample crontab line displayed in Syndication > Feeds & Updates. Some web hosting environments disable shell_exec for security reasons (since it could in theory be used to do a lot more stuff than the very limited information gathering FWP uses it for); in which case, this part of the code in FeedWordPress could spit out a nasty-looking and potentially worrisome-looking error message. So, now this code is fenced with checks to make sure that shell_exec is available, before FWP attempts to make use of it.
98
99 = 2016.1213 =
100
101 * WORDPRESS BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY FOR VERSIONS [4.5, 4.7]: This change fixes a fatal PHP error (on some web server configurations you'd see the message "Fatal error: require_once(): Failed opening required '[...]/wp-includes/class-wp-feed-cache.php'" on others, you might just see an HTTP 500 Internal Server Error or a blank page) when using FeedWordPress with versions of WordPress before 4.7. A change that I introduced to avoid a code module that had been deprecated in version 4.7 ended up relying on code modules that were only introduced as of version 4.7; so now, instead, FeedWordPress attempts to detect which modules the current version of the WordPress core makes available, and load the right modules depending on your WordPress version.
102
103 In theory, up to this point, FeedWordPress supported any version of WordPress from version 3.0 onward. In practice, version 3.0 was released over 6 years ago, and I can realistically commit only to testing out new releases of FeedWordPress with a few prior versions of WordPress; so I've updated the "Requires at least" field to version 4.5, the first major release issued in 2016. If you've really got to use FeedWordPress with older versions of WordPress, it will probably still work with any moderately modern release of WordPress, but I won't promise to keep it working with releases of WordPress that are more than about a year old.
104
105 = 2016.1211 =
106
107 * WORDPRESS COMPATIBILITY: Tested with new versions of WordPress up to 4.7.
108
109 * PHP WARNINGS UNDER WP 4.7: Eliminated cause of a PHP warning under WP 4.7 "Parameter 1 to FeedWordPressHTTPAuthenticator::set_auth_options expected to be reference" Warnings were due to a change in how http_api_curl hook is sometimes called in WP 4.7; so I changed the signature of the event handling method to avoid the notice. Props to @cogdog, @froomkin, @gwynethllewelyn et al. for flagging the issue and @garymarkfuller for suggesting a preliminary fix to the issue that was fairly similar to the solution I ended up adopting.
110
111 * PHP 7 and PHP Strict Standards compatibility changes: @alexiskulash @daidais and @zoul0813 all sent pull requests through Github to fix some issues from a very old code base that has made its way from PHP 3.x through 5.x to the roll-out of PHP 7. Class methods should now fare better under modern versions of PHP and generate fewer "Deprecated" notices.
112
113 * IMPROVEMENTS TO SCHEDULED AND AUTOMATIC UPDATES: use wp_loaded hook to check for magic URL parameters and to execute updates, to do pageload-based automatic updates, etc. Ensures that anything plugins or themes need to do in init to set up custom post types, taxonomies, etc. will be done before the update_feedwordpress updates are attempted. If you saw posts not getting put into the correct custom post type or custom taxonomies or similar problems when performing scheduled updates, but the problem seemed to go away when you manually performed updates through the wp-admin interface, then you might be able to solve those problems with this update.
114
115 = 2016.0420 =
116
117 * WORDPRESS COMPATIBILITY: Tested with new versions of WordPress up to 4.5.
118
119 * FILTERS AND ADD-ONS: Allow filters and add-ons to filter terms and taxonomy (categories, tags, custom taxonomies, etc.) more thoroughly and more fine-grainedly using syndicated_post_terms_match, syndicated_post_terms_match_{taxonomy}, syndicated_post_terms_unfamiliar, syndicated_post_terms_mapping, syndicated_item_feed_terms, and syndicated_item_preset_terms filters.
120
121 * FILTERS AND ADD-ONS: Globals $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta REMOVED. These global variables, originally introduced to allow filters access to information about the source feed in `syndicated_item` filters were deprecated 6+ years ago. If you have any filters or add-ons which still depend on these global variables, you've been using obsolete techniques and you should see about fixing them to access data about the source feed using the SyndicatedPost::link element instead. For documentation, see the FeedWordPress documentation wiki at <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedpost> and <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedlink>.
122
123 * BUGFIX: Syndication > Diagnostics HTTP diagnostic test widget was broken due to a dumb error on my part. Now fixed.
124
125 * SMALL CODING CHANGES: Lots of small changes to code organization, incorporation of some PHP 5.x coding conventions, etc.
126
127 = 2015.0514 =
128
129 * IMPORTANT SECURITY UPDATE: This version includes two important fixes for potential security vulnerabilities reported to me through support channels.
130
131 The first is a common problem across several plugins due to an ambiguity in the WordPress documentation and a change in the behavior of WordPress's built-in add_query_arg() and remove_query_arg() functions which could, under certain low-probability conditions, allow for potential XSS attack vectors. This fixes issue # 39 reported at <https://github.com/radgeek/feedwordpress/issues/39> Thanks to github.com/quassy
132
133 The second is a security vulnerability fixes a security vulnerability that was reported to me privately (thanks to Adrián M. F.) which, under other low-probability conditions, could allow for SQL insertion attacks by a malicious user with access to login credentials, which would compromise data security.
134
135 It is *IMPORTANT* and worth your while to upgrade FeedWordPress as soon as possible in order to eliminate these vulnerabilities. If you have any questions or if there is something blocking you from making the upgrade which you need my help with, don't hesitate to get in touch.
136
137 * ADMIN UI BUGFIX: "Update Now" button in feeds setting pages should now work once again instead of causing a PHP fatal error. See <https://github.com/radgeek/feedwordpress/issues/46>
138
139 * SEVERAL OTHER SMALL BUG FIXES. See <https://github.com/radgeek/feedwordpress/issues/32> <https://github.com/radgeek/feedwordpress/issues/30> <https://github.com/radgeek/feedwordpress/issues/29> etc.
140
141 = 2014.0805 =
142
143 * FILTERS AND ADD-ONS: A number of new hooks for filters and add-ons to further customize the behavior of FWP have been added.
144
145 * COMPATIBILITY/BUGFIX: Many users saw odd characters, especially "n," appearing in posts in versions of WordPress from 3.6 on, due to a change in when the API expects HTML data for posts to be slashed and when it does not. This has been fixed, so that the junk characters should no longer appear, regardless of your version of WordPress.
146
147 * BUGFIX: A bug preventing FWP from saving categories assigned under Syndication > Categories & Tags has been fixed.
148
149 * BUGFIX: Post-editing related metaboxes should now show up when you edit items of any post type, including custom types, not only normal WordPress posts.
150
151 * BUGFIX: A bug in the admin UI that caused the "Alternative Feeds" / "Find Feeds" box to throw a permissions error has been fixed.
152
153 * BUGFIX: A bug preventing proper mapping of categories and other terms in 2013.0504 has been fixed.
154
155 * BUGFIX: A number of small fixes contributed through Github by Flynsarmy should eliminate PHP warnings for many users on several methods that are called as static methods within FeedWordPress.
156
157 = 2013.0504 =
158
159 * BUGFIX: PHP 5.4 compatibility -- includes some more extensive fixes to compatibility issues with PHP 5.4's handling of global variables
160
161 * DIAGNOSTICS: New diagnostics settings added to help track behavior of terms (categories, post tags, etc.) for syndicated posts.
162
163 = 2012.0504 =
164
165 * MODULE REORGANIZATION: Should ensure that all needed submodules will be properly included regardless of whether you are installing from github, from SVN, or from the WordPress plugins page. If you've been getting fatal errors about required modules not being found, this release should hopefully resolve the issue.
166
167 = 2012.0503 =
168
169 * BUGFIX: Works properly again with WordPress installations that use a MySQL table name prefix other than the default `wp_` prefix.
170
171 * BUGFIX: Includes a couple of significant PHP 5.4 compatibility fixes. Now that PHP 5.4 is more widely deployed, Diagnostics will now also show PHP version and some other potentially useful troubleshooting information.
172
173 * ADMIN UI: Better indicates your options when deleting a syndicated post so as to let you know whether it will be Trashed (and thus not resyndicated) or Erased (and thus potentially resyndicated)
174
175 * ADMIN UI: Adds an AJAXy Test Expression button to allow live testing of sample results from expressions in Custom Post Settings.
176
177 = 2012.1218 =
178
179 * WORDPRESS VISUAL EDITOR FIXED. There was an unlisted change in the 2012.1212 release which had the effect of disabling the WordPress Visual Editor for all posts syndicated by FeedWordPress. Many users reported this as a bug. It was actually a deliberate decision -- a crappy way to try to deal with a crappy situation. (Many users had previously reported a "bug" in which all the paragraph or line breaks seemed to be stripped out of their syndicated posts; the issue turned out to be that the Visual Editor was stripping out `<p>` and `<br/>` tags on the assumption that the resulting post would be sent through standard WordPress formatting filters. But under default settings, posts syndicated by FWP deliberately bypass WordPress formatting filters.) In any case, this version adopts a more flexible compromise. *If* FeedWordPress is set up to bypass WordPress formatting filters (as it is by default), *then* the Visual Editor will be disabled for syndicated posts (since using it would produce incorrect results). If on the other hand FeedWordPress is set up to expose syndicated posts to WordPress formatting filters (as it usually is for those using the Visual Editor to manually edit posts), then the Visual Editor tab will be re-enabled for syndicated posts.
180
181 * BUG FIX: PERMALINKS REWRITTEN FOR CUSTOM POST TYPES AS WELL AS NORMAL
182 WORDPRESS POSTS. If you had WordPress set up to syndicate incoming posts
183 to a custom post type (under Syndication > Posts & Links), and asked
184 FeedWordPress to make "permalinks point to the original site", then
185 previous versions of FeedWordPress would fail to do the rewriting --
186 permalinks would only be rewritten to point to the original source for
187 normal WordPress posts, not for custom post types. In 2012.1218 this bug
188 has been fixed: all post types will now have permalinks rewritten unless
189 you request for permalinks to point to the local copy on your aggregator
190 site.
191
192 * BUG FIX: ELIMINATES "PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function
193 setting() on a non-object...." Some changes to the in-memory caching of
194 information about feed subscriptions could result in a fatal PHP error
195 in cases where you have de-activated one of your subscriptions, but
196 posts from that subscription were still in the archive. This would
197 normally show up through half-completed feeds or half-completed pages
198 that suddenly broke off in the middle, and displayed or logged an error
199 message like: "PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function setting() on a
200 non-object in {...}/wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress/feedwordpress.php
201 on line 615". This bug has been eliminated, so affected feeds and pages
202 should now render correctly, and the error message should no longer
203 appear.
204
205 * BUG FIX: CATEGORY BOXES IN SYNDICATION > CATEGORIES & TAGS. Some minor
206 bugs in the appearance and animation of category checkboxes (for
207 example, the checkbox used to select categories for syndicated posts on
208 the Syndication > Categories & Tags settings page) have been fixed.
209
210 = 2012.1212 =
211
212 * WORDPRESS 3.5 COMPATIBILITY: This release has been tested for compatibility
213 with new releases of WordPress, up to version 3.5, and any documented
214 compatibility issues have been cleared -- in particular, if you were seeing
215 error pages stating that you don't have permission to access the
216 FeedWordPress Syndication page within the WordPress admin interface, then
217 upgrading to this release should fix the problem.
218
219 As always, if you encounter any compatibility problems after upgrading your
220 version of WordPress and your version of FeedWordPress to the most recent
221 versions, please contact me with as detailed a description as possible of
222 the issue you are encountering, the circumstances you're encountering it
223 under, what you expect to see happening, and what is happening instead.
224
225 * PHP 5.4 COMPATIBILITY: This release has been audited to fix potential
226 problems with deprecation notices or fatal errors under recent versions
227 of PHP. In particular, all uses of run-time pass-by-reference have been
228 eliminated from the code; if you were seeing a fatal error reading
229 "Call-time pass-by-reference has been removed ..." then upgrading to
230 this release should fix the problem.
231
232 * CUSTOMIZATION FRAMEWORK: A great deal of work has been done to make the
233 underlying framework more flexible, so that PHP add-ons can be written
234 to adapt FeedWordPress to handle custom XML vocabularies, expiration of
235 posts under specified conditions, and other custom behavior.
236
237 * BUGFIX: MANUALLY EDITED POST SLUGS NOT OVERWRITTEN. Thanks to a report
238 by Chris Fritz, I've identified some code that causes post slugs for the
239 posts generated by FWP to be rewritten with every update, even if the
240 user has manually updated the slug from within the WordPress editing
241 interface. This has been fixed: FWP will continue to generate new slugs
242 for syndicated posts, but when syndicated posts are updated, they will
243 retain the slug that they had at the time of the update; any manual
244 changes to the post slug should be preserved.
245
246 * USER-AGENT STRING: FeedWordPress now sends a distinctive User-Agent
247 string identifying itself, and noting that it is a feed aggregator.
248
249 * MISCELLANEOUS PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS: A number of changes have been
250 made to try to reduce the intensity and expense in terms of both
251 database performance and web server memory consumption.
252
253 * DIAGNOSTICS IMPROVEMENTS: A number of new and improved diagnostics have
254 been added which should aid in understanding and troubleshooting issues
255 that may arise.
256
257 = 2011.1019 =
258
259 * BUGFIX: "THERE ARE NO HTTP TRANSPORTS AVAILABLE" ERROR FIXED: The initial
260 support for HTTP Basic and Digest authentication in version 2011.1018
261 contained a bug that could cause HTTP requests for feeds or for other
262 WordPress resources to break down if you do not have the PHP curl module
263 installed. This bug has been fixed, and these errors should no longer
264 appear.
265
266 * IMPROVED HTTP AUTHENTICATION SUPPORT: In addition, the HTTP Authentication
267 support in FeedWordPress has been extended, to ensure that Basic
268 authentication is available in many web host configurations, and to allow
269 you to add a username and password for a feed immediately when you
270 subscribe to it.
271
272 = 2011.1018 =
273
274 * HTTP BASIC AND DIGEST AUTHENTICATION SUPPORT: FeedWordPress now offers
275 improved support for syndicating feeds that make use of HTTP Basic or HTTP
276 Digest authentication methods. In order to set up authentication on one of
277 your feeds, just go to its Settings > Feed page, and click on the "Uses
278 Username/Password" link underneath the Feed URL. Enter the username and
279 password for accessing the feed, then select the authentication method. (If
280 you're not sure which method your feed provider uses, try Basic first.)
281 Save Changes, and syndicate away.
282
283 NOTE: HTTP Digest support requires the curl module for PHP. If you are not
284 sure whether this module has been installed, contact your web hosting
285 provider to check.
286
287 * WP 3.3 (BETA) COMPATIBILITY: This version fixes an init-sequence bug that
288 could cause intrusive warning messages or fatal errors in WP 3.3 beta
289 versions.
290
291 * BUGFIX: FIXES LONG DELAYS IN UPDATES SCHEDULES IN LARGE INSTALLATIONS. A
292 performance feature introduced in version 2011.0721 had some flaws in its
293 implementation, which tended to create serious delays (on the order of
294 several hours) in FeedWordPress's attempts to schedule updates for feeds,
295 when users had a very large number of feeds (several dozen or more) in their
296 FeedWordPress installation. This feature has been reconfigured to adjust
297 dynamically to the number of feeds in Syndicated Sources and the frequency
298 with which they are updated. If you've seen a lot of ready-to-update feeds
299 piling up, several hours after they were supposed to get updated, then this
300 upgrade should better ensure that your feeds get updated in a timely fashion.
301
302 * BUGFIX: syndicated_item_guid FILTERS FIXED. Previous versions of
303 FeedWordPress theoretically allowed for filters on the syndicated_item_guid
304 hook, which was intended to filter the globally-unique identifier element
305 (rss:guid or atom:id) -- useful if you need to convince FeedWordPress to use
306 different guids, or to recognize two or more incoming posts as versions of
307 the same post rather than as distinct items. However, while the hook
308 affected the guid stored in the WordPress database, it did not affect the
309 guid used to check whether an incoming feed item had already been syndicated
310 or was a new item -- which greatly limited the practical usefulness of the
311 filter. This bug has been fixed: syndicated_item_guid filters should now
312 properly control not only the final database record, but also the initial
313 uniqueness test applied to posts.
314
315 = 2011.0721 =
316
317 * BUGFIX: SERIOUS BUG CAUSING RARE UNEXPECTED DELETION OF PAGES AND OTHER
318 CONTENT. A bug in the guid-checking code for some rare kinds of guids could
319 cause content in the wp_posts table to seemingly disappear at random after
320 FeedWordPress updates.This most frequently but not exclusively affected
321 static pages. What actually happened is that in these rare cases the
322 existing static page was mistaken for an older version of the new incoming
323 syndicated post, which was then stored as a new revision of the original
324 page. The bug that caused these mistaken identities has been fixed.
325
326 * BUGFIX: UNWANTED AUTOMATIC PAGE-LOAD-BASED UPDATES NO LONGER A NUISANCE.
327 Some users encountered a bug in which FeedWordPress would adopt an automatic
328 page-load-based update method, even if they had requested that it not do
329 so, and that it use a manual or cron job update method instead. The bug
330 causing this has been fixed, and page-load-based updates should no longer
331 trigger unless explicitly turned on.
332
333 * WP 3.2 USER INTERFACE COMPATIBILITY: POST TAGS BOX NOW WORKS AGAIN. The
334 release of WordPress 3.2 caused a breakage in the tags box which prevented
335 you from adding or removing tags under Syndication --> Categories & Tags.
336 (The breakage was the result of an incompatibility introduced by the new
337 release of jQuery.) This breakage has now been fixed, and the tags box
338 should work correctly again.
339
340 * FEED UPDATE SCHEDULING IMPROVEMENTS: UI. The Syndicated Sources table now
341 provides considerably more data to understand update scheduling, when
342 specific scheduling decisions are made because of, e.g., requests from the
343 feed producer.
344
345 * FEED UPDATE SCHEDULING IMPROVEMENTS: ENFORCEABLE "MINIMUM INTERVAL" SETTING
346 TO SPACE OUT UPDATES. Some feeds request specific update schedules, using
347 standard elements such as sy:updateFrequency and rss:ttl. Normally,
348 FeedWordPress respects any scheduling requests that a feed makes -- if it
349 requests a longer gap between polls than what FWP would normally adopt, then
350 FWP slows down to meet the request. If it indicates a shorter gap than what
351 FWP would normally adopt, FWP speeds up and checks that feed for updates
352 more often than it normally would. Now, there should not be any way for user
353 settings to override an explicit slow-down request from the feed producer --
354 if producers indicate a particular update schedule, then polling the feed
355 more frequently than they request is considered abusive behavior. But
356 there's no reason why users should not be able -- if they so desire -- to
357 override speed-up requests, and poll a feed *less* frequently than the
358 indicated update schedule, if the FWP user wants to space update checkins
359 over a longer interval of time. Before, they could not do this: FWP always
360 sped up to meet the indicated update schedule. Now, they can do this, by
361 using the new "Minimum Interval" setting in Syndication --> Feeds &
362 Updates..
363
364 = 2011.0706 =
365
366 * WP 3.2 COMPATIBILITY: ELIMINATES FATAL ERROR "Call to undefined method
367 WP_SimplePie_File::WP_SimplePie_File() in
368 [...]/wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress/feedwordpress.php on line 1841." The
369 latest release of WordPress, version 3.2, has shifted the minimum
370 requirements up to PHP 5.2, and in line with the shift to PHP5 they have
371 rewritten a number of code segments that made use of now-obsolete PHP4
372 idioms. Unfortunately, this caused a fatal error whenever FeedWordPress
373 attempted to make use of the cache, since FWP's caching plugin was written
374 to match the older idiom. FeedWordPress has been updated to follow the new,
375 PHP5 idiom when possible, thus eliminating the fatal error.
376
377 * PERFORMANCE: The handling of queries to determine whether posts had been
378 previously syndicated produced some very slow queries (usually, but not
379 always, involving a scan over the MD5(post_guid) column of the table). The
380 code that prepares MySQL queries for previously-syndicated checks has been
381 revised to eliminate the MD5(post_guid) scan entirely, and to significantly
382 improve performance by eliminating other unnecessary clauses.
383
384 * BUGFIX: NO LONGER DESTROYS STICKY POSTS. Previous versions could destroy
385 (or, more precisely, replace the content of) sticky posts due to some
386 queries mashed together in unexpected ways by WordPress. Version 2011.0706
387 accounts for and eliminates the problem; your sticky posts should be safe
388 once again.
389
390 * BUGFIX: GUIDS CONTAINING MYSQL-ESCAPED CHARACTERS NO LONGER CAUSE DUPLICATE
391 POSTS TO APPEAR. One remaining source of duplicate post issues in 2011.0602
392 was guids that contained characters that needed to be escaped for MySQL,
393 such as single quotes and double quotes. The work-around for handling
394 filtered URIs has now been corrected to ensure that these do not cause
395 duplicate posts.
396
397 = 2011.0602 =
398
399 * WP 3.1.3 COMPAT / BUGFIX: WHITESPACE IN GUIDS NO LONGER PRODUCES DUPLICATE
400 POSTS. The work-around for handling filtered URIs in guid elements has now
401 been extended to handle URIs that were filtered because of leading or
402 trailing whitespace, in addition to URIs that were filtered because of
403 unapproved schemes.
404
405 * WP 3.1.3 COMPAT / BUGFIX: RELATIVE URLS IN GUIDS NO LONGER PRODUCE DUPLICATE
406 POSTS. The work-around for handling filtered URIs in guid elements has now
407 been extended to handle URIs that were altered without being filtered out
408 entirely (most commonly because a scheme was added to a relative URL).
409
410 * BUGFIX: UPDATES TO POST NO LONGER CAUSE DUPLICATE DRAFT VERSION TO APPEAR.
411 Under certain conditions in 2011.0531, an update to an existing post would
412 not be properly applied to the post itself, but rather would appear as a
413 duplicate post with Draft status. This bug has been eliminated, and updates
414 will now be properly inserted as revisions to the existing post.
415
416 = 2011.0531 =
417
418 * WORDPRESS 3.1.3 COMPATIBILITY: DUPLICATE POSTS ISSUE FIXED. Due to
419 internal changes in the way that WordPress handles post guids in the
420 most recent release (3.1.3), many users experienced problems with many
421 duplicate posts appearing in rapid succession. (Specifically, this would
422 happen with any posts using tag: URL guids -- such as all the posts
423 coming from Blogger feeds or feeds from other Google services.) This
424 compatibility release of FeedWordPress eliminates the issue by working
425 around the new restrictions on tag: URLs.
426
427 * NEW AND IMPROVED DIAGNOSTICS: Syndication --> Diagnostics now contains some
428 new diagnostics settings useful for debugging problems with duplicate posts
429 (allowing you to easily view the guid of posts in the WordPress posts
430 database and allowing you to track the SQL used to check for existing
431 versions of a syndicated post).
432
433 = 2011.0512 =
434
435 * DIAGNOSTICS IMPROVEMENTS; "THERE MAY BE A BUG IN FEEDWORDPRESS" CRITICAL
436 ERROR NOTICES ELIMINATED: This version includes some major improvements
437 to the Syndication --> Diagnostics section, which should aid in
438 troubleshooting difficulties with items failing to be imported, posts
439 failing to be properly inserted into the database, or updates failing to
440 be recorded. If you have been encountering critical error / bug notices
441 with a white screen and the message "THERE MAY BE A BUG IN
442 FEEDWORDPRESS," followed by an extraordinarily long dump of mostly
443 incomprehensible diagnostic information, you'll be happy to know that
444 the condition causing these notices has been eliminated. In the few
445 cases where errors may still crop up with database insertions,
446 FeedWordPress will now produce a significantly more manageable and more
447 useful diagnostic message.
448
449 * BUGFIX: NEW POSTS FAILING TO APPEAR IN A CLEANLY-INSTALLED FEEDWORDPRESS
450 SYSTEM. If you encountered a recurring problem with FeedWordPress
451 failing to import new posts, after a clean install of FeedWordPress
452 (i.e., not an upgrade from a previous version), this problem may have
453 been the result of a bug with author-handling which has now been fixed
454 in the 2011.0512 release. (If the problem does *not* go away with the
455 upgrade, this version also includes significant improvements to the
456 Diagnostics system, which will help track down what *is* causing it
457 in your particular case.)
458
459 * PERFORMANCE: New handling of update hashes allows FeedWordPress to avoid
460 a certain kind of infinite loop, caused when two more more different
461 syndicated feeds each carried a version of the same item (for example,
462 because it appeared on two different aggregator feeds that you're
463 syndicating). In previous versions, when this kind of loop cropped up,
464 syndicated posts could pile up an indefinitely large number of revisions
465 -- each revision alternating between the version from each of the two
466 feeds where it appeared -- which would, over time, dramatically inflate
467 the size of the database, and kill the performance of queries on the
468 post table. This issue has been resolved: revisions of the post that
469 have been syndicated once will not be re-syndicated over and over again.
470
471 * AUTHOR LISTS: Lists of authors presented on the Author settings pages
472 should now be easier to scan through, with author names arranged in
473 alphabetical order.
474
475 * FEED ITEM DATE PARSING: More tweaks to make date-time handling more
476 resilient when feeds provide broken or weird values for the timestamps
477 on syndicated items. FWP will now attempt to work around unparseable
478 timezone values.
479
480 * AUTHOR MATCHING: Now attempts to match author names against the WP login
481 name in addition to display_name; when creating user record, also fills
482 in some best-guess values for nickname, firstname and lastname. Also
483 properly picks up Atom 1.0 author/uri data from feed.
484
485 * COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress has been successfully tested for
486 compatibility with recent releases of WordPress, up to version 3.1.2.
487
488 = 2011.0211 =
489
490 * BUGFIX: DUPLICATE POSTS WHEN GUIDS ARE TOO LONG: When feeds included
491 exceptionally long GUIDs, FeedWordPress could occasionally get into
492 a situation where posts with the long GUIDs would be duplicated over
493 and over again with each update (because FWP failed to store the full
494 GUID, due to length constraints in the relevant database tables).
495 Without the full GUID, FWP would not know that the post had already
496 been syndicated once. This bug has been fixed, and should no longer
497 produce duplicate posts.
498
499 * HTTP TIMEOUT SETTING: If you are frequently running into timeout
500 problems with one or more of the feeds you syndicate, FWP now allows you
501 to adjust the timeout for HTTP requests using a global or feed-by-feed
502 setting.
503
504 * HTTP GET PARAMETERS: You can now temporarily or permanently add HTTP
505 GET parameters to a subscription using an interface in Syndication -->
506 Feeds & Updates. This is especially helpful for making quick, short-term
507 changes to a subscription (for example, to pull in all the previous
508 items from a web service, before settling down to pulling in only newly
509 updated items).
510
511 * DIAGNOSTICS SYSTEM: Added several new diagnostics which are useful in
512 troubleshooting, and established a framework for add-on modules to hook
513 in with their own diagnostic messages.
514
515 * UI: Adjusted some internal coding, which should allow for settings
516 pages and add-ons to properly display multiple category pickers on a
517 single settings page.
518
519 * PHP4 COMPATIBILITY TWEAKS: This version makes some tweaks to the handling
520 of object references which should improve compatibility with older
521 versions of PHP. (Although, I should note, web hosts that still force
522 you to run under PHP 4 -- in 2011! -- are *bad web hosts*.)
523
524 * IMPROVED PERFORMANCE: This version eliminates a *major* performance drag
525 that shows up on sites with large numbers of users (due to some poor
526 decisions about where to place a user query, which caused the user table
527 to be scanned frequently when it did not need to be). If you experienced
528 serious problems with CPU load or slow database performance under
529 2010.0905, which kicked in immediately when FWP was loaded and tended
530 to disappear immediately if FWP was de-activated, it is likely that
531 upgrading away from 2010.0905 to the most recent version will resolve
532 your problem.
533
534
535 = 2010.0905 =
536
537 * BUGFIX: CATEGORIES AND TAGS CORRECTLY ASSIGNED IN AUTOMATIC UPDATES.
538 Version 2010.0903 switched over to a new way of assigning categories and
539 tags as part of its support for handling custom taxonomies.
540 Unfortunately, the method that it uses is subjected to some checks of
541 the current user's capabilities, which creates problems for posts that
542 are being inserted into the WordPress database when there *is* no
543 current user logged in (as, for example, when an update is being carried
544 out from a cron job or automatic update). The result was that posts
545 from cron jobs and automatic updates ended up with no Categories and no
546 Tags being assigned. This bug has now been fixed: in 2010.0905, Tags and
547 Categories should be correctly assigned to all posts, regardless of
548 whether they were added from manual updates, cron jobs, or automatic
549 updates.
550
551 = 2010.0903 =
552
553 * WORDPRESS 3 REQUIRED: Please note that this release of FeedWordPress
554 *requires* WordPress 3.0 or later. If you are currently using a 2.x
555 branch of WordPress, you will need to upgrade to WordPress 3 before you
556 can successfully upgrade FeedWordPress.
557
558 * BUGFIX: NO MORE DISAPPEARING "SYNDICATED SOURCES" PANEL; INTERNET
559 EXPLORER UI GLITCH APPARENTLY FIXED: Several users independently
560 reported a problem with FWP 2010.0623 and various versions of IE. A
561 problem with the HTML markup caused IE (but not Firefox or
562 Chrome) to completely hide the Syndicated Sources administration panel
563 (the main list of currently-syndicated sources, and the main location
564 for adding new sources, under the Syndication menu item) when a user
565 added their first syndicated feed. Maddeningly, the glitch seemed to
566 affect some IE users and not others: I was never able to reproduce the
567 problem for myself on my own machines. However, the markup of Syndicated
568 Sources has undergone significant changes and corrections since
569 2010.0623, and two independent sources who had been having this problem
570 confirm that they no longer encounter it with the updated version. For
571 the time being, I am going to declare this bug squashed.
572
573 * BUGFIX: MORE PROTECTION AGAINST FATAL ERRORS FROM PLUGGABLE VERSIONS OF
574 SimplePie: FeedWordPress now takes some precautions that should help to
575 better avoid conflicts for users who have installed pluggable versions
576 of SimplePie for another plugin or theme. (You may not know that you have
577 done this; but if you've been encountering fatal errors indicating that
578 you cannot redeclare class SimplePie, or something along those lines,
579 there is now a better chance that those fatal errors will be eliminated.
580
581 * PERFORMANCE: SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCED MEMORY CONSUMPTION FOR LARGE UPDATES:
582 FeedWordPress is still a memory-hungry little module, especially when
583 you are dealing with very large feeds. However, users should notice a
584 significant reduction in memory overloads, especially if they update a
585 large number of feeds at once.
586
587 * USER INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: Nothing is radically different, but there's
588 been a fair amount of extra spit and polish added, including a convenient
589 new Dashboard widget that may save you a trip to the Syndication menu,
590 a lot of effort to make the relationship between global and feed-by-feed
591 settings more obvious to the user and more easily controllable, to make
592 navigation between settings pages easier, to sand off a few rough edges,
593 and to make other improvements on the margins. I hope you'll like how
594 it looks.
595
596 * ADDING MULTIPLE FEEDS: FeedWordPress now provides a convenient mode for
597 adding multiple feeds at once, using either a copy-and-pasted list, or
598 else an OPML file. Go to Syndication --> Syndicated Sources and check
599 out the two new buttons underneath the New Source input box. When you
600 have to add a number of feeds at once, this can save you considerable
601 time and trouble.
602
603 * IMPROVED HANDLING OF AUTHORS WITH DUPLICATE E-MAIL ADDRESS AND AUTHORS
604 WITH NAMES WRITTEN IN FOREIGN SCRIPTS: WordPress 3 is increasingly picky
605 about what it will accept for new author accounts, and some of the
606 conditions it imposes can cause error conditions that prevent posts from
607 being properly syndicated, or properly attributed, if authors happen to
608 have identical e-mail addresses, or if users are given usernames that are
609 written in non-Western scripts. FeedWordPress now handles these much
610 better, and systematically works to avoid clashes between syndicated
611 authors' account names or in their e-mail addresses, which should result
612 in significantly better results in mapping author names to WordPress
613 user accounts.
614
615 * MAPPING CATEGORIES ON SYNDICATED POSTS TO TAGS NOW BETTER SUPPORTED:
616 In previous versions, the only way for the Categories provided by a
617 syndicated feed to be mapped into Post Tags was to instruct FWP to
618 create new tags, rather than new categories, for unfamiliar categories
619 from the feed. This works fine if you want tags to be the default; but
620 if you want only a *specific* set of tags, there was no way to get them
621 without getting most or all other categories imported as tags. You can
622 now do this by creating a tag (under Posts ==> Post Tags) before
623 importing the post; when the syndicated category matches a pre-existing
624 tag, the incoming post will be tagged with that tag, without creating
625 a local Post Category.
626
627 * REL-TAG MICROFORMAT SUPPORT FOR INLINE TAGS: Syndicated posts that
628 contain inline tags, marked up using the Rel-Tag microformat
629 <http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag>, are now tagged with the tags
630 provided by Rel-Tag format links.
631
632 * MUCH GREATER CONTROL OVER CATEGORY AND TAG MAPPING: This is partly the
633 result of building in support for a potentially endless set of custom
634 taxonomies (see below), but in general there has been a great deal of
635 effort towards giving you more control over how categories and tags
636 provided by the feed are mapped into terms on the local blog. In
637 particular, you can now force FeedWordPress to create only categories
638 from categories and tags provided by the feed; or to create only tags;
639 or to search both categories and tags for a match; or you can simply
640 force it to drop all of the categories provided by the feed and use
641 only categories or tags that you explicitly provide. In addition, you
642 can now also choose whether to override global categories settings with
643 a local, feed-specific setting; or whether to *add together* *both* the
644 global categories and the local feed-specific categories -- depending
645 on whatever your use-case may demand.
646
647 * CUSTOM POST TYPES AND TAXONOMY SUPPORTS: This is mainly for the
648 super-geeky, but if you use other plugins or themes that make
649 significant use of WordPress's support for custom post types and custom
650 taxonomies, you may be pleased to find that FeedWordPress now allows you
651 to feed incoming posts into any custom feed type that you wish, and to
652 map categories and tags from the feed to custom taxonomies as well as
653 to the standard Category and Tag taxonomies.
654
655 * STORING NAMESPACED CUSTOM FEED ELEMENTS IN POST CUSTOM FIELDS: If you
656 would like to use FeedWordPress's support for storing custom meta-data
657 from feed elements in the custom fields for a post (for example, to
658 store geolocation data or iTunes media meta-data), you'll find that it's
659 now much easier for you to access these namespaced elements. You always
660 could access them, but in previous versions you might have to write
661 something ugly like $(/{http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#}lat)
662 just to get at the value of a `<geo:lat>` tag. Now, as long as you use
663 the same mnemonic codes that the feed producer used, you should always
664 be able to write a nice, simple expression like $(/geo:lat) to get the
665 value of a <geo:lat> tag.
666
667 * CUSTOM DIRECTORY STRUCTURE SUPPORT: if you poke at it enough, WordPress
668 is relatively flexible about where it should store admin interface code,
669 uploaded content, plugins, and a number of other things that occupy an
670 important place in the WordPress directory structure. Previous versions
671 of FeedWordPress encountered serious errors or broke entirely when used
672 with directory structures other than the default. This should now be
673 fixed: FWP now supports custom directory structures wherever WordPress
674 allows them to be customized, rather than depending on the default
675 locations. Enjoy your freedom!
676
677 * MANY NEW FILTERS AND API UTILITY FUNCTIONS FOR ADD-ON PROGRAMMERS: There
678 have been too many improvements to list them all in this ChangeLog, but
679 it means that much more power and ease for folks who are customizing
680 FeedWordPress through PHP filters or add-on modules. Fuller
681 documentation will be put up at the Wiki at feedwordpress.radgeek.org
682 soon.
683
684 = 2010.0623 =
685
686 * WORDPRESS 3.0 COMPATIBILITY / AUTHOR MAPPING INTERFACE ISSUES: I
687 resolved a couple of outstanding issues with the author mapping
688 interface (Syndication --> Authors), which were preventing new users
689 from being created correctly and author mapping rules from being set up
690 correctly. These partly had to do with new restrictions on user account
691 creation introduced in WordPress 3.0; anyway, they should now be fixed.
692
693 * MORE EFFICIENT SYNDICATED URL LOOKUPS: Several users noticed that the
694 bug fix introduced in 2010.0528 for compatibility with post-listing
695 plugins caused a lot more queries to the database in order to look up
696 numerical post IDs from the URL provided to the filter. This shouldn't
697 cause any major problems, but it is not as efficient as it could be; the
698 code now takes advantage of a more efficient way of doing things,
699 which usually will not require any additional database queries.
700
701 * SIMPLEPIE FEED UPDATE ISSUES: If you have been having significant
702 problems with getting feeds to update correctly, this may be the result
703 of some bugs in the implementation of SimplePie caching that ships with
704 WordPress (as of version 3.0). (You would most commonly experience this
705 error if you continually saw errors such as "No feed found at <...>" in
706 your updates.) Fortunately, SimplePie allows for a great deal of
707 extensibility and this allows me to work around the problem; these
708 error conditions should now be mostly eliminated when the underlying
709 feed is valid.
710
711 * UI: SHOW INACTIVE SOURCES: When you use the default unsubscribe option
712 -- which turns off the subscription to a feed while preserving the posts
713 from it and the syndication-related meta-data for the feed -- the
714 unsubscribed feed can now easily be viewed in a special "Inactive"
715 section of the Syndicated Sources page. (As a side benefit, if you've
716 accidentally, or only temporarily, turned off the subscription to a
717 feed, it is now much easier to restore the feed to being active, or to
718 delete it permanently, if you prefer.
719
720 * UI: FEED FINDER / SWITCH FEED INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: changes to styling
721 and options for the feed finder / switch feed, which should now make it
722 easier, in some cases, to find alternative feeds, and make interface
723 options more clearly visible.
724
725 * FILTERS: `syndicated_item_published` and `syndicated_item_updated` NOW
726 PROPERLY AFFECT THE DATING OF POSTS. These filters used to affect some
727 date-related settings, but not others -- and, most importantly, not the
728 final date that is set for a post's publication or last-modified date
729 in the WordPress database. Now, they do affect that, as they should.
730 (Filters should receive, and return, a long integer, representing a Unix
731 epoch relative timestamp.)
732
733 * MAGIC URL TO CLEAR THE CACHE: Suppose that you need to clear the feed
734 cache, for whatever reason; suppose, even, that you need to clear it on
735 a regular basis. One way you might do this is by logging into the
736 FeedWordPress administrative interface and going to Syndication -->
737 Performance. Another way you might do it, now, is to simply send an
738 HTTP request to a magic URL provided by FeedWordPress: if your blog is
739 at example.com, the URL would be <http://example.com/?clear_cache=1>
740
741 = 2010.0602 =
742
743 * CATEGORY BOX INTERFACE ELEMENT FIXED FOR WP 3.0: Stylesheet changes
744 between WordPress 2.9.x and the WordPress 3.0 RC caused the Categories
745 box under **Syndication --> Categories & Tags** to malfunction. This
746 has been fixed.
747
748 * LINK CATEGORY SELECTION BOX IN SYNDICATION ==> FEEDS FIXED FOR WP 2.8
749 AND 2.9: A WP 3.0 compatibility change introduced in 2010.0531
750 inadvertently broke the Syndicated Link Category selector under
751 Syndication --> Feeds & Updates in WP 2.8 and WP 2.9, causing the post
752 categories to be displayed in the selector rather than the link
753 categories. This should now be fixed so that the selector will work
754 correctly under both the current versions of WordPress and the 3.0 RC.
755
756 * MORE PERMISSIVE HANDLING OF FEEDS WITH BAD CONTENT-TYPE HEADERS: One of
757 the small advantages that MagpieRSS had over SimplePie is that it was
758 more tolerant about parsing well-formed feeds that the remote web server
759 happened to deliver with weird or incorrect HTTP Content-type headers.
760 In feeds affected by this problem, the new SimplePie parser would simply
761 fail to find a feed, due to its being led astray by the contents of the
762 Content-type header. This version includes an extension to SimplePie's
763 content-type sniffer that offers more permissive handling of the HTTP
764 headers.
765
766 * MORE FULL-TEXT "EXCERPTS" NOW PROPERLY SHORTENED. Version 2010.0528
767 introduced code to control for cases in which elements intended for
768 item summaries are (ill-advisedly) used to carry the full text of posts;
769 past versions of FeedWordPress would simply include the full text of the
770 post in the excerpt field, but newer versions now attempt to detect
771 this condition when it arises and to head it off, by blanking out the
772 excerpt field and filling it with an automatically generated short,
773 plain text excerpt from the full content. This release broadens the
774 test conditions that indicate when an excerpt field is treated as
775 identical to the full text of the post, and should therefore improve
776 the handling of some feeds (such as Google Reader feeds) where the full
777 text of each post was still appearing in the excerpt field.
778
779 * FILTERS: `syndicated_item_published` AND `syndicated_item_updated`
780 FILTERS NOW ALLOW FILTER AUTHORS TO CHANGE POST TIMESTAMPS. You can now
781 use the `syndicated_item_published` and `syndicated_item_updated` filter
782 hooks to write filters or add-ons which directly change the post date
783 and most-recently-updated timestamps on incoming syndicated posts. Props
784 to niska for pointing out where the filters needed to be applied in
785 order to change WordPress's internal timestamps for incoming posts.
786
787 = 2010.0531 =
788
789 * PERMALINK / CUSTOM FIELDS PROBLEM RESOLVED: An issue in 2010.0528 caused
790 some posts to be imported without the proper syndication-related
791 meta-data being attached (thus causing permalinks to point back to the
792 aggregator website rather than to the source website, among other
793 problems). This problem has been resolved (and a fix has been applied
794 which will resolve the problem for any posts affected by this problem,
795 if the original post is recent enough to still be available on the feed).
796
797 * UI: The "Back End" section has been split into two separate sections --
798 "Performance" (dealing with caching, database index, and other
799 performance tweaks), and "Diagnostics" (dealing with debug mode,
800 update logging, and a number of new diagnostic tests which I will be
801 rolling out over the next few releases).
802
803 * Several minor interface bug fixes and PHP warning notices eliminated.
804
805 = 2010.0528 =
806
807 #### Compatibility ####
808
809 * SIMPLEPIE IS NOW USED TO PARSE FEEDS; NO MORE MAGPIERSS UPGRADES NEEDED:
810 One of the biggest changes in this release is that FeedWordPress no
811 longer depends on MagpieRSS to parse feeds, and has switched to the much
812 more up-to-date and flexible SimplePie feed parser, which is included as
813 a standard part of WordPress versions 2.8 and later. Using SimplePie will
814 hopefully allow for better handling of feeds going further, and will
815 allow me greater flexibility in determining how exactly the feed parser
816 will operate. It also means that FeedWordPress no longer requires
817 special upgrades to the WordPress core MagpieRSS files, and should
818 eliminate quite a bit of complexity.
819
820 * MAGPIERSS COMPATIBILITY LAYER FOR EXISTING FILTERS AND ADD-ONS: However,
821 I have also implemented a compatibility layer to ensure that existing
822 filters and add-ons for FeedWordPress which depended on the MagpieRSS
823 data format *should not be broken* by the switch to SimplePie. Going
824 forward, I recommend that new filters and add-ons be written to take
825 advantage of the SimplePie object representations of items, feeds, etc.,
826 rather than the MagpieRSS arrays, but the MagpieRSS arrays will still
827 be available and older filters should continue to work as they have in
828 the past.
829
830 * COMPATIBILITY WITH WORDPRESS 2.9.x and 3.0: This release has been tested
831 for the existing WordPress 2.9.x branch and with the upcoming release of
832 WordPress 3.0. Changes in the user interface JavaScript between WordPress
833 2.8.x and WordPress 2.9 caused the tag box interface element to break in
834 the Syndication --> Categories & Tags settings page; changes in the API
835 functions for adding new authors caused fatal errors under certain
836 conditions in WordPress 3.0. These breakages have been fixed.
837
838 * DROPPED LEGACY SUPPORT FOR WORDPRESS PRIOR TO 2.8: Because SimplePie is
839 not included with versions of WordPress prior to 2.8, I have chosen to
840 drop legacy support for WordPress versions 1.5 through 2.7. If you are
841 using FeedWordPress with a version of WordPress before 2.8, you will
842 have to upgrade your installation of WordPress in order to take
843 advantage of this release.
844
845 * PHP 5.3 COMPATIBILITY: A couple of compatibility issues, which were
846 causing fatal errors amd ugly warnings for users of PHP 5.3,
847 have been eliminated.
848
849 #### Features and Processing ####
850
851 * INTERFACE REORGANIZATION: The interface restructuring, began with
852 Version 2009.0612, has been completed. Catch-all settings pages have
853 been eliminated entirely for pages that cover each aspect of handling
854 a feed: Feeds & Updates, Posts & Links, Authors, Categories & Tags,
855 and Back End handling of the database and diagnostic information.
856 Extensive new interface hooks allow add-on modules to significantly
857 change or extend the FeedWordPress admin interface and workflow.
858
859 * STORING INFORMATION FROM THE FEED IN CUSTOM FIELDS: Many users
860 have written to request the ability to store information from elements
861 in the feed in a custom field on each post. (So that, for example, if
862 post includes a `itunes:duration` element, you could store the contents
863 in a Custom Field called `duration` on the post (for a Theme to access
864 later). The Custom Post Settings under Syndication --> Posts & Links now
865 allow you to access any item or feed tag, using a syntax similar to
866 a much-simplified version of XPath. See Posts & Links settings for
867 details.
868
869 * UPDATE-FREEZING ON MANUALLY EDITED POSTS: FeedWordPress now allows you
870 to mark posts that have been manually edited, so that the changes you
871 make will not be overwritten by later updates from the feed. If you make
872 manual edits to a particular post, just check the "Manual editing"
873 checkbox in order to protect your changes from being overwritten. If you
874 want to block *all* posts from being updated after they are imported
875 for the first time, a new "Updated Posts" setting in Posts & Links
876 allows you to freeze all posts from a particular feed, or all syndicated
877 posts.
878
879 * SETTING: FEED-BY-FEED SETTINGS FOR WHERE PERMALINKS POINT TO: You've
880 always been able to tell FeedWordPress whether permalinks for posts
881 should point to the original source of the story or the local copy. Now
882 you can choose different policies for different feeds, instead of one
883 global policy for all feeds. (Of course, you can still use a global
884 default if you prefer.)
885
886 * SETTING: USER CONTROL OVER TIMING BASIS. You can now determine the
887 schedule on which feeds are considered ready to poll for updates --
888 by default feeds become ready for polling after about 1 hour. You can
889 now increase or decrease the time window under Syndication --> Feeds &
890 Updates. (However, please pay *CAREFUL ATTENTION* to the recommendations
891 and DO NOT set the scheduling lower than 60 minutes unless you are
892 ABSOLUTELY SURE that you have specific permission from webmaster who
893 provides that specific feed to poll more frequently than that. If you
894 set this too low (and about 60 minutes is the polite minimum if you
895 haven't been given a different figure), most webmasters will consider
896 the frequent hits on their server as rude, or even downright abusive.
897
898 * OTHER SETTINGS: New settings also include the ability to stop FWP from
899 resolving relative URLs within syndicated content, and the ability to
900 choose whether FeedWordPress should indicate the comment feed from the
901 original source, or the local comment feed, when providing the comment
902 feed URL for a syndicated post.
903
904 #### Parsing ####
905
906 * BETTER DATE HANDLING -- FEWER FLASHBACKS TO 1969 and 1970: FeedWordPress
907 has made some bugfixes and some improvements in the logic for parsing
908 dates. This should allow FeedWordPress to correctly parse more dates in
909 more feeds; and, in the last resort, when FeedWordPress fails to
910 correctly parse a date, to fall back to a more intelligent default. This
911 should hopefully avoid most or all error conditions that have resulted
912 in articles being erroneously dated to the dawn of the Unix epoch
913 (31 December 1969 or 1 January 1970).
914
915 * FULL-TEXT "EXCERPTS" NOW PROPERLY SHORTENED. Based on a straightforward
916 reading of the existing RSS specs, it's reasonable for the
917 rss:description element to be read as a plaintext summary or excerpt for
918 the item containing the description -- with the full text of the item,
919 if available, in another, better-suited element, such as the de facto
920 standard content:encoded extension element. The problem is that uses of
921 RSS rarely have much to do with anything like a straightforward reading
922 of the specs. As a result, many actual RSS producers in the wild put the
923 full text of the article in a description element. But since
924 FeedWordPress has treated this text as a summary, this produces
925 aggregated posts with lengthy "excerpts" containing the full text of the
926 article. This release of FeedWordPress fixes the problem by doing a
927 little digging before treating rss:description as a summary: if the
928 description element is used properly as a plain text summary, then
929 FeedWordPress will take the summary provided by the feed, rather than
930 recreating its own excerpt from the full text; but if an RSS item has no
931 full-text element other than description, FeedWordPress will treat the
932 description element as the full text of the article, and generate a
933 shortened excerpt automatically from that text.
934
935 #### API ####
936
937 * TEMPLATE API: new template tags `get_local_permalink()` and
938 `the_local_permalink()` allow you to access the permalink for a post on
939 your aggregator site, even when FeedWordPress is rewriting permalinks to
940 point to the original source site.
941
942 * NEW HOOKS FOR ADD-ONS AND FILTERS: I have added a number of new hooks
943 which allow add-on modules to filter more precisely, gather information
944 at more points, and to enhance the FeedWordPress admin interface. For
945 a list of new hooks and documentation, see the FeedWordPress
946 documentation wiki at
947 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/add-ons-and-filters>
948
949 * FILTER API: A number of new utility methods have been added to the
950 SyndicatedPost class to make it easier for filters and add-ons to
951
952 * FILTER API: Globals $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta DEPRECATED. These
953 global variables, originally introduced to allow filters access to
954 information about the source feed in `syndicated_item` filters (which
955 were passed in through global variables rather than as parameters
956 because of a bug in WP 1.5 which was then fixed in 1.5.1) have been
957 DEPRECATED. If you have any filters or add-ons which still depend on
958 these global variables, you should see about fixing them to access data
959 about the source feed using the SyndicatedPost::link element instead.
960 For documentation, see the FeedWordPress documentation wiki at
961 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedpost> and
962 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedlink>.
963
964 * DIAGNOSTICS: I've included a number of new diagnostic options and
965 messages, which should allow an experienced user to better investigate
966 any problems that may crop up.
967
968 #### Bug Fixes ####
969
970 * BUGFIX: & IN PERMALINKS NO LONGER CAUSING ATOM OR HTML VALIDATION
971 EFFORTS: Many users reported an issue in which syndicating a feed with
972 special XML characters in the URLs (& was the most common, since it is
973 used to separate HTTP GET parameters) would cause the aggregator's
974 feeds to produce invalid (malformed) XML. This update addresses the
975 issue in Atom feeds. Unfortunately, it has not been technically possible
976 to address the problem in RSS 2.0 feeds, due to limitations on
977 WordPress's internal templates for RSS feeds.
978
979 * BUGFIX: BROKEN URLS IN "POPULAR POSTS" AND SIMILAR PLUGINS SHOULD NO
980 LONGER BE BROKEN. A number of users noticed an issue where plugins and
981 templates that listed posts in locations outside of the post loop
982 (for example, "Popular Posts"-style plugins that listed posts in the
983 sidebar), often produced the wrong URL for post links. (Typically, all
984 the posts listed would get the same wrong URL.) This should now be
985 fixed. Thanks to Björn for sending in a quick fix!
986
987 * MINOR BUGFIXES: This release includes a number of fixes to minor bugs
988 and compatibility issues, including: silent failures of the "Syndicate"
989 button, "Illegal Offset Type" error messages from MagpieRSS, and others.
990
991 = 2009.0707 =
992
993 * BUGFIX: WORDPRESS 2.8 AJAX COMPATIBILITY ISSUES RESOLVED (blank or
994 truncated "Syndicated Sites" administration page): Due to changes in the
995 AJAX interface elements between WordPress 2.7 and WordPress 2.8, several
996 FeedWordPress users encountered an issue where the front "Syndication"
997 page in the FeedWordPress administrative interface would come up blank,
998 without the normal "Syndicated Sites" list and "Update" control, or
999 sometimes wth the boxes visible but one or both of them truncated, with
1000 only the title bar. This issue should now be resolved: with the new
1001 version of FeedWordPress, the compatibility issue that caused the
1002 disappearance should be eliminated, and if boxes are shown with only
1003 their handle visible, you should once again be able to drop down the
1004 rest of the box by clicking once on its title bar.
1005
1006 * BUGFIX: TAG SETTING WIDGET FIXED. Due to changes in interface elements
1007 between WordPress 2.7 and WordPress 2.8, people using FeedWordPress with
1008 WordPress 2.8 found that the widget for setting tags to be applied to
1009 all syndicated posts, or all syndicated posts from a particular feed,
1010 no longer displayed "Add" and "Remove" buttons for individual tags. This
1011 issue has now been fixed, and the tagging widget should once again work
1012 more or less exactly like the tagging widget for individual posts in the
1013 normal WordPress admin interface.
1014
1015 = 2009.0618 =
1016
1017 * BUGFIX: MYSTERY ERRORS WITH WITH WP_Http_Fsockopen HTTP TRANSPORT
1018 ELIMINATED: Thanks to a combination of a subtle bug in FeedWordPress,
1019 and changes to the HTTP transport code in WordPress, a number of users
1020 encountered an error in which any time they attempted to add a new feed
1021 through the FeedFinder interface, FeedWordPress would fail and display
1022 an HTTP request failure diagnostic message. The subtle bug has been
1023 fixed, and with it, most of these errors should now be eliminated.
1024
1025 Be sure to upgrade your MagpieRSS to the most recent MagpieRSS version
1026 after you have insalled FeedWordPress 2009.0618, or this bug fix will
1027 not take effect.
1028
1029 = 2009.0613 =
1030
1031 * INTERFACE/BUGFIX: WORDPRESS 2.8 CATEGORY BOX FIX. Thanks to a subtle
1032 change in class names between the WordPress 2.7 and 2.8 stylesheets,
1033 category boxes in the FeedWordPress settings interface tended to overflow
1034 and have a lot of messy-looking overlapping text under WordPress 2.8.
1035 This has now been fixed.
1036
1037 * FeedFinder FAILURE DIAGNOSTICS: When FWP's FeedFinder fails to find any
1038 feeds at a given URL (for example, when you are trying to add a
1039 subscription through the administrative interface and you run into an
1040 error message), FeedWordPress now provides more diagnostic information
1041 for the reasons behind the failure. If that helps you, great; if not,
1042 it should help me respond more intelligently to your support request..
1043
1044 = 2009.0612 =
1045
1046 * WORDPRESS 2.8 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress 2009.0612 has been tested for
1047 compatibility with the recent version 2.8 release of WordPress.
1048
1049 * INTERFACE RESTRUCTURING: In order to avoid settings posts from becoming
1050 too crowded, and to modularize and better organize the user interface,
1051 new "Posts" and "Categories & Tags" subpages have been created under the
1052 "Syndication" menu. "Posts" controls settings for individal syndicated
1053 posts (such as publication status, comment and ping status, whether or
1054 not to use the original location of the post as the permalink, whether
1055 or not to expose posts to formatting filters, and so on). "Categories &
1056 Tags" controls settings for assigning new syndicated posts to categories
1057 and tags, such as categories or tags to apply to all syndicated posts,
1058 and how to handle categories that do not yet exist in the WordPress
1059 database. These subpages, like the Authors subpage, handle settings for
1060 the global default level and for individual syndicated feeds.
1061
1062 Corresponding to these new subpages, the old Syndication Settings and
1063 Feed Settings subpages have been cleaned up and simplified, and now only
1064 link to the appropriate subpages for options that can be set in the
1065 Posts, Authors, or Categories & Tags subpages.
1066
1067 * FEATURE: ADD CUSTOM SETTINGS TO EACH SYNDICATED POST: FeedWordPress has
1068 long had an interface for creating custom settings for each syndicated
1069 *feed* which could be retrieved in templates using the `get_feed_meta()`
1070 template function. But it had no feature for adding custom fields to
1071 each individual syndicated *post*. In response to requests from users, I
1072 have added the ability to apply custom fields to each individual
1073 syndicated post, using the new Syndication --> Posts subpage. You can
1074 set up custom fields to be applied to every syndicated post, or custom
1075 fields to be applied to syndicated posts from a particular feed.
1076
1077 * FEATURE: MAGPIERSS VERSION CHECK AND UPGRADE: FeedWordPress will attempt
1078 to determine whether or not you are using the upgraded version of
1079 MagpieRSS that comes packaged with FeedWordPress. If not, it will throw
1080 an error on admin pages, and, if you are a site administrator, it will
1081 give you the option to ignore the error message, or to attempt an
1082 automatic upgrade (using a native file copy). If the file copy fails,
1083 FeedWordPress will offer some guidance on how to perform the upgrade
1084 manually.
1085
1086 * BLANK POSTS PROBLEM NO LONGER OCCURS WITH OLD & BUSTED MAGPIERSS: Due
1087 to the fact that I relied on a content normalization that occurs in my
1088 upgraded version of MagpieRSS, but not in the old & busted version of
1089 MagpieRSS that ships with WordPress, until this version, if you tried to
1090 syndicate an Atom feed without having performed the (*strongly
1091 recommended*) MagpieRSS upgrade, all of the posts would come up with
1092 completely blank contents. That's not because MagpieRSS couldn't read
1093 the data, but rather because the new Magpie version puts that data in a
1094 location where the old version doesn't, and I was only looking in that
1095 newer location. Now it checks for both, meaning that posts will continue
1096 to display their contents even if you don't upgrade MagpieRSS. (But you
1097 **really should** upgrade it, anyway.)
1098
1099 * BUGFIX: RELATIVE URI RESOLUTION FOR POST CONTENT RESTORED. Some time
1100 back, I added support for resolving relative URIs against xml:base on
1101 feeds that support it to the MagpieRSS upgrade in FeedWordPress. Then I
1102 took out code that did the same thing from the main FeedWordPress code.
1103 Of course, the problem is that some people, even though it is clearly
1104 stupid or evil to do so, still include relative URIs for images or links
1105 in posts on feed formats that do *not* adequately support xml:base
1106 (notably, RSS 2.0 feeds). In response to a user request, I have added
1107 this functionality back in, so that MagpieRSS will resolve any relative
1108 URIs that it knows how to resolve using xml:base, and then FeedWordPress
1109 will attempt to resolve any relative URIs that are left over afterwards.
1110
1111 * BUGFIX: INTERFACE OPTION FOR SETTING SYNDICATED POST PUBLICATION STATUS
1112 ON A FEED-BY-FEED BASIS HAS BEEN RESTORED: Due to a version-checking
1113 bug, users of WordPress 2.7.x lost an option from the "Edit a syndicated
1114 feed" interface which allowed them to determine whether newly syndicated
1115 posts should be published immediately, held as "Pending Review," saved
1116 as drafts, or saved as private posts. (The option to change this
1117 setting globally remained in place, but users could no longer set it on
1118 a feed-by-feed basis.) The version-checking bug has been fixed, and the
1119 option has been restored.
1120
1121 * BUGFIX: "ARE YOU SURE?" FATAL ERROR ELIMINATED AND SECURITY IMPROVED:
1122 Under certain circumstances (for example, when users have configured
1123 their browser or proxy not to send HTTP Referer headers, for privacy or
1124 other reasons), many features in the FeedWordPress administrative
1125 interface (such as adding new feeds or changing settings) would hit a
1126 fatal error, displaying only a cryptic message reading "Are you sure?"
1127 and a blank page following it. This problem has been eliminated by
1128 taking advantage of WordPress's nonce functions, which allow the
1129 security check which ran into this error to work properly even without
1130 receiving an HTTP Referer header. (N.B.: WordPress's nonce functions
1131 were first introduced in WordPress 2.0.3. If you're using FeedWordPress
1132 with an older version of WordPress, there's no fix for this problem:
1133 you'll just need to turn Referer headers back on. Sorry.)
1134
1135 * BUGFIX: MANUALLY-ALTERED POST STATUS, COMMENT STATUS, AND PING STATUS NO
1136 LONGER REVERTED BY POST UPDATES: If you manually altered the post status,
1137 comment status, or ping status of a syndicated post from what it was set
1138 to when first syndicated -- for example, if you had a feed that was set
1139 to bring in new posts as "Pending Review," and you then marked some of
1140 the pending posts as "Published" and others as "Unpublished" -- then
1141 in previous versions of FeedWordPress, these manual changes to the
1142 status would be lost -- so that, for example, your Published or Unpublished
1143 articles would revert to Pending Review -- if the source feed made any
1144 upates to the item. This could make the Pending Review feature both
1145 unreliable and also extremely frustrating to work with. The good news is
1146 that this bug has since been fixed: if you manually update the status
1147 of a post, it will no longer be reverted if or when the post is updated.
1148
1149 * BUGFIX: OCCASIONAL FATAL ERROR ON UPDATE ELIMINATED: Under certain
1150 limited conditions (specifically, when both the title and the content of
1151 a post to be updated are empty), an attempt to update the post would
1152 result in a fatal error. This has been fixed.
1153
1154 * INTERFACE: "CONFIGURE SETTINGS" CONVENIENCE LINK ADDED TO CONFIRMATION
1155 MESSAGE WHEN A NEW FEED IS ADDED: When you add a new subscription to
1156 FeedWordPress, the message box that appears to confirm it now includes a
1157 handy link to the feed's settings subpage, so that you can quickly set
1158 up any special settings you may want to set up for the new feed, without
1159 having to hunt through the list of all your other subscriptions to pick
1160 out the new one.
1161
1162 * INTERFACE: SIMPLIFYING AND CLARIFYING AUTOMATIC UPDATES SETTINGS. I have
1163 removed an interval setting for the cronless automatic updates which has
1164 confused many FeedWordPress users. In past versions of FWP, when you
1165 turned on automatic updates, you would be presented with a time interval
1166 setting which controlled how often FeedWordPress would check for feeds
1167 ready to be polled for updates. (That is, it DID NOT control how often
1168 feeds *would be polled*; it controlled how often FeedWordPress would
1169 *check* for feeds that *had become ready to poll*. The schedule on which
1170 feeds became ready for polling was still controlled either by requests
1171 encoded in elements within the feed itself, or else according to an
1172 internal calculation within FeedWordPress, averaging out to about 1 hour,
1173 if the feed did not include any scheduling request elements.) Since many
1174 users very often (and understandably) confused the purpose of this
1175 setting, and since the setting is for a feature that's actually very
1176 unlikely to require any manual control by the user, I have removed the
1177 setting; FeedWordPress now simply uses the default value of checking for
1178 feeds to poll every 10 minutes.
1179
1180 * FEEDFINDER PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT: FeedWordPress's FeedFinder class
1181 now uses `array_unique()` to make sure that it doesn't waste time
1182 repeatedly iterating over and polling the same URI. Props to Camilo
1183 (<http://projects.radgeek.com/2008/12/14/feedwordpress-20081214/#comment-20090122160414>).
1184
1185 = 2008.1214 =
1186
1187 * WORDPRESS 2.7 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress has been tested for
1188 compatibility with the newly released WordPress 2.7. WordPress 2.7 has
1189 deprecated the Snoopy library for HTTP requests, which caused a fatal
1190 error for users who had not installed the MagpieRSS upgrade (or whose
1191 installation of the MagpieRSS upgrade was overwritten by a recent update
1192 of WordPress). FeedWordPress now handles things gracefully when Snoopy
1193 is not immediately available.
1194
1195 * INTERFACE SPIFFED UP: Interface elements have been updated so that
1196 FeedWordPress's management interface fits in more naturally with the
1197 WordPress 2.7 interface (including a new logo and a number of small
1198 interface tweaks).
1199
1200 * BUG WITH TAGS FOR SYNDICATED ARTICLES FIXED: Several users encountered a
1201 bug with the option to add tags to all syndicated posts under
1202 Syndication --> Settings -- if you told FeedWordPress to add more than
1203 one tag to all syndicated posts, instead of doing so correctly, it would
1204 add a *single* tag instead, whose name was composed of the names of all
1205 the tags you asked it to add. This bug was the result of nothing more
1206 dignified than a typographical error on my part. It has now been fixed.
1207
1208 * MORE INFORMATION AVAILABLE WHEN FEEDWORDPRESS CAN'T FIND A FEED: When
1209 you enter a URL for a new syndication source, FeedWordPress uses a
1210 simple feed-finding algorithm (originally based on Mark Pilgrim's
1211 Universal Feed Finder) to try to determine whether the URL is the URL
1212 for a feed, or, if the URL points to an ordinary website rather than to
1213 a feed, whether there is a feed for that website. All well and good, but
1214 if FeedWordPress failed to find a feed, for whatever reason, it would
1215 typically return nothing more than a nasty little note to the effect of
1216 "no feed found," without any explanation of what went wrong.
1217 FeedWordPress now keeps track of error conditions from the HTTP
1218 requests that it uses in the course of looking for the feed, and so may
1219 be able to give you a bit more information about the nature of the
1220 problem if something goes wrong.
1221
1222
1223 = 2008.1105 =
1224
1225 * INTERFACE RESTRUCTURING AND SYNDICATION --> AUTHORS PAGE: As a first
1226 step towards modularizing and better organizing the user interface, a
1227 new "Authors" subpage has been created under the Syndication menu, which
1228 controls settings for syndicated authors, both at the global default
1229 level and at level of individual syndicated feeds.
1230
1231 * BUG RELATED TO THE ATTRIBUTION OF POSTS TO THE WRONG AUTHOR FIXED: Some
1232 users encountered an issue in which posts by different authors on
1233 different blogs -- especially blogs generated by Blogger -- were
1234 mistakenly attributed to a single author. The problem was caused by the
1235 way in which FeedWordPress matches syndicated authors to user accounts
1236 in the WordPress database: normally, if two feeds each list an author
1237 with the same e-mail address, they are counted as being the same person.
1238 Normally this works well, but it creates an issue in cases where
1239 blogging software assigns a single anonymous e-mail address to users who
1240 do not want their real e-mail address published. This is, for example,
1241 what Blogger does (by giving all users a default e-mail address of
1242 <noreply@blogger.com> if they don't want their own e-mail address
1243 listed). FeedWordPress now allows the user to correct for this problem
1244 with a couple of new settings under **Syndication --> Authors**, which
1245 allow users to turn off e-mail based author matching for particular
1246 addresses, or, if desired, to turn it off entirely. By default, e-mail
1247 based author matching is still turned on, but disabled for a list of
1248 known generic e-mail addresses. Right now, the "list" consists entirely
1249 of <noreply@blogger.com>; if you know other addresses that should be
1250 added, please [contact me](http://radgeek.com/contact) to let me know.
1251
1252 Please note that if you have already encountered this issue on your
1253 blog, upgrading FeedWordPress will prevent it from re-occurring in the
1254 future, but you still need to do two other things to fix the existing
1255 problem on your blog.
1256
1257 First, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to
1258 change the existing author mapping rules to re-map a a syndicated
1259 author's name to the proper target account. Go to **Syndication -->
1260 Authors**, select the feed you want to change from the drop-down list,
1261 and then change the settings under the "Syndicated Authors" section.
1262 (You will probably need to select "will be assigned to a new user..." to
1263 create a new user account with the appropriate name.)
1264
1265 Second, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to
1266 re-assign already-syndicated posts that were mis-attributed to the
1267 correct author. You can do that from **Syndication --> Authors** by
1268 using the author re-assignment feature, described below.
1269
1270 * AUTHOR RE-ASSIGNMENT FOR A PARTICULAR FEED: The author settings page
1271 for each syndicated feed, under **Syndication --> Authors**, now
1272 includes an section titled "Fixing mis-matched authors," which provides
1273 an interface for re-assigning or deleting all posts attributed to a
1274 particular author on a particular feed.
1275
1276 * SUPPORT FOR `<atom:source>` ELEMENT IN SYNDICATED FEEDS: Some feeds
1277 (for example, those produced by FeedWordPress) aggregate content from
1278 several different sources, and include information about the original
1279 source of the post in an `<atom:source>` element. A new setting under
1280 **Syndication --> Options** allows you to control what FeedWordPress
1281 will report as the source of posts syndicated from aggregator feeds in
1282 your templates and feeds: you can have FeedWordPress report that the
1283 source of a post is the aggregator feed itself, or you can have it
1284 report that the source of a post is the original source that the
1285 aggregator originally syndicated the post from.
1286
1287 By default, FeedWordPress will report the aggregator, not the original
1288 source, as the source of a syndicated item.
1289
1290 * LOAD BALANCING AND TIME LIMITING FEATURES FOR UPDATES: Some users have
1291 encountered issues due to running up against PHP execution time limits
1292 during the process of updating large syndicated feeds, or a very large
1293 set of syndicated feeds. FeedWordPress now has a feature that allows you
1294 to limit the total amount of time spent updating a feed, through the
1295 "Time limit on updates" setting under **Syndication --> Options**. By
1296 turning on this setting and adjusting the time limit to a low enough
1297 figure to avoid your PHP installation's time-out setting. (PHP execution
1298 time limits are usually in the vicinity of 30 seconds, so an update
1299 time limit of 25 seconds or so should provide plenty of time for updates
1300 while allowing a cushion of time for other, non-update-related functions
1301 to do their work.)
1302
1303 If feed updates are interrupted by the time limit, FeedWordPress uses
1304 some simple load balancing features to make sure that updates to other
1305 feeds will not be blocked by the time-hogging feed, and will also make
1306 sure that when the interrupted update is resumed, FeedWordPress will
1307 skip ahead to resume processing items at the point at which it was
1308 interrupted last time, so that posts further down in the feed will
1309 eventually get processed, and not get blocked by the amount of time it
1310 takes to process the items higher up in the feed.
1311
1312 * `guid` INDEX CREATION BUTTON: FeedWordPress frequently issues queries on
1313 the `guid` column of the WordPress posts database (since it uses post
1314 guid URIs to keep track of which posts it has syndicated). In very large
1315 FeedWordPress installations, you can often significantly improve
1316 performance by creating a database index on the `guid` column, but
1317 normally you would need to poke around with MySQL or a tool like
1318 phpMyAdmin to do this. FeedWordPress can now save you the trouble: to
1319 create an index on the `guid` column, just go to
1320 **Syndication --> Options**, and mash the button at the bottom of the
1321 "Back End" section.
1322
1323 = 2008.1101 =
1324
1325 * INTERFACE BUG THAT PREVENTED ADDING NEW SITES FIXED: The UI reforms in
1326 FWP 2008.1030 unintentionally introduced a bug that prevents clean
1327 installations of FeedWordPress from providing an input box for adding
1328 new feeds to the list of syndicated feeds. This bug has been fixed.
1329
1330 = 2008.1030 =
1331
1332 * WORDPRESS 2.6 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with
1333 WordPress 2.6, and should work more or less seamlessly with the new post
1334 revision system. A bug which caused multiple new revisions to be created
1335 for posts on certain feeds, regardless of whether or not the item had
1336 been updated, has been fixed.
1337
1338 * INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: The user interface has been substantially
1339 restyled to fit in better with the visual style of WordPress 2.5 and
1340 2.6.
1341
1342 * YOUTUBE BUG FIXED: POSTS SYNDICATED THROUGH AN AUTOMATIC UPDATE ARE NO
1343 LONGER STRIPPED OF `<OBJECT>` TAGS AND CERTAIN OTHER HTML ELEMENTS: Due
1344 to the way that some versions of WordPress process posts that are
1345 inserted into the database when no user is logged in, many users
1346 experienced an issue where YouTube videos and other content using the
1347 HTML `<object>` tag would be stripped out of posts that were syndicated
1348 during an automatic update. (Posts that were syndicated through manual
1349 updates from within the WordPress Dashboard were not affected, because
1350 the issue does not arise when an update is executed under a logged-in
1351 administrator's credentials.) This bug has now been fixed; YouTube
1352 videos and other content using `<object>` tags should now appear
1353 properly in syndicated posts, regardless of the way in which the post
1354 was syndicated.
1355
1356 * AJAX BUGS FIXED: Bugs which blocked the normal operation of WordPress
1357 2.5's AJAX interface elements when FeedWordPress was activated have been
1358 fixed.
1359
1360 * TAG SUPPORT: A couple of features have been introduced to take advantage
1361 of the tagging features in WordPress 2.3.x, 2.5.x, and 2.6.x. Now, when
1362 unfamiliar categories are encountered for posts on a feed, you can
1363 choose for FeedWordPress (1) to drop the category; (2) to drop the
1364 category and to filter out any post that does not match at least one
1365 familiar category; (3) to create a new category with that name, or,
1366 now, you can also have FeedWordPress (4) create a new *tag* with that
1367 name. This option can be set site-wide under Syndication --> Options,
1368 or it can be set on a feed-by-feed basis in a feed's Edit screen.
1369
1370 In addition, you can now set particular tags to apply to all incoming
1371 syndicated posts, under Syndication --> Options, or you can set tags
1372 to apply to all incoming syndicated posts from a particular feed in that
1373 feed's Edit screen.
1374
1375 * FORMATTING FILTERS: There is a new option available under Syndication ->
1376 Options which allows users to choose whether or not to expose syndicated
1377 posts to being altered by formatting filters. By default, FeedWordPress
1378 has always protected syndicated posts (which are already in display-ready
1379 HTML when they are syndicated) from being reformatted by formatting
1380 filters. However, this approach means that certain plugins which depend
1381 on formatting filters (for example, to add "Share This" bars or relevant
1382 links to the end of a post) are blocked from working on any syndicated
1383 posts. If you want to use one of these plugins together with
1384 FeedWordPress, you can now do so by changing the "Formatting Filters"
1385 setting from "Protect" to "Expose."
1386
1387 * `<atom:source>` ELEMENTS NOW INCLUDED IN ATOM FEED: Atom 1.0 provides
1388 a standard method for aggregators to indicate information about the original source of
1389 a syndicated post, using the `<atom:source>` element. FeedWordPress now
1390 introduces standard `<atom:source>` elements including the title, homepage, and
1391 feed URI of the source from which a syndicated post was syndicated. Cf.
1392 <http://www.atomenabled.org/developers/syndication/atom-format-spec.php#element.source>
1393
1394 * MODULARIZATION OF CODE: The code for different elements of FeedWordPress
1395 has been broken out into several modules for easier inspection,
1396 documentation, and maintenance of the code.
1397
1398 * VERSIONING SCHEME CHANGED: FeedWordPress's feature set has proven stable
1399 enough that it can now be removed from beta status; a good thing, since
1400 I was very quickly running out of version numbers to use. New releases
1401 of FeedWordPress will have version numbers based on the date of their
1402 release.
1403
1404 = 0.993 =
1405
1406 * WORDPRESS 2.5.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible
1407 with WordPress 2.5.1.
1408
1409 * WORDPRESS 2.5 INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: FeedWordPress's Dashboard
1410 interface has undergone several cosmetic changes that should help it
1411 integrate better with the WordPress Dashboard interface in WordPress
1412 version 2.5.x.
1413
1414 * SYNDICATED POSTS CAN BE MARKED AS "PENDING REVIEW": WordPress 2.3 users
1415 can now take advantage of WordPress's new "Pending Review" features for
1416 incoming syndicated posts. Posts marked as "Pending Review" are not
1417 published immediately, but are marked as ready to be reviewed by an
1418 Administrator or Editor, who can then choose to publish the post or
1419 hold it back. If you want to review syndicated posts from a particular
1420 feed, or from all feeds, before they are posted, then use
1421 Syndication --> Syndicated Sites --> Edit or Syndication --> Options to
1422 change the settings for handling new posts.
1423
1424 * AWARE OF NEW URI FOR del.icio.us FEEDS: Previous releases of
1425 FeedWordPress already automatically split del.icio.us tags up
1426 appropriately appropriately when generating categories. (del.icio.us
1427 feeds smoosh all the tags into a single `<dc:subject>` element,
1428 separated by spaces; FeedWordPress un-smooshes them into multiple
1429 categories by separating them at whitespace.) Unfortunately, del.icio.us
1430 recently broke the existing behavior by changing host names for their
1431 feeds from del.icio.us to feeds.delicious.com. Version 0.993 accounts
1432 for the new host name and un-breaks the tag splitting.
1433
1434 = 0.992 =
1435
1436 * AUTHOR RE-MAPPING: FeedWordPress now offers considerable control over
1437 how author names on a feed are translated into usernames within the
1438 WordPress database. When a post by an unrecognized author comes in,
1439 Administrators can now specify any username as the default username to
1440 assign the post to by setting the option in Syndication --> Options
1441 (formerly FeedWordPress only allowed you to assign such posts to user
1442 #1, the site administrator). Administrators can also create re-mapping
1443 rules for particular feeds (under Syndication --> Syndicated Sites -->
1444 Edit), so that (for example) any posts attributed to "Administrator"
1445 on the feed <http://praxeology.net/blog/feed/> will be assigned to
1446 a user named "Roderick T. Long," rather than a user named
1447 "Administrator." These settings also allow administrators to filter out
1448 posts by particular users, and to control what will happen when
1449 FeedWordPress encounters a post by an unrecognized user on that
1450 particular feed.
1451
1452 * BUG RELATED TO URIS CONTAINING AMPERSAND CHARACTERS FIXED: A bug in
1453 WordPress 2.x's handling of URIs in Blogroll links created problems for
1454 updating any feeds whose URIs included an ampersand character, such as
1455 Google News RSS feeds and other feeds that have multiple parameters
1456 passed through HTTP GET. If you experienced this bug, the most likely
1457 effect was that FeedWordPress simply would not import new posts from a
1458 feed when instructred to do so, returning a "0 new posts" response. In
1459 other cases, it might lead to unpredictable results from feed updates,
1460 such as importing posts which were not contained in the feed being
1461 syndicated, but which did appear elsewhere on the same website. This bug
1462 has, hopefully, been resolved, by correcting for the bug in WordPress.
1463
1464 = 0.991 =
1465
1466 * WORDPRESS MU COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with
1467 recent releases of WordPress MU. Once FeedWordPress is made available
1468 as a plugin, each individual blog can choose to activate FeedWordPress
1469 and syndicate content from its own set of contributors.
1470
1471 * DISPLAY OF MAGPIE WARNINGS: A number of MagpieRSS warnings or error
1472 messages that were displayed when performing an automatic update are
1473 no longer displayed, unless debugging parameters have been explicitly
1474 enabled.
1475
1476 * BUG RELATED TO INTERNATIONAL CHARACTERS IN AUTHOR NAMES FIXED: Due to a
1477 subtle incompatability between the way that FeedWordPress generated new
1478 user information, and the way that WordPress 2.0 and later added new
1479 authors to the database, FeedWordPress might end up creating duplicate
1480 authors, or throwing a critical error message, when it encountered
1481 authors whose names included international characters. This
1482 incompatability has now been fixed; hopefully, authors with
1483 international characters in their names should now be handled properly.
1484
1485 * `<media:content>` BUG IN MAGPIERSS FIXED: A bug in MagpieRSS's handling
1486 of namespaced elements has been fixed. Among other things, this bug
1487 caused items containing a Yahoo MediaRSS `<media:content>` element (such
1488 as many of the feeds produced by wordpress.com) to be represented
1489 incorrectly, with only a capital "A" where the content of the post
1490 should have been. Feeds containing `<media:content>` elements should now
1491 be syndicated correctly.
1492
1493 * update_feedwordpress PARAMETER: You can now use an HTTP GET parameter
1494 (`update_feedwordpress=1`) to request that FeedWordPress poll its feeds
1495 for updates. When used together with a crontab or other means of
1496 scheduling tasks, this means that you can keep your blog automatically
1497 updated on a regular schedule, even if you do not choose to use the
1498 cron-less automatic updates option.
1499
1500 * Some minor interface-related bugs were also fixed.
1501
1502
1503 = 0.99 =
1504
1505 Version 0.99 adds several significant new features, fixes some bugs, and
1506 provides compatability with WordPress 2.2.x and 2.3.x.
1507
1508 * WORDPRESS 2.2 AND 2.3 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be
1509 compatible with WordPress version 2.2 and the upcoming WordPress
1510 version 2.3. In particular, it has been tested extensively against
1511 WordPress 2.2.3 and WordPress 2.3 Release Candidate 1.
1512
1513 * AUTOMATIC UPDATES WITHOUT CRON: FeedWordPress now allows you to
1514 automatically schedule checks for new posts without using external task
1515 scheduling tools such as cron. In order to enable automatic updates, go
1516 to **Syndication --> Options** and set "Check for new posts" to
1517 "automatically." For details, see "Automatic Feed Updates" in
1518 README.text.
1519
1520 An important side-effect of the changes to the update system is that if
1521 you were previously using the cron job and the `update-feeds.php` script
1522 to schedule updates, you need to change your cron set-up. The old
1523 `update-feeds.php` script no longer exists. Instead, if you wish to use
1524 a cron job to guarantee updates on a particular schedule, you should
1525 have the cron job fetch the front page of your blog (for example, by
1526 using `curl http://www.zyx.com/blog/ > /dev/null`) instead of activating
1527 the `update-feeds.php` script. If automatic updates have been enabled,
1528 fetching the front page will automatically trigger the update process.
1529
1530 * INTERFACE REORGANIZATION: All FeedWordPress functions are now located
1531 under a top-level "Syndication" menu in the WordPress Dashboard. To
1532 manage the list of syndicated sites, manually check for new posts on
1533 one or more feeds, or syndicate a new site, you should use the main page
1534 under **Syndication**. To change global settings for FeedWordPress,
1535 you should use **Syndication --> Options**.
1536
1537 * FILE STRUCTURE REORGANIZATION: Due to a combination of changing styles
1538 for FeedWordPress plugins and lingering bugs in the FeedWordPress admin
1539 menu code, the code for FeedWordPress is now contained in two different
1540 PHP files, which should be installed together in a subdirectory of your
1541 plugins directory named `feedwordpress`. (See README.text for
1542 installation and upgrade instructions relating to the change.)
1543
1544 * MULTIPLE CATEGORIES SETTING: Some feeds use non-standard methods to
1545 indicate multiple categories within a single category element. (The most
1546 popular site to do this is del.icio.us, which separates tags with a
1547 space.) FeedWordPress now allows you to set an optional setting, for any
1548 feed which does this, indicating the character or characters used to
1549 divide multiple categories, using a Perl-compatible regular expression.
1550 (In the case of del.icio.us feeds, FeedWordPress will automatically use
1551 \s for the pattern without your having to do any further configuration.)
1552 To turn this setting on, simply use the "Edit" link for the feed that
1553 you want to turn it on for.
1554
1555 * REGULAR EXPRESSION BUG FIXED: Eliminated a minor bug in the regular
1556 expressions for e-mail addresses (used in parsing RSS `author`
1557 elements), which could produce unsightly error messages for some users
1558 parsing RSS 2.0 feeds.
1559
1560 * DATE / UPDATE BUG FIXED: A bug in date handling was eliminated that may
1561 have caused problems if any of (1) WordPress, or (2) PHP, or (3) your
1562 web server, or (4) your MySQL server, has been set to use a different
1563 time zone from the one that any of the others is set to use. If
1564 FeedWordPress has not been properly updating updated posts, or has been
1565 updating posts when there shouldn't be any changes for the update, this
1566 release may solve that problem.
1567
1568 * GOOGLE READER BUGS FIXED: A couple of bugs that made it difficult for
1569 FeedWordPress to interact with Google Reader public feeds have been
1570 fixed. Firstly, if you encountered an error message reading "There was a
1571 problem adding the newsfeed. [SQL: ]" when you tried to add the feed,
1572 the cause of this error has been fixed. Secondly, if you succeeded in
1573 getting FeedWordPress to check a Google Reader feed, only to find that
1574 the title of posts had junk squashed on to the end of them, that bug
1575 has been fixed too. To fix this bug, you must install the newest version
1576 of the optional MagpieRSS upgrade.
1577
1578 * FILTER PARAMETERS: Due to an old, old bug in WordPress 1.5.0 (which was
1579 what was available back when I first wrote the filter interface),
1580 FeedWordPress has traditionally only passed one parameter to
1581 syndicated_item and syndicated_post filters functions -- an array
1582 containing either the Magpie representation of a syndicated item from
1583 the feed, or the database representation of a post about to be inserted
1584 into the WordPress database. If you needed information about the feed
1585 that the item came from, this was accessible only through a pair of
1586 global variables, $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta.
1587
1588 Since it's been a pretty long time since WordPress 1.5.0 was in
1589 widespread usage, I have gone ahead and added an optional second
1590 parameter to the invocation of the syndicated_item and syndicated_post
1591 filters. If you have written a filter for FeedWordPress that uses either
1592 of these hooks, you can now register that filter to accept 2 parameters.
1593 If you do so, the second parameter will be a SyndicatedPost object,
1594 which, among other things, allows you to access information about the
1595 feed from which an item is syndicated using the $post->feed and the
1596 $post->feedmeta elements (where $post is the name of the second
1597 parameter).
1598
1599 NOTE THAT THE OLD GLOBAL VARIABLES ARE STILL AVAILABLE, for the time
1600 being at least, so existing filters will not break with the upgrade.
1601 They should be considered deprecated, however, and may be eliminated in
1602 the future.
1603
1604 * FILTER CHANGE / BUGFIX: the array that is passed as the first argument
1605 syndicated_post filters no longer is no longer backslash-escaped for
1606 MySQL when filters are called. This was originally a bug, or an
1607 oversight; the contents of the array should only be escaped for the
1608 database *after* they have gone through all filters. IF YOU HAVE WRITTEN
1609 ANY syndicated_post FILTERS THAT PRESUME THE OLD BEHAVIOR OF PASSING IN
1610 STRINGS THAT ARE ALREADY BACKSLASH-ESCAPED, UPDATE YOUR FILTERS
1611 ACCORDINGLY.
1612
1613 * OTHER MINOR BUGFIXES AND INTERNAL CHANGES: The internal architecture of
1614 FeedWordPress has been significantly changed to make the code more
1615 modular and clean; hopefully this should help reduce the number of
1616 compatibility updates that are needed, and make them easier and quicker
1617 when they are needed.
1618
1619 = 0.981 =
1620
1621 Version 0.981 is a narrowly targeted bugfix and compatibility release, whose
1622 main purpose is to resolve a major outstanding problem: the incompatibility
1623 between version 0.98 of WordPress and the recently released WordPress 2.1.
1624
1625 * WORDPRESS 2.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress is now compatible with
1626 WordPress 2.1, as well as retaining its existing support for WordPress
1627 2.0 and 1.5. Incompatibilities that resulted in database warnings, fatal
1628 errors, and which prevented FeedWordPress from syndicating new posts,
1629 have been eliminated.
1630
1631 * RSS-FUNCTIONS.PHP RENAMED TO RSS.PHP: if you use the upgraded MagpieRSS
1632 replacement that's included with FeedWordPress, be sure to note that
1633 there are now *two* files to upload from the `OPTIONAL/wp-includes`
1634 subdirectory in order to carry out the upgrade: rss-functions.php and
1635 rss.php. **It is necessary to upload both files**, due to a change in
1636 the file naming scheme in WordPress 2.1, and it is necessary to do so
1637 whether you are using WordPress 2.1 or not. If you only upload the
1638 `rss-functions.php` file as in previous installations you will not have
1639 a working copy of MagpieRSS; the rss.php file contains the actual code.
1640
1641 * DATE BUG AFFECTING SOME PHP INSTALLATIONS RESOLVED: due to a subtle bug
1642 in parse_w3cdtf(), some installations of PHP encountered problems with
1643 FeedWordPress's attempt to date posts, which would cause some new posts
1644 on Atom feeds to be dated as if they had apppeared in 1969 or 1970
1645 (thus, effectively, never appearing on front page at all). This bug in
1646 the date handling should now be fixed.
1647
1648 * PHP <?=...?> SHORT FORM ELIMINATED: some installations of PHP do not
1649 allow the <?=...?> short form for printing PHP values, which was used
1650 extensively in the FeedWordPress interface code. Since this could cause
1651 fatal errors for users with the wrong installation of PHP, the short
1652 form has been replaced with full PHP echo statements, and is no longer
1653 used in FeedWordPress.
1654
1655 * BETTER USER INTERFACE INTEGRATION WITH WORDPRESS 2.x: Some minor changes
1656 have been made to help the FeedWordPress interface pages blend in better
1657 with the user interface when running under WordPress 2.x.
1658
1659 * GLOBAL CATEGORIES BUG RESOLVED: a bug that prevented some users from
1660 setting one or more categories to apply to syndicated posts from all
1661 feeds (using the checkbox interface under Options --> Syndication) has
1662 been resolved.
1663
1664 = 0.98 =
1665
1666 * WORDPRESS 2.0 COMPATIBILITY: This is a narrowly-targeted release to
1667 solve a major outstanding problem. FeedWordPress is now compatible with
1668 both WordPress 1.5 and WordPress 2.0. Incompatibilities that caused
1669 fatal SQL errors, and a more subtle bug with off-kilter counts of posts
1670 under a given category, have been resolved. FeedWordPress tests for
1671 database schema using the global $wp_db_version variable (if null, then
1672 we presume that we're dealing with WordPress 1.5).
1673
1674 NOTE: I have **not** fully tested FeedWordPress with WordPress 2.0.
1675 Further testing may reveal more bugs. However, you should now be able
1676 to get at least basic FeedWordPress functionality up and running.
1677
1678 * AUTHOR MATCHING: FeedWordPress tests several fields to see if it can
1679 identify the author of the post as a user already in the WordPress user
1680 database. In previous versions, it tested the user login, the nickname,
1681 and tested for "aliases" listed in the Profile (see documentation). FWP
1682 now also matches authors on the basis of e-mail address (*if* an e-mail
1683 address is present). This is particularly helpful for formats such as
1684 RSS 2.0, in which authors are primarily identified by e-mail addresses.
1685
1686 = 0.97 =
1687
1688 * INSTALLATION PROCEDURE: Some of the changes between 0.96 and 0.97
1689 require upgrades to the meta-data stored by FeedWordPress to work
1690 properly. Thus, if you are upgrading from 0.96 or earlier to 0.97, most
1691 FeedWordPress operations (including updates and template functions)
1692 WILL BE DISABLED until you run the upgrade procedure. Fortunately,
1693 running the upgrade procedure is easy: just go to either Options -->
1694 Syndication or Links --> Syndicated in the WordPress Dashboard and press
1695 the button.
1696
1697 * FEED FORMAT SUPPORT: Support has been added for the Atom 1.0 IETF
1698 standard. Several other elements are also newly supported
1699 (dcterms:created, dcterms:issued, dcterms:modified, dc:identifier,
1700 proper support for the RSS 2.0 guid element, the RSS 2.0 author element,
1701 the use of Atom author or Dublin Core dc:creator constructs at the feed
1702 level to identify the author of individual items, etc.)
1703
1704 N.B.: full support of several Atom 1.0 features, such as categories
1705 and enclosures, requires you to install the optional rss-functions.php
1706 upgrade in your wp-includes directory.
1707
1708 * BUG FIX: Running `update-feeds.php` from command line or crontab
1709 returned "I don't syndicate..." errors. It turns out that WordPress
1710 sometimes tramples on the internal PHP superglobals that I depended on
1711 to determine whether or not the script was being invoked from the
1712 command line. This has been fixed (the variables are now checked
1713 *before* WordPress can trample them). Note that `update-feeds.php` has
1714 been thoroughly overhauled anyway; see below for details.
1715
1716 * BUG FIX: Duplicate categories or author names. Fixed two bugs that could
1717 create duplicate author and/or category names when the name contained
1718 either (a) certain international characters (causing a mismatch between
1719 MySQL and PHP's handling of lowercasing text), or (b) characters that
1720 have a special meaning in regular expressions (causing MySQL errors when
1721 looking for the author or category due to regexp syntax errors). These
1722 should now be fixed thanks to careful escaping of names that go into
1723 regular expressions and careful matching of lowercasing functions
1724 (comparing results from PHP only to other results from PHP, and results
1725 from MySQL only to other results from MySQL).
1726
1727 * BUG FIX: Items dated December 31, 1969 should appear less often. The
1728 function for parsing W3C date-time format dates that ships with
1729 MagpieRSS can only correctly parse fully-specified dates with a
1730 fully-specified time, but valid W3C date-time format dates may omit the
1731 time, the day of the month, or even the month. Some feeds in the wild
1732 date their items with coarse-grained dates, so the optional
1733 `rss-functions.php` upgrade now includes a more flexible parse_w3cdtf()
1734 function that will work with both coarse-grained and fully-specified
1735 dates. (If parts of the date or the time are omitted, they are filled in
1736 with values based on the current time, so '2005-09-10' will be dated to
1737 the current time on that day; '2004' will be dated to this day and time
1738 one year ago.
1739
1740 N.B.: This fix is only available in the optional `rss-functions.php`
1741 upgrade.
1742
1743 * BUG FIX: Evil use of HTTP GET has been undone. The WordPress interface
1744 is riddled with inappropriate (non-idempotent) uses of HTTP GET queries
1745 (ordinary links that make the server do something with significant
1746 side-effects, such as deleting a post or a link from the database).
1747 FeedWordPress did some of this too, especially in places where it aped
1748 the WordPress interface (e.g. the "Delete" links in Links -->
1749 Syndicated). That's bad business, though. I've changed the interface so
1750 that all the examples of improper side-effects that I can find now
1751 require an HTTP POST to take effect. I think I got pretty much
1752 everything; if there's anything that I missed, let me know.
1753
1754 Further reading: [Sam Ruby 2005-05-06: This Stuff Matters](http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2005/05/06/This-Stuff-Matters)
1755
1756 * BUG FIX: Categories applied by `cats` setting should no longer prevent
1757 category-based filtering from working. In FeedWordPress, you can (1)
1758 apply certain categories to all syndicated posts, or all posts from
1759 a particular feed; and (2) filter out all posts that don't match one
1760 of the categories that are already in the WordPress database (allowing
1761 for simple category-based filtering; just load up WordPress with the
1762 categories you want to accept, and then tell FeedWordPress not to create
1763 new ones). However, the way that (1) and (2) were implemented meant that
1764 you couldn't effectively use them together; once you applied a known
1765 category to all syndicated posts from a particular feed, it meant that
1766 they'd have at least one familiar category (the category or categories
1767 you were applying), and that would get all posts past the filter no
1768 matter what categories they were originally from.
1769
1770 Well, no longer. You can still apply categories to all syndicated posts
1771 (using either Syndication --> Options, or the feed-level settings under
1772 Links --> Syndicated). But these categories are not applied to the post
1773 until *after* it has already passed by the "familiar categories" filter.
1774 So now, if you want, you can do category filtering and *then* apply as
1775 many categories as you please to all and only posts that pass the filter.
1776
1777 * BUG FIX: Other minor typos and HTML gaffes were fixed along the way.
1778
1779 * PERFORMANCE: get_feed_meta() no longer hits the database for information
1780 on every call; it now caches link data in memory, so FeedWordPress only
1781 goes to the database once for each syndicated link. This may
1782 substantially improve performance if your database server resources
1783 are tight and your templates make a lot of use of custom settings from
1784 get_feed_meta().
1785
1786 * API CHANGE: Link ID numbers, rather than RSS URIs, are now used to
1787 identify the feed from which a post is syndicated when you use template
1788 functions such as get_feed_meta(). The practical upshot of this is you
1789 can switch feeds, or change the feed address for a particular syndicated
1790 site, without breaking your templates for all the posts that were
1791 syndicated from the earlier URI.
1792
1793 * API CHANGE: if you have plugins or templates that make use of the
1794 get_feed_meta() function or the $fwp_feedmeta global, note that the
1795 data formerly located under the `uri` and `name` fields is now located
1796 under the `link/uri` field and the `link/name` field, respectively. Note
1797 also that you can access the link ID number for any given feed under the
1798 global $fwp_feedmeta['link/id'] (in plugins) or
1799 get_feed_meta('link/id') (in a template in post contexts).
1800
1801 * FEATURE: the settings for individual feeds can now be edited using a
1802 humane interface (where formerly you had to tweak key-value pairs in the
1803 Link Notes section). To edit settings for a feed, pick the feed that you
1804 want under Links --> Syndicated and click the Edit link.
1805
1806 * FEATURE: The "Unsubscribe" button (formerly "Delete") in Links -->
1807 Syndicated now offers three options for unsubscribing from a feed: (1)
1808 turning off the subscription without deleting the feed data or affecting
1809 posts that were syndicated from the feed (this works by setting the Link
1810 for the feed as "invisible"); (2) deleting the feed data and all of the
1811 posts that were syndicated from the feed; or (3) deleting the feed data
1812 and *keeping* the posts that were syndicated from the feed
1813 setting the Link to "Invisible" (meaning that it will not be displayed
1814 in lists of the site links on the front page, and it won't be checked
1815 for updates; (2) deleting the Link and all of the posts that were
1816 syndicated from its feed; or (3) deleting the feed data but keeping the
1817 posts that were syndicated (which will henceforward be treated as if
1818 they were local rather than syndicated posts). (Note that (1) is usually
1819 the best option for aggregator sites, unless you want to clean up the
1820 results of an error or a test.)
1821
1822 * FEATURE / BUG FIX: If you have been receiving mysterious "I don't
1823 syndicate...", or "(local) HTTP status code was not 200", or "(local)
1824 transport error - could not open socket", or "parse error - not well
1825 formed" errors, then this update may solve your problems, and if it does
1826 *not* solve them, it will at least make the reasons for the problems
1827 easier to understand. That's because I've overhauled the way that
1828 FeedWordPress goes about updating feeds.
1829
1830 If you use the command-line PHP scripting method to run scheduled
1831 updates, then not much should change for you, except for fewer
1832 mysterious errors. If you have done updates by sending periodic HTTP
1833 requests to <http://your-blog.com/path/wp-content/update-feeds.php>,
1834 then the details have changed somewhat; mostly in such a way as to make
1835 things easier on you. See the README file or online documentation on
1836 Staying Current for the details.
1837
1838 * FEATURE: FeedWordPress now features a more sophisticated system for
1839 timed updates. Instead of polling *every* subscribed feed for updates
1840 *each* time `update-feeds.php` is run, FeedWordPress now keeps track of
1841 the last time it polled each feed, and only polls them again after a
1842 certain period of time has passed. The amount of time is normally set
1843 randomly for each feed, in a period between 30 minutes and 2 hours (so
1844 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
1845 directly by the feed, which brings us to ...
1846
1847 * FEATURE: FeedWordPress now respects the settings in the `ttl` and
1848 Syndication Module RSS elements. Feeds with these elements set will not
1849 be polled any more frequently than they indicate with these feeds unless
1850 the user manually forces FeedWordPress to poll the feed (see Links -->
1851 Syndicated --> Edit settings).
1852
1853 = 0.96 =
1854
1855 * FEATURE: support has been added for enclosures in RSS 2.0 and Atom
1856 0.6+ newsfeeds. WordPress already supports adding enclosures to an
1857 item; FeedWordPress merely gets the information on the enclosure
1858 from the feed it is syndicating and plugs that information directly
1859 into the WordPress database so that (among other things) that post
1860 will have its enclosure listed in your blog's RSS 2 newsfeed.
1861
1862 Note that enclosure support requires using the optional MagpieRSS
1863 upgrade (i.e., replacing your `wp-includes/rss-functions.php` with
1864 `OPTIONAL/wp-includes/rss-functions.php` from the FWP archive)
1865
1866 * FEATURE: for completeness's sake, there is now a feed setting,
1867 `hardcode url`, that allows you to set the URI for the front page
1868 of a contributor's website manually (that is, prevent it from being
1869 automatically updated from the feed channel link on each update). To
1870 set the URI manually, put a line like this in the Link Notes section
1871 of a feed:
1872
1873 hardcode url: yes
1874
1875 You can also instruct FeedWordPress to use hardcoded URIs by default
1876 on all feeds using Options --> Syndication
1877
1878 * FEATURE: by default, when FeedWordPress finds new syndicated posts,
1879 it (1) publishes them immediately, (2) turns comments off, and (3)
1880 turns trackback / pingback pings off. You can now alter all three
1881 default behaviors (e.g., to allow pings on syndicated posts, or to
1882 send newly-syndicated posts to the draft pile for moderation) using
1883 Options --> Syndication
1884
1885
1886 = From 0.91 to 0.95 =
1887
1888 * BUG FIX: Fixed an obscure bug in the handling of categories: categories with trailing whitespace could cause categories with duplicate names to be created. This no longer happens. While I was at it I tightened up the operation of FeedWordPress::lookup_categories() a bit in general.
1889
1890 * FEATURE DEPRECATED: the feed setting `hardcode categories` is now deprecated in favor of `unknown categories` (see below), which allows you to strip off any syndication categories not already in your database using `unknown categories: default` or `unknown categories: filter`. If you have `hardcode categories: yes` set on a feed, this will be treated as `unknown categories: default` (i.e., no new categories will be added, but if a post doesn't match any of the categories it will be added in the default category--usually "Uncategorized" or "General").
1891
1892 * FEATURE: You can now set global defaults as to whether or not FeedWordPress will update the Link Name and Link Description settings for feeds automatically from the feed title and feed tagline. (By default, it does, as it has in past versions.) Whether this behavior is turned on or off, you can still override the default behavior using feed settings of `hardcode name: yes`, `hardcode name: no`, `hardcode description: yes`, or `hardcode description: no`.
1893
1894 * FEATURE: Users can now provide one or several "aliases" for an author, just as they can for a category. For example, to make FeedWordPress treat posts by "Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger" and "Pope Benedict XVI" as by the same author, edit the user profile for Pope Benedict XVI and add a line like this to the "User profile" field:
1895
1896 a.k.a.: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
1897
1898 You can add several aliases, each on a line by itself. You can also add any other text you like to the Profile without interfering with the aliases.
1899
1900 * FEATURE: Users can now choose how to handle syndicated posts that are in unfamiliar categories or by unfamiliar authors (i.e., categories or authors whose names are not yet in the WordPress database). By default, FeedWordPress will (as before) create a new category (or new author) and use it for the current post and any future posts. This behavior can be changed, either for all feeds or for one or another particular feed.
1901
1902 There are now three different options for an unfamiliar author: (1) FeedWordPress can create a new author account and attribute the syndicated post to the new account; (2) FeedWordPress can attribute the post to an author if the author's name is familiar, and to a default author (currently, this means the Site Administrator account) if it is not; (3) FeedWordPress can drop posts by unfamiliar authors and syndicate only posts by authors who are already in the database.
1903
1904 There are, similarly, two different options for an unfamiliar category: (1) FeedWordPress can create new categories and place the syndicated post in them; (2) FeedWordPress can drop the unfamiliar categories and place syndicated posts only in categories that it is already familiar with. In addition, FeedWordPress 0.95 lets you choose whether posts that are in *no* familiar categories should be syndicated (and placed in the default category for the blog) or simply dropped.
1905
1906 You can set the default behavior for both authors and categories using the settings in Options --> Syndication. You can also set different behavior for specific feeds by adding the `unfamiliar author` and / or `unfamiliar categories` settings to the Link Notes section of a feed:
1907
1908 unfamiliar author: (create|default|filter)
1909 unfamiliar categories: (create|default|filter)
1910
1911 A setting of `unfamiliar author: create` will make FeedWordPress create new authors to match unfamiliar author names *for this feed alone*. A setting of `unfamiliar author: default` will make it assign posts from unfamiliar authors to the default user account. A setting of `unfamiliar author: filter` will cause all posts (from this feed alone) to be dropped unless they are by an author already listed in the database. Similiarly, `unfamiliar categories: create` will make FeedWordPress create new categories to match unfamiliar category names *for this feed alone*; `unfamiliar categories: default` will cause it to drop any unfamiliar category names; and `unfamiliar categories: filter` will cause it to *both* drop any unfamiliar category names *and* to only syndicate posts that are placed in one or more familiar categories.
1912
1913 These two new features allow users to do some coarse-grained filtering without having to write a PHP filter. Specifically, they offer an easy way for you to filter feeds by category or by author. Suppose, for example, that you only wanted to syndicate posts that your contributors place in the "Llamas" category. You could do so by setting up your installation of WordPress so that the only category in the database is "Llamas," and then use Options --> Syndication to set "Unfamiliar categories" to "don't create new categories and don't syndicate posts unless they match at least one familiar category". Now, when you update, only posts in the "Llamas" category will be syndicated by FeedWordPress.
1914
1915 Similarly, if you wanted to filter one particular feed so that only posts by (for example) the author "Earl J. Llama" were syndicated to your site, you could do so by creating a user account for Earl J. Llama, then adding the following line to the settings for the feed in Link Notes:
1916
1917 unfamiliar author: filter
1918
1919 This will cause any posts from this feed that are not authored by Earl J. Llama to be discarded, and only the posts by Earl J. Llama will be syndicated. (If the setting is used on one specific feed, it will not affect how posts from other feeds are syndicated.)
1920
1921 == License ==
1922
1923 The FeedWordPress plugin is copyright © 2005-2017 by Charles Johnson. It uses code derived or translated from:
1924
1925 - [wp-rss-aggregate.php][] by [Kellan Elliot-McCrea](kellan@protest.net)
1926 - [SimplePie][] feed parser by Ryan Parman, Geoffrey Sneddon, Ryan McCue, et al.
1927 - [MagpieRSS][] feed parser by [Kellan Elliot-McCrea](kellan@protest.net)
1928 - [Ultra-Liberal Feed Finder][] by [Mark Pilgrim](mark@diveintomark.org)
1929 - [WordPress Blog Tool and Publishing Platform](http://wordpress.org/)
1930
1931 according to the terms of the [GNU General Public License][].
1932
1933 This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the [GNU General Public License][] as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
1934
1935 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
1936
1937 [wp-rss-aggregate.php]: http://laughingmeme.org/archives/002203.html
1938 [SimplePie]: http://www.simplepie.org/
1939 [MagpieRSS]: http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/
1940 [Ultra-Liberal Feed Finder]: http://diveintomark.org/projects/feed_finder/
1941 [GNU General Public License]: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
1942
1943