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FeedWordPress / 2022.0208
FeedWordPress v2022.0208
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feedwordpress / readme.txt

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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: 5.9
7 Stable tag: 2022.0208
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 = 2022.0204 =
69
70 * ADDITIONAL CODE CLEANUP: This version does some additional code clean-up to remove some obsolete methods of generating output, and to do a better job of sanitizing input and escaping output in the FeedWordPress administrative dashboard.
71
72 = 2022.0123 =
73
74 * IMPORTANT SECURITY FIX: This version includes an important fix for a security vulnerability reported to me through WPScan and WordPress support channels.
75
76 Vulnerability CVE-2021-25055 allowed for an XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) attack using a specially crafted URL for a page within the FeedWordPress admin interface. (To be exploited, an existing user with login credentials that allow them to access the FeedWordPress dashboard would have to follow the malicious URL and log in.) This vulnerability has been corrected in the current version; to protect your site's security PLEASE BE SURE TO UPGRADE AS SOON AS POSSIBLE to version 2022.0123 or later, via the WordPress Plugin Repository or via Github.
77
78 * BUG FIXES: Fixes a number of small possible bugs when creating new syndicated posts under unusual conditions -- a sanity check is built in to avoid infinite loops in case of certain unexpected error outcomes when creating new users; some more possible sources of PHP 8 "Countable" warnings are eliminated, etc.
79
80 = 2021.0713 =
81
82 * WORDPRESS 5.6, 5.7.x COMPATIBILITY FIXES. This release introduces fixes to annoying or worse warnings resulting from
83 the deprecation of WordPress's built-in WP_Feed_Cache class. This should resolve the problem if you are encountering
84 annoying, worrying, or breaking problems related to the PHP warnings: "Deprecated: class-wp-feed-cache.php is
85 <strong>deprecated</strong> since version 5.6.0", and/or "Message: ./cache is not writable. Make sure you've set the
86 correct relative or absolute path, and that the location is server-writable."
87
88 * Fixes PHP warning for "count(): Parameter must be an array or an object that implements Countable in
89 .../wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress/feedwordpress.php on line 1566"
90
91 * Miscellaneous fixes for other missing variable and global warnings.
92
93 * Code cleanup and reorganization to allow better modularization of error messages, warning dialogs, and extended text.
94
95 = 2020.0818 =
96
97 * WORDPRESS 5.5 COMPATIBILITY FIXES, RESOLVES WARNING NOTICES OR WP-ADMIN LOCKOUT. WordPress 5.5 incorporated a newer release of SimplePie, version 1.5.5, which is pretty rad, but FeedWordPress classes that relied on SimplePie 1.3.1's method signatures would then produce PHP warning notices. That should be pretty innocuous, but depending on web server configurations, some users could get locked out of their own wp-admin interface by the display of error notices in the browser at inopportune times. In any case, I have added code to switch between backward-compatible modules for SimplePie 1.3.1 or updated modules compatible with SimplePie 1.5.5, based on the version available in your WordPress installation; so these notices and their untoward effects should be eliminated.
98
99 * PHP 7.4 COMPATIBILITY FIX: Magic quotes were deprecated and then removed back in PHP 5.x, and in PHP 7.4 the vestigial `get_magic_quotes_gpc()` function has been deprecated. We don't need to worry about it anymore for versions of PHP still supported by WordPress. The reference to the function in the MyPHP utility class caused PHP warnings in more recent versions of PHP; so it has now been removed.
100
101 * DIVERS BUG FIXES AND PHP WARNING NOTICES RESOLVED, thanks to @oppiansteve's fixes and pull requests. (Thanks!)
102
103 * JQUERY COMPATIBILITY FIXES, RESOLVES MYSTERIOUS VANISHING FEED SELECTOR IN WP-ADMIN. An upgrade to WordPress's packaged jQuery caused the drop-down box for feed settings (in Syndication > Feeds & Updates, Syndication > Posts & Links, etc.) to vanish shortly after pageload. That was awkward, so I disabled the now-incompatible interface chrome that was causing it to vanish.
104
105 = 2020.0118 =
106
107 * WORDPRESS COMPATIBILITY TESTING. It's been some time since a public release of FeedWordPress; so I have tested the plugin functionality with recent versions of WordPress and incorporated a number of PHP 7-compatibility related tweaks.
108
109 * FEED PARSING FAULT TOLERANCE. If FeedWordPress fails to parse a feed using normal XML functions, it will attempt to convert any named entities that may be causing a problem, and then try to parse again. Props to @inanimatt for utility functions that help make the code go.
110
111 * PAUSING UPDATES. In Syndication > Feeds & Updates, you can now instruct FeedWordPress to temporarily pause or resume updating feeds -- whatever update method you are using, you can put new updates on hold for a while so that you can fiddle with setings, run tests, or do whatever you need to do before allowing updates to resume.
112
113 * CODE MODERNIZATION, PHP 7.x COMPATIBILITY AND CLEANUP AND REORGANIZATION. I have been dusting out nooks and crannies in the code and hiving more functionality off into discrete modules. A number of FeedWordPress users have also offered pull requests to eliminate bothersome PHP notices and warnings related to PHP 7.x compatibility -- in particular removing uses of deprecated `each()` functions, and avoiding use of `count()` on null values -- which I have rolled into the main branch release. Props to @manzoorwanijk, @tristanleboss, @martinburchell and @oppiansteve
114
115 = 2017.1020 =
116
117 * 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.
118
119 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:
120
121 <?php if (is_syndicated()) : ?>
122 <p class="byline">This post by <?php the_author(); ?> originally
123 appeared at <a href="<?php the_syndication_source_link(); ?>"><?php
124 the_syndication_source(); ?></a>.</p>
125 <?php else : ?>
126 <p class="byline">By <?php the_author(); ?>.</p>
127 <?php endif; ?>
128
129 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!
130
131 * 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.
132
133 = 2017.0913 =
134
135 * 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:
136
137 http://www.example.com/?guid=c1cd28da39e8d7babcf6499983aca545
138 https://www.example.com/?guid=c1cd28da39e8d7babcf6499983aca545
139
140 ... 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.
141
142 * 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.
143
144 * 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.
145
146 = 2016.1213 =
147
148 * 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.
149
150 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.
151
152 = 2016.1211 =
153
154 * WORDPRESS COMPATIBILITY: Tested with new versions of WordPress up to 4.7.
155
156 * PHP WARNINGS UNDER WP 4.7: Eliminated cause of a PHP warning under WP 4.7 "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.
157
158 * 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.
159
160 * 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.
161
162 = 2016.0420 =
163
164 * WORDPRESS COMPATIBILITY: Tested with new versions of WordPress up to 4.5.
165
166 * 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.
167
168 * 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>.
169
170 * BUGFIX: Syndication > Diagnostics HTTP diagnostic test widget was broken due to a dumb error on my part. Now fixed.
171
172 * SMALL CODING CHANGES: Lots of small changes to code organization, incorporation of some PHP 5.x coding conventions, etc.
173
174 = 2015.0514 =
175
176 * IMPORTANT SECURITY UPDATE: This version includes two important fixes for potential security vulnerabilities reported to me through support channels.
177
178 The first is a common problem across several plugins due to an ambiguity in 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
179
180 The second 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.
181
182 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.
183
184 * 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>
185
186 * 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.
187
188 = 2014.0805 =
189
190 * FILTERS AND ADD-ONS: A number of new hooks for filters and add-ons to further customize the behavior of FWP have been added.
191
192 * 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.
193
194 * BUGFIX: A bug preventing FWP from saving categories assigned under Syndication > Categories & Tags has been fixed.
195
196 * 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.
197
198 * BUGFIX: A bug in the admin UI that caused the "Alternative Feeds" / "Find Feeds" box to throw a permissions error has been fixed.
199
200 * BUGFIX: A bug preventing proper mapping of categories and other terms in 2013.0504 has been fixed.
201
202 * 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.
203
204 = 2013.0504 =
205
206 * BUGFIX: PHP 5.4 compatibility -- includes some more extensive fixes to compatibility issues with PHP 5.4's handling of global variables
207
208 * DIAGNOSTICS: New diagnostics settings added to help track behavior of terms (categories, post tags, etc.) for syndicated posts.
209
210 = 2012.0504 =
211
212 * 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.
213
214 = 2012.0503 =
215
216 * BUGFIX: Works properly again with WordPress installations that use a MySQL table name prefix other than the default `wp_` prefix.
217
218 * 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.
219
220 * 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)
221
222 * ADMIN UI: Adds an AJAXy Test Expression button to allow live testing of sample results from expressions in Custom Post Settings.
223
224 = 2012.1218 =
225
226 * 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.
227
228 * BUG FIX: PERMALINKS REWRITTEN FOR CUSTOM POST TYPES AS WELL AS NORMAL
229 WORDPRESS POSTS. If you had WordPress set up to syndicate incoming posts
230 to a custom post type (under Syndication > Posts & Links), and asked
231 FeedWordPress to make "permalinks point to the original site", then
232 previous versions of FeedWordPress would fail to do the rewriting --
233 permalinks would only be rewritten to point to the original source for
234 normal WordPress posts, not for custom post types. In 2012.1218 this bug
235 has been fixed: all post types will now have permalinks rewritten unless
236 you request for permalinks to point to the local copy on your aggregator
237 site.
238
239 * BUG FIX: ELIMINATES "PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function
240 setting() on a non-object...." Some changes to the in-memory caching of
241 information about feed subscriptions could result in a fatal PHP error
242 in cases where you have de-activated one of your subscriptions, but
243 posts from that subscription were still in the archive. This would
244 normally show up through half-completed feeds or half-completed pages
245 that suddenly broke off in the middle, and displayed or logged an error
246 message like: "PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function setting() on a
247 non-object in {...}/wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress/feedwordpress.php
248 on line 615". This bug has been eliminated, so affected feeds and pages
249 should now render correctly, and the error message should no longer
250 appear.
251
252 * BUG FIX: CATEGORY BOXES IN SYNDICATION > CATEGORIES & TAGS. Some minor
253 bugs in the appearance and animation of category checkboxes (for
254 example, the checkbox used to select categories for syndicated posts on
255 the Syndication > Categories & Tags settings page) have been fixed.
256
257 = 2012.1212 =
258
259 * WORDPRESS 3.5 COMPATIBILITY: This release has been tested for compatibility
260 with new releases of WordPress, up to version 3.5, and any documented
261 compatibility issues have been cleared -- in particular, if you were seeing
262 error pages stating that you don't have permission to access the
263 FeedWordPress Syndication page within the WordPress admin interface, then
264 upgrading to this release should fix the problem.
265
266 As always, if you encounter any compatibility problems after upgrading your
267 version of WordPress and your version of FeedWordPress to the most recent
268 versions, please contact me with as detailed a description as possible of
269 the issue you are encountering, the circumstances you're encountering it
270 under, what you expect to see happening, and what is happening instead.
271
272 * PHP 5.4 COMPATIBILITY: This release has been audited to fix potential
273 problems with deprecation notices or fatal errors under recent versions
274 of PHP. In particular, all uses of run-time pass-by-reference have been
275 eliminated from the code; if you were seeing a fatal error reading
276 "Call-time pass-by-reference has been removed ..." then upgrading to
277 this release should fix the problem.
278
279 * CUSTOMIZATION FRAMEWORK: A great deal of work has been done to make the
280 underlying framework more flexible, so that PHP add-ons can be written
281 to adapt FeedWordPress to handle custom XML vocabularies, expiration of
282 posts under specified conditions, and other custom behavior.
283
284 * BUGFIX: MANUALLY EDITED POST SLUGS NOT OVERWRITTEN. Thanks to a report
285 by Chris Fritz, I've identified some code that causes post slugs for the
286 posts generated by FWP to be rewritten with every update, even if the
287 user has manually updated the slug from within the WordPress editing
288 interface. This has been fixed: FWP will continue to generate new slugs
289 for syndicated posts, but when syndicated posts are updated, they will
290 retain the slug that they had at the time of the update; any manual
291 changes to the post slug should be preserved.
292
293 * USER-AGENT STRING: FeedWordPress now sends a distinctive User-Agent
294 string identifying itself, and noting that it is a feed aggregator.
295
296 * MISCELLANEOUS PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS: A number of changes have been
297 made to try to reduce the intensity and expense in terms of both
298 database performance and web server memory consumption.
299
300 * DIAGNOSTICS IMPROVEMENTS: A number of new and improved diagnostics have
301 been added which should aid in understanding and troubleshooting issues
302 that may arise.
303
304 = 2011.1019 =
305
306 * BUGFIX: "THERE ARE NO HTTP TRANSPORTS AVAILABLE" ERROR FIXED: The initial
307 support for HTTP Basic and Digest authentication in version 2011.1018
308 contained a bug that could cause HTTP requests for feeds or for other
309 WordPress resources to break down if you do not have the PHP curl module
310 installed. This bug has been fixed, and these errors should no longer
311 appear.
312
313 * IMPROVED HTTP AUTHENTICATION SUPPORT: In addition, the HTTP Authentication
314 support in FeedWordPress has been extended, to ensure that Basic
315 authentication is available in many web host configurations, and to allow
316 you to add a username and password for a feed immediately when you
317 subscribe to it.
318
319 = 2011.1018 =
320
321 * HTTP BASIC AND DIGEST AUTHENTICATION SUPPORT: FeedWordPress now offers
322 improved support for syndicating feeds that make use of HTTP Basic or HTTP
323 Digest authentication methods. In order to set up authentication on one of
324 your feeds, just go to its Settings > Feed page, and click on the "Uses
325 Username/Password" link underneath the Feed URL. Enter the username and
326 password for accessing the feed, then select the authentication method. (If
327 you're not sure which method your feed provider uses, try Basic first.)
328 Save Changes, and syndicate away.
329
330 NOTE: HTTP Digest support requires the curl module for PHP. If you are not
331 sure whether this module has been installed, contact your web hosting
332 provider to check.
333
334 * WP 3.3 (BETA) COMPATIBILITY: This version fixes an init-sequence bug that
335 could cause intrusive warning messages or fatal errors in WP 3.3 beta
336 versions.
337
338 * BUGFIX: FIXES LONG DELAYS IN UPDATES SCHEDULES IN LARGE INSTALLATIONS. A
339 performance feature introduced in version 2011.0721 had some flaws in its
340 implementation, which tended to create serious delays (on the order of
341 several hours) in FeedWordPress's attempts to schedule updates for feeds,
342 when users had a very large number of feeds (several dozen or more) in their
343 FeedWordPress installation. This feature has been reconfigured to adjust
344 dynamically to the number of feeds in Syndicated Sources and the frequency
345 with which they are updated. If you've seen a lot of ready-to-update feeds
346 piling up, several hours after they were supposed to get updated, then this
347 upgrade should better ensure that your feeds get updated in a timely fashion.
348
349 * BUGFIX: syndicated_item_guid FILTERS FIXED. Previous versions of
350 FeedWordPress theoretically allowed for filters on the syndicated_item_guid
351 hook, which was intended to filter the globally-unique identifier element
352 (rss:guid or atom:id) -- useful if you need to convince FeedWordPress to use
353 different guids, or to recognize two or more incoming posts as versions of
354 the same post rather than as distinct items. However, while the hook
355 affected the guid stored in the WordPress database, it did not affect the
356 guid used to check whether an incoming feed item had already been syndicated
357 or was a new item -- which greatly limited the practical usefulness of the
358 filter. This bug has been fixed: syndicated_item_guid filters should now
359 properly control not only the final database record, but also the initial
360 uniqueness test applied to posts.
361
362 = 2011.0721 =
363
364 * BUGFIX: SERIOUS BUG CAUSING RARE UNEXPECTED DELETION OF PAGES AND OTHER
365 CONTENT. A bug in the guid-checking code for some rare kinds of guids could
366 cause content in the wp_posts table to seemingly disappear at random after
367 FeedWordPress updates.This most frequently but not exclusively affected
368 static pages. What actually happened is that in these rare cases the
369 existing static page was mistaken for an older version of the new incoming
370 syndicated post, which was then stored as a new revision of the original
371 page. The bug that caused these mistaken identities has been fixed.
372
373 * BUGFIX: UNWANTED AUTOMATIC PAGE-LOAD-BASED UPDATES NO LONGER A NUISANCE.
374 Some users encountered a bug in which FeedWordPress would adopt an automatic
375 page-load-based update method, even if they had requested that it not do
376 so, and that it use a manual or cron job update method instead. The bug
377 causing this has been fixed, and page-load-based updates should no longer
378 trigger unless explicitly turned on.
379
380 * WP 3.2 USER INTERFACE COMPATIBILITY: POST TAGS BOX NOW WORKS AGAIN. The
381 release of WordPress 3.2 caused a breakage in the tags box which prevented
382 you from adding or removing tags under Syndication --> Categories & Tags.
383 (The breakage was the result of an incompatibility introduced by the new
384 release of jQuery.) This breakage has now been fixed, and the tags box
385 should work correctly again.
386
387 * FEED UPDATE SCHEDULING IMPROVEMENTS: UI. The Syndicated Sources table now
388 provides considerably more data to understand update scheduling, when
389 specific scheduling decisions are made because of, e.g., requests from the
390 feed producer.
391
392 * FEED UPDATE SCHEDULING IMPROVEMENTS: ENFORCEABLE "MINIMUM INTERVAL" SETTING
393 TO SPACE OUT UPDATES. Some feeds request specific update schedules, using
394 standard elements such as sy:updateFrequency and rss:ttl. Normally,
395 FeedWordPress respects any scheduling requests that a feed makes -- if it
396 requests a longer gap between polls than what FWP would normally adopt, then
397 FWP slows down to meet the request. If it indicates a shorter gap than what
398 FWP would normally adopt, FWP speeds up and checks that feed for updates
399 more often than it normally would. Now, there should not be any way for user
400 settings to override an explicit slow-down request from the feed producer --
401 if producers indicate a particular update schedule, then polling the feed
402 more frequently than they request is considered abusive behavior. But
403 there's no reason why users should not be able -- if they so desire -- to
404 override speed-up requests, and poll a feed *less* frequently than the
405 indicated update schedule, if the FWP user wants to space update checkins
406 over a longer interval of time. Before, they could not do this: FWP always
407 sped up to meet the indicated update schedule. Now, they can do this, by
408 using the new "Minimum Interval" setting in Syndication --> Feeds &
409 Updates..
410
411 = 2011.0706 =
412
413 * WP 3.2 COMPATIBILITY: ELIMINATES FATAL ERROR "Call to undefined method
414 WP_SimplePie_File::WP_SimplePie_File() in
415 [...]/wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress/feedwordpress.php on line 1841." The
416 latest release of WordPress, version 3.2, has shifted the minimum
417 requirements up to PHP 5.2, and in line with the shift to PHP5 they have
418 rewritten a number of code segments that made use of now-obsolete PHP4
419 idioms. Unfortunately, this caused a fatal error whenever FeedWordPress
420 attempted to make use of the cache, since FWP's caching plugin was written
421 to match the older idiom. FeedWordPress has been updated to follow the new,
422 PHP5 idiom when possible, thus eliminating the fatal error.
423
424 * PERFORMANCE: The handling of queries to determine whether posts had been
425 previously syndicated produced some very slow queries (usually, but not
426 always, involving a scan over the MD5(post_guid) column of the table). The
427 code that prepares MySQL queries for previously-syndicated checks has been
428 revised to eliminate the MD5(post_guid) scan entirely, and to significantly
429 improve performance by eliminating other unnecessary clauses.
430
431 * BUGFIX: NO LONGER DESTROYS STICKY POSTS. Previous versions could destroy
432 (or, more precisely, replace the content of) sticky posts due to some
433 queries mashed together in unexpected ways by WordPress. Version 2011.0706
434 accounts for and eliminates the problem; your sticky posts should be safe
435 once again.
436
437 * BUGFIX: GUIDS CONTAINING MYSQL-ESCAPED CHARACTERS NO LONGER CAUSE DUPLICATE
438 POSTS TO APPEAR. One remaining source of duplicate post issues in 2011.0602
439 was guids that contained characters that needed to be escaped for MySQL,
440 such as single quotes and double quotes. The work-around for handling
441 filtered URIs has now been corrected to ensure that these do not cause
442 duplicate posts.
443
444 = 2011.0602 =
445
446 * WP 3.1.3 COMPAT / BUGFIX: WHITESPACE IN GUIDS NO LONGER PRODUCES DUPLICATE
447 POSTS. The work-around for handling filtered URIs in guid elements has now
448 been extended to handle URIs that were filtered because of leading or
449 trailing whitespace, in addition to URIs that were filtered because of
450 unapproved schemes.
451
452 * WP 3.1.3 COMPAT / BUGFIX: RELATIVE URLS IN GUIDS NO LONGER PRODUCE DUPLICATE
453 POSTS. The work-around for handling filtered URIs in guid elements has now
454 been extended to handle URIs that were altered without being filtered out
455 entirely (most commonly because a scheme was added to a relative URL).
456
457 * BUGFIX: UPDATES TO POST NO LONGER CAUSE DUPLICATE DRAFT VERSION TO APPEAR.
458 Under certain conditions in 2011.0531, an update to an existing post would
459 not be properly applied to the post itself, but rather would appear as a
460 duplicate post with Draft status. This bug has been eliminated, and updates
461 will now be properly inserted as revisions to the existing post.
462
463 = 2011.0531 =
464
465 * WORDPRESS 3.1.3 COMPATIBILITY: DUPLICATE POSTS ISSUE FIXED. Due to
466 internal changes in the way that WordPress handles post guids in the
467 most recent release (3.1.3), many users experienced problems with many
468 duplicate posts appearing in rapid succession. (Specifically, this would
469 happen with any posts using tag: URL guids -- such as all the posts
470 coming from Blogger feeds or feeds from other Google services.) This
471 compatibility release of FeedWordPress eliminates the issue by working
472 around the new restrictions on tag: URLs.
473
474 * NEW AND IMPROVED DIAGNOSTICS: Syndication --> Diagnostics now contains some
475 new diagnostics settings useful for debugging problems with duplicate posts
476 (allowing you to easily view the guid of posts in the WordPress posts
477 database and allowing you to track the SQL used to check for existing
478 versions of a syndicated post).
479
480 = 2011.0512 =
481
482 * DIAGNOSTICS IMPROVEMENTS; "THERE MAY BE A BUG IN FEEDWORDPRESS" CRITICAL
483 ERROR NOTICES ELIMINATED: This version includes some major improvements
484 to the Syndication --> Diagnostics section, which should aid in
485 troubleshooting difficulties with items failing to be imported, posts
486 failing to be properly inserted into the database, or updates failing to
487 be recorded. If you have been encountering critical error / bug notices
488 with a white screen and the message "THERE MAY BE A BUG IN
489 FEEDWORDPRESS," followed by an extraordinarily long dump of mostly
490 incomprehensible diagnostic information, you'll be happy to know that
491 the condition causing these notices has been eliminated. In the few
492 cases where errors may still crop up with database insertions,
493 FeedWordPress will now produce a significantly more manageable and more
494 useful diagnostic message.
495
496 * BUGFIX: NEW POSTS FAILING TO APPEAR IN A CLEANLY-INSTALLED FEEDWORDPRESS
497 SYSTEM. If you encountered a recurring problem with FeedWordPress
498 failing to import new posts, after a clean install of FeedWordPress
499 (i.e., not an upgrade from a previous version), this problem may have
500 been the result of a bug with author-handling which has now been fixed
501 in the 2011.0512 release. (If the problem does *not* go away with the
502 upgrade, this version also includes significant improvements to the
503 Diagnostics system, which will help track down what *is* causing it
504 in your particular case.)
505
506 * PERFORMANCE: New handling of update hashes allows FeedWordPress to avoid
507 a certain kind of infinite loop, caused when two more more different
508 syndicated feeds each carried a version of the same item (for example,
509 because it appeared on two different aggregator feeds that you're
510 syndicating). In previous versions, when this kind of loop cropped up,
511 syndicated posts could pile up an indefinitely large number of revisions
512 -- each revision alternating between the version from each of the two
513 feeds where it appeared -- which would, over time, dramatically inflate
514 the size of the database, and kill the performance of queries on the
515 post table. This issue has been resolved: revisions of the post that
516 have been syndicated once will not be re-syndicated over and over again.
517
518 * AUTHOR LISTS: Lists of authors presented on the Author settings pages
519 should now be easier to scan through, with author names arranged in
520 alphabetical order.
521
522 * FEED ITEM DATE PARSING: More tweaks to make date-time handling more
523 resilient when feeds provide broken or weird values for the timestamps
524 on syndicated items. FWP will now attempt to work around unparseable
525 timezone values.
526
527 * AUTHOR MATCHING: Now attempts to match author names against the WP login
528 name in addition to display_name; when creating user record, also fills
529 in some best-guess values for nickname, firstname and lastname. Also
530 properly picks up Atom 1.0 author/uri data from feed.
531
532 * COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress has been successfully tested for
533 compatibility with recent releases of WordPress, up to version 3.1.2.
534
535 = 2011.0211 =
536
537 * BUGFIX: DUPLICATE POSTS WHEN GUIDS ARE TOO LONG: When feeds included
538 exceptionally long GUIDs, FeedWordPress could occasionally get into
539 a situation where posts with the long GUIDs would be duplicated over
540 and over again with each update (because FWP failed to store the full
541 GUID, due to length constraints in the relevant database tables).
542 Without the full GUID, FWP would not know that the post had already
543 been syndicated once. This bug has been fixed, and should no longer
544 produce duplicate posts.
545
546 * HTTP TIMEOUT SETTING: If you are frequently running into timeout
547 problems with one or more of the feeds you syndicate, FWP now allows you
548 to adjust the timeout for HTTP requests using a global or feed-by-feed
549 setting.
550
551 * HTTP GET PARAMETERS: You can now temporarily or permanently add HTTP
552 GET parameters to a subscription using an interface in Syndication -->
553 Feeds & Updates. This is especially helpful for making quick, short-term
554 changes to a subscription (for example, to pull in all the previous
555 items from a web service, before settling down to pulling in only newly
556 updated items).
557
558 * DIAGNOSTICS SYSTEM: Added several new diagnostics which are useful in
559 troubleshooting, and established a framework for add-on modules to hook
560 in with their own diagnostic messages.
561
562 * UI: Adjusted some internal coding, which should allow for settings
563 pages and add-ons to properly display multiple category pickers on a
564 single settings page.
565
566 * PHP4 COMPATIBILITY TWEAKS: This version makes some tweaks to the handling
567 of object references which should improve compatibility with older
568 versions of PHP. (Although, I should note, web hosts that still force
569 you to run under PHP 4 -- in 2011! -- are *bad web hosts*.)
570
571 * IMPROVED PERFORMANCE: This version eliminates a *major* performance drag
572 that shows up on sites with large numbers of users (due to some poor
573 decisions about where to place a user query, which caused the user table
574 to be scanned frequently when it did not need to be). If you experienced
575 serious problems with CPU load or slow database performance under
576 2010.0905, which kicked in immediately when FWP was loaded and tended
577 to disappear immediately if FWP was de-activated, it is likely that
578 upgrading away from 2010.0905 to the most recent version will resolve
579 your problem.
580
581
582 = 2010.0905 =
583
584 * BUGFIX: CATEGORIES AND TAGS CORRECTLY ASSIGNED IN AUTOMATIC UPDATES.
585 Version 2010.0903 switched over to a new way of assigning categories and
586 tags as part of its support for handling custom taxonomies.
587 Unfortunately, the method that it uses is subjected to some checks of
588 the current user's capabilities, which creates problems for posts that
589 are being inserted into the WordPress database when there *is* no
590 current user logged in (as, for example, when an update is being carried
591 out from a cron job or automatic update). The result was that posts
592 from cron jobs and automatic updates ended up with no Categories and no
593 Tags being assigned. This bug has now been fixed: in 2010.0905, Tags and
594 Categories should be correctly assigned to all posts, regardless of
595 whether they were added from manual updates, cron jobs, or automatic
596 updates.
597
598 = 2010.0903 =
599
600 * WORDPRESS 3 REQUIRED: Please note that this release of FeedWordPress
601 *requires* WordPress 3.0 or later. If you are currently using a 2.x
602 branch of WordPress, you will need to upgrade to WordPress 3 before you
603 can successfully upgrade FeedWordPress.
604
605 * BUGFIX: NO MORE DISAPPEARING "SYNDICATED SOURCES" PANEL; INTERNET
606 EXPLORER UI GLITCH APPARENTLY FIXED: Several users independently
607 reported a problem with FWP 2010.0623 and various versions of IE. A
608 problem with the HTML markup caused IE (but not Firefox or
609 Chrome) to completely hide the Syndicated Sources administration panel
610 (the main list of currently-syndicated sources, and the main location
611 for adding new sources, under the Syndication menu item) when a user
612 added their first syndicated feed. Maddeningly, the glitch seemed to
613 affect some IE users and not others: I was never able to reproduce the
614 problem for myself on my own machines. However, the markup of Syndicated
615 Sources has undergone significant changes and corrections since
616 2010.0623, and two independent sources who had been having this problem
617 confirm that they no longer encounter it with the updated version. For
618 the time being, I am going to declare this bug squashed.
619
620 * BUGFIX: MORE PROTECTION AGAINST FATAL ERRORS FROM PLUGGABLE VERSIONS OF
621 SimplePie: FeedWordPress now takes some precautions that should help to
622 better avoid conflicts for users who have installed pluggable versions
623 of SimplePie for another plugin or theme. (You may not know that you have
624 done this; but if you've been encountering fatal errors indicating that
625 you cannot redeclare class SimplePie, or something along those lines,
626 there is now a better chance that those fatal errors will be eliminated.
627
628 * PERFORMANCE: SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCED MEMORY CONSUMPTION FOR LARGE UPDATES:
629 FeedWordPress is still a memory-hungry little module, especially when
630 you are dealing with very large feeds. However, users should notice a
631 significant reduction in memory overloads, especially if they update a
632 large number of feeds at once.
633
634 * USER INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: Nothing is radically different, but there's
635 been a fair amount of extra spit and polish added, including a convenient
636 new Dashboard widget that may save you a trip to the Syndication menu,
637 a lot of effort to make the relationship between global and feed-by-feed
638 settings more obvious to the user and more easily controllable, to make
639 navigation between settings pages easier, to sand off a few rough edges,
640 and to make other improvements on the margins. I hope you'll like how
641 it looks.
642
643 * ADDING MULTIPLE FEEDS: FeedWordPress now provides a convenient mode for
644 adding multiple feeds at once, using either a copy-and-pasted list, or
645 else an OPML file. Go to Syndication --> Syndicated Sources and check
646 out the two new buttons underneath the New Source input box. When you
647 have to add a number of feeds at once, this can save you considerable
648 time and trouble.
649
650 * IMPROVED HANDLING OF AUTHORS WITH DUPLICATE E-MAIL ADDRESS AND AUTHORS
651 WITH NAMES WRITTEN IN FOREIGN SCRIPTS: WordPress 3 is increasingly picky
652 about what it will accept for new author accounts, and some of the
653 conditions it imposes can cause error conditions that prevent posts from
654 being properly syndicated, or properly attributed, if authors happen to
655 have identical e-mail addresses, or if users are given usernames that are
656 written in non-Western scripts. FeedWordPress now handles these much
657 better, and systematically works to avoid clashes between syndicated
658 authors' account names or in their e-mail addresses, which should result
659 in significantly better results in mapping author names to WordPress
660 user accounts.
661
662 * MAPPING CATEGORIES ON SYNDICATED POSTS TO TAGS NOW BETTER SUPPORTED:
663 In previous versions, the only way for the Categories provided by a
664 syndicated feed to be mapped into Post Tags was to instruct FWP to
665 create new tags, rather than new categories, for unfamiliar categories
666 from the feed. This works fine if you want tags to be the default; but
667 if you want only a *specific* set of tags, there was no way to get them
668 without getting most or all other categories imported as tags. You can
669 now do this by creating a tag (under Posts ==> Post Tags) before
670 importing the post; when the syndicated category matches a pre-existing
671 tag, the incoming post will be tagged with that tag, without creating
672 a local Post Category.
673
674 * REL-TAG MICROFORMAT SUPPORT FOR INLINE TAGS: Syndicated posts that
675 contain inline tags, marked up using the Rel-Tag microformat
676 <http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag>, are now tagged with the tags
677 provided by Rel-Tag format links.
678
679 * MUCH GREATER CONTROL OVER CATEGORY AND TAG MAPPING: This is partly the
680 result of building in support for a potentially endless set of custom
681 taxonomies (see below), but in general there has been a great deal of
682 effort towards giving you more control over how categories and tags
683 provided by the feed are mapped into terms on the local blog. In
684 particular, you can now force FeedWordPress to create only categories
685 from categories and tags provided by the feed; or to create only tags;
686 or to search both categories and tags for a match; or you can simply
687 force it to drop all of the categories provided by the feed and use
688 only categories or tags that you explicitly provide. In addition, you
689 can now also choose whether to override global categories settings with
690 a local, feed-specific setting; or whether to *add together* *both* the
691 global categories and the local feed-specific categories -- depending
692 on whatever your use-case may demand.
693
694 * CUSTOM POST TYPES AND TAXONOMY SUPPORTS: This is mainly for the
695 super-geeky, but if you use other plugins or themes that make
696 significant use of WordPress's support for custom post types and custom
697 taxonomies, you may be pleased to find that FeedWordPress now allows you
698 to feed incoming posts into any custom feed type that you wish, and to
699 map categories and tags from the feed to custom taxonomies as well as
700 to the standard Category and Tag taxonomies.
701
702 * STORING NAMESPACED CUSTOM FEED ELEMENTS IN POST CUSTOM FIELDS: If you
703 would like to use FeedWordPress's support for storing custom meta-data
704 from feed elements in the custom fields for a post (for example, to
705 store geolocation data or iTunes media meta-data), you'll find that it's
706 now much easier for you to access these namespaced elements. You always
707 could access them, but in previous versions you might have to write
708 something ugly like $(/{http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#}lat)
709 just to get at the value of a `<geo:lat>` tag. Now, as long as you use
710 the same mnemonic codes that the feed producer used, you should always
711 be able to write a nice, simple expression like $(/geo:lat) to get the
712 value of a <geo:lat> tag.
713
714 * CUSTOM DIRECTORY STRUCTURE SUPPORT: if you poke at it enough, WordPress
715 is relatively flexible about where it should store admin interface code,
716 uploaded content, plugins, and a number of other things that occupy an
717 important place in the WordPress directory structure. Previous versions
718 of FeedWordPress encountered serious errors or broke entirely when used
719 with directory structures other than the default. This should now be
720 fixed: FWP now supports custom directory structures wherever WordPress
721 allows them to be customized, rather than depending on the default
722 locations. Enjoy your freedom!
723
724 * MANY NEW FILTERS AND API UTILITY FUNCTIONS FOR ADD-ON PROGRAMMERS: There
725 have been too many improvements to list them all in this ChangeLog, but
726 it means that much more power and ease for folks who are customizing
727 FeedWordPress through PHP filters or add-on modules. Fuller
728 documentation will be put up at the Wiki at feedwordpress.radgeek.org
729 soon.
730
731 = 2010.0623 =
732
733 * WORDPRESS 3.0 COMPATIBILITY / AUTHOR MAPPING INTERFACE ISSUES: I
734 resolved a couple of outstanding issues with the author mapping
735 interface (Syndication --> Authors), which were preventing new users
736 from being created correctly and author mapping rules from being set up
737 correctly. These partly had to do with new restrictions on user account
738 creation introduced in WordPress 3.0; anyway, they should now be fixed.
739
740 * MORE EFFICIENT SYNDICATED URL LOOKUPS: Several users noticed that the
741 bug fix introduced in 2010.0528 for compatibility with post-listing
742 plugins caused a lot more queries to the database in order to look up
743 numerical post IDs from the URL provided to the filter. This shouldn't
744 cause any major problems, but it is not as efficient as it could be; the
745 code now takes advantage of a more efficient way of doing things,
746 which usually will not require any additional database queries.
747
748 * SIMPLEPIE FEED UPDATE ISSUES: If you have been having significant
749 problems with getting feeds to update correctly, this may be the result
750 of some bugs in the implementation of SimplePie caching that ships with
751 WordPress (as of version 3.0). (You would most commonly experience this
752 error if you continually saw errors such as "No feed found at <...>" in
753 your updates.) Fortunately, SimplePie allows for a great deal of
754 extensibility and this allows me to work around the problem; these
755 error conditions should now be mostly eliminated when the underlying
756 feed is valid.
757
758 * UI: SHOW INACTIVE SOURCES: When you use the default unsubscribe option
759 -- which turns off the subscription to a feed while preserving the posts
760 from it and the syndication-related meta-data for the feed -- the
761 unsubscribed feed can now easily be viewed in a special "Inactive"
762 section of the Syndicated Sources page. (As a side benefit, if you've
763 accidentally, or only temporarily, turned off the subscription to a
764 feed, it is now much easier to restore the feed to being active, or to
765 delete it permanently, if you prefer.
766
767 * UI: FEED FINDER / SWITCH FEED INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: changes to styling
768 and options for the feed finder / switch feed, which should now make it
769 easier, in some cases, to find alternative feeds, and make interface
770 options more clearly visible.
771
772 * FILTERS: `syndicated_item_published` and `syndicated_item_updated` NOW
773 PROPERLY AFFECT THE DATING OF POSTS. These filters used to affect some
774 date-related settings, but not others -- and, most importantly, not the
775 final date that is set for a post's publication or last-modified date
776 in the WordPress database. Now, they do affect that, as they should.
777 (Filters should receive, and return, a long integer, representing a Unix
778 epoch relative timestamp.)
779
780 * MAGIC URL TO CLEAR THE CACHE: Suppose that you need to clear the feed
781 cache, for whatever reason; suppose, even, that you need to clear it on
782 a regular basis. One way you might do this is by logging into the
783 FeedWordPress administrative interface and going to Syndication -->
784 Performance. Another way you might do it, now, is to simply send an
785 HTTP request to a magic URL provided by FeedWordPress: if your blog is
786 at example.com, the URL would be <http://example.com/?clear_cache=1>
787
788 = 2010.0602 =
789
790 * CATEGORY BOX INTERFACE ELEMENT FIXED FOR WP 3.0: Stylesheet changes
791 between WordPress 2.9.x and the WordPress 3.0 RC caused the Categories
792 box under **Syndication --> Categories & Tags** to malfunction. This
793 has been fixed.
794
795 * LINK CATEGORY SELECTION BOX IN SYNDICATION ==> FEEDS FIXED FOR WP 2.8
796 AND 2.9: A WP 3.0 compatibility change introduced in 2010.0531
797 inadvertently broke the Syndicated Link Category selector under
798 Syndication --> Feeds & Updates in WP 2.8 and WP 2.9, causing the post
799 categories to be displayed in the selector rather than the link
800 categories. This should now be fixed so that the selector will work
801 correctly under both the current versions of WordPress and the 3.0 RC.
802
803 * MORE PERMISSIVE HANDLING OF FEEDS WITH BAD CONTENT-TYPE HEADERS: One of
804 the small advantages that MagpieRSS had over SimplePie is that it was
805 more tolerant about parsing well-formed feeds that the remote web server
806 happened to deliver with weird or incorrect HTTP Content-type headers.
807 In feeds affected by this problem, the new SimplePie parser would simply
808 fail to find a feed, due to its being led astray by the contents of the
809 Content-type header. This version includes an extension to SimplePie's
810 content-type sniffer that offers more permissive handling of the HTTP
811 headers.
812
813 * MORE FULL-TEXT "EXCERPTS" NOW PROPERLY SHORTENED. Version 2010.0528
814 introduced code to control for cases in which elements intended for
815 item summaries are (ill-advisedly) used to carry the full text of posts;
816 past versions of FeedWordPress would simply include the full text of the
817 post in the excerpt field, but newer versions now attempt to detect
818 this condition when it arises and to head it off, by blanking out the
819 excerpt field and filling it with an automatically generated short,
820 plain text excerpt from the full content. This release broadens the
821 test conditions that indicate when an excerpt field is treated as
822 identical to the full text of the post, and should therefore improve
823 the handling of some feeds (such as Google Reader feeds) where the full
824 text of each post was still appearing in the excerpt field.
825
826 * FILTERS: `syndicated_item_published` AND `syndicated_item_updated`
827 FILTERS NOW ALLOW FILTER AUTHORS TO CHANGE POST TIMESTAMPS. You can now
828 use the `syndicated_item_published` and `syndicated_item_updated` filter
829 hooks to write filters or add-ons which directly change the post date
830 and most-recently-updated timestamps on incoming syndicated posts. Props
831 to niska for pointing out where the filters needed to be applied in
832 order to change WordPress's internal timestamps for incoming posts.
833
834 = 2010.0531 =
835
836 * PERMALINK / CUSTOM FIELDS PROBLEM RESOLVED: An issue in 2010.0528 caused
837 some posts to be imported without the proper syndication-related
838 meta-data being attached (thus causing permalinks to point back to the
839 aggregator website rather than to the source website, among other
840 problems). This problem has been resolved (and a fix has been applied
841 which will resolve the problem for any posts affected by this problem,
842 if the original post is recent enough to still be available on the feed).
843
844 * UI: The "Back End" section has been split into two separate sections --
845 "Performance" (dealing with caching, database index, and other
846 performance tweaks), and "Diagnostics" (dealing with debug mode,
847 update logging, and a number of new diagnostic tests which I will be
848 rolling out over the next few releases).
849
850 * Several minor interface bug fixes and PHP warning notices eliminated.
851
852 = 2010.0528 =
853
854 #### Compatibility ####
855
856 * SIMPLEPIE IS NOW USED TO PARSE FEEDS; NO MORE MAGPIERSS UPGRADES NEEDED:
857 One of the biggest changes in this release is that FeedWordPress no
858 longer depends on MagpieRSS to parse feeds, and has switched to the much
859 more up-to-date and flexible SimplePie feed parser, which is included as
860 a standard part of WordPress versions 2.8 and later. Using SimplePie will
861 hopefully allow for better handling of feeds going further, and will
862 allow me greater flexibility in determining how exactly the feed parser
863 will operate. It also means that FeedWordPress no longer requires
864 special upgrades to the WordPress core MagpieRSS files, and should
865 eliminate quite a bit of complexity.
866
867 * MAGPIERSS COMPATIBILITY LAYER FOR EXISTING FILTERS AND ADD-ONS: However,
868 I have also implemented a compatibility layer to ensure that existing
869 filters and add-ons for FeedWordPress which depended on the MagpieRSS
870 data format *should not be broken* by the switch to SimplePie. Going
871 forward, I recommend that new filters and add-ons be written to take
872 advantage of the SimplePie object representations of items, feeds, etc.,
873 rather than the MagpieRSS arrays, but the MagpieRSS arrays will still
874 be available and older filters should continue to work as they have in
875 the past.
876
877 * COMPATIBILITY WITH WORDPRESS 2.9.x and 3.0: This release has been tested
878 for the existing WordPress 2.9.x branch and with the upcoming release of
879 WordPress 3.0. Changes in the user interface JavaScript between WordPress
880 2.8.x and WordPress 2.9 caused the tag box interface element to break in
881 the Syndication --> Categories & Tags settings page; changes in the API
882 functions for adding new authors caused fatal errors under certain
883 conditions in WordPress 3.0. These breakages have been fixed.
884
885 * DROPPED LEGACY SUPPORT FOR WORDPRESS PRIOR TO 2.8: Because SimplePie is
886 not included with versions of WordPress prior to 2.8, I have chosen to
887 drop legacy support for WordPress versions 1.5 through 2.7. If you are
888 using FeedWordPress with a version of WordPress before 2.8, you will
889 have to upgrade your installation of WordPress in order to take
890 advantage of this release.
891
892 * PHP 5.3 COMPATIBILITY: A couple of compatibility issues, which were
893 causing fatal errors amd ugly warnings for users of PHP 5.3,
894 have been eliminated.
895
896 #### Features and Processing ####
897
898 * INTERFACE REORGANIZATION: The interface restructuring, began with
899 Version 2009.0612, has been completed. Catch-all settings pages have
900 been eliminated entirely for pages that cover each aspect of handling
901 a feed: Feeds & Updates, Posts & Links, Authors, Categories & Tags,
902 and Back End handling of the database and diagnostic information.
903 Extensive new interface hooks allow add-on modules to significantly
904 change or extend the FeedWordPress admin interface and workflow.
905
906 * STORING INFORMATION FROM THE FEED IN CUSTOM FIELDS: Many users
907 have written to request the ability to store information from elements
908 in the feed in a custom field on each post. (So that, for example, if
909 post includes a `itunes:duration` element, you could store the contents
910 in a Custom Field called `duration` on the post (for a Theme to access
911 later). The Custom Post Settings under Syndication --> Posts & Links now
912 allow you to access any item or feed tag, using a syntax similar to
913 a much-simplified version of XPath. See Posts & Links settings for
914 details.
915
916 * UPDATE-FREEZING ON MANUALLY EDITED POSTS: FeedWordPress now allows you
917 to mark posts that have been manually edited, so that the changes you
918 make will not be overwritten by later updates from the feed. If you make
919 manual edits to a particular post, just check the "Manual editing"
920 checkbox in order to protect your changes from being overwritten. If you
921 want to block *all* posts from being updated after they are imported
922 for the first time, a new "Updated Posts" setting in Posts & Links
923 allows you to freeze all posts from a particular feed, or all syndicated
924 posts.
925
926 * SETTING: FEED-BY-FEED SETTINGS FOR WHERE PERMALINKS POINT TO: You've
927 always been able to tell FeedWordPress whether permalinks for posts
928 should point to the original source of the story or the local copy. Now
929 you can choose different policies for different feeds, instead of one
930 global policy for all feeds. (Of course, you can still use a global
931 default if you prefer.)
932
933 * SETTING: USER CONTROL OVER TIMING BASIS. You can now determine the
934 schedule on which feeds are considered ready to poll for updates --
935 by default feeds become ready for polling after about 1 hour. You can
936 now increase or decrease the time window under Syndication --> Feeds &
937 Updates. (However, please pay *CAREFUL ATTENTION* to the recommendations
938 and DO NOT set the scheduling lower than 60 minutes unless you are
939 ABSOLUTELY SURE that you have specific permission from webmaster who
940 provides that specific feed to poll more frequently than that. If you
941 set this too low (and about 60 minutes is the polite minimum if you
942 haven't been given a different figure), most webmasters will consider
943 the frequent hits on their server as rude, or even downright abusive.
944
945 * OTHER SETTINGS: New settings also include the ability to stop FWP from
946 resolving relative URLs within syndicated content, and the ability to
947 choose whether FeedWordPress should indicate the comment feed from the
948 original source, or the local comment feed, when providing the comment
949 feed URL for a syndicated post.
950
951 #### Parsing ####
952
953 * BETTER DATE HANDLING -- FEWER FLASHBACKS TO 1969 and 1970: FeedWordPress
954 has made some bugfixes and some improvements in the logic for parsing
955 dates. This should allow FeedWordPress to correctly parse more dates in
956 more feeds; and, in the last resort, when FeedWordPress fails to
957 correctly parse a date, to fall back to a more intelligent default. This
958 should hopefully avoid most or all error conditions that have resulted
959 in articles being erroneously dated to the dawn of the Unix epoch
960 (31 December 1969 or 1 January 1970).
961
962 * FULL-TEXT "EXCERPTS" NOW PROPERLY SHORTENED. Based on a straightforward
963 reading of the existing RSS specs, it's reasonable for the
964 rss:description element to be read as a plaintext summary or excerpt for
965 the item containing the description -- with the full text of the item,
966 if available, in another, better-suited element, such as the de facto
967 standard content:encoded extension element. The problem is that uses of
968 RSS rarely have much to do with anything like a straightforward reading
969 of the specs. As a result, many actual RSS producers in the wild put the
970 full text of the article in a description element. But since
971 FeedWordPress has treated this text as a summary, this produces
972 aggregated posts with lengthy "excerpts" containing the full text of the
973 article. This release of FeedWordPress fixes the problem by doing a
974 little digging before treating rss:description as a summary: if the
975 description element is used properly as a plain text summary, then
976 FeedWordPress will take the summary provided by the feed, rather than
977 recreating its own excerpt from the full text; but if an RSS item has no
978 full-text element other than description, FeedWordPress will treat the
979 description element as the full text of the article, and generate a
980 shortened excerpt automatically from that text.
981
982 #### API ####
983
984 * TEMPLATE API: new template tags `get_local_permalink()` and
985 `the_local_permalink()` allow you to access the permalink for a post on
986 your aggregator site, even when FeedWordPress is rewriting permalinks to
987 point to the original source site.
988
989 * NEW HOOKS FOR ADD-ONS AND FILTERS: I have added a number of new hooks
990 which allow add-on modules to filter more precisely, gather information
991 at more points, and to enhance the FeedWordPress admin interface. For
992 a list of new hooks and documentation, see the FeedWordPress
993 documentation wiki at
994 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/add-ons-and-filters>
995
996 * FILTER API: A number of new utility methods have been added to the
997 SyndicatedPost class to make it easier for filters and add-ons to
998
999 * FILTER API: Globals $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta DEPRECATED. These
1000 global variables, originally introduced to allow filters access to
1001 information about the source feed in `syndicated_item` filters (which
1002 were passed in through global variables rather than as parameters
1003 because of a bug in WP 1.5 which was then fixed in 1.5.1) have been
1004 DEPRECATED. If you have any filters or add-ons which still depend on
1005 these global variables, you should see about fixing them to access data
1006 about the source feed using the SyndicatedPost::link element instead.
1007 For documentation, see the FeedWordPress documentation wiki at
1008 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedpost> and
1009 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedlink>.
1010
1011 * DIAGNOSTICS: I've included a number of new diagnostic options and
1012 messages, which should allow an experienced user to better investigate
1013 any problems that may crop up.
1014
1015 #### Bug Fixes ####
1016
1017 * BUGFIX: & IN PERMALINKS NO LONGER CAUSING ATOM OR HTML VALIDATION
1018 EFFORTS: Many users reported an issue in which syndicating a feed with
1019 special XML characters in the URLs (& was the most common, since it is
1020 used to separate HTTP GET parameters) would cause the aggregator's
1021 feeds to produce invalid (malformed) XML. This update addresses the
1022 issue in Atom feeds. Unfortunately, it has not been technically possible
1023 to address the problem in RSS 2.0 feeds, due to limitations on
1024 WordPress's internal templates for RSS feeds.
1025
1026 * BUGFIX: BROKEN URLS IN "POPULAR POSTS" AND SIMILAR PLUGINS SHOULD NO
1027 LONGER BE BROKEN. A number of users noticed an issue where plugins and
1028 templates that listed posts in locations outside of the post loop
1029 (for example, "Popular Posts"-style plugins that listed posts in the
1030 sidebar), often produced the wrong URL for post links. (Typically, all
1031 the posts listed would get the same wrong URL.) This should now be
1032 fixed. Thanks to Björn for sending in a quick fix!
1033
1034 * MINOR BUGFIXES: This release includes a number of fixes to minor bugs
1035 and compatibility issues, including: silent failures of the "Syndicate"
1036 button, "Illegal Offset Type" error messages from MagpieRSS, and others.
1037
1038 = 2009.0707 =
1039
1040 * BUGFIX: WORDPRESS 2.8 AJAX COMPATIBILITY ISSUES RESOLVED (blank or
1041 truncated "Syndicated Sites" administration page): Due to changes in the
1042 AJAX interface elements between WordPress 2.7 and WordPress 2.8, several
1043 FeedWordPress users encountered an issue where the front "Syndication"
1044 page in the FeedWordPress administrative interface would come up blank,
1045 without the normal "Syndicated Sites" list and "Update" control, or
1046 sometimes wth the boxes visible but one or both of them truncated, with
1047 only the title bar. This issue should now be resolved: with the new
1048 version of FeedWordPress, the compatibility issue that caused the
1049 disappearance should be eliminated, and if boxes are shown with only
1050 their handle visible, you should once again be able to drop down the
1051 rest of the box by clicking once on its title bar.
1052
1053 * BUGFIX: TAG SETTING WIDGET FIXED. Due to changes in interface elements
1054 between WordPress 2.7 and WordPress 2.8, people using FeedWordPress with
1055 WordPress 2.8 found that the widget for setting tags to be applied to
1056 all syndicated posts, or all syndicated posts from a particular feed,
1057 no longer displayed "Add" and "Remove" buttons for individual tags. This
1058 issue has now been fixed, and the tagging widget should once again work
1059 more or less exactly like the tagging widget for individual posts in the
1060 normal WordPress admin interface.
1061
1062 = 2009.0618 =
1063
1064 * BUGFIX: MYSTERY ERRORS WITH WITH WP_Http_Fsockopen HTTP TRANSPORT
1065 ELIMINATED: Thanks to a combination of a subtle bug in FeedWordPress,
1066 and changes to the HTTP transport code in WordPress, a number of users
1067 encountered an error in which any time they attempted to add a new feed
1068 through the FeedFinder interface, FeedWordPress would fail and display
1069 an HTTP request failure diagnostic message. The subtle bug has been
1070 fixed, and with it, most of these errors should now be eliminated.
1071
1072 Be sure to upgrade your MagpieRSS to the most recent MagpieRSS version
1073 after you have insalled FeedWordPress 2009.0618, or this bug fix will
1074 not take effect.
1075
1076 = 2009.0613 =
1077
1078 * INTERFACE/BUGFIX: WORDPRESS 2.8 CATEGORY BOX FIX. Thanks to a subtle
1079 change in class names between the WordPress 2.7 and 2.8 stylesheets,
1080 category boxes in the FeedWordPress settings interface tended to overflow
1081 and have a lot of messy-looking overlapping text under WordPress 2.8.
1082 This has now been fixed.
1083
1084 * FeedFinder FAILURE DIAGNOSTICS: When FWP's FeedFinder fails to find any
1085 feeds at a given URL (for example, when you are trying to add a
1086 subscription through the administrative interface and you run into an
1087 error message), FeedWordPress now provides more diagnostic information
1088 for the reasons behind the failure. If that helps you, great; if not,
1089 it should help me respond more intelligently to your support request..
1090
1091 = 2009.0612 =
1092
1093 * WORDPRESS 2.8 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress 2009.0612 has been tested for
1094 compatibility with the recent version 2.8 release of WordPress.
1095
1096 * INTERFACE RESTRUCTURING: In order to avoid settings posts from becoming
1097 too crowded, and to modularize and better organize the user interface,
1098 new "Posts" and "Categories & Tags" subpages have been created under the
1099 "Syndication" menu. "Posts" controls settings for individal syndicated
1100 posts (such as publication status, comment and ping status, whether or
1101 not to use the original location of the post as the permalink, whether
1102 or not to expose posts to formatting filters, and so on). "Categories &
1103 Tags" controls settings for assigning new syndicated posts to categories
1104 and tags, such as categories or tags to apply to all syndicated posts,
1105 and how to handle categories that do not yet exist in the WordPress
1106 database. These subpages, like the Authors subpage, handle settings for
1107 the global default level and for individual syndicated feeds.
1108
1109 Corresponding to these new subpages, the old Syndication Settings and
1110 Feed Settings subpages have been cleaned up and simplified, and now only
1111 link to the appropriate subpages for options that can be set in the
1112 Posts, Authors, or Categories & Tags subpages.
1113
1114 * FEATURE: ADD CUSTOM SETTINGS TO EACH SYNDICATED POST: FeedWordPress has
1115 long had an interface for creating custom settings for each syndicated
1116 *feed* which could be retrieved in templates using the `get_feed_meta()`
1117 template function. But it had no feature for adding custom fields to
1118 each individual syndicated *post*. In response to requests from users, I
1119 have added the ability to apply custom fields to each individual
1120 syndicated post, using the new Syndication --> Posts subpage. You can
1121 set up custom fields to be applied to every syndicated post, or custom
1122 fields to be applied to syndicated posts from a particular feed.
1123
1124 * FEATURE: MAGPIERSS VERSION CHECK AND UPGRADE: FeedWordPress will attempt
1125 to determine whether or not you are using the upgraded version of
1126 MagpieRSS that comes packaged with FeedWordPress. If not, it will throw
1127 an error on admin pages, and, if you are a site administrator, it will
1128 give you the option to ignore the error message, or to attempt an
1129 automatic upgrade (using a native file copy). If the file copy fails,
1130 FeedWordPress will offer some guidance on how to perform the upgrade
1131 manually.
1132
1133 * BLANK POSTS PROBLEM NO LONGER OCCURS WITH OLD & BUSTED MAGPIERSS: Due
1134 to the fact that I relied on a content normalization that occurs in my
1135 upgraded version of MagpieRSS, but not in the old & busted version of
1136 MagpieRSS that ships with WordPress, until this version, if you tried to
1137 syndicate an Atom feed without having performed the (*strongly
1138 recommended*) MagpieRSS upgrade, all of the posts would come up with
1139 completely blank contents. That's not because MagpieRSS couldn't read
1140 the data, but rather because the new Magpie version puts that data in a
1141 location where the old version doesn't, and I was only looking in that
1142 newer location. Now it checks for both, meaning that posts will continue
1143 to display their contents even if you don't upgrade MagpieRSS. (But you
1144 **really should** upgrade it, anyway.)
1145
1146 * BUGFIX: RELATIVE URI RESOLUTION FOR POST CONTENT RESTORED. Some time
1147 back, I added support for resolving relative URIs against xml:base on
1148 feeds that support it to the MagpieRSS upgrade in FeedWordPress. Then I
1149 took out code that did the same thing from the main FeedWordPress code.
1150 Of course, the problem is that some people, even though it is clearly
1151 stupid or evil to do so, still include relative URIs for images or links
1152 in posts on feed formats that do *not* adequately support xml:base
1153 (notably, RSS 2.0 feeds). In response to a user request, I have added
1154 this functionality back in, so that MagpieRSS will resolve any relative
1155 URIs that it knows how to resolve using xml:base, and then FeedWordPress
1156 will attempt to resolve any relative URIs that are left over afterwards.
1157
1158 * BUGFIX: INTERFACE OPTION FOR SETTING SYNDICATED POST PUBLICATION STATUS
1159 ON A FEED-BY-FEED BASIS HAS BEEN RESTORED: Due to a version-checking
1160 bug, users of WordPress 2.7.x lost an option from the "Edit a syndicated
1161 feed" interface which allowed them to determine whether newly syndicated
1162 posts should be published immediately, held as "Pending Review," saved
1163 as drafts, or saved as private posts. (The option to change this
1164 setting globally remained in place, but users could no longer set it on
1165 a feed-by-feed basis.) The version-checking bug has been fixed, and the
1166 option has been restored.
1167
1168 * BUGFIX: "ARE YOU SURE?" FATAL ERROR ELIMINATED AND SECURITY IMPROVED:
1169 Under certain circumstances (for example, when users have configured
1170 their browser or proxy not to send HTTP Referer headers, for privacy or
1171 other reasons), many features in the FeedWordPress administrative
1172 interface (such as adding new feeds or changing settings) would hit a
1173 fatal error, displaying only a cryptic message reading "Are you sure?"
1174 and a blank page following it. This problem has been eliminated by
1175 taking advantage of WordPress's nonce functions, which allow the
1176 security check which ran into this error to work properly even without
1177 receiving an HTTP Referer header. (N.B.: WordPress's nonce functions
1178 were first introduced in WordPress 2.0.3. If you're using FeedWordPress
1179 with an older version of WordPress, there's no fix for this problem:
1180 you'll just need to turn Referer headers back on. Sorry.)
1181
1182 * BUGFIX: MANUALLY-ALTERED POST STATUS, COMMENT STATUS, AND PING STATUS NO
1183 LONGER REVERTED BY POST UPDATES: If you manually altered the post status,
1184 comment status, or ping status of a syndicated post from what it was set
1185 to when first syndicated -- for example, if you had a feed that was set
1186 to bring in new posts as "Pending Review," and you then marked some of
1187 the pending posts as "Published" and others as "Unpublished" -- then
1188 in previous versions of FeedWordPress, these manual changes to the
1189 status would be lost -- so that, for example, your Published or Unpublished
1190 articles would revert to Pending Review -- if the source feed made any
1191 upates to the item. This could make the Pending Review feature both
1192 unreliable and also extremely frustrating to work with. The good news is
1193 that this bug has since been fixed: if you manually update the status
1194 of a post, it will no longer be reverted if or when the post is updated.
1195
1196 * BUGFIX: OCCASIONAL FATAL ERROR ON UPDATE ELIMINATED: Under certain
1197 limited conditions (specifically, when both the title and the content of
1198 a post to be updated are empty), an attempt to update the post would
1199 result in a fatal error. This has been fixed.
1200
1201 * INTERFACE: "CONFIGURE SETTINGS" CONVENIENCE LINK ADDED TO CONFIRMATION
1202 MESSAGE WHEN A NEW FEED IS ADDED: When you add a new subscription to
1203 FeedWordPress, the message box that appears to confirm it now includes a
1204 handy link to the feed's settings subpage, so that you can quickly set
1205 up any special settings you may want to set up for the new feed, without
1206 having to hunt through the list of all your other subscriptions to pick
1207 out the new one.
1208
1209 * INTERFACE: SIMPLIFYING AND CLARIFYING AUTOMATIC UPDATES SETTINGS. I have
1210 removed an interval setting for the cronless automatic updates which has
1211 confused many FeedWordPress users. In past versions of FWP, when you
1212 turned on automatic updates, you would be presented with a time interval
1213 setting which controlled how often FeedWordPress would check for feeds
1214 ready to be polled for updates. (That is, it DID NOT control how often
1215 feeds *would be polled*; it controlled how often FeedWordPress would
1216 *check* for feeds that *had become ready to poll*. The schedule on which
1217 feeds became ready for polling was still controlled either by requests
1218 encoded in elements within the feed itself, or else according to an
1219 internal calculation within FeedWordPress, averaging out to about 1 hour,
1220 if the feed did not include any scheduling request elements.) Since many
1221 users very often (and understandably) confused the purpose of this
1222 setting, and since the setting is for a feature that's actually very
1223 unlikely to require any manual control by the user, I have removed the
1224 setting; FeedWordPress now simply uses the default value of checking for
1225 feeds to poll every 10 minutes.
1226
1227 * FEEDFINDER PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT: FeedWordPress's FeedFinder class
1228 now uses `array_unique()` to make sure that it doesn't waste time
1229 repeatedly iterating over and polling the same URI. Props to Camilo
1230 (<http://projects.radgeek.com/2008/12/14/feedwordpress-20081214/#comment-20090122160414>).
1231
1232 = 2008.1214 =
1233
1234 * WORDPRESS 2.7 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress has been tested for
1235 compatibility with the newly released WordPress 2.7. WordPress 2.7 has
1236 deprecated the Snoopy library for HTTP requests, which caused a fatal
1237 error for users who had not installed the MagpieRSS upgrade (or whose
1238 installation of the MagpieRSS upgrade was overwritten by a recent update
1239 of WordPress). FeedWordPress now handles things gracefully when Snoopy
1240 is not immediately available.
1241
1242 * INTERFACE SPIFFED UP: Interface elements have been updated so that
1243 FeedWordPress's management interface fits in more naturally with the
1244 WordPress 2.7 interface (including a new logo and a number of small
1245 interface tweaks).
1246
1247 * BUG WITH TAGS FOR SYNDICATED ARTICLES FIXED: Several users encountered a
1248 bug with the option to add tags to all syndicated posts under
1249 Syndication --> Settings -- if you told FeedWordPress to add more than
1250 one tag to all syndicated posts, instead of doing so correctly, it would
1251 add a *single* tag instead, whose name was composed of the names of all
1252 the tags you asked it to add. This bug was the result of nothing more
1253 dignified than a typographical error on my part. It has now been fixed.
1254
1255 * MORE INFORMATION AVAILABLE WHEN FEEDWORDPRESS CAN'T FIND A FEED: When
1256 you enter a URL for a new syndication source, FeedWordPress uses a
1257 simple feed-finding algorithm (originally based on Mark Pilgrim's
1258 Universal Feed Finder) to try to determine whether the URL is the URL
1259 for a feed, or, if the URL points to an ordinary website rather than to
1260 a feed, whether there is a feed for that website. All well and good, but
1261 if FeedWordPress failed to find a feed, for whatever reason, it would
1262 typically return nothing more than a nasty little note to the effect of
1263 "no feed found," without any explanation of what went wrong.
1264 FeedWordPress now keeps track of error conditions from the HTTP
1265 requests that it uses in the course of looking for the feed, and so may
1266 be able to give you a bit more information about the nature of the
1267 problem if something goes wrong.
1268
1269
1270 = 2008.1105 =
1271
1272 * INTERFACE RESTRUCTURING AND SYNDICATION --> AUTHORS PAGE: As a first
1273 step towards modularizing and better organizing the user interface, a
1274 new "Authors" subpage has been created under the Syndication menu, which
1275 controls settings for syndicated authors, both at the global default
1276 level and at level of individual syndicated feeds.
1277
1278 * BUG RELATED TO THE ATTRIBUTION OF POSTS TO THE WRONG AUTHOR FIXED: Some
1279 users encountered an issue in which posts by different authors on
1280 different blogs -- especially blogs generated by Blogger -- were
1281 mistakenly attributed to a single author. The problem was caused by the
1282 way in which FeedWordPress matches syndicated authors to user accounts
1283 in the WordPress database: normally, if two feeds each list an author
1284 with the same e-mail address, they are counted as being the same person.
1285 Normally this works well, but it creates an issue in cases where
1286 blogging software assigns a single anonymous e-mail address to users who
1287 do not want their real e-mail address published. This is, for example,
1288 what Blogger does (by giving all users a default e-mail address of
1289 <noreply@blogger.com> if they don't want their own e-mail address
1290 listed). FeedWordPress now allows the user to correct for this problem
1291 with a couple of new settings under **Syndication --> Authors**, which
1292 allow users to turn off e-mail based author matching for particular
1293 addresses, or, if desired, to turn it off entirely. By default, e-mail
1294 based author matching is still turned on, but disabled for a list of
1295 known generic e-mail addresses. Right now, the "list" consists entirely
1296 of <noreply@blogger.com>; if you know other addresses that should be
1297 added, please [contact me](http://radgeek.com/contact) to let me know.
1298
1299 Please note that if you have already encountered this issue on your
1300 blog, upgrading FeedWordPress will prevent it from re-occurring in the
1301 future, but you still need to do two other things to fix the existing
1302 problem on your blog.
1303
1304 First, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to
1305 change the existing author mapping rules to re-map a a syndicated
1306 author's name to the proper target account. Go to **Syndication -->
1307 Authors**, select the feed you want to change from the drop-down list,
1308 and then change the settings under the "Syndicated Authors" section.
1309 (You will probably need to select "will be assigned to a new user..." to
1310 create a new user account with the appropriate name.)
1311
1312 Second, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to
1313 re-assign already-syndicated posts that were mis-attributed to the
1314 correct author. You can do that from **Syndication --> Authors** by
1315 using the author re-assignment feature, described below.
1316
1317 * AUTHOR RE-ASSIGNMENT FOR A PARTICULAR FEED: The author settings page
1318 for each syndicated feed, under **Syndication --> Authors**, now
1319 includes an section titled "Fixing mis-matched authors," which provides
1320 an interface for re-assigning or deleting all posts attributed to a
1321 particular author on a particular feed.
1322
1323 * SUPPORT FOR `<atom:source>` ELEMENT IN SYNDICATED FEEDS: Some feeds
1324 (for example, those produced by FeedWordPress) aggregate content from
1325 several different sources, and include information about the original
1326 source of the post in an `<atom:source>` element. A new setting under
1327 **Syndication --> Options** allows you to control what FeedWordPress
1328 will report as the source of posts syndicated from aggregator feeds in
1329 your templates and feeds: you can have FeedWordPress report that the
1330 source of a post is the aggregator feed itself, or you can have it
1331 report that the source of a post is the original source that the
1332 aggregator originally syndicated the post from.
1333
1334 By default, FeedWordPress will report the aggregator, not the original
1335 source, as the source of a syndicated item.
1336
1337 * LOAD BALANCING AND TIME LIMITING FEATURES FOR UPDATES: Some users have
1338 encountered issues due to running up against PHP execution time limits
1339 during the process of updating large syndicated feeds, or a very large
1340 set of syndicated feeds. FeedWordPress now has a feature that allows you
1341 to limit the total amount of time spent updating a feed, through the
1342 "Time limit on updates" setting under **Syndication --> Options**. By
1343 turning on this setting and adjusting the time limit to a low enough
1344 figure to avoid your PHP installation's time-out setting. (PHP execution
1345 time limits are usually in the vicinity of 30 seconds, so an update
1346 time limit of 25 seconds or so should provide plenty of time for updates
1347 while allowing a cushion of time for other, non-update-related functions
1348 to do their work.)
1349
1350 If feed updates are interrupted by the time limit, FeedWordPress uses
1351 some simple load balancing features to make sure that updates to other
1352 feeds will not be blocked by the time-hogging feed, and will also make
1353 sure that when the interrupted update is resumed, FeedWordPress will
1354 skip ahead to resume processing items at the point at which it was
1355 interrupted last time, so that posts further down in the feed will
1356 eventually get processed, and not get blocked by the amount of time it
1357 takes to process the items higher up in the feed.
1358
1359 * `guid` INDEX CREATION BUTTON: FeedWordPress frequently issues queries on
1360 the `guid` column of the WordPress posts database (since it uses post
1361 guid URIs to keep track of which posts it has syndicated). In very large
1362 FeedWordPress installations, you can often significantly improve
1363 performance by creating a database index on the `guid` column, but
1364 normally you would need to poke around with MySQL or a tool like
1365 phpMyAdmin to do this. FeedWordPress can now save you the trouble: to
1366 create an index on the `guid` column, just go to
1367 **Syndication --> Options**, and mash the button at the bottom of the
1368 "Back End" section.
1369
1370 = 2008.1101 =
1371
1372 * INTERFACE BUG THAT PREVENTED ADDING NEW SITES FIXED: The UI reforms in
1373 FWP 2008.1030 unintentionally introduced a bug that prevents clean
1374 installations of FeedWordPress from providing an input box for adding
1375 new feeds to the list of syndicated feeds. This bug has been fixed.
1376
1377 = 2008.1030 =
1378
1379 * WORDPRESS 2.6 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with
1380 WordPress 2.6, and should work more or less seamlessly with the new post
1381 revision system. A bug which caused multiple new revisions to be created
1382 for posts on certain feeds, regardless of whether or not the item had
1383 been updated, has been fixed.
1384
1385 * INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: The user interface has been substantially
1386 restyled to fit in better with the visual style of WordPress 2.5 and
1387 2.6.
1388
1389 * YOUTUBE BUG FIXED: POSTS SYNDICATED THROUGH AN AUTOMATIC UPDATE ARE NO
1390 LONGER STRIPPED OF `<OBJECT>` TAGS AND CERTAIN OTHER HTML ELEMENTS: Due
1391 to the way that some versions of WordPress process posts that are
1392 inserted into the database when no user is logged in, many users
1393 experienced an issue where YouTube videos and other content using the
1394 HTML `<object>` tag would be stripped out of posts that were syndicated
1395 during an automatic update. (Posts that were syndicated through manual
1396 updates from within the WordPress Dashboard were not affected, because
1397 the issue does not arise when an update is executed under a logged-in
1398 administrator's credentials.) This bug has now been fixed; YouTube
1399 videos and other content using `<object>` tags should now appear
1400 properly in syndicated posts, regardless of the way in which the post
1401 was syndicated.
1402
1403 * AJAX BUGS FIXED: Bugs which blocked the normal operation of WordPress
1404 2.5's AJAX interface elements when FeedWordPress was activated have been
1405 fixed.
1406
1407 * TAG SUPPORT: A couple of features have been introduced to take advantage
1408 of the tagging features in WordPress 2.3.x, 2.5.x, and 2.6.x. Now, when
1409 unfamiliar categories are encountered for posts on a feed, you can
1410 choose for FeedWordPress (1) to drop the category; (2) to drop the
1411 category and to filter out any post that does not match at least one
1412 familiar category; (3) to create a new category with that name, or,
1413 now, you can also have FeedWordPress (4) create a new *tag* with that
1414 name. This option can be set site-wide under Syndication --> Options,
1415 or it can be set on a feed-by-feed basis in a feed's Edit screen.
1416
1417 In addition, you can now set particular tags to apply to all incoming
1418 syndicated posts, under Syndication --> Options, or you can set tags
1419 to apply to all incoming syndicated posts from a particular feed in that
1420 feed's Edit screen.
1421
1422 * FORMATTING FILTERS: There is a new option available under Syndication ->
1423 Options which allows users to choose whether or not to expose syndicated
1424 posts to being altered by formatting filters. By default, FeedWordPress
1425 has always protected syndicated posts (which are already in display-ready
1426 HTML when they are syndicated) from being reformatted by formatting
1427 filters. However, this approach means that certain plugins which depend
1428 on formatting filters (for example, to add "Share This" bars or relevant
1429 links to the end of a post) are blocked from working on any syndicated
1430 posts. If you want to use one of these plugins together with
1431 FeedWordPress, you can now do so by changing the "Formatting Filters"
1432 setting from "Protect" to "Expose."
1433
1434 * `<atom:source>` ELEMENTS NOW INCLUDED IN ATOM FEED: Atom 1.0 provides
1435 a standard method for aggregators to indicate information about the original source of
1436 a syndicated post, using the `<atom:source>` element. FeedWordPress now
1437 introduces standard `<atom:source>` elements including the title, homepage, and
1438 feed URI of the source from which a syndicated post was syndicated. Cf.
1439 <http://www.atomenabled.org/developers/syndication/atom-format-spec.php#element.source>
1440
1441 * MODULARIZATION OF CODE: The code for different elements of FeedWordPress
1442 has been broken out into several modules for easier inspection,
1443 documentation, and maintenance of the code.
1444
1445 * VERSIONING SCHEME CHANGED: FeedWordPress's feature set has proven stable
1446 enough that it can now be removed from beta status; a good thing, since
1447 I was very quickly running out of version numbers to use. New releases
1448 of FeedWordPress will have version numbers based on the date of their
1449 release.
1450
1451 = 0.993 =
1452
1453 * WORDPRESS 2.5.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible
1454 with WordPress 2.5.1.
1455
1456 * WORDPRESS 2.5 INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: FeedWordPress's Dashboard
1457 interface has undergone several cosmetic changes that should help it
1458 integrate better with the WordPress Dashboard interface in WordPress
1459 version 2.5.x.
1460
1461 * SYNDICATED POSTS CAN BE MARKED AS "PENDING REVIEW": WordPress 2.3 users
1462 can now take advantage of WordPress's new "Pending Review" features for
1463 incoming syndicated posts. Posts marked as "Pending Review" are not
1464 published immediately, but are marked as ready to be reviewed by an
1465 Administrator or Editor, who can then choose to publish the post or
1466 hold it back. If you want to review syndicated posts from a particular
1467 feed, or from all feeds, before they are posted, then use
1468 Syndication --> Syndicated Sites --> Edit or Syndication --> Options to
1469 change the settings for handling new posts.
1470
1471 * AWARE OF NEW URI FOR del.icio.us FEEDS: Previous releases of
1472 FeedWordPress already automatically split del.icio.us tags up
1473 appropriately appropriately when generating categories. (del.icio.us
1474 feeds smoosh all the tags into a single `<dc:subject>` element,
1475 separated by spaces; FeedWordPress un-smooshes them into multiple
1476 categories by separating them at whitespace.) Unfortunately, del.icio.us
1477 recently broke the existing behavior by changing host names for their
1478 feeds from del.icio.us to feeds.delicious.com. Version 0.993 accounts
1479 for the new host name and un-breaks the tag splitting.
1480
1481 = 0.992 =
1482
1483 * AUTHOR RE-MAPPING: FeedWordPress now offers considerable control over
1484 how author names on a feed are translated into usernames within the
1485 WordPress database. When a post by an unrecognized author comes in,
1486 Administrators can now specify any username as the default username to
1487 assign the post to by setting the option in Syndication --> Options
1488 (formerly FeedWordPress only allowed you to assign such posts to user
1489 #1, the site administrator). Administrators can also create re-mapping
1490 rules for particular feeds (under Syndication --> Syndicated Sites -->
1491 Edit), so that (for example) any posts attributed to "Administrator"
1492 on the feed <http://praxeology.net/blog/feed/> will be assigned to
1493 a user named "Roderick T. Long," rather than a user named
1494 "Administrator." These settings also allow administrators to filter out
1495 posts by particular users, and to control what will happen when
1496 FeedWordPress encounters a post by an unrecognized user on that
1497 particular feed.
1498
1499 * BUG RELATED TO URIS CONTAINING AMPERSAND CHARACTERS FIXED: A bug in
1500 WordPress 2.x's handling of URIs in Blogroll links created problems for
1501 updating any feeds whose URIs included an ampersand character, such as
1502 Google News RSS feeds and other feeds that have multiple parameters
1503 passed through HTTP GET. If you experienced this bug, the most likely
1504 effect was that FeedWordPress simply would not import new posts from a
1505 feed when instructred to do so, returning a "0 new posts" response. In
1506 other cases, it might lead to unpredictable results from feed updates,
1507 such as importing posts which were not contained in the feed being
1508 syndicated, but which did appear elsewhere on the same website. This bug
1509 has, hopefully, been resolved, by correcting for the bug in WordPress.
1510
1511 = 0.991 =
1512
1513 * WORDPRESS MU COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with
1514 recent releases of WordPress MU. Once FeedWordPress is made available
1515 as a plugin, each individual blog can choose to activate FeedWordPress
1516 and syndicate content from its own set of contributors.
1517
1518 * DISPLAY OF MAGPIE WARNINGS: A number of MagpieRSS warnings or error
1519 messages that were displayed when performing an automatic update are
1520 no longer displayed, unless debugging parameters have been explicitly
1521 enabled.
1522
1523 * BUG RELATED TO INTERNATIONAL CHARACTERS IN AUTHOR NAMES FIXED: Due to a
1524 subtle incompatability between the way that FeedWordPress generated new
1525 user information, and the way that WordPress 2.0 and later added new
1526 authors to the database, FeedWordPress might end up creating duplicate
1527 authors, or throwing a critical error message, when it encountered
1528 authors whose names included international characters. This
1529 incompatability has now been fixed; hopefully, authors with
1530 international characters in their names should now be handled properly.
1531
1532 * `<media:content>` BUG IN MAGPIERSS FIXED: A bug in MagpieRSS's handling
1533 of namespaced elements has been fixed. Among other things, this bug
1534 caused items containing a Yahoo MediaRSS `<media:content>` element (such
1535 as many of the feeds produced by wordpress.com) to be represented
1536 incorrectly, with only a capital "A" where the content of the post
1537 should have been. Feeds containing `<media:content>` elements should now
1538 be syndicated correctly.
1539
1540 * update_feedwordpress PARAMETER: You can now use an HTTP GET parameter
1541 (`update_feedwordpress=1`) to request that FeedWordPress poll its feeds
1542 for updates. When used together with a crontab or other means of
1543 scheduling tasks, this means that you can keep your blog automatically
1544 updated on a regular schedule, even if you do not choose to use the
1545 cron-less automatic updates option.
1546
1547 * Some minor interface-related bugs were also fixed.
1548
1549
1550 = 0.99 =
1551
1552 Version 0.99 adds several significant new features, fixes some bugs, and
1553 provides compatability with WordPress 2.2.x and 2.3.x.
1554
1555 * WORDPRESS 2.2 AND 2.3 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be
1556 compatible with WordPress version 2.2 and the upcoming WordPress
1557 version 2.3. In particular, it has been tested extensively against
1558 WordPress 2.2.3 and WordPress 2.3 Release Candidate 1.
1559
1560 * AUTOMATIC UPDATES WITHOUT CRON: FeedWordPress now allows you to
1561 automatically schedule checks for new posts without using external task
1562 scheduling tools such as cron. In order to enable automatic updates, go
1563 to **Syndication --> Options** and set "Check for new posts" to
1564 "automatically." For details, see "Automatic Feed Updates" in
1565 README.text.
1566
1567 An important side-effect of the changes to the update system is that if
1568 you were previously using the cron job and the `update-feeds.php` script
1569 to schedule updates, you need to change your cron set-up. The old
1570 `update-feeds.php` script no longer exists. Instead, if you wish to use
1571 a cron job to guarantee updates on a particular schedule, you should
1572 have the cron job fetch the front page of your blog (for example, by
1573 using `curl http://www.zyx.com/blog/ > /dev/null`) instead of activating
1574 the `update-feeds.php` script. If automatic updates have been enabled,
1575 fetching the front page will automatically trigger the update process.
1576
1577 * INTERFACE REORGANIZATION: All FeedWordPress functions are now located
1578 under a top-level "Syndication" menu in the WordPress Dashboard. To
1579 manage the list of syndicated sites, manually check for new posts on
1580 one or more feeds, or syndicate a new site, you should use the main page
1581 under **Syndication**. To change global settings for FeedWordPress,
1582 you should use **Syndication --> Options**.
1583
1584 * FILE STRUCTURE REORGANIZATION: Due to a combination of changing styles
1585 for FeedWordPress plugins and lingering bugs in the FeedWordPress admin
1586 menu code, the code for FeedWordPress is now contained in two different
1587 PHP files, which should be installed together in a subdirectory of your
1588 plugins directory named `feedwordpress`. (See README.text for
1589 installation and upgrade instructions relating to the change.)
1590
1591 * MULTIPLE CATEGORIES SETTING: Some feeds use non-standard methods to
1592 indicate multiple categories within a single category element. (The most
1593 popular site to do this is del.icio.us, which separates tags with a
1594 space.) FeedWordPress now allows you to set an optional setting, for any
1595 feed which does this, indicating the character or characters used to
1596 divide multiple categories, using a Perl-compatible regular expression.
1597 (In the case of del.icio.us feeds, FeedWordPress will automatically use
1598 \s for the pattern without your having to do any further configuration.)
1599 To turn this setting on, simply use the "Edit" link for the feed that
1600 you want to turn it on for.
1601
1602 * REGULAR EXPRESSION BUG FIXED: Eliminated a minor bug in the regular
1603 expressions for e-mail addresses (used in parsing RSS `author`
1604 elements), which could produce unsightly error messages for some users
1605 parsing RSS 2.0 feeds.
1606
1607 * DATE / UPDATE BUG FIXED: A bug in date handling was eliminated that may
1608 have caused problems if any of (1) WordPress, or (2) PHP, or (3) your
1609 web server, or (4) your MySQL server, has been set to use a different
1610 time zone from the one that any of the others is set to use. If
1611 FeedWordPress has not been properly updating updated posts, or has been
1612 updating posts when there shouldn't be any changes for the update, this
1613 release may solve that problem.
1614
1615 * GOOGLE READER BUGS FIXED: A couple of bugs that made it difficult for
1616 FeedWordPress to interact with Google Reader public feeds have been
1617 fixed. Firstly, if you encountered an error message reading "There was a
1618 problem adding the newsfeed. [SQL: ]" when you tried to add the feed,
1619 the cause of this error has been fixed. Secondly, if you succeeded in
1620 getting FeedWordPress to check a Google Reader feed, only to find that
1621 the title of posts had junk squashed on to the end of them, that bug
1622 has been fixed too. To fix this bug, you must install the newest version
1623 of the optional MagpieRSS upgrade.
1624
1625 * FILTER PARAMETERS: Due to an old, old bug in WordPress 1.5.0 (which was
1626 what was available back when I first wrote the filter interface),
1627 FeedWordPress has traditionally only passed one parameter to
1628 syndicated_item and syndicated_post filters functions -- an array
1629 containing either the Magpie representation of a syndicated item from
1630 the feed, or the database representation of a post about to be inserted
1631 into the WordPress database. If you needed information about the feed
1632 that the item came from, this was accessible only through a pair of
1633 global variables, $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta.
1634
1635 Since it's been a pretty long time since WordPress 1.5.0 was in
1636 widespread usage, I have gone ahead and added an optional second
1637 parameter to the invocation of the syndicated_item and syndicated_post
1638 filters. If you have written a filter for FeedWordPress that uses either
1639 of these hooks, you can now register that filter to accept 2 parameters.
1640 If you do so, the second parameter will be a SyndicatedPost object,
1641 which, among other things, allows you to access information about the
1642 feed from which an item is syndicated using the $post->feed and the
1643 $post->feedmeta elements (where $post is the name of the second
1644 parameter).
1645
1646 NOTE THAT THE OLD GLOBAL VARIABLES ARE STILL AVAILABLE, for the time
1647 being at least, so existing filters will not break with the upgrade.
1648 They should be considered deprecated, however, and may be eliminated in
1649 the future.
1650
1651 * FILTER CHANGE / BUGFIX: the array that is passed as the first argument
1652 syndicated_post filters no longer is no longer backslash-escaped for
1653 MySQL when filters are called. This was originally a bug, or an
1654 oversight; the contents of the array should only be escaped for the
1655 database *after* they have gone through all filters. IF YOU HAVE WRITTEN
1656 ANY syndicated_post FILTERS THAT PRESUME THE OLD BEHAVIOR OF PASSING IN
1657 STRINGS THAT ARE ALREADY BACKSLASH-ESCAPED, UPDATE YOUR FILTERS
1658 ACCORDINGLY.
1659
1660 * OTHER MINOR BUGFIXES AND INTERNAL CHANGES: The internal architecture of
1661 FeedWordPress has been significantly changed to make the code more
1662 modular and clean; hopefully this should help reduce the number of
1663 compatibility updates that are needed, and make them easier and quicker
1664 when they are needed.
1665
1666 = 0.981 =
1667
1668 Version 0.981 is a narrowly targeted bugfix and compatibility release, whose
1669 main purpose is to resolve a major outstanding problem: the incompatibility
1670 between version 0.98 of WordPress and the recently released WordPress 2.1.
1671
1672 * WORDPRESS 2.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress is now compatible with
1673 WordPress 2.1, as well as retaining its existing support for WordPress
1674 2.0 and 1.5. Incompatibilities that resulted in database warnings, fatal
1675 errors, and which prevented FeedWordPress from syndicating new posts,
1676 have been eliminated.
1677
1678 * RSS-FUNCTIONS.PHP RENAMED TO RSS.PHP: if you use the upgraded MagpieRSS
1679 replacement that's included with FeedWordPress, be sure to note that
1680 there are now *two* files to upload from the `OPTIONAL/wp-includes`
1681 subdirectory in order to carry out the upgrade: rss-functions.php and
1682 rss.php. **It is necessary to upload both files**, due to a change in
1683 the file naming scheme in WordPress 2.1, and it is necessary to do so
1684 whether you are using WordPress 2.1 or not. If you only upload the
1685 `rss-functions.php` file as in previous installations you will not have
1686 a working copy of MagpieRSS; the rss.php file contains the actual code.
1687
1688 * DATE BUG AFFECTING SOME PHP INSTALLATIONS RESOLVED: due to a subtle bug
1689 in parse_w3cdtf(), some installations of PHP encountered problems with
1690 FeedWordPress's attempt to date posts, which would cause some new posts
1691 on Atom feeds to be dated as if they had apppeared in 1969 or 1970
1692 (thus, effectively, never appearing on front page at all). This bug in
1693 the date handling should now be fixed.
1694
1695 * PHP <?=...?> SHORT FORM ELIMINATED: some installations of PHP do not
1696 allow the <?=...?> short form for printing PHP values, which was used
1697 extensively in the FeedWordPress interface code. Since this could cause
1698 fatal errors for users with the wrong installation of PHP, the short
1699 form has been replaced with full PHP echo statements, and is no longer
1700 used in FeedWordPress.
1701
1702 * BETTER USER INTERFACE INTEGRATION WITH WORDPRESS 2.x: Some minor changes
1703 have been made to help the FeedWordPress interface pages blend in better
1704 with the user interface when running under WordPress 2.x.
1705
1706 * GLOBAL CATEGORIES BUG RESOLVED: a bug that prevented some users from
1707 setting one or more categories to apply to syndicated posts from all
1708 feeds (using the checkbox interface under Options --> Syndication) has
1709 been resolved.
1710
1711 = 0.98 =
1712
1713 * WORDPRESS 2.0 COMPATIBILITY: This is a narrowly-targeted release to
1714 solve a major outstanding problem. FeedWordPress is now compatible with
1715 both WordPress 1.5 and WordPress 2.0. Incompatibilities that caused
1716 fatal SQL errors, and a more subtle bug with off-kilter counts of posts
1717 under a given category, have been resolved. FeedWordPress tests for
1718 database schema using the global $wp_db_version variable (if null, then
1719 we presume that we're dealing with WordPress 1.5).
1720
1721 NOTE: I have **not** fully tested FeedWordPress with WordPress 2.0.
1722 Further testing may reveal more bugs. However, you should now be able
1723 to get at least basic FeedWordPress functionality up and running.
1724
1725 * AUTHOR MATCHING: FeedWordPress tests several fields to see if it can
1726 identify the author of the post as a user already in the WordPress user
1727 database. In previous versions, it tested the user login, the nickname,
1728 and tested for "aliases" listed in the Profile (see documentation). FWP
1729 now also matches authors on the basis of e-mail address (*if* an e-mail
1730 address is present). This is particularly helpful for formats such as
1731 RSS 2.0, in which authors are primarily identified by e-mail addresses.
1732
1733 = 0.97 =
1734
1735 * INSTALLATION PROCEDURE: Some of the changes between 0.96 and 0.97
1736 require upgrades to the meta-data stored by FeedWordPress to work
1737 properly. Thus, if you are upgrading from 0.96 or earlier to 0.97, most
1738 FeedWordPress operations (including updates and template functions)
1739 WILL BE DISABLED until you run the upgrade procedure. Fortunately,
1740 running the upgrade procedure is easy: just go to either Options -->
1741 Syndication or Links --> Syndicated in the WordPress Dashboard and press
1742 the button.
1743
1744 * FEED FORMAT SUPPORT: Support has been added for the Atom 1.0 IETF
1745 standard. Several other elements are also newly supported
1746 (dcterms:created, dcterms:issued, dcterms:modified, dc:identifier,
1747 proper support for the RSS 2.0 guid element, the RSS 2.0 author element,
1748 the use of Atom author or Dublin Core dc:creator constructs at the feed
1749 level to identify the author of individual items, etc.)
1750
1751 N.B.: full support of several Atom 1.0 features, such as categories
1752 and enclosures, requires you to install the optional rss-functions.php
1753 upgrade in your wp-includes directory.
1754
1755 * BUG FIX: Running `update-feeds.php` from command line or crontab
1756 returned "I don't syndicate..." errors. It turns out that WordPress
1757 sometimes tramples on the internal PHP superglobals that I depended on
1758 to determine whether or not the script was being invoked from the
1759 command line. This has been fixed (the variables are now checked
1760 *before* WordPress can trample them). Note that `update-feeds.php` has
1761 been thoroughly overhauled anyway; see below for details.
1762
1763 * BUG FIX: Duplicate categories or author names. Fixed two bugs that could
1764 create duplicate author and/or category names when the name contained
1765 either (a) certain international characters (causing a mismatch between
1766 MySQL and PHP's handling of lowercasing text), or (b) characters that
1767 have a special meaning in regular expressions (causing MySQL errors when
1768 looking for the author or category due to regexp syntax errors). These
1769 should now be fixed thanks to careful escaping of names that go into
1770 regular expressions and careful matching of lowercasing functions
1771 (comparing results from PHP only to other results from PHP, and results
1772 from MySQL only to other results from MySQL).
1773
1774 * BUG FIX: Items dated December 31, 1969 should appear less often. The
1775 function for parsing W3C date-time format dates that ships with
1776 MagpieRSS can only correctly parse fully-specified dates with a
1777 fully-specified time, but valid W3C date-time format dates may omit the
1778 time, the day of the month, or even the month. Some feeds in the wild
1779 date their items with coarse-grained dates, so the optional
1780 `rss-functions.php` upgrade now includes a more flexible parse_w3cdtf()
1781 function that will work with both coarse-grained and fully-specified
1782 dates. (If parts of the date or the time are omitted, they are filled in
1783 with values based on the current time, so '2005-09-10' will be dated to
1784 the current time on that day; '2004' will be dated to this day and time
1785 one year ago.
1786
1787 N.B.: This fix is only available in the optional `rss-functions.php`
1788 upgrade.
1789
1790 * BUG FIX: Evil use of HTTP GET has been undone. The WordPress interface
1791 is riddled with inappropriate (non-idempotent) uses of HTTP GET queries
1792 (ordinary links that make the server do something with significant
1793 side-effects, such as deleting a post or a link from the database).
1794 FeedWordPress did some of this too, especially in places where it aped
1795 the WordPress interface (e.g. the "Delete" links in Links -->
1796 Syndicated). That's bad business, though. I've changed the interface so
1797 that all the examples of improper side-effects that I can find now
1798 require an HTTP POST to take effect. I think I got pretty much
1799 everything; if there's anything that I missed, let me know.
1800
1801 Further reading: [Sam Ruby 2005-05-06: This Stuff Matters](http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2005/05/06/This-Stuff-Matters)
1802
1803 * BUG FIX: Categories applied by `cats` setting should no longer prevent
1804 category-based filtering from working. In FeedWordPress, you can (1)
1805 apply certain categories to all syndicated posts, or all posts from
1806 a particular feed; and (2) filter out all posts that don't match one
1807 of the categories that are already in the WordPress database (allowing
1808 for simple category-based filtering; just load up WordPress with the
1809 categories you want to accept, and then tell FeedWordPress not to create
1810 new ones). However, the way that (1) and (2) were implemented meant that
1811 you couldn't effectively use them together; once you applied a known
1812 category to all syndicated posts from a particular feed, it meant that
1813 they'd have at least one familiar category (the category or categories
1814 you were applying), and that would get all posts past the filter no
1815 matter what categories they were originally from.
1816
1817 Well, no longer. You can still apply categories to all syndicated posts
1818 (using either Syndication --> Options, or the feed-level settings under
1819 Links --> Syndicated). But these categories are not applied to the post
1820 until *after* it has already passed by the "familiar categories" filter.
1821 So now, if you want, you can do category filtering and *then* apply as
1822 many categories as you please to all and only posts that pass the filter.
1823
1824 * BUG FIX: Other minor typos and HTML gaffes were fixed along the way.
1825
1826 * PERFORMANCE: get_feed_meta() no longer hits the database for information
1827 on every call; it now caches link data in memory, so FeedWordPress only
1828 goes to the database once for each syndicated link. This may
1829 substantially improve performance if your database server resources
1830 are tight and your templates make a lot of use of custom settings from
1831 get_feed_meta().
1832
1833 * API CHANGE: Link ID numbers, rather than RSS URIs, are now used to
1834 identify the feed from which a post is syndicated when you use template
1835 functions such as get_feed_meta(). The practical upshot of this is you
1836 can switch feeds, or change the feed address for a particular syndicated
1837 site, without breaking your templates for all the posts that were
1838 syndicated from the earlier URI.
1839
1840 * API CHANGE: if you have plugins or templates that make use of the
1841 get_feed_meta() function or the $fwp_feedmeta global, note that the
1842 data formerly located under the `uri` and `name` fields is now located
1843 under the `link/uri` field and the `link/name` field, respectively. Note
1844 also that you can access the link ID number for any given feed under the
1845 global $fwp_feedmeta['link/id'] (in plugins) or
1846 get_feed_meta('link/id') (in a template in post contexts).
1847
1848 * FEATURE: the settings for individual feeds can now be edited using a
1849 humane interface (where formerly you had to tweak key-value pairs in the
1850 Link Notes section). To edit settings for a feed, pick the feed that you
1851 want under Links --> Syndicated and click the Edit link.
1852
1853 * FEATURE: The "Unsubscribe" button (formerly "Delete") in Links -->
1854 Syndicated now offers three options for unsubscribing from a feed: (1)
1855 turning off the subscription without deleting the feed data or affecting
1856 posts that were syndicated from the feed (this works by setting the Link
1857 for the feed as "invisible"); (2) deleting the feed data and all of the
1858 posts that were syndicated from the feed; or (3) deleting the feed data
1859 and *keeping* the posts that were syndicated from the feed
1860 setting the Link to "Invisible" (meaning that it will not be displayed
1861 in lists of the site links on the front page, and it won't be checked
1862 for updates; (2) deleting the Link and all of the posts that were
1863 syndicated from its feed; or (3) deleting the feed data but keeping the
1864 posts that were syndicated (which will henceforward be treated as if
1865 they were local rather than syndicated posts). (Note that (1) is usually
1866 the best option for aggregator sites, unless you want to clean up the
1867 results of an error or a test.)
1868
1869 * FEATURE / BUG FIX: If you have been receiving mysterious "I don't
1870 syndicate...", or "(local) HTTP status code was not 200", or "(local)
1871 transport error - could not open socket", or "parse error - not well
1872 formed" errors, then this update may solve your problems, and if it does
1873 *not* solve them, it will at least make the reasons for the problems
1874 easier to understand. That's because I've overhauled the way that
1875 FeedWordPress goes about updating feeds.
1876
1877 If you use the command-line PHP scripting method to run scheduled
1878 updates, then not much should change for you, except for fewer
1879 mysterious errors. If you have done updates by sending periodic HTTP
1880 requests to <http://your-blog.com/path/wp-content/update-feeds.php>,
1881 then the details have changed somewhat; mostly in such a way as to make
1882 things easier on you. See the README file or online documentation on
1883 Staying Current for the details.
1884
1885 * FEATURE: FeedWordPress now features a more sophisticated system for
1886 timed updates. Instead of polling *every* subscribed feed for updates
1887 *each* time `update-feeds.php` is run, FeedWordPress now keeps track of
1888 the last time it polled each feed, and only polls them again after a
1889 certain period of time has passed. The amount of time is normally set
1890 randomly for each feed, in a period between 30 minutes and 2 hours (so
1891 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
1892 directly by the feed, which brings us to ...
1893
1894 * FEATURE: FeedWordPress now respects the settings in the `ttl` and
1895 Syndication Module RSS elements. Feeds with these elements set will not
1896 be polled any more frequently than they indicate with these feeds unless
1897 the user manually forces FeedWordPress to poll the feed (see Links -->
1898 Syndicated --> Edit settings).
1899
1900 = 0.96 =
1901
1902 * FEATURE: support has been added for enclosures in RSS 2.0 and Atom
1903 0.6+ newsfeeds. WordPress already supports adding enclosures to an
1904 item; FeedWordPress merely gets the information on the enclosure
1905 from the feed it is syndicating and plugs that information directly
1906 into the WordPress database so that (among other things) that post
1907 will have its enclosure listed in your blog's RSS 2 newsfeed.
1908
1909 Note that enclosure support requires using the optional MagpieRSS
1910 upgrade (i.e., replacing your `wp-includes/rss-functions.php` with
1911 `OPTIONAL/wp-includes/rss-functions.php` from the FWP archive)
1912
1913 * FEATURE: for completeness's sake, there is now a feed setting,
1914 `hardcode url`, that allows you to set the URI for the front page
1915 of a contributor's website manually (that is, prevent it from being
1916 automatically updated from the feed channel link on each update). To
1917 set the URI manually, put a line like this in the Link Notes section
1918 of a feed:
1919
1920 hardcode url: yes
1921
1922 You can also instruct FeedWordPress to use hardcoded URIs by default
1923 on all feeds using Options --> Syndication
1924
1925 * FEATURE: by default, when FeedWordPress finds new syndicated posts,
1926 it (1) publishes them immediately, (2) turns comments off, and (3)
1927 turns trackback / pingback pings off. You can now alter all three
1928 default behaviors (e.g., to allow pings on syndicated posts, or to
1929 send newly-syndicated posts to the draft pile for moderation) using
1930 Options --> Syndication
1931
1932
1933 = From 0.91 to 0.95 =
1934
1935 * 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.
1936
1937 * 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").
1938
1939 * 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`.
1940
1941 * 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:
1942
1943 a.k.a.: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
1944
1945 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.
1946
1947 * 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.
1948
1949 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.
1950
1951 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.
1952
1953 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:
1954
1955 unfamiliar author: (create|default|filter)
1956 unfamiliar categories: (create|default|filter)
1957
1958 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.
1959
1960 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.
1961
1962 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:
1963
1964 unfamiliar author: filter
1965
1966 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.)
1967
1968 == License ==
1969
1970 The FeedWordPress plugin is copyright © 2005-2017 by Charles Johnson. It uses code derived or translated from:
1971
1972 - [wp-rss-aggregate.php][] by [Kellan Elliot-McCrea](kellan@protest.net)
1973 - [SimplePie][] feed parser by Ryan Parman, Geoffrey Sneddon, Ryan McCue, et al.
1974 - [MagpieRSS][] feed parser by [Kellan Elliot-McCrea](kellan@protest.net)
1975 - [Ultra-Liberal Feed Finder][] by [Mark Pilgrim](mark@diveintomark.org)
1976 - [WordPress Blog Tool and Publishing Platform](http://wordpress.org/)
1977
1978 according to the terms of the [GNU General Public License][].
1979
1980 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.
1981
1982 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.
1983
1984 [wp-rss-aggregate.php]: http://laughingmeme.org/archives/002203.html
1985 [SimplePie]: http://www.simplepie.org/
1986 [MagpieRSS]: http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/
1987 [Ultra-Liberal Feed Finder]: http://diveintomark.org/projects/feed_finder/
1988 [GNU General Public License]: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
1989
1990