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FeedWordPress / 2024.0428
FeedWordPress v2024.0428
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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: 6.5.2
7 Stable tag: 2024.0428
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]: https://web.archive.org/web/20051029095046/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 == Screenshots ==
67
68 1. Syndicated Sites Settings
69 2. Dashboard widget for Syndicated Sources
70 3. Feed and Update Settings (single feed)
71 4. Feed and Update Settings (defaults for all feeds)
72
73 == Changelog ==
74
75 = 2024.0428 =
76
77 * IMPORTANT SECURITY FIX: This version includes an important fix for a security vulnerability reported to me through Wordfence and WordPress support channels.
78
79 Vulnerability CVE-2024-0839 allowed for an insecure Direct Object Reference which could allow contents of Private, Pending, or otherwise non-Published post objects to be accessed by an attacker possessing or generating the internal guid URI of the post object. This vulnerability has been eliminated in the current version; to protect your site's security PLEASE BE SURE TO UPGRADE AS SOON AS POSSIBLE to version 2024.0428 or later, via the WordPress Plugin Repository or via Github.
80
81 * ADDITIONAL COMPATIBILITY FIXES AND CODE CLEANUP: This version includes numerous fixes to improve compatibility fixes for ongoing new releases of PHP, and 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. It features numerous fixes and improvements contributed by user @GwynethLlewelyn and several new hooks allowing for translation of interface elements.
82
83 = 2022.0222 =
84
85 * 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.
86
87 = 2022.0204 =
88
89 * 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.
90
91 = 2022.0123 =
92
93 * IMPORTANT SECURITY FIX: This version includes an important fix for a security vulnerability reported to me through WPScan and WordPress support channels.
94
95 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.
96
97 * 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.
98
99 = 2021.0713 =
100
101 * WORDPRESS 5.6, 5.7.x COMPATIBILITY FIXES. This release introduces fixes to annoying or worse warnings resulting from
102 the deprecation of WordPress's built-in WP_Feed_Cache class. This should resolve the problem if you are encountering
103 annoying, worrying, or breaking problems related to the PHP warnings: "Deprecated: class-wp-feed-cache.php is
104 <strong>deprecated</strong> since version 5.6.0", and/or "Message: ./cache is not writable. Make sure you've set the
105 correct relative or absolute path, and that the location is server-writable."
106
107 * Fixes PHP warning for "count(): Parameter must be an array or an object that implements Countable in
108 .../wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress/feedwordpress.php on line 1566"
109
110 * Miscellaneous fixes for other missing variable and global warnings.
111
112 * Code cleanup and reorganization to allow better modularization of error messages, warning dialogs, and extended text.
113
114 = 2020.0818 =
115
116 * 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.
117
118 * 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.
119
120 * DIVERS BUG FIXES AND PHP WARNING NOTICES RESOLVED, thanks to @oppiansteve's fixes and pull requests. (Thanks!)
121
122 * 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.
123
124 = 2020.0118 =
125
126 * 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.
127
128 * 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.
129
130 * 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.
131
132 * 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
133
134 = 2017.1020 =
135
136 * 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.
137
138 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:
139
140 <?php if (is_syndicated()) : ?>
141 <p class="byline">This post by <?php the_author(); ?> originally
142 appeared at <a href="<?php the_syndication_source_link(); ?>"><?php
143 the_syndication_source(); ?></a>.</p>
144 <?php else : ?>
145 <p class="byline">By <?php the_author(); ?>.</p>
146 <?php endif; ?>
147
148 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!
149
150 * 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.
151
152 = 2017.0913 =
153
154 * 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:
155
156 http://www.example.com/?guid=c1cd28da39e8d7babcf6499983aca545
157 https://www.example.com/?guid=c1cd28da39e8d7babcf6499983aca545
158
159 ... 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.
160
161 * 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.
162
163 * 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.
164
165 = 2016.1213 =
166
167 * 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.
168
169 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.
170
171 = 2016.1211 =
172
173 * WORDPRESS COMPATIBILITY: Tested with new versions of WordPress up to 4.7.
174
175 * 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.
176
177 * 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.
178
179 * 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.
180
181 = 2016.0420 =
182
183 * WORDPRESS COMPATIBILITY: Tested with new versions of WordPress up to 4.5.
184
185 * 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.
186
187 * 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>.
188
189 * BUGFIX: Syndication > Diagnostics HTTP diagnostic test widget was broken due to a dumb error on my part. Now fixed.
190
191 * SMALL CODING CHANGES: Lots of small changes to code organization, incorporation of some PHP 5.x coding conventions, etc.
192
193 = 2015.0514 =
194
195 * IMPORTANT SECURITY UPDATE: This version includes two important fixes for potential security vulnerabilities reported to me through support channels.
196
197 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
198
199 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.
200
201 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.
202
203 * 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>
204
205 * 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.
206
207 = 2014.0805 =
208
209 * FILTERS AND ADD-ONS: A number of new hooks for filters and add-ons to further customize the behavior of FWP have been added.
210
211 * 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.
212
213 * BUGFIX: A bug preventing FWP from saving categories assigned under Syndication > Categories & Tags has been fixed.
214
215 * 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.
216
217 * BUGFIX: A bug in the admin UI that caused the "Alternative Feeds" / "Find Feeds" box to throw a permissions error has been fixed.
218
219 * BUGFIX: A bug preventing proper mapping of categories and other terms in 2013.0504 has been fixed.
220
221 * 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.
222
223 = 2013.0504 =
224
225 * BUGFIX: PHP 5.4 compatibility -- includes some more extensive fixes to compatibility issues with PHP 5.4's handling of global variables
226
227 * DIAGNOSTICS: New diagnostics settings added to help track behavior of terms (categories, post tags, etc.) for syndicated posts.
228
229 = 2012.0504 =
230
231 * 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.
232
233 = 2012.0503 =
234
235 * BUGFIX: Works properly again with WordPress installations that use a MySQL table name prefix other than the default `wp_` prefix.
236
237 * 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.
238
239 * 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)
240
241 * ADMIN UI: Adds an AJAXy Test Expression button to allow live testing of sample results from expressions in Custom Post Settings.
242
243 = 2012.1218 =
244
245 * 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.
246
247 * BUG FIX: PERMALINKS REWRITTEN FOR CUSTOM POST TYPES AS WELL AS NORMAL
248 WORDPRESS POSTS. If you had WordPress set up to syndicate incoming posts
249 to a custom post type (under Syndication > Posts & Links), and asked
250 FeedWordPress to make "permalinks point to the original site", then
251 previous versions of FeedWordPress would fail to do the rewriting --
252 permalinks would only be rewritten to point to the original source for
253 normal WordPress posts, not for custom post types. In 2012.1218 this bug
254 has been fixed: all post types will now have permalinks rewritten unless
255 you request for permalinks to point to the local copy on your aggregator
256 site.
257
258 * BUG FIX: ELIMINATES "PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function
259 setting() on a non-object...." Some changes to the in-memory caching of
260 information about feed subscriptions could result in a fatal PHP error
261 in cases where you have de-activated one of your subscriptions, but
262 posts from that subscription were still in the archive. This would
263 normally show up through half-completed feeds or half-completed pages
264 that suddenly broke off in the middle, and displayed or logged an error
265 message like: "PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function setting() on a
266 non-object in {...}/wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress/feedwordpress.php
267 on line 615". This bug has been eliminated, so affected feeds and pages
268 should now render correctly, and the error message should no longer
269 appear.
270
271 * BUG FIX: CATEGORY BOXES IN SYNDICATION > CATEGORIES & TAGS. Some minor
272 bugs in the appearance and animation of category checkboxes (for
273 example, the checkbox used to select categories for syndicated posts on
274 the Syndication > Categories & Tags settings page) have been fixed.
275
276 = 2012.1212 =
277
278 * WORDPRESS 3.5 COMPATIBILITY: This release has been tested for compatibility
279 with new releases of WordPress, up to version 3.5, and any documented
280 compatibility issues have been cleared -- in particular, if you were seeing
281 error pages stating that you don't have permission to access the
282 FeedWordPress Syndication page within the WordPress admin interface, then
283 upgrading to this release should fix the problem.
284
285 As always, if you encounter any compatibility problems after upgrading your
286 version of WordPress and your version of FeedWordPress to the most recent
287 versions, please contact me with as detailed a description as possible of
288 the issue you are encountering, the circumstances you're encountering it
289 under, what you expect to see happening, and what is happening instead.
290
291 * PHP 5.4 COMPATIBILITY: This release has been audited to fix potential
292 problems with deprecation notices or fatal errors under recent versions
293 of PHP. In particular, all uses of run-time pass-by-reference have been
294 eliminated from the code; if you were seeing a fatal error reading
295 "Call-time pass-by-reference has been removed ..." then upgrading to
296 this release should fix the problem.
297
298 * CUSTOMIZATION FRAMEWORK: A great deal of work has been done to make the
299 underlying framework more flexible, so that PHP add-ons can be written
300 to adapt FeedWordPress to handle custom XML vocabularies, expiration of
301 posts under specified conditions, and other custom behavior.
302
303 * BUGFIX: MANUALLY EDITED POST SLUGS NOT OVERWRITTEN. Thanks to a report
304 by Chris Fritz, I've identified some code that causes post slugs for the
305 posts generated by FWP to be rewritten with every update, even if the
306 user has manually updated the slug from within the WordPress editing
307 interface. This has been fixed: FWP will continue to generate new slugs
308 for syndicated posts, but when syndicated posts are updated, they will
309 retain the slug that they had at the time of the update; any manual
310 changes to the post slug should be preserved.
311
312 * USER-AGENT STRING: FeedWordPress now sends a distinctive User-Agent
313 string identifying itself, and noting that it is a feed aggregator.
314
315 * MISCELLANEOUS PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS: A number of changes have been
316 made to try to reduce the intensity and expense in terms of both
317 database performance and web server memory consumption.
318
319 * DIAGNOSTICS IMPROVEMENTS: A number of new and improved diagnostics have
320 been added which should aid in understanding and troubleshooting issues
321 that may arise.
322
323 = 2011.1019 =
324
325 * BUGFIX: "THERE ARE NO HTTP TRANSPORTS AVAILABLE" ERROR FIXED: The initial
326 support for HTTP Basic and Digest authentication in version 2011.1018
327 contained a bug that could cause HTTP requests for feeds or for other
328 WordPress resources to break down if you do not have the PHP curl module
329 installed. This bug has been fixed, and these errors should no longer
330 appear.
331
332 * IMPROVED HTTP AUTHENTICATION SUPPORT: In addition, the HTTP Authentication
333 support in FeedWordPress has been extended, to ensure that Basic
334 authentication is available in many web host configurations, and to allow
335 you to add a username and password for a feed immediately when you
336 subscribe to it.
337
338 = 2011.1018 =
339
340 * HTTP BASIC AND DIGEST AUTHENTICATION SUPPORT: FeedWordPress now offers
341 improved support for syndicating feeds that make use of HTTP Basic or HTTP
342 Digest authentication methods. In order to set up authentication on one of
343 your feeds, just go to its Settings > Feed page, and click on the "Uses
344 Username/Password" link underneath the Feed URL. Enter the username and
345 password for accessing the feed, then select the authentication method. (If
346 you're not sure which method your feed provider uses, try Basic first.)
347 Save Changes, and syndicate away.
348
349 NOTE: HTTP Digest support requires the curl module for PHP. If you are not
350 sure whether this module has been installed, contact your web hosting
351 provider to check.
352
353 * WP 3.3 (BETA) COMPATIBILITY: This version fixes an init-sequence bug that
354 could cause intrusive warning messages or fatal errors in WP 3.3 beta
355 versions.
356
357 * BUGFIX: FIXES LONG DELAYS IN UPDATES SCHEDULES IN LARGE INSTALLATIONS. A
358 performance feature introduced in version 2011.0721 had some flaws in its
359 implementation, which tended to create serious delays (on the order of
360 several hours) in FeedWordPress's attempts to schedule updates for feeds,
361 when users had a very large number of feeds (several dozen or more) in their
362 FeedWordPress installation. This feature has been reconfigured to adjust
363 dynamically to the number of feeds in Syndicated Sources and the frequency
364 with which they are updated. If you've seen a lot of ready-to-update feeds
365 piling up, several hours after they were supposed to get updated, then this
366 upgrade should better ensure that your feeds get updated in a timely fashion.
367
368 * BUGFIX: syndicated_item_guid FILTERS FIXED. Previous versions of
369 FeedWordPress theoretically allowed for filters on the syndicated_item_guid
370 hook, which was intended to filter the globally-unique identifier element
371 (rss:guid or atom:id) -- useful if you need to convince FeedWordPress to use
372 different guids, or to recognize two or more incoming posts as versions of
373 the same post rather than as distinct items. However, while the hook
374 affected the guid stored in the WordPress database, it did not affect the
375 guid used to check whether an incoming feed item had already been syndicated
376 or was a new item -- which greatly limited the practical usefulness of the
377 filter. This bug has been fixed: syndicated_item_guid filters should now
378 properly control not only the final database record, but also the initial
379 uniqueness test applied to posts.
380
381 = 2011.0721 =
382
383 * BUGFIX: SERIOUS BUG CAUSING RARE UNEXPECTED DELETION OF PAGES AND OTHER
384 CONTENT. A bug in the guid-checking code for some rare kinds of guids could
385 cause content in the wp_posts table to seemingly disappear at random after
386 FeedWordPress updates.This most frequently but not exclusively affected
387 static pages. What actually happened is that in these rare cases the
388 existing static page was mistaken for an older version of the new incoming
389 syndicated post, which was then stored as a new revision of the original
390 page. The bug that caused these mistaken identities has been fixed.
391
392 * BUGFIX: UNWANTED AUTOMATIC PAGE-LOAD-BASED UPDATES NO LONGER A NUISANCE.
393 Some users encountered a bug in which FeedWordPress would adopt an automatic
394 page-load-based update method, even if they had requested that it not do
395 so, and that it use a manual or cron job update method instead. The bug
396 causing this has been fixed, and page-load-based updates should no longer
397 trigger unless explicitly turned on.
398
399 * WP 3.2 USER INTERFACE COMPATIBILITY: POST TAGS BOX NOW WORKS AGAIN. The
400 release of WordPress 3.2 caused a breakage in the tags box which prevented
401 you from adding or removing tags under Syndication --> Categories & Tags.
402 (The breakage was the result of an incompatibility introduced by the new
403 release of jQuery.) This breakage has now been fixed, and the tags box
404 should work correctly again.
405
406 * FEED UPDATE SCHEDULING IMPROVEMENTS: UI. The Syndicated Sources table now
407 provides considerably more data to understand update scheduling, when
408 specific scheduling decisions are made because of, e.g., requests from the
409 feed producer.
410
411 * FEED UPDATE SCHEDULING IMPROVEMENTS: ENFORCEABLE "MINIMUM INTERVAL" SETTING
412 TO SPACE OUT UPDATES. Some feeds request specific update schedules, using
413 standard elements such as sy:updateFrequency and rss:ttl. Normally,
414 FeedWordPress respects any scheduling requests that a feed makes -- if it
415 requests a longer gap between polls than what FWP would normally adopt, then
416 FWP slows down to meet the request. If it indicates a shorter gap than what
417 FWP would normally adopt, FWP speeds up and checks that feed for updates
418 more often than it normally would. Now, there should not be any way for user
419 settings to override an explicit slow-down request from the feed producer --
420 if producers indicate a particular update schedule, then polling the feed
421 more frequently than they request is considered abusive behavior. But
422 there's no reason why users should not be able -- if they so desire -- to
423 override speed-up requests, and poll a feed *less* frequently than the
424 indicated update schedule, if the FWP user wants to space update checkins
425 over a longer interval of time. Before, they could not do this: FWP always
426 sped up to meet the indicated update schedule. Now, they can do this, by
427 using the new "Minimum Interval" setting in Syndication --> Feeds &
428 Updates..
429
430 = 2011.0706 =
431
432 * WP 3.2 COMPATIBILITY: ELIMINATES FATAL ERROR "Call to undefined method
433 WP_SimplePie_File::WP_SimplePie_File() in
434 [...]/wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress/feedwordpress.php on line 1841." The
435 latest release of WordPress, version 3.2, has shifted the minimum
436 requirements up to PHP 5.2, and in line with the shift to PHP5 they have
437 rewritten a number of code segments that made use of now-obsolete PHP4
438 idioms. Unfortunately, this caused a fatal error whenever FeedWordPress
439 attempted to make use of the cache, since FWP's caching plugin was written
440 to match the older idiom. FeedWordPress has been updated to follow the new,
441 PHP5 idiom when possible, thus eliminating the fatal error.
442
443 * PERFORMANCE: The handling of queries to determine whether posts had been
444 previously syndicated produced some very slow queries (usually, but not
445 always, involving a scan over the MD5(post_guid) column of the table). The
446 code that prepares MySQL queries for previously-syndicated checks has been
447 revised to eliminate the MD5(post_guid) scan entirely, and to significantly
448 improve performance by eliminating other unnecessary clauses.
449
450 * BUGFIX: NO LONGER DESTROYS STICKY POSTS. Previous versions could destroy
451 (or, more precisely, replace the content of) sticky posts due to some
452 queries mashed together in unexpected ways by WordPress. Version 2011.0706
453 accounts for and eliminates the problem; your sticky posts should be safe
454 once again.
455
456 * BUGFIX: GUIDS CONTAINING MYSQL-ESCAPED CHARACTERS NO LONGER CAUSE DUPLICATE
457 POSTS TO APPEAR. One remaining source of duplicate post issues in 2011.0602
458 was guids that contained characters that needed to be escaped for MySQL,
459 such as single quotes and double quotes. The work-around for handling
460 filtered URIs has now been corrected to ensure that these do not cause
461 duplicate posts.
462
463 = 2011.0602 =
464
465 * WP 3.1.3 COMPAT / BUGFIX: WHITESPACE IN GUIDS NO LONGER PRODUCES DUPLICATE
466 POSTS. The work-around for handling filtered URIs in guid elements has now
467 been extended to handle URIs that were filtered because of leading or
468 trailing whitespace, in addition to URIs that were filtered because of
469 unapproved schemes.
470
471 * WP 3.1.3 COMPAT / BUGFIX: RELATIVE URLS IN GUIDS NO LONGER PRODUCE DUPLICATE
472 POSTS. The work-around for handling filtered URIs in guid elements has now
473 been extended to handle URIs that were altered without being filtered out
474 entirely (most commonly because a scheme was added to a relative URL).
475
476 * BUGFIX: UPDATES TO POST NO LONGER CAUSE DUPLICATE DRAFT VERSION TO APPEAR.
477 Under certain conditions in 2011.0531, an update to an existing post would
478 not be properly applied to the post itself, but rather would appear as a
479 duplicate post with Draft status. This bug has been eliminated, and updates
480 will now be properly inserted as revisions to the existing post.
481
482 = 2011.0531 =
483
484 * WORDPRESS 3.1.3 COMPATIBILITY: DUPLICATE POSTS ISSUE FIXED. Due to
485 internal changes in the way that WordPress handles post guids in the
486 most recent release (3.1.3), many users experienced problems with many
487 duplicate posts appearing in rapid succession. (Specifically, this would
488 happen with any posts using tag: URL guids -- such as all the posts
489 coming from Blogger feeds or feeds from other Google services.) This
490 compatibility release of FeedWordPress eliminates the issue by working
491 around the new restrictions on tag: URLs.
492
493 * NEW AND IMPROVED DIAGNOSTICS: Syndication --> Diagnostics now contains some
494 new diagnostics settings useful for debugging problems with duplicate posts
495 (allowing you to easily view the guid of posts in the WordPress posts
496 database and allowing you to track the SQL used to check for existing
497 versions of a syndicated post).
498
499 = 2011.0512 =
500
501 * DIAGNOSTICS IMPROVEMENTS; "THERE MAY BE A BUG IN FEEDWORDPRESS" CRITICAL
502 ERROR NOTICES ELIMINATED: This version includes some major improvements
503 to the Syndication --> Diagnostics section, which should aid in
504 troubleshooting difficulties with items failing to be imported, posts
505 failing to be properly inserted into the database, or updates failing to
506 be recorded. If you have been encountering critical error / bug notices
507 with a white screen and the message "THERE MAY BE A BUG IN
508 FEEDWORDPRESS," followed by an extraordinarily long dump of mostly
509 incomprehensible diagnostic information, you'll be happy to know that
510 the condition causing these notices has been eliminated. In the few
511 cases where errors may still crop up with database insertions,
512 FeedWordPress will now produce a significantly more manageable and more
513 useful diagnostic message.
514
515 * BUGFIX: NEW POSTS FAILING TO APPEAR IN A CLEANLY-INSTALLED FEEDWORDPRESS
516 SYSTEM. If you encountered a recurring problem with FeedWordPress
517 failing to import new posts, after a clean install of FeedWordPress
518 (i.e., not an upgrade from a previous version), this problem may have
519 been the result of a bug with author-handling which has now been fixed
520 in the 2011.0512 release. (If the problem does *not* go away with the
521 upgrade, this version also includes significant improvements to the
522 Diagnostics system, which will help track down what *is* causing it
523 in your particular case.)
524
525 * PERFORMANCE: New handling of update hashes allows FeedWordPress to avoid
526 a certain kind of infinite loop, caused when two more more different
527 syndicated feeds each carried a version of the same item (for example,
528 because it appeared on two different aggregator feeds that you're
529 syndicating). In previous versions, when this kind of loop cropped up,
530 syndicated posts could pile up an indefinitely large number of revisions
531 -- each revision alternating between the version from each of the two
532 feeds where it appeared -- which would, over time, dramatically inflate
533 the size of the database, and kill the performance of queries on the
534 post table. This issue has been resolved: revisions of the post that
535 have been syndicated once will not be re-syndicated over and over again.
536
537 * AUTHOR LISTS: Lists of authors presented on the Author settings pages
538 should now be easier to scan through, with author names arranged in
539 alphabetical order.
540
541 * FEED ITEM DATE PARSING: More tweaks to make date-time handling more
542 resilient when feeds provide broken or weird values for the timestamps
543 on syndicated items. FWP will now attempt to work around unparseable
544 timezone values.
545
546 * AUTHOR MATCHING: Now attempts to match author names against the WP login
547 name in addition to display_name; when creating user record, also fills
548 in some best-guess values for nickname, firstname and lastname. Also
549 properly picks up Atom 1.0 author/uri data from feed.
550
551 * COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress has been successfully tested for
552 compatibility with recent releases of WordPress, up to version 3.1.2.
553
554 = 2011.0211 =
555
556 * BUGFIX: DUPLICATE POSTS WHEN GUIDS ARE TOO LONG: When feeds included
557 exceptionally long GUIDs, FeedWordPress could occasionally get into
558 a situation where posts with the long GUIDs would be duplicated over
559 and over again with each update (because FWP failed to store the full
560 GUID, due to length constraints in the relevant database tables).
561 Without the full GUID, FWP would not know that the post had already
562 been syndicated once. This bug has been fixed, and should no longer
563 produce duplicate posts.
564
565 * HTTP TIMEOUT SETTING: If you are frequently running into timeout
566 problems with one or more of the feeds you syndicate, FWP now allows you
567 to adjust the timeout for HTTP requests using a global or feed-by-feed
568 setting.
569
570 * HTTP GET PARAMETERS: You can now temporarily or permanently add HTTP
571 GET parameters to a subscription using an interface in Syndication -->
572 Feeds & Updates. This is especially helpful for making quick, short-term
573 changes to a subscription (for example, to pull in all the previous
574 items from a web service, before settling down to pulling in only newly
575 updated items).
576
577 * DIAGNOSTICS SYSTEM: Added several new diagnostics which are useful in
578 troubleshooting, and established a framework for add-on modules to hook
579 in with their own diagnostic messages.
580
581 * UI: Adjusted some internal coding, which should allow for settings
582 pages and add-ons to properly display multiple category pickers on a
583 single settings page.
584
585 * PHP4 COMPATIBILITY TWEAKS: This version makes some tweaks to the handling
586 of object references which should improve compatibility with older
587 versions of PHP. (Although, I should note, web hosts that still force
588 you to run under PHP 4 -- in 2011! -- are *bad web hosts*.)
589
590 * IMPROVED PERFORMANCE: This version eliminates a *major* performance drag
591 that shows up on sites with large numbers of users (due to some poor
592 decisions about where to place a user query, which caused the user table
593 to be scanned frequently when it did not need to be). If you experienced
594 serious problems with CPU load or slow database performance under
595 2010.0905, which kicked in immediately when FWP was loaded and tended
596 to disappear immediately if FWP was de-activated, it is likely that
597 upgrading away from 2010.0905 to the most recent version will resolve
598 your problem.
599
600
601 = 2010.0905 =
602
603 * BUGFIX: CATEGORIES AND TAGS CORRECTLY ASSIGNED IN AUTOMATIC UPDATES.
604 Version 2010.0903 switched over to a new way of assigning categories and
605 tags as part of its support for handling custom taxonomies.
606 Unfortunately, the method that it uses is subjected to some checks of
607 the current user's capabilities, which creates problems for posts that
608 are being inserted into the WordPress database when there *is* no
609 current user logged in (as, for example, when an update is being carried
610 out from a cron job or automatic update). The result was that posts
611 from cron jobs and automatic updates ended up with no Categories and no
612 Tags being assigned. This bug has now been fixed: in 2010.0905, Tags and
613 Categories should be correctly assigned to all posts, regardless of
614 whether they were added from manual updates, cron jobs, or automatic
615 updates.
616
617 = 2010.0903 =
618
619 * WORDPRESS 3 REQUIRED: Please note that this release of FeedWordPress
620 *requires* WordPress 3.0 or later. If you are currently using a 2.x
621 branch of WordPress, you will need to upgrade to WordPress 3 before you
622 can successfully upgrade FeedWordPress.
623
624 * BUGFIX: NO MORE DISAPPEARING "SYNDICATED SOURCES" PANEL; INTERNET
625 EXPLORER UI GLITCH APPARENTLY FIXED: Several users independently
626 reported a problem with FWP 2010.0623 and various versions of IE. A
627 problem with the HTML markup caused IE (but not Firefox or
628 Chrome) to completely hide the Syndicated Sources administration panel
629 (the main list of currently-syndicated sources, and the main location
630 for adding new sources, under the Syndication menu item) when a user
631 added their first syndicated feed. Maddeningly, the glitch seemed to
632 affect some IE users and not others: I was never able to reproduce the
633 problem for myself on my own machines. However, the markup of Syndicated
634 Sources has undergone significant changes and corrections since
635 2010.0623, and two independent sources who had been having this problem
636 confirm that they no longer encounter it with the updated version. For
637 the time being, I am going to declare this bug squashed.
638
639 * BUGFIX: MORE PROTECTION AGAINST FATAL ERRORS FROM PLUGGABLE VERSIONS OF
640 SimplePie: FeedWordPress now takes some precautions that should help to
641 better avoid conflicts for users who have installed pluggable versions
642 of SimplePie for another plugin or theme. (You may not know that you have
643 done this; but if you've been encountering fatal errors indicating that
644 you cannot redeclare class SimplePie, or something along those lines,
645 there is now a better chance that those fatal errors will be eliminated.
646
647 * PERFORMANCE: SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCED MEMORY CONSUMPTION FOR LARGE UPDATES:
648 FeedWordPress is still a memory-hungry little module, especially when
649 you are dealing with very large feeds. However, users should notice a
650 significant reduction in memory overloads, especially if they update a
651 large number of feeds at once.
652
653 * USER INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: Nothing is radically different, but there's
654 been a fair amount of extra spit and polish added, including a convenient
655 new Dashboard widget that may save you a trip to the Syndication menu,
656 a lot of effort to make the relationship between global and feed-by-feed
657 settings more obvious to the user and more easily controllable, to make
658 navigation between settings pages easier, to sand off a few rough edges,
659 and to make other improvements on the margins. I hope you'll like how
660 it looks.
661
662 * ADDING MULTIPLE FEEDS: FeedWordPress now provides a convenient mode for
663 adding multiple feeds at once, using either a copy-and-pasted list, or
664 else an OPML file. Go to Syndication --> Syndicated Sources and check
665 out the two new buttons underneath the New Source input box. When you
666 have to add a number of feeds at once, this can save you considerable
667 time and trouble.
668
669 * IMPROVED HANDLING OF AUTHORS WITH DUPLICATE E-MAIL ADDRESS AND AUTHORS
670 WITH NAMES WRITTEN IN FOREIGN SCRIPTS: WordPress 3 is increasingly picky
671 about what it will accept for new author accounts, and some of the
672 conditions it imposes can cause error conditions that prevent posts from
673 being properly syndicated, or properly attributed, if authors happen to
674 have identical e-mail addresses, or if users are given usernames that are
675 written in non-Western scripts. FeedWordPress now handles these much
676 better, and systematically works to avoid clashes between syndicated
677 authors' account names or in their e-mail addresses, which should result
678 in significantly better results in mapping author names to WordPress
679 user accounts.
680
681 * MAPPING CATEGORIES ON SYNDICATED POSTS TO TAGS NOW BETTER SUPPORTED:
682 In previous versions, the only way for the Categories provided by a
683 syndicated feed to be mapped into Post Tags was to instruct FWP to
684 create new tags, rather than new categories, for unfamiliar categories
685 from the feed. This works fine if you want tags to be the default; but
686 if you want only a *specific* set of tags, there was no way to get them
687 without getting most or all other categories imported as tags. You can
688 now do this by creating a tag (under Posts ==> Post Tags) before
689 importing the post; when the syndicated category matches a pre-existing
690 tag, the incoming post will be tagged with that tag, without creating
691 a local Post Category.
692
693 * REL-TAG MICROFORMAT SUPPORT FOR INLINE TAGS: Syndicated posts that
694 contain inline tags, marked up using the Rel-Tag microformat
695 <http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag>, are now tagged with the tags
696 provided by Rel-Tag format links.
697
698 * MUCH GREATER CONTROL OVER CATEGORY AND TAG MAPPING: This is partly the
699 result of building in support for a potentially endless set of custom
700 taxonomies (see below), but in general there has been a great deal of
701 effort towards giving you more control over how categories and tags
702 provided by the feed are mapped into terms on the local blog. In
703 particular, you can now force FeedWordPress to create only categories
704 from categories and tags provided by the feed; or to create only tags;
705 or to search both categories and tags for a match; or you can simply
706 force it to drop all of the categories provided by the feed and use
707 only categories or tags that you explicitly provide. In addition, you
708 can now also choose whether to override global categories settings with
709 a local, feed-specific setting; or whether to *add together* *both* the
710 global categories and the local feed-specific categories -- depending
711 on whatever your use-case may demand.
712
713 * CUSTOM POST TYPES AND TAXONOMY SUPPORTS: This is mainly for the
714 super-geeky, but if you use other plugins or themes that make
715 significant use of WordPress's support for custom post types and custom
716 taxonomies, you may be pleased to find that FeedWordPress now allows you
717 to feed incoming posts into any custom feed type that you wish, and to
718 map categories and tags from the feed to custom taxonomies as well as
719 to the standard Category and Tag taxonomies.
720
721 * STORING NAMESPACED CUSTOM FEED ELEMENTS IN POST CUSTOM FIELDS: If you
722 would like to use FeedWordPress's support for storing custom meta-data
723 from feed elements in the custom fields for a post (for example, to
724 store geolocation data or iTunes media meta-data), you'll find that it's
725 now much easier for you to access these namespaced elements. You always
726 could access them, but in previous versions you might have to write
727 something ugly like $(/{http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#}lat)
728 just to get at the value of a `<geo:lat>` tag. Now, as long as you use
729 the same mnemonic codes that the feed producer used, you should always
730 be able to write a nice, simple expression like $(/geo:lat) to get the
731 value of a <geo:lat> tag.
732
733 * CUSTOM DIRECTORY STRUCTURE SUPPORT: if you poke at it enough, WordPress
734 is relatively flexible about where it should store admin interface code,
735 uploaded content, plugins, and a number of other things that occupy an
736 important place in the WordPress directory structure. Previous versions
737 of FeedWordPress encountered serious errors or broke entirely when used
738 with directory structures other than the default. This should now be
739 fixed: FWP now supports custom directory structures wherever WordPress
740 allows them to be customized, rather than depending on the default
741 locations. Enjoy your freedom!
742
743 * MANY NEW FILTERS AND API UTILITY FUNCTIONS FOR ADD-ON PROGRAMMERS: There
744 have been too many improvements to list them all in this ChangeLog, but
745 it means that much more power and ease for folks who are customizing
746 FeedWordPress through PHP filters or add-on modules. Fuller
747 documentation will be put up at the Wiki at feedwordpress.radgeek.org
748 soon.
749
750 = 2010.0623 =
751
752 * WORDPRESS 3.0 COMPATIBILITY / AUTHOR MAPPING INTERFACE ISSUES: I
753 resolved a couple of outstanding issues with the author mapping
754 interface (Syndication --> Authors), which were preventing new users
755 from being created correctly and author mapping rules from being set up
756 correctly. These partly had to do with new restrictions on user account
757 creation introduced in WordPress 3.0; anyway, they should now be fixed.
758
759 * MORE EFFICIENT SYNDICATED URL LOOKUPS: Several users noticed that the
760 bug fix introduced in 2010.0528 for compatibility with post-listing
761 plugins caused a lot more queries to the database in order to look up
762 numerical post IDs from the URL provided to the filter. This shouldn't
763 cause any major problems, but it is not as efficient as it could be; the
764 code now takes advantage of a more efficient way of doing things,
765 which usually will not require any additional database queries.
766
767 * SIMPLEPIE FEED UPDATE ISSUES: If you have been having significant
768 problems with getting feeds to update correctly, this may be the result
769 of some bugs in the implementation of SimplePie caching that ships with
770 WordPress (as of version 3.0). (You would most commonly experience this
771 error if you continually saw errors such as "No feed found at <...>" in
772 your updates.) Fortunately, SimplePie allows for a great deal of
773 extensibility and this allows me to work around the problem; these
774 error conditions should now be mostly eliminated when the underlying
775 feed is valid.
776
777 * UI: SHOW INACTIVE SOURCES: When you use the default unsubscribe option
778 -- which turns off the subscription to a feed while preserving the posts
779 from it and the syndication-related meta-data for the feed -- the
780 unsubscribed feed can now easily be viewed in a special "Inactive"
781 section of the Syndicated Sources page. (As a side benefit, if you've
782 accidentally, or only temporarily, turned off the subscription to a
783 feed, it is now much easier to restore the feed to being active, or to
784 delete it permanently, if you prefer.
785
786 * UI: FEED FINDER / SWITCH FEED INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: changes to styling
787 and options for the feed finder / switch feed, which should now make it
788 easier, in some cases, to find alternative feeds, and make interface
789 options more clearly visible.
790
791 * FILTERS: `syndicated_item_published` and `syndicated_item_updated` NOW
792 PROPERLY AFFECT THE DATING OF POSTS. These filters used to affect some
793 date-related settings, but not others -- and, most importantly, not the
794 final date that is set for a post's publication or last-modified date
795 in the WordPress database. Now, they do affect that, as they should.
796 (Filters should receive, and return, a long integer, representing a Unix
797 epoch relative timestamp.)
798
799 * MAGIC URL TO CLEAR THE CACHE: Suppose that you need to clear the feed
800 cache, for whatever reason; suppose, even, that you need to clear it on
801 a regular basis. One way you might do this is by logging into the
802 FeedWordPress administrative interface and going to Syndication -->
803 Performance. Another way you might do it, now, is to simply send an
804 HTTP request to a magic URL provided by FeedWordPress: if your blog is
805 at example.com, the URL would be <http://example.com/?clear_cache=1>
806
807 = 2010.0602 =
808
809 * CATEGORY BOX INTERFACE ELEMENT FIXED FOR WP 3.0: Stylesheet changes
810 between WordPress 2.9.x and the WordPress 3.0 RC caused the Categories
811 box under **Syndication --> Categories & Tags** to malfunction. This
812 has been fixed.
813
814 * LINK CATEGORY SELECTION BOX IN SYNDICATION ==> FEEDS FIXED FOR WP 2.8
815 AND 2.9: A WP 3.0 compatibility change introduced in 2010.0531
816 inadvertently broke the Syndicated Link Category selector under
817 Syndication --> Feeds & Updates in WP 2.8 and WP 2.9, causing the post
818 categories to be displayed in the selector rather than the link
819 categories. This should now be fixed so that the selector will work
820 correctly under both the current versions of WordPress and the 3.0 RC.
821
822 * MORE PERMISSIVE HANDLING OF FEEDS WITH BAD CONTENT-TYPE HEADERS: One of
823 the small advantages that MagpieRSS had over SimplePie is that it was
824 more tolerant about parsing well-formed feeds that the remote web server
825 happened to deliver with weird or incorrect HTTP Content-type headers.
826 In feeds affected by this problem, the new SimplePie parser would simply
827 fail to find a feed, due to its being led astray by the contents of the
828 Content-type header. This version includes an extension to SimplePie's
829 content-type sniffer that offers more permissive handling of the HTTP
830 headers.
831
832 * MORE FULL-TEXT "EXCERPTS" NOW PROPERLY SHORTENED. Version 2010.0528
833 introduced code to control for cases in which elements intended for
834 item summaries are (ill-advisedly) used to carry the full text of posts;
835 past versions of FeedWordPress would simply include the full text of the
836 post in the excerpt field, but newer versions now attempt to detect
837 this condition when it arises and to head it off, by blanking out the
838 excerpt field and filling it with an automatically generated short,
839 plain text excerpt from the full content. This release broadens the
840 test conditions that indicate when an excerpt field is treated as
841 identical to the full text of the post, and should therefore improve
842 the handling of some feeds (such as Google Reader feeds) where the full
843 text of each post was still appearing in the excerpt field.
844
845 * FILTERS: `syndicated_item_published` AND `syndicated_item_updated`
846 FILTERS NOW ALLOW FILTER AUTHORS TO CHANGE POST TIMESTAMPS. You can now
847 use the `syndicated_item_published` and `syndicated_item_updated` filter
848 hooks to write filters or add-ons which directly change the post date
849 and most-recently-updated timestamps on incoming syndicated posts. Props
850 to niska for pointing out where the filters needed to be applied in
851 order to change WordPress's internal timestamps for incoming posts.
852
853 = 2010.0531 =
854
855 * PERMALINK / CUSTOM FIELDS PROBLEM RESOLVED: An issue in 2010.0528 caused
856 some posts to be imported without the proper syndication-related
857 meta-data being attached (thus causing permalinks to point back to the
858 aggregator website rather than to the source website, among other
859 problems). This problem has been resolved (and a fix has been applied
860 which will resolve the problem for any posts affected by this problem,
861 if the original post is recent enough to still be available on the feed).
862
863 * UI: The "Back End" section has been split into two separate sections --
864 "Performance" (dealing with caching, database index, and other
865 performance tweaks), and "Diagnostics" (dealing with debug mode,
866 update logging, and a number of new diagnostic tests which I will be
867 rolling out over the next few releases).
868
869 * Several minor interface bug fixes and PHP warning notices eliminated.
870
871 = 2010.0528 =
872
873 #### Compatibility ####
874
875 * SIMPLEPIE IS NOW USED TO PARSE FEEDS; NO MORE MAGPIERSS UPGRADES NEEDED:
876 One of the biggest changes in this release is that FeedWordPress no
877 longer depends on MagpieRSS to parse feeds, and has switched to the much
878 more up-to-date and flexible SimplePie feed parser, which is included as
879 a standard part of WordPress versions 2.8 and later. Using SimplePie will
880 hopefully allow for better handling of feeds going further, and will
881 allow me greater flexibility in determining how exactly the feed parser
882 will operate. It also means that FeedWordPress no longer requires
883 special upgrades to the WordPress core MagpieRSS files, and should
884 eliminate quite a bit of complexity.
885
886 * MAGPIERSS COMPATIBILITY LAYER FOR EXISTING FILTERS AND ADD-ONS: However,
887 I have also implemented a compatibility layer to ensure that existing
888 filters and add-ons for FeedWordPress which depended on the MagpieRSS
889 data format *should not be broken* by the switch to SimplePie. Going
890 forward, I recommend that new filters and add-ons be written to take
891 advantage of the SimplePie object representations of items, feeds, etc.,
892 rather than the MagpieRSS arrays, but the MagpieRSS arrays will still
893 be available and older filters should continue to work as they have in
894 the past.
895
896 * COMPATIBILITY WITH WORDPRESS 2.9.x and 3.0: This release has been tested
897 for the existing WordPress 2.9.x branch and with the upcoming release of
898 WordPress 3.0. Changes in the user interface JavaScript between WordPress
899 2.8.x and WordPress 2.9 caused the tag box interface element to break in
900 the Syndication --> Categories & Tags settings page; changes in the API
901 functions for adding new authors caused fatal errors under certain
902 conditions in WordPress 3.0. These breakages have been fixed.
903
904 * DROPPED LEGACY SUPPORT FOR WORDPRESS PRIOR TO 2.8: Because SimplePie is
905 not included with versions of WordPress prior to 2.8, I have chosen to
906 drop legacy support for WordPress versions 1.5 through 2.7. If you are
907 using FeedWordPress with a version of WordPress before 2.8, you will
908 have to upgrade your installation of WordPress in order to take
909 advantage of this release.
910
911 * PHP 5.3 COMPATIBILITY: A couple of compatibility issues, which were
912 causing fatal errors amd ugly warnings for users of PHP 5.3,
913 have been eliminated.
914
915 #### Features and Processing ####
916
917 * INTERFACE REORGANIZATION: The interface restructuring, began with
918 Version 2009.0612, has been completed. Catch-all settings pages have
919 been eliminated entirely for pages that cover each aspect of handling
920 a feed: Feeds & Updates, Posts & Links, Authors, Categories & Tags,
921 and Back End handling of the database and diagnostic information.
922 Extensive new interface hooks allow add-on modules to significantly
923 change or extend the FeedWordPress admin interface and workflow.
924
925 * STORING INFORMATION FROM THE FEED IN CUSTOM FIELDS: Many users
926 have written to request the ability to store information from elements
927 in the feed in a custom field on each post. (So that, for example, if
928 post includes a `itunes:duration` element, you could store the contents
929 in a Custom Field called `duration` on the post (for a Theme to access
930 later). The Custom Post Settings under Syndication --> Posts & Links now
931 allow you to access any item or feed tag, using a syntax similar to
932 a much-simplified version of XPath. See Posts & Links settings for
933 details.
934
935 * UPDATE-FREEZING ON MANUALLY EDITED POSTS: FeedWordPress now allows you
936 to mark posts that have been manually edited, so that the changes you
937 make will not be overwritten by later updates from the feed. If you make
938 manual edits to a particular post, just check the "Manual editing"
939 checkbox in order to protect your changes from being overwritten. If you
940 want to block *all* posts from being updated after they are imported
941 for the first time, a new "Updated Posts" setting in Posts & Links
942 allows you to freeze all posts from a particular feed, or all syndicated
943 posts.
944
945 * SETTING: FEED-BY-FEED SETTINGS FOR WHERE PERMALINKS POINT TO: You've
946 always been able to tell FeedWordPress whether permalinks for posts
947 should point to the original source of the story or the local copy. Now
948 you can choose different policies for different feeds, instead of one
949 global policy for all feeds. (Of course, you can still use a global
950 default if you prefer.)
951
952 * SETTING: USER CONTROL OVER TIMING BASIS. You can now determine the
953 schedule on which feeds are considered ready to poll for updates --
954 by default feeds become ready for polling after about 1 hour. You can
955 now increase or decrease the time window under Syndication --> Feeds &
956 Updates. (However, please pay *CAREFUL ATTENTION* to the recommendations
957 and DO NOT set the scheduling lower than 60 minutes unless you are
958 ABSOLUTELY SURE that you have specific permission from webmaster who
959 provides that specific feed to poll more frequently than that. If you
960 set this too low (and about 60 minutes is the polite minimum if you
961 haven't been given a different figure), most webmasters will consider
962 the frequent hits on their server as rude, or even downright abusive.
963
964 * OTHER SETTINGS: New settings also include the ability to stop FWP from
965 resolving relative URLs within syndicated content, and the ability to
966 choose whether FeedWordPress should indicate the comment feed from the
967 original source, or the local comment feed, when providing the comment
968 feed URL for a syndicated post.
969
970 #### Parsing ####
971
972 * BETTER DATE HANDLING -- FEWER FLASHBACKS TO 1969 and 1970: FeedWordPress
973 has made some bugfixes and some improvements in the logic for parsing
974 dates. This should allow FeedWordPress to correctly parse more dates in
975 more feeds; and, in the last resort, when FeedWordPress fails to
976 correctly parse a date, to fall back to a more intelligent default. This
977 should hopefully avoid most or all error conditions that have resulted
978 in articles being erroneously dated to the dawn of the Unix epoch
979 (31 December 1969 or 1 January 1970).
980
981 * FULL-TEXT "EXCERPTS" NOW PROPERLY SHORTENED. Based on a straightforward
982 reading of the existing RSS specs, it's reasonable for the
983 rss:description element to be read as a plaintext summary or excerpt for
984 the item containing the description -- with the full text of the item,
985 if available, in another, better-suited element, such as the de facto
986 standard content:encoded extension element. The problem is that uses of
987 RSS rarely have much to do with anything like a straightforward reading
988 of the specs. As a result, many actual RSS producers in the wild put the
989 full text of the article in a description element. But since
990 FeedWordPress has treated this text as a summary, this produces
991 aggregated posts with lengthy "excerpts" containing the full text of the
992 article. This release of FeedWordPress fixes the problem by doing a
993 little digging before treating rss:description as a summary: if the
994 description element is used properly as a plain text summary, then
995 FeedWordPress will take the summary provided by the feed, rather than
996 recreating its own excerpt from the full text; but if an RSS item has no
997 full-text element other than description, FeedWordPress will treat the
998 description element as the full text of the article, and generate a
999 shortened excerpt automatically from that text.
1000
1001 #### API ####
1002
1003 * TEMPLATE API: new template tags `get_local_permalink()` and
1004 `the_local_permalink()` allow you to access the permalink for a post on
1005 your aggregator site, even when FeedWordPress is rewriting permalinks to
1006 point to the original source site.
1007
1008 * NEW HOOKS FOR ADD-ONS AND FILTERS: I have added a number of new hooks
1009 which allow add-on modules to filter more precisely, gather information
1010 at more points, and to enhance the FeedWordPress admin interface. For
1011 a list of new hooks and documentation, see the FeedWordPress
1012 documentation wiki at
1013 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/add-ons-and-filters>
1014
1015 * FILTER API: A number of new utility methods have been added to the
1016 SyndicatedPost class to make it easier for filters and add-ons to
1017
1018 * FILTER API: Globals $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta DEPRECATED. These
1019 global variables, originally introduced to allow filters access to
1020 information about the source feed in `syndicated_item` filters (which
1021 were passed in through global variables rather than as parameters
1022 because of a bug in WP 1.5 which was then fixed in 1.5.1) have been
1023 DEPRECATED. If you have any filters or add-ons which still depend on
1024 these global variables, you should see about fixing them to access data
1025 about the source feed using the SyndicatedPost::link element instead.
1026 For documentation, see the FeedWordPress documentation wiki at
1027 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedpost> and
1028 <http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/syndicatedlink>.
1029
1030 * DIAGNOSTICS: I've included a number of new diagnostic options and
1031 messages, which should allow an experienced user to better investigate
1032 any problems that may crop up.
1033
1034 #### Bug Fixes ####
1035
1036 * BUGFIX: & IN PERMALINKS NO LONGER CAUSING ATOM OR HTML VALIDATION
1037 EFFORTS: Many users reported an issue in which syndicating a feed with
1038 special XML characters in the URLs (& was the most common, since it is
1039 used to separate HTTP GET parameters) would cause the aggregator's
1040 feeds to produce invalid (malformed) XML. This update addresses the
1041 issue in Atom feeds. Unfortunately, it has not been technically possible
1042 to address the problem in RSS 2.0 feeds, due to limitations on
1043 WordPress's internal templates for RSS feeds.
1044
1045 * BUGFIX: BROKEN URLS IN "POPULAR POSTS" AND SIMILAR PLUGINS SHOULD NO
1046 LONGER BE BROKEN. A number of users noticed an issue where plugins and
1047 templates that listed posts in locations outside of the post loop
1048 (for example, "Popular Posts"-style plugins that listed posts in the
1049 sidebar), often produced the wrong URL for post links. (Typically, all
1050 the posts listed would get the same wrong URL.) This should now be
1051 fixed. Thanks to Björn for sending in a quick fix!
1052
1053 * MINOR BUGFIXES: This release includes a number of fixes to minor bugs
1054 and compatibility issues, including: silent failures of the "Syndicate"
1055 button, "Illegal Offset Type" error messages from MagpieRSS, and others.
1056
1057 = 2009.0707 =
1058
1059 * BUGFIX: WORDPRESS 2.8 AJAX COMPATIBILITY ISSUES RESOLVED (blank or
1060 truncated "Syndicated Sites" administration page): Due to changes in the
1061 AJAX interface elements between WordPress 2.7 and WordPress 2.8, several
1062 FeedWordPress users encountered an issue where the front "Syndication"
1063 page in the FeedWordPress administrative interface would come up blank,
1064 without the normal "Syndicated Sites" list and "Update" control, or
1065 sometimes wth the boxes visible but one or both of them truncated, with
1066 only the title bar. This issue should now be resolved: with the new
1067 version of FeedWordPress, the compatibility issue that caused the
1068 disappearance should be eliminated, and if boxes are shown with only
1069 their handle visible, you should once again be able to drop down the
1070 rest of the box by clicking once on its title bar.
1071
1072 * BUGFIX: TAG SETTING WIDGET FIXED. Due to changes in interface elements
1073 between WordPress 2.7 and WordPress 2.8, people using FeedWordPress with
1074 WordPress 2.8 found that the widget for setting tags to be applied to
1075 all syndicated posts, or all syndicated posts from a particular feed,
1076 no longer displayed "Add" and "Remove" buttons for individual tags. This
1077 issue has now been fixed, and the tagging widget should once again work
1078 more or less exactly like the tagging widget for individual posts in the
1079 normal WordPress admin interface.
1080
1081 = 2009.0618 =
1082
1083 * BUGFIX: MYSTERY ERRORS WITH WITH WP_Http_Fsockopen HTTP TRANSPORT
1084 ELIMINATED: Thanks to a combination of a subtle bug in FeedWordPress,
1085 and changes to the HTTP transport code in WordPress, a number of users
1086 encountered an error in which any time they attempted to add a new feed
1087 through the FeedFinder interface, FeedWordPress would fail and display
1088 an HTTP request failure diagnostic message. The subtle bug has been
1089 fixed, and with it, most of these errors should now be eliminated.
1090
1091 Be sure to upgrade your MagpieRSS to the most recent MagpieRSS version
1092 after you have insalled FeedWordPress 2009.0618, or this bug fix will
1093 not take effect.
1094
1095 = 2009.0613 =
1096
1097 * INTERFACE/BUGFIX: WORDPRESS 2.8 CATEGORY BOX FIX. Thanks to a subtle
1098 change in class names between the WordPress 2.7 and 2.8 stylesheets,
1099 category boxes in the FeedWordPress settings interface tended to overflow
1100 and have a lot of messy-looking overlapping text under WordPress 2.8.
1101 This has now been fixed.
1102
1103 * FeedFinder FAILURE DIAGNOSTICS: When FWP's FeedFinder fails to find any
1104 feeds at a given URL (for example, when you are trying to add a
1105 subscription through the administrative interface and you run into an
1106 error message), FeedWordPress now provides more diagnostic information
1107 for the reasons behind the failure. If that helps you, great; if not,
1108 it should help me respond more intelligently to your support request..
1109
1110 = 2009.0612 =
1111
1112 * WORDPRESS 2.8 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress 2009.0612 has been tested for
1113 compatibility with the recent version 2.8 release of WordPress.
1114
1115 * INTERFACE RESTRUCTURING: In order to avoid settings posts from becoming
1116 too crowded, and to modularize and better organize the user interface,
1117 new "Posts" and "Categories & Tags" subpages have been created under the
1118 "Syndication" menu. "Posts" controls settings for individal syndicated
1119 posts (such as publication status, comment and ping status, whether or
1120 not to use the original location of the post as the permalink, whether
1121 or not to expose posts to formatting filters, and so on). "Categories &
1122 Tags" controls settings for assigning new syndicated posts to categories
1123 and tags, such as categories or tags to apply to all syndicated posts,
1124 and how to handle categories that do not yet exist in the WordPress
1125 database. These subpages, like the Authors subpage, handle settings for
1126 the global default level and for individual syndicated feeds.
1127
1128 Corresponding to these new subpages, the old Syndication Settings and
1129 Feed Settings subpages have been cleaned up and simplified, and now only
1130 link to the appropriate subpages for options that can be set in the
1131 Posts, Authors, or Categories & Tags subpages.
1132
1133 * FEATURE: ADD CUSTOM SETTINGS TO EACH SYNDICATED POST: FeedWordPress has
1134 long had an interface for creating custom settings for each syndicated
1135 *feed* which could be retrieved in templates using the `get_feed_meta()`
1136 template function. But it had no feature for adding custom fields to
1137 each individual syndicated *post*. In response to requests from users, I
1138 have added the ability to apply custom fields to each individual
1139 syndicated post, using the new Syndication --> Posts subpage. You can
1140 set up custom fields to be applied to every syndicated post, or custom
1141 fields to be applied to syndicated posts from a particular feed.
1142
1143 * FEATURE: MAGPIERSS VERSION CHECK AND UPGRADE: FeedWordPress will attempt
1144 to determine whether or not you are using the upgraded version of
1145 MagpieRSS that comes packaged with FeedWordPress. If not, it will throw
1146 an error on admin pages, and, if you are a site administrator, it will
1147 give you the option to ignore the error message, or to attempt an
1148 automatic upgrade (using a native file copy). If the file copy fails,
1149 FeedWordPress will offer some guidance on how to perform the upgrade
1150 manually.
1151
1152 * BLANK POSTS PROBLEM NO LONGER OCCURS WITH OLD & BUSTED MAGPIERSS: Due
1153 to the fact that I relied on a content normalization that occurs in my
1154 upgraded version of MagpieRSS, but not in the old & busted version of
1155 MagpieRSS that ships with WordPress, until this version, if you tried to
1156 syndicate an Atom feed without having performed the (*strongly
1157 recommended*) MagpieRSS upgrade, all of the posts would come up with
1158 completely blank contents. That's not because MagpieRSS couldn't read
1159 the data, but rather because the new Magpie version puts that data in a
1160 location where the old version doesn't, and I was only looking in that
1161 newer location. Now it checks for both, meaning that posts will continue
1162 to display their contents even if you don't upgrade MagpieRSS. (But you
1163 **really should** upgrade it, anyway.)
1164
1165 * BUGFIX: RELATIVE URI RESOLUTION FOR POST CONTENT RESTORED. Some time
1166 back, I added support for resolving relative URIs against xml:base on
1167 feeds that support it to the MagpieRSS upgrade in FeedWordPress. Then I
1168 took out code that did the same thing from the main FeedWordPress code.
1169 Of course, the problem is that some people, even though it is clearly
1170 stupid or evil to do so, still include relative URIs for images or links
1171 in posts on feed formats that do *not* adequately support xml:base
1172 (notably, RSS 2.0 feeds). In response to a user request, I have added
1173 this functionality back in, so that MagpieRSS will resolve any relative
1174 URIs that it knows how to resolve using xml:base, and then FeedWordPress
1175 will attempt to resolve any relative URIs that are left over afterwards.
1176
1177 * BUGFIX: INTERFACE OPTION FOR SETTING SYNDICATED POST PUBLICATION STATUS
1178 ON A FEED-BY-FEED BASIS HAS BEEN RESTORED: Due to a version-checking
1179 bug, users of WordPress 2.7.x lost an option from the "Edit a syndicated
1180 feed" interface which allowed them to determine whether newly syndicated
1181 posts should be published immediately, held as "Pending Review," saved
1182 as drafts, or saved as private posts. (The option to change this
1183 setting globally remained in place, but users could no longer set it on
1184 a feed-by-feed basis.) The version-checking bug has been fixed, and the
1185 option has been restored.
1186
1187 * BUGFIX: "ARE YOU SURE?" FATAL ERROR ELIMINATED AND SECURITY IMPROVED:
1188 Under certain circumstances (for example, when users have configured
1189 their browser or proxy not to send HTTP Referer headers, for privacy or
1190 other reasons), many features in the FeedWordPress administrative
1191 interface (such as adding new feeds or changing settings) would hit a
1192 fatal error, displaying only a cryptic message reading "Are you sure?"
1193 and a blank page following it. This problem has been eliminated by
1194 taking advantage of WordPress's nonce functions, which allow the
1195 security check which ran into this error to work properly even without
1196 receiving an HTTP Referer header. (N.B.: WordPress's nonce functions
1197 were first introduced in WordPress 2.0.3. If you're using FeedWordPress
1198 with an older version of WordPress, there's no fix for this problem:
1199 you'll just need to turn Referer headers back on. Sorry.)
1200
1201 * BUGFIX: MANUALLY-ALTERED POST STATUS, COMMENT STATUS, AND PING STATUS NO
1202 LONGER REVERTED BY POST UPDATES: If you manually altered the post status,
1203 comment status, or ping status of a syndicated post from what it was set
1204 to when first syndicated -- for example, if you had a feed that was set
1205 to bring in new posts as "Pending Review," and you then marked some of
1206 the pending posts as "Published" and others as "Unpublished" -- then
1207 in previous versions of FeedWordPress, these manual changes to the
1208 status would be lost -- so that, for example, your Published or Unpublished
1209 articles would revert to Pending Review -- if the source feed made any
1210 upates to the item. This could make the Pending Review feature both
1211 unreliable and also extremely frustrating to work with. The good news is
1212 that this bug has since been fixed: if you manually update the status
1213 of a post, it will no longer be reverted if or when the post is updated.
1214
1215 * BUGFIX: OCCASIONAL FATAL ERROR ON UPDATE ELIMINATED: Under certain
1216 limited conditions (specifically, when both the title and the content of
1217 a post to be updated are empty), an attempt to update the post would
1218 result in a fatal error. This has been fixed.
1219
1220 * INTERFACE: "CONFIGURE SETTINGS" CONVENIENCE LINK ADDED TO CONFIRMATION
1221 MESSAGE WHEN A NEW FEED IS ADDED: When you add a new subscription to
1222 FeedWordPress, the message box that appears to confirm it now includes a
1223 handy link to the feed's settings subpage, so that you can quickly set
1224 up any special settings you may want to set up for the new feed, without
1225 having to hunt through the list of all your other subscriptions to pick
1226 out the new one.
1227
1228 * INTERFACE: SIMPLIFYING AND CLARIFYING AUTOMATIC UPDATES SETTINGS. I have
1229 removed an interval setting for the cronless automatic updates which has
1230 confused many FeedWordPress users. In past versions of FWP, when you
1231 turned on automatic updates, you would be presented with a time interval
1232 setting which controlled how often FeedWordPress would check for feeds
1233 ready to be polled for updates. (That is, it DID NOT control how often
1234 feeds *would be polled*; it controlled how often FeedWordPress would
1235 *check* for feeds that *had become ready to poll*. The schedule on which
1236 feeds became ready for polling was still controlled either by requests
1237 encoded in elements within the feed itself, or else according to an
1238 internal calculation within FeedWordPress, averaging out to about 1 hour,
1239 if the feed did not include any scheduling request elements.) Since many
1240 users very often (and understandably) confused the purpose of this
1241 setting, and since the setting is for a feature that's actually very
1242 unlikely to require any manual control by the user, I have removed the
1243 setting; FeedWordPress now simply uses the default value of checking for
1244 feeds to poll every 10 minutes.
1245
1246 * FEEDFINDER PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT: FeedWordPress's FeedFinder class
1247 now uses `array_unique()` to make sure that it doesn't waste time
1248 repeatedly iterating over and polling the same URI. Props to Camilo
1249 (<http://projects.radgeek.com/2008/12/14/feedwordpress-20081214/#comment-20090122160414>).
1250
1251 = 2008.1214 =
1252
1253 * WORDPRESS 2.7 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress has been tested for
1254 compatibility with the newly released WordPress 2.7. WordPress 2.7 has
1255 deprecated the Snoopy library for HTTP requests, which caused a fatal
1256 error for users who had not installed the MagpieRSS upgrade (or whose
1257 installation of the MagpieRSS upgrade was overwritten by a recent update
1258 of WordPress). FeedWordPress now handles things gracefully when Snoopy
1259 is not immediately available.
1260
1261 * INTERFACE SPIFFED UP: Interface elements have been updated so that
1262 FeedWordPress's management interface fits in more naturally with the
1263 WordPress 2.7 interface (including a new logo and a number of small
1264 interface tweaks).
1265
1266 * BUG WITH TAGS FOR SYNDICATED ARTICLES FIXED: Several users encountered a
1267 bug with the option to add tags to all syndicated posts under
1268 Syndication --> Settings -- if you told FeedWordPress to add more than
1269 one tag to all syndicated posts, instead of doing so correctly, it would
1270 add a *single* tag instead, whose name was composed of the names of all
1271 the tags you asked it to add. This bug was the result of nothing more
1272 dignified than a typographical error on my part. It has now been fixed.
1273
1274 * MORE INFORMATION AVAILABLE WHEN FEEDWORDPRESS CAN'T FIND A FEED: When
1275 you enter a URL for a new syndication source, FeedWordPress uses a
1276 simple feed-finding algorithm (originally based on Mark Pilgrim's
1277 Universal Feed Finder) to try to determine whether the URL is the URL
1278 for a feed, or, if the URL points to an ordinary website rather than to
1279 a feed, whether there is a feed for that website. All well and good, but
1280 if FeedWordPress failed to find a feed, for whatever reason, it would
1281 typically return nothing more than a nasty little note to the effect of
1282 "no feed found," without any explanation of what went wrong.
1283 FeedWordPress now keeps track of error conditions from the HTTP
1284 requests that it uses in the course of looking for the feed, and so may
1285 be able to give you a bit more information about the nature of the
1286 problem if something goes wrong.
1287
1288
1289 = 2008.1105 =
1290
1291 * INTERFACE RESTRUCTURING AND SYNDICATION --> AUTHORS PAGE: As a first
1292 step towards modularizing and better organizing the user interface, a
1293 new "Authors" subpage has been created under the Syndication menu, which
1294 controls settings for syndicated authors, both at the global default
1295 level and at level of individual syndicated feeds.
1296
1297 * BUG RELATED TO THE ATTRIBUTION OF POSTS TO THE WRONG AUTHOR FIXED: Some
1298 users encountered an issue in which posts by different authors on
1299 different blogs -- especially blogs generated by Blogger -- were
1300 mistakenly attributed to a single author. The problem was caused by the
1301 way in which FeedWordPress matches syndicated authors to user accounts
1302 in the WordPress database: normally, if two feeds each list an author
1303 with the same e-mail address, they are counted as being the same person.
1304 Normally this works well, but it creates an issue in cases where
1305 blogging software assigns a single anonymous e-mail address to users who
1306 do not want their real e-mail address published. This is, for example,
1307 what Blogger does (by giving all users a default e-mail address of
1308 <noreply@blogger.com> if they don't want their own e-mail address
1309 listed). FeedWordPress now allows the user to correct for this problem
1310 with a couple of new settings under **Syndication --> Authors**, which
1311 allow users to turn off e-mail based author matching for particular
1312 addresses, or, if desired, to turn it off entirely. By default, e-mail
1313 based author matching is still turned on, but disabled for a list of
1314 known generic e-mail addresses. Right now, the "list" consists entirely
1315 of <noreply@blogger.com>; if you know other addresses that should be
1316 added, please [contact me](http://radgeek.com/contact) to let me know.
1317
1318 Please note that if you have already encountered this issue on your
1319 blog, upgrading FeedWordPress will prevent it from re-occurring in the
1320 future, but you still need to do two other things to fix the existing
1321 problem on your blog.
1322
1323 First, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to
1324 change the existing author mapping rules to re-map a a syndicated
1325 author's name to the proper target account. Go to **Syndication -->
1326 Authors**, select the feed you want to change from the drop-down list,
1327 and then change the settings under the "Syndicated Authors" section.
1328 (You will probably need to select "will be assigned to a new user..." to
1329 create a new user account with the appropriate name.)
1330
1331 Second, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to
1332 re-assign already-syndicated posts that were mis-attributed to the
1333 correct author. You can do that from **Syndication --> Authors** by
1334 using the author re-assignment feature, described below.
1335
1336 * AUTHOR RE-ASSIGNMENT FOR A PARTICULAR FEED: The author settings page
1337 for each syndicated feed, under **Syndication --> Authors**, now
1338 includes an section titled "Fixing mis-matched authors," which provides
1339 an interface for re-assigning or deleting all posts attributed to a
1340 particular author on a particular feed.
1341
1342 * SUPPORT FOR `<atom:source>` ELEMENT IN SYNDICATED FEEDS: Some feeds
1343 (for example, those produced by FeedWordPress) aggregate content from
1344 several different sources, and include information about the original
1345 source of the post in an `<atom:source>` element. A new setting under
1346 **Syndication --> Options** allows you to control what FeedWordPress
1347 will report as the source of posts syndicated from aggregator feeds in
1348 your templates and feeds: you can have FeedWordPress report that the
1349 source of a post is the aggregator feed itself, or you can have it
1350 report that the source of a post is the original source that the
1351 aggregator originally syndicated the post from.
1352
1353 By default, FeedWordPress will report the aggregator, not the original
1354 source, as the source of a syndicated item.
1355
1356 * LOAD BALANCING AND TIME LIMITING FEATURES FOR UPDATES: Some users have
1357 encountered issues due to running up against PHP execution time limits
1358 during the process of updating large syndicated feeds, or a very large
1359 set of syndicated feeds. FeedWordPress now has a feature that allows you
1360 to limit the total amount of time spent updating a feed, through the
1361 "Time limit on updates" setting under **Syndication --> Options**. By
1362 turning on this setting and adjusting the time limit to a low enough
1363 figure to avoid your PHP installation's time-out setting. (PHP execution
1364 time limits are usually in the vicinity of 30 seconds, so an update
1365 time limit of 25 seconds or so should provide plenty of time for updates
1366 while allowing a cushion of time for other, non-update-related functions
1367 to do their work.)
1368
1369 If feed updates are interrupted by the time limit, FeedWordPress uses
1370 some simple load balancing features to make sure that updates to other
1371 feeds will not be blocked by the time-hogging feed, and will also make
1372 sure that when the interrupted update is resumed, FeedWordPress will
1373 skip ahead to resume processing items at the point at which it was
1374 interrupted last time, so that posts further down in the feed will
1375 eventually get processed, and not get blocked by the amount of time it
1376 takes to process the items higher up in the feed.
1377
1378 * `guid` INDEX CREATION BUTTON: FeedWordPress frequently issues queries on
1379 the `guid` column of the WordPress posts database (since it uses post
1380 guid URIs to keep track of which posts it has syndicated). In very large
1381 FeedWordPress installations, you can often significantly improve
1382 performance by creating a database index on the `guid` column, but
1383 normally you would need to poke around with MySQL or a tool like
1384 phpMyAdmin to do this. FeedWordPress can now save you the trouble: to
1385 create an index on the `guid` column, just go to
1386 **Syndication --> Options**, and mash the button at the bottom of the
1387 "Back End" section.
1388
1389 = 2008.1101 =
1390
1391 * INTERFACE BUG THAT PREVENTED ADDING NEW SITES FIXED: The UI reforms in
1392 FWP 2008.1030 unintentionally introduced a bug that prevents clean
1393 installations of FeedWordPress from providing an input box for adding
1394 new feeds to the list of syndicated feeds. This bug has been fixed.
1395
1396 = 2008.1030 =
1397
1398 * WORDPRESS 2.6 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with
1399 WordPress 2.6, and should work more or less seamlessly with the new post
1400 revision system. A bug which caused multiple new revisions to be created
1401 for posts on certain feeds, regardless of whether or not the item had
1402 been updated, has been fixed.
1403
1404 * INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: The user interface has been substantially
1405 restyled to fit in better with the visual style of WordPress 2.5 and
1406 2.6.
1407
1408 * YOUTUBE BUG FIXED: POSTS SYNDICATED THROUGH AN AUTOMATIC UPDATE ARE NO
1409 LONGER STRIPPED OF `<OBJECT>` TAGS AND CERTAIN OTHER HTML ELEMENTS: Due
1410 to the way that some versions of WordPress process posts that are
1411 inserted into the database when no user is logged in, many users
1412 experienced an issue where YouTube videos and other content using the
1413 HTML `<object>` tag would be stripped out of posts that were syndicated
1414 during an automatic update. (Posts that were syndicated through manual
1415 updates from within the WordPress Dashboard were not affected, because
1416 the issue does not arise when an update is executed under a logged-in
1417 administrator's credentials.) This bug has now been fixed; YouTube
1418 videos and other content using `<object>` tags should now appear
1419 properly in syndicated posts, regardless of the way in which the post
1420 was syndicated.
1421
1422 * AJAX BUGS FIXED: Bugs which blocked the normal operation of WordPress
1423 2.5's AJAX interface elements when FeedWordPress was activated have been
1424 fixed.
1425
1426 * TAG SUPPORT: A couple of features have been introduced to take advantage
1427 of the tagging features in WordPress 2.3.x, 2.5.x, and 2.6.x. Now, when
1428 unfamiliar categories are encountered for posts on a feed, you can
1429 choose for FeedWordPress (1) to drop the category; (2) to drop the
1430 category and to filter out any post that does not match at least one
1431 familiar category; (3) to create a new category with that name, or,
1432 now, you can also have FeedWordPress (4) create a new *tag* with that
1433 name. This option can be set site-wide under Syndication --> Options,
1434 or it can be set on a feed-by-feed basis in a feed's Edit screen.
1435
1436 In addition, you can now set particular tags to apply to all incoming
1437 syndicated posts, under Syndication --> Options, or you can set tags
1438 to apply to all incoming syndicated posts from a particular feed in that
1439 feed's Edit screen.
1440
1441 * FORMATTING FILTERS: There is a new option available under Syndication ->
1442 Options which allows users to choose whether or not to expose syndicated
1443 posts to being altered by formatting filters. By default, FeedWordPress
1444 has always protected syndicated posts (which are already in display-ready
1445 HTML when they are syndicated) from being reformatted by formatting
1446 filters. However, this approach means that certain plugins which depend
1447 on formatting filters (for example, to add "Share This" bars or relevant
1448 links to the end of a post) are blocked from working on any syndicated
1449 posts. If you want to use one of these plugins together with
1450 FeedWordPress, you can now do so by changing the "Formatting Filters"
1451 setting from "Protect" to "Expose."
1452
1453 * `<atom:source>` ELEMENTS NOW INCLUDED IN ATOM FEED: Atom 1.0 provides
1454 a standard method for aggregators to indicate information about the original source of
1455 a syndicated post, using the `<atom:source>` element. FeedWordPress now
1456 introduces standard `<atom:source>` elements including the title, homepage, and
1457 feed URI of the source from which a syndicated post was syndicated. Cf.
1458 <http://www.atomenabled.org/developers/syndication/atom-format-spec.php#element.source>
1459
1460 * MODULARIZATION OF CODE: The code for different elements of FeedWordPress
1461 has been broken out into several modules for easier inspection,
1462 documentation, and maintenance of the code.
1463
1464 * VERSIONING SCHEME CHANGED: FeedWordPress's feature set has proven stable
1465 enough that it can now be removed from beta status; a good thing, since
1466 I was very quickly running out of version numbers to use. New releases
1467 of FeedWordPress will have version numbers based on the date of their
1468 release.
1469
1470 = 0.993 =
1471
1472 * WORDPRESS 2.5.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible
1473 with WordPress 2.5.1.
1474
1475 * WORDPRESS 2.5 INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: FeedWordPress's Dashboard
1476 interface has undergone several cosmetic changes that should help it
1477 integrate better with the WordPress Dashboard interface in WordPress
1478 version 2.5.x.
1479
1480 * SYNDICATED POSTS CAN BE MARKED AS "PENDING REVIEW": WordPress 2.3 users
1481 can now take advantage of WordPress's new "Pending Review" features for
1482 incoming syndicated posts. Posts marked as "Pending Review" are not
1483 published immediately, but are marked as ready to be reviewed by an
1484 Administrator or Editor, who can then choose to publish the post or
1485 hold it back. If you want to review syndicated posts from a particular
1486 feed, or from all feeds, before they are posted, then use
1487 Syndication --> Syndicated Sites --> Edit or Syndication --> Options to
1488 change the settings for handling new posts.
1489
1490 * AWARE OF NEW URI FOR del.icio.us FEEDS: Previous releases of
1491 FeedWordPress already automatically split del.icio.us tags up
1492 appropriately appropriately when generating categories. (del.icio.us
1493 feeds smoosh all the tags into a single `<dc:subject>` element,
1494 separated by spaces; FeedWordPress un-smooshes them into multiple
1495 categories by separating them at whitespace.) Unfortunately, del.icio.us
1496 recently broke the existing behavior by changing host names for their
1497 feeds from del.icio.us to feeds.delicious.com. Version 0.993 accounts
1498 for the new host name and un-breaks the tag splitting.
1499
1500 = 0.992 =
1501
1502 * AUTHOR RE-MAPPING: FeedWordPress now offers considerable control over
1503 how author names on a feed are translated into usernames within the
1504 WordPress database. When a post by an unrecognized author comes in,
1505 Administrators can now specify any username as the default username to
1506 assign the post to by setting the option in Syndication --> Options
1507 (formerly FeedWordPress only allowed you to assign such posts to user
1508 #1, the site administrator). Administrators can also create re-mapping
1509 rules for particular feeds (under Syndication --> Syndicated Sites -->
1510 Edit), so that (for example) any posts attributed to "Administrator"
1511 on the feed <http://praxeology.net/blog/feed/> will be assigned to
1512 a user named "Roderick T. Long," rather than a user named
1513 "Administrator." These settings also allow administrators to filter out
1514 posts by particular users, and to control what will happen when
1515 FeedWordPress encounters a post by an unrecognized user on that
1516 particular feed.
1517
1518 * BUG RELATED TO URIS CONTAINING AMPERSAND CHARACTERS FIXED: A bug in
1519 WordPress 2.x's handling of URIs in Blogroll links created problems for
1520 updating any feeds whose URIs included an ampersand character, such as
1521 Google News RSS feeds and other feeds that have multiple parameters
1522 passed through HTTP GET. If you experienced this bug, the most likely
1523 effect was that FeedWordPress simply would not import new posts from a
1524 feed when instructred to do so, returning a "0 new posts" response. In
1525 other cases, it might lead to unpredictable results from feed updates,
1526 such as importing posts which were not contained in the feed being
1527 syndicated, but which did appear elsewhere on the same website. This bug
1528 has, hopefully, been resolved, by correcting for the bug in WordPress.
1529
1530 = 0.991 =
1531
1532 * WORDPRESS MU COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with
1533 recent releases of WordPress MU. Once FeedWordPress is made available
1534 as a plugin, each individual blog can choose to activate FeedWordPress
1535 and syndicate content from its own set of contributors.
1536
1537 * DISPLAY OF MAGPIE WARNINGS: A number of MagpieRSS warnings or error
1538 messages that were displayed when performing an automatic update are
1539 no longer displayed, unless debugging parameters have been explicitly
1540 enabled.
1541
1542 * BUG RELATED TO INTERNATIONAL CHARACTERS IN AUTHOR NAMES FIXED: Due to a
1543 subtle incompatability between the way that FeedWordPress generated new
1544 user information, and the way that WordPress 2.0 and later added new
1545 authors to the database, FeedWordPress might end up creating duplicate
1546 authors, or throwing a critical error message, when it encountered
1547 authors whose names included international characters. This
1548 incompatability has now been fixed; hopefully, authors with
1549 international characters in their names should now be handled properly.
1550
1551 * `<media:content>` BUG IN MAGPIERSS FIXED: A bug in MagpieRSS's handling
1552 of namespaced elements has been fixed. Among other things, this bug
1553 caused items containing a Yahoo MediaRSS `<media:content>` element (such
1554 as many of the feeds produced by wordpress.com) to be represented
1555 incorrectly, with only a capital "A" where the content of the post
1556 should have been. Feeds containing `<media:content>` elements should now
1557 be syndicated correctly.
1558
1559 * update_feedwordpress PARAMETER: You can now use an HTTP GET parameter
1560 (`update_feedwordpress=1`) to request that FeedWordPress poll its feeds
1561 for updates. When used together with a crontab or other means of
1562 scheduling tasks, this means that you can keep your blog automatically
1563 updated on a regular schedule, even if you do not choose to use the
1564 cron-less automatic updates option.
1565
1566 * Some minor interface-related bugs were also fixed.
1567
1568
1569 = 0.99 =
1570
1571 Version 0.99 adds several significant new features, fixes some bugs, and
1572 provides compatability with WordPress 2.2.x and 2.3.x.
1573
1574 * WORDPRESS 2.2 AND 2.3 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be
1575 compatible with WordPress version 2.2 and the upcoming WordPress
1576 version 2.3. In particular, it has been tested extensively against
1577 WordPress 2.2.3 and WordPress 2.3 Release Candidate 1.
1578
1579 * AUTOMATIC UPDATES WITHOUT CRON: FeedWordPress now allows you to
1580 automatically schedule checks for new posts without using external task
1581 scheduling tools such as cron. In order to enable automatic updates, go
1582 to **Syndication --> Options** and set "Check for new posts" to
1583 "automatically." For details, see "Automatic Feed Updates" in
1584 README.text.
1585
1586 An important side-effect of the changes to the update system is that if
1587 you were previously using the cron job and the `update-feeds.php` script
1588 to schedule updates, you need to change your cron set-up. The old
1589 `update-feeds.php` script no longer exists. Instead, if you wish to use
1590 a cron job to guarantee updates on a particular schedule, you should
1591 have the cron job fetch the front page of your blog (for example, by
1592 using `curl http://www.zyx.com/blog/ > /dev/null`) instead of activating
1593 the `update-feeds.php` script. If automatic updates have been enabled,
1594 fetching the front page will automatically trigger the update process.
1595
1596 * INTERFACE REORGANIZATION: All FeedWordPress functions are now located
1597 under a top-level "Syndication" menu in the WordPress Dashboard. To
1598 manage the list of syndicated sites, manually check for new posts on
1599 one or more feeds, or syndicate a new site, you should use the main page
1600 under **Syndication**. To change global settings for FeedWordPress,
1601 you should use **Syndication --> Options**.
1602
1603 * FILE STRUCTURE REORGANIZATION: Due to a combination of changing styles
1604 for FeedWordPress plugins and lingering bugs in the FeedWordPress admin
1605 menu code, the code for FeedWordPress is now contained in two different
1606 PHP files, which should be installed together in a subdirectory of your
1607 plugins directory named `feedwordpress`. (See README.text for
1608 installation and upgrade instructions relating to the change.)
1609
1610 * MULTIPLE CATEGORIES SETTING: Some feeds use non-standard methods to
1611 indicate multiple categories within a single category element. (The most
1612 popular site to do this is del.icio.us, which separates tags with a
1613 space.) FeedWordPress now allows you to set an optional setting, for any
1614 feed which does this, indicating the character or characters used to
1615 divide multiple categories, using a Perl-compatible regular expression.
1616 (In the case of del.icio.us feeds, FeedWordPress will automatically use
1617 \s for the pattern without your having to do any further configuration.)
1618 To turn this setting on, simply use the "Edit" link for the feed that
1619 you want to turn it on for.
1620
1621 * REGULAR EXPRESSION BUG FIXED: Eliminated a minor bug in the regular
1622 expressions for e-mail addresses (used in parsing RSS `author`
1623 elements), which could produce unsightly error messages for some users
1624 parsing RSS 2.0 feeds.
1625
1626 * DATE / UPDATE BUG FIXED: A bug in date handling was eliminated that may
1627 have caused problems if any of (1) WordPress, or (2) PHP, or (3) your
1628 web server, or (4) your MySQL server, has been set to use a different
1629 time zone from the one that any of the others is set to use. If
1630 FeedWordPress has not been properly updating updated posts, or has been
1631 updating posts when there shouldn't be any changes for the update, this
1632 release may solve that problem.
1633
1634 * GOOGLE READER BUGS FIXED: A couple of bugs that made it difficult for
1635 FeedWordPress to interact with Google Reader public feeds have been
1636 fixed. Firstly, if you encountered an error message reading "There was a
1637 problem adding the newsfeed. [SQL: ]" when you tried to add the feed,
1638 the cause of this error has been fixed. Secondly, if you succeeded in
1639 getting FeedWordPress to check a Google Reader feed, only to find that
1640 the title of posts had junk squashed on to the end of them, that bug
1641 has been fixed too. To fix this bug, you must install the newest version
1642 of the optional MagpieRSS upgrade.
1643
1644 * FILTER PARAMETERS: Due to an old, old bug in WordPress 1.5.0 (which was
1645 what was available back when I first wrote the filter interface),
1646 FeedWordPress has traditionally only passed one parameter to
1647 syndicated_item and syndicated_post filters functions -- an array
1648 containing either the Magpie representation of a syndicated item from
1649 the feed, or the database representation of a post about to be inserted
1650 into the WordPress database. If you needed information about the feed
1651 that the item came from, this was accessible only through a pair of
1652 global variables, $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta.
1653
1654 Since it's been a pretty long time since WordPress 1.5.0 was in
1655 widespread usage, I have gone ahead and added an optional second
1656 parameter to the invocation of the syndicated_item and syndicated_post
1657 filters. If you have written a filter for FeedWordPress that uses either
1658 of these hooks, you can now register that filter to accept 2 parameters.
1659 If you do so, the second parameter will be a SyndicatedPost object,
1660 which, among other things, allows you to access information about the
1661 feed from which an item is syndicated using the $post->feed and the
1662 $post->feedmeta elements (where $post is the name of the second
1663 parameter).
1664
1665 NOTE THAT THE OLD GLOBAL VARIABLES ARE STILL AVAILABLE, for the time
1666 being at least, so existing filters will not break with the upgrade.
1667 They should be considered deprecated, however, and may be eliminated in
1668 the future.
1669
1670 * FILTER CHANGE / BUGFIX: the array that is passed as the first argument
1671 syndicated_post filters no longer is no longer backslash-escaped for
1672 MySQL when filters are called. This was originally a bug, or an
1673 oversight; the contents of the array should only be escaped for the
1674 database *after* they have gone through all filters. IF YOU HAVE WRITTEN
1675 ANY syndicated_post FILTERS THAT PRESUME THE OLD BEHAVIOR OF PASSING IN
1676 STRINGS THAT ARE ALREADY BACKSLASH-ESCAPED, UPDATE YOUR FILTERS
1677 ACCORDINGLY.
1678
1679 * OTHER MINOR BUGFIXES AND INTERNAL CHANGES: The internal architecture of
1680 FeedWordPress has been significantly changed to make the code more
1681 modular and clean; hopefully this should help reduce the number of
1682 compatibility updates that are needed, and make them easier and quicker
1683 when they are needed.
1684
1685 = 0.981 =
1686
1687 Version 0.981 is a narrowly targeted bugfix and compatibility release, whose
1688 main purpose is to resolve a major outstanding problem: the incompatibility
1689 between version 0.98 of WordPress and the recently released WordPress 2.1.
1690
1691 * WORDPRESS 2.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress is now compatible with
1692 WordPress 2.1, as well as retaining its existing support for WordPress
1693 2.0 and 1.5. Incompatibilities that resulted in database warnings, fatal
1694 errors, and which prevented FeedWordPress from syndicating new posts,
1695 have been eliminated.
1696
1697 * RSS-FUNCTIONS.PHP RENAMED TO RSS.PHP: if you use the upgraded MagpieRSS
1698 replacement that's included with FeedWordPress, be sure to note that
1699 there are now *two* files to upload from the `OPTIONAL/wp-includes`
1700 subdirectory in order to carry out the upgrade: rss-functions.php and
1701 rss.php. **It is necessary to upload both files**, due to a change in
1702 the file naming scheme in WordPress 2.1, and it is necessary to do so
1703 whether you are using WordPress 2.1 or not. If you only upload the
1704 `rss-functions.php` file as in previous installations you will not have
1705 a working copy of MagpieRSS; the rss.php file contains the actual code.
1706
1707 * DATE BUG AFFECTING SOME PHP INSTALLATIONS RESOLVED: due to a subtle bug
1708 in parse_w3cdtf(), some installations of PHP encountered problems with
1709 FeedWordPress's attempt to date posts, which would cause some new posts
1710 on Atom feeds to be dated as if they had apppeared in 1969 or 1970
1711 (thus, effectively, never appearing on front page at all). This bug in
1712 the date handling should now be fixed.
1713
1714 * PHP <?=...?> SHORT FORM ELIMINATED: some installations of PHP do not
1715 allow the <?=...?> short form for printing PHP values, which was used
1716 extensively in the FeedWordPress interface code. Since this could cause
1717 fatal errors for users with the wrong installation of PHP, the short
1718 form has been replaced with full PHP echo statements, and is no longer
1719 used in FeedWordPress.
1720
1721 * BETTER USER INTERFACE INTEGRATION WITH WORDPRESS 2.x: Some minor changes
1722 have been made to help the FeedWordPress interface pages blend in better
1723 with the user interface when running under WordPress 2.x.
1724
1725 * GLOBAL CATEGORIES BUG RESOLVED: a bug that prevented some users from
1726 setting one or more categories to apply to syndicated posts from all
1727 feeds (using the checkbox interface under Options --> Syndication) has
1728 been resolved.
1729
1730 = 0.98 =
1731
1732 * WORDPRESS 2.0 COMPATIBILITY: This is a narrowly-targeted release to
1733 solve a major outstanding problem. FeedWordPress is now compatible with
1734 both WordPress 1.5 and WordPress 2.0. Incompatibilities that caused
1735 fatal SQL errors, and a more subtle bug with off-kilter counts of posts
1736 under a given category, have been resolved. FeedWordPress tests for
1737 database schema using the global $wp_db_version variable (if null, then
1738 we presume that we're dealing with WordPress 1.5).
1739
1740 NOTE: I have **not** fully tested FeedWordPress with WordPress 2.0.
1741 Further testing may reveal more bugs. However, you should now be able
1742 to get at least basic FeedWordPress functionality up and running.
1743
1744 * AUTHOR MATCHING: FeedWordPress tests several fields to see if it can
1745 identify the author of the post as a user already in the WordPress user
1746 database. In previous versions, it tested the user login, the nickname,
1747 and tested for "aliases" listed in the Profile (see documentation). FWP
1748 now also matches authors on the basis of e-mail address (*if* an e-mail
1749 address is present). This is particularly helpful for formats such as
1750 RSS 2.0, in which authors are primarily identified by e-mail addresses.
1751
1752 = 0.97 =
1753
1754 * INSTALLATION PROCEDURE: Some of the changes between 0.96 and 0.97
1755 require upgrades to the meta-data stored by FeedWordPress to work
1756 properly. Thus, if you are upgrading from 0.96 or earlier to 0.97, most
1757 FeedWordPress operations (including updates and template functions)
1758 WILL BE DISABLED until you run the upgrade procedure. Fortunately,
1759 running the upgrade procedure is easy: just go to either Options -->
1760 Syndication or Links --> Syndicated in the WordPress Dashboard and press
1761 the button.
1762
1763 * FEED FORMAT SUPPORT: Support has been added for the Atom 1.0 IETF
1764 standard. Several other elements are also newly supported
1765 (dcterms:created, dcterms:issued, dcterms:modified, dc:identifier,
1766 proper support for the RSS 2.0 guid element, the RSS 2.0 author element,
1767 the use of Atom author or Dublin Core dc:creator constructs at the feed
1768 level to identify the author of individual items, etc.)
1769
1770 N.B.: full support of several Atom 1.0 features, such as categories
1771 and enclosures, requires you to install the optional rss-functions.php
1772 upgrade in your wp-includes directory.
1773
1774 * BUG FIX: Running `update-feeds.php` from command line or crontab
1775 returned "I don't syndicate..." errors. It turns out that WordPress
1776 sometimes tramples on the internal PHP superglobals that I depended on
1777 to determine whether or not the script was being invoked from the
1778 command line. This has been fixed (the variables are now checked
1779 *before* WordPress can trample them). Note that `update-feeds.php` has
1780 been thoroughly overhauled anyway; see below for details.
1781
1782 * BUG FIX: Duplicate categories or author names. Fixed two bugs that could
1783 create duplicate author and/or category names when the name contained
1784 either (a) certain international characters (causing a mismatch between
1785 MySQL and PHP's handling of lowercasing text), or (b) characters that
1786 have a special meaning in regular expressions (causing MySQL errors when
1787 looking for the author or category due to regexp syntax errors). These
1788 should now be fixed thanks to careful escaping of names that go into
1789 regular expressions and careful matching of lowercasing functions
1790 (comparing results from PHP only to other results from PHP, and results
1791 from MySQL only to other results from MySQL).
1792
1793 * BUG FIX: Items dated December 31, 1969 should appear less often. The
1794 function for parsing W3C date-time format dates that ships with
1795 MagpieRSS can only correctly parse fully-specified dates with a
1796 fully-specified time, but valid W3C date-time format dates may omit the
1797 time, the day of the month, or even the month. Some feeds in the wild
1798 date their items with coarse-grained dates, so the optional
1799 `rss-functions.php` upgrade now includes a more flexible parse_w3cdtf()
1800 function that will work with both coarse-grained and fully-specified
1801 dates. (If parts of the date or the time are omitted, they are filled in
1802 with values based on the current time, so '2005-09-10' will be dated to
1803 the current time on that day; '2004' will be dated to this day and time
1804 one year ago.
1805
1806 N.B.: This fix is only available in the optional `rss-functions.php`
1807 upgrade.
1808
1809 * BUG FIX: Evil use of HTTP GET has been undone. The WordPress interface
1810 is riddled with inappropriate (non-idempotent) uses of HTTP GET queries
1811 (ordinary links that make the server do something with significant
1812 side-effects, such as deleting a post or a link from the database).
1813 FeedWordPress did some of this too, especially in places where it aped
1814 the WordPress interface (e.g. the "Delete" links in Links -->
1815 Syndicated). That's bad business, though. I've changed the interface so
1816 that all the examples of improper side-effects that I can find now
1817 require an HTTP POST to take effect. I think I got pretty much
1818 everything; if there's anything that I missed, let me know.
1819
1820 Further reading: [Sam Ruby 2005-05-06: This Stuff Matters](http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2005/05/06/This-Stuff-Matters)
1821
1822 * BUG FIX: Categories applied by `cats` setting should no longer prevent
1823 category-based filtering from working. In FeedWordPress, you can (1)
1824 apply certain categories to all syndicated posts, or all posts from
1825 a particular feed; and (2) filter out all posts that don't match one
1826 of the categories that are already in the WordPress database (allowing
1827 for simple category-based filtering; just load up WordPress with the
1828 categories you want to accept, and then tell FeedWordPress not to create
1829 new ones). However, the way that (1) and (2) were implemented meant that
1830 you couldn't effectively use them together; once you applied a known
1831 category to all syndicated posts from a particular feed, it meant that
1832 they'd have at least one familiar category (the category or categories
1833 you were applying), and that would get all posts past the filter no
1834 matter what categories they were originally from.
1835
1836 Well, no longer. You can still apply categories to all syndicated posts
1837 (using either Syndication --> Options, or the feed-level settings under
1838 Links --> Syndicated). But these categories are not applied to the post
1839 until *after* it has already passed by the "familiar categories" filter.
1840 So now, if you want, you can do category filtering and *then* apply as
1841 many categories as you please to all and only posts that pass the filter.
1842
1843 * BUG FIX: Other minor typos and HTML gaffes were fixed along the way.
1844
1845 * PERFORMANCE: get_feed_meta() no longer hits the database for information
1846 on every call; it now caches link data in memory, so FeedWordPress only
1847 goes to the database once for each syndicated link. This may
1848 substantially improve performance if your database server resources
1849 are tight and your templates make a lot of use of custom settings from
1850 get_feed_meta().
1851
1852 * API CHANGE: Link ID numbers, rather than RSS URIs, are now used to
1853 identify the feed from which a post is syndicated when you use template
1854 functions such as get_feed_meta(). The practical upshot of this is you
1855 can switch feeds, or change the feed address for a particular syndicated
1856 site, without breaking your templates for all the posts that were
1857 syndicated from the earlier URI.
1858
1859 * API CHANGE: if you have plugins or templates that make use of the
1860 get_feed_meta() function or the $fwp_feedmeta global, note that the
1861 data formerly located under the `uri` and `name` fields is now located
1862 under the `link/uri` field and the `link/name` field, respectively. Note
1863 also that you can access the link ID number for any given feed under the
1864 global $fwp_feedmeta['link/id'] (in plugins) or
1865 get_feed_meta('link/id') (in a template in post contexts).
1866
1867 * FEATURE: the settings for individual feeds can now be edited using a
1868 humane interface (where formerly you had to tweak key-value pairs in the
1869 Link Notes section). To edit settings for a feed, pick the feed that you
1870 want under Links --> Syndicated and click the Edit link.
1871
1872 * FEATURE: The "Unsubscribe" button (formerly "Delete") in Links -->
1873 Syndicated now offers three options for unsubscribing from a feed: (1)
1874 turning off the subscription without deleting the feed data or affecting
1875 posts that were syndicated from the feed (this works by setting the Link
1876 for the feed as "invisible"); (2) deleting the feed data and all of the
1877 posts that were syndicated from the feed; or (3) deleting the feed data
1878 and *keeping* the posts that were syndicated from the feed
1879 setting the Link to "Invisible" (meaning that it will not be displayed
1880 in lists of the site links on the front page, and it won't be checked
1881 for updates; (2) deleting the Link and all of the posts that were
1882 syndicated from its feed; or (3) deleting the feed data but keeping the
1883 posts that were syndicated (which will henceforward be treated as if
1884 they were local rather than syndicated posts). (Note that (1) is usually
1885 the best option for aggregator sites, unless you want to clean up the
1886 results of an error or a test.)
1887
1888 * FEATURE / BUG FIX: If you have been receiving mysterious "I don't
1889 syndicate...", or "(local) HTTP status code was not 200", or "(local)
1890 transport error - could not open socket", or "parse error - not well
1891 formed" errors, then this update may solve your problems, and if it does
1892 *not* solve them, it will at least make the reasons for the problems
1893 easier to understand. That's because I've overhauled the way that
1894 FeedWordPress goes about updating feeds.
1895
1896 If you use the command-line PHP scripting method to run scheduled
1897 updates, then not much should change for you, except for fewer
1898 mysterious errors. If you have done updates by sending periodic HTTP
1899 requests to <http://your-blog.com/path/wp-content/update-feeds.php>,
1900 then the details have changed somewhat; mostly in such a way as to make
1901 things easier on you. See the README file or online documentation on
1902 Staying Current for the details.
1903
1904 * FEATURE: FeedWordPress now features a more sophisticated system for
1905 timed updates. Instead of polling *every* subscribed feed for updates
1906 *each* time `update-feeds.php` is run, FeedWordPress now keeps track of
1907 the last time it polled each feed, and only polls them again after a
1908 certain period of time has passed. The amount of time is normally set
1909 randomly for each feed, in a period between 30 minutes and 2 hours (so
1910 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
1911 directly by the feed, which brings us to ...
1912
1913 * FEATURE: FeedWordPress now respects the settings in the `ttl` and
1914 Syndication Module RSS elements. Feeds with these elements set will not
1915 be polled any more frequently than they indicate with these feeds unless
1916 the user manually forces FeedWordPress to poll the feed (see Links -->
1917 Syndicated --> Edit settings).
1918
1919 = 0.96 =
1920
1921 * FEATURE: support has been added for enclosures in RSS 2.0 and Atom
1922 0.6+ newsfeeds. WordPress already supports adding enclosures to an
1923 item; FeedWordPress merely gets the information on the enclosure
1924 from the feed it is syndicating and plugs that information directly
1925 into the WordPress database so that (among other things) that post
1926 will have its enclosure listed in your blog's RSS 2 newsfeed.
1927
1928 Note that enclosure support requires using the optional MagpieRSS
1929 upgrade (i.e., replacing your `wp-includes/rss-functions.php` with
1930 `OPTIONAL/wp-includes/rss-functions.php` from the FWP archive)
1931
1932 * FEATURE: for completeness's sake, there is now a feed setting,
1933 `hardcode url`, that allows you to set the URI for the front page
1934 of a contributor's website manually (that is, prevent it from being
1935 automatically updated from the feed channel link on each update). To
1936 set the URI manually, put a line like this in the Link Notes section
1937 of a feed:
1938
1939 hardcode url: yes
1940
1941 You can also instruct FeedWordPress to use hardcoded URIs by default
1942 on all feeds using Options --> Syndication
1943
1944 * FEATURE: by default, when FeedWordPress finds new syndicated posts,
1945 it (1) publishes them immediately, (2) turns comments off, and (3)
1946 turns trackback / pingback pings off. You can now alter all three
1947 default behaviors (e.g., to allow pings on syndicated posts, or to
1948 send newly-syndicated posts to the draft pile for moderation) using
1949 Options --> Syndication
1950
1951
1952 = From 0.91 to 0.95 =
1953
1954 * 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.
1955
1956 * 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").
1957
1958 * 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`.
1959
1960 * 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:
1961
1962 a.k.a.: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
1963
1964 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.
1965
1966 * 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.
1967
1968 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.
1969
1970 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.
1971
1972 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:
1973
1974 unfamiliar author: (create|default|filter)
1975 unfamiliar categories: (create|default|filter)
1976
1977 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.
1978
1979 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.
1980
1981 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:
1982
1983 unfamiliar author: filter
1984
1985 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.)
1986
1987 == License ==
1988
1989 The FeedWordPress plugin is copyright © 2005-2021 by Charles Johnson. It uses code derived or translated from:
1990
1991 - [wp-rss-aggregate.php][] by [Kellan Elliot-McCrea](kellan@protest.net)
1992 - [SimplePie][] feed parser by Ryan Parman, Geoffrey Sneddon, Ryan McCue, et al.
1993 - [MagpieRSS][] feed parser by [Kellan Elliot-McCrea](kellan@protest.net)
1994 - [Ultra-Liberal Feed Finder][] by [Mark Pilgrim](mark@diveintomark.org)
1995 - [WordPress Blog Tool and Publishing Platform](http://wordpress.org/)
1996
1997 according to the terms of the [GNU General Public License][].
1998
1999 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.
2000
2001 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.
2002
2003 [wp-rss-aggregate.php]: http://laughingmeme.org/archives/002203.html
2004 [SimplePie]: http://www.simplepie.org/
2005 [MagpieRSS]: http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/
2006 [Ultra-Liberal Feed Finder]: http://diveintomark.org/projects/feed_finder/
2007 [GNU General Public License]: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
2008
2009