FeedWordPress 2010.0623 is now available for download.

This release addresses some performance issues related to a bug fix that was introduced in FeedWordPress 2010.0528; it also includes fixes to a couple of issues introduced by the transition to SimplePie (related to a frequent error condition in feed updates) and WordPress 3.0 (related to the author mapping interface in Syndication –> Authors). In addition, some users related an odd fatal error related to the Relative_URI class. I am not sure what was causing this error, but whatever it was, it should no longer be a problem, because this release eliminates the dependency on the Relative_URI class to resolve relative URIs (instead, FeedWordPress now uses a perfectly adequate substitute which is built in to the SimplePie module).

Here’s a breakdown of some of the major changes since the previous release:

• WORDPRESS 3.0 COMPATIBILITY / AUTHOR MAPPING INTERFACE ISSUES: I
  resolved a couple of outstanding issues with the author mapping
  interface (Syndication –> Authors), which were preventing new users
  from being created correctly and author mapping rules from being set up
  correctly. These partly had to do with new restrictions on user account
  creation introduced in WordPress 3.0; anyway, they should now be fixed.

• MORE EFFICIENT SYNDICATED URL LOOKUPS: Several users noticed that the
  bug fix introduced in 2010.0528 for compatibility with post-listing
  plugins caused a lot more queries to the database in order to look up
  numerical post IDs from the URL provided to the filter. This shouldn’t
  cause any major problems, but it is not as efficient as it could be; the
  code now takes advantage of a more efficient way of doing things,
  which usually will not require any additional database queries.

• SIMPLEPIE FEED UPDATE ISSUES: If you have been having significant
  problems with getting feeds to update correctly, this may be the result
  of some bugs in the implementation of SimplePie caching that ships with
  WordPress (as of version 3.0). (You would most commonly experience this
  error if you continually saw errors such as “No feed found at <…>” in
  your updates.) Fortunately, SimplePie allows for a great deal of
  extensibility and this allows me to work around the problem; these
  error conditions should now be mostly eliminated when the underlying
  feed is valid.

• UI: SHOW INACTIVE SOURCES: When you use the default unsubscribe option
  – which turns off the subscription to a feed while preserving the posts
  from it and the syndication-related meta-data for the feed — the
  unsubscribed feed can now easily be viewed in a special “Inactive”
  section of the Syndicated Sources page. (As a side benefit, if you’ve
  accidentally, or only temporarily, turned off the subscription to a
  feed, it is now much easier to restore the feed to being active, or to
  delete it permanently, if you prefer.

• UI: FEED FINDER / SWITCH FEED INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: changes to styling
  and options for the feed finder / switch feed, which should now make it
  easier, in some cases, to find alternative feeds, and make interface
  options more clearly visible.

• FILTERS: syndicated_item_published and syndicated_item_updated NOW
  PROPERLY AFFECT THE DATING OF POSTS. These filters used to affect some
  date-related settings, but not others — and, most importantly, not the
  final date that is set for a post’s publication or last-modified date
  in the WordPress database. Now, they do affect that, as they should.
  (Filters should receive, and return, a long integer, representing a Unix
  epoch relative timestamp.)

• MAGIC URL TO CLEAR THE CACHE: Suppose that you need to clear the feed
  cache, for whatever reason; suppose, even, that you need to clear it on
  a regular basis. One way you might do this is by logging into the
  FeedWordPress administrative interface and going to Syndication –>
  Performance. Another way you might do it, now, is to simply send an
  HTTP request to a magic URL provided by FeedWordPress: if your blog is
  at example.com, the URL would be http://example.com/?clear_cache=1

Download and enjoy! If you have any issues with the release, or any questions I can help answer, or if there is anything that you would like to see included in a future release, please use the comments form or drop me a line to let me know about it. If you have an issue to report, please be sure to tell me what version of FeedWordPress you’re using, what version of WordPress you’re using it with, and try to tell me, as clearly as possible,

Please remember that your generous gifts to the project tip jar make ongoing development, quick fixes and timely support for FeedWordPress possible.

FeedWordPress 2010.0602 is now available for download.

Happy June!

I know a lot of you have questions related to the past couple of releases of FeedWordPress that I haven’t yet gotten back to you about. I’m sorry it’s taking a while, but I have been reading all the questions and reports coming in, and have been working on resolving a number of issues reported, while also doing a lot of work under the hood in order to improve FeedWordPress’s extensibility and to allow add-on modules to more thoroughly extend FeedWordPress’s user interface and features. I don’t have much to say about the under-the-hood changes just yet (I’ll have more to say about them as they prove themselves in practical uses in the future). But for now, I thought it would be important to push out another public release which will wrap up some of the improvements and fixes made in response to user questions and reports. There are several questions and issues still outstanding that I will be working on soon, but my wedding anniversary is coming up and I’ll be out of town and away from work for the next few days, so I wanted to make sure that these fixes get out before I leave town. The rest are things that I’ll be getting to when I get back this weekend.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the changes you might notice between the previous release and FeedWordPress 2010.0602:

• CATEGORY BOX INTERFACE ELEMENT FIXED FOR WP 3.0: Stylesheet changes
  between WordPress 2.9.x and the WordPress 3.0 RC caused the Categories
  box under Syndication –> Categories & Tags to malfunction. This
  has been fixed.

• LINK CATEGORY SELECTION BOX IN SYNDICATION ==> FEEDS FIXED FOR WP 2.8
  AND 2.9: A WP 3.0 compatibility change introduced in 2010.0531
  inadvertently broke the Syndicated Link Category selector under
  Syndication –> Feeds & Updates in WP 2.8 and WP 2.9, causing the post
  categories to be displayed in the selector rather than the link
  categories. This should now be fixed so that the selector will work
  correctly under both the current versions of WordPress and the 3.0 RC.

• MORE PERMISSIVE HANDLING OF FEEDS WITH BAD CONTENT-TYPE HEADERS: One of
  the small advantages that MagpieRSS had over SimplePie is that it was
  more tolerant about parsing well-formed feeds that the remote web server
  happened to deliver with weird or incorrect HTTP Content-type headers.
  In feeds affected by this problem, the new SimplePie parser would simply
  fail to find a feed, due to its being led astray by the contents of the
  Content-type header. This version includes an extension to SimplePie’s
  content-type sniffer that offers more permissive handling of the HTTP
  headers.

• MORE FULL-TEXT “EXCERPTS” NOW PROPERLY SHORTENED. Version 2010.0528
  introduced code to control for cases in which elements intended for
  item summaries are (ill-advisedly) used to carry the full text of posts;
  past versions of FeedWordPress would simply include the full text of the
  post in the excerpt field, but newer versions now attempt to detect
  this condition when it arises and to head it off, by blanking out the
  excerpt field and filling it with an automatically generated short,
  plain text excerpt from the full content. This release broadens the
  test conditions that indicate when an excerpt field is treated as
  identical to the full text of the post, and should therefore improve
  the handling of some feeds (such as Google Reader feeds) where the full
  text of each post was still appearing in the excerpt field.

• FILTERS: syndicated_item_published AND syndicated_item_updated
  FILTERS NOW ALLOW FILTER AUTHORS TO CHANGE POST TIMESTAMPS. You can now
  use the syndicated_item_published and syndicated_item_updated filter
  hooks to write filters or add-ons which directly change the post date
  and most-recently-updated timestamps on incoming syndicated posts. Props
  to niska for pointing out where the filters needed to be applied in
  order to change WordPress’s internal timestamps for incoming posts.

Download and enjoy! If you have any issues with the release, or any questions I can help answer, or if there is anything that you would like to see included in a future release, please use the comments form or drop me a line to let me know about it. If you have an issue to report, please be sure to tell me what version of FeedWordPress you’re using, what version of WordPress you’re using it with, and try to tell me, as clearly as possible, what you’re trying to accomplish, what you expect to see, and what you see instead when you try to accomplish it (including any error messages you may be seeing). Also, as I mentioned, I will be out of town for the next few days. Please don’t let this stop you from sending in your questions — I’ll be reading through everything that came in while I was away. Just be aware that I’ll be getting back to you sometime around early next week.

Please remember that your generous gifts to the project tip jar make ongoing development, quick fixes and timely support for FeedWordPress possible.

FeedWordPress 2010.0531 is now available for download.

I put out this update quckly because it contains fixes to a couple of important issues that y’all helped me to discover in early user reports back about FeedWordPress 2010.0528. Most of the issues that you reported are issues that are linked, in one way or another, to memory consumption, and to running up against the memory constraints provided by PHP. I will be working on some changes over the next several days to FeedWordPress’s internal handling of feed data, and the new MagpieRSS compatibility layer, which I hope will help to alleviate the problems with memory consumption, but I wanted to make sure that this bugfix release was issued as quickly as possible in order to help avert a couple of other problems — database performance problems during updates, and problems with certain syndicated items not having the syndication meta-data properly attached. (This would result in posts appearing as if they were authored locally, without meta-data about syndication source, with permalinks pointing back to the aggregator website, etc.) Both of these issues were actually caused by a common problem, which I believe has been resolved by the changes in this release. I apologize for the difficulties, and want to thank the users who sent me the detailed, informative bug reports that helped me identify the part of the code that needed to be tested, track down the issue, and eliminate the bug. As a result of one part of this fix, it will be much more difficult in the future for any error condition to result in syndicated posts to lose their custom fields or to end up being improperly sourced in the future.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the major changes since the release of FeedWordPress 2010.0531:

• PERMALINK / CUSTOM FIELDS PROBLEM RESOLVED: An issue in 2010.0528 caused some significant performance problems when updating feeds, and caused
  some posts to be imported without the proper syndication-related
  meta-data being attached (thus causing permalinks to point back to the
  aggregator website rather than to the source website, among other
  problems). This problem has been resolved (and a fix has been applied
  which will resolve the problem for any posts affected by this problem,
  if the original post is recent enough to still be available on the feed).

• UI: The “Back End” section has been split into two separate sections –
  “Performance” (dealing with caching, database index, and other
  performance tweaks), and “Diagnostics” (dealing with debug mode,
  update logging, and a number of new diagnostic tests which I will be
  rolling out over the next few releases).

• Several minor interface bugs and PHP warning notices have also been eliminated.

Download and enjoy! If you have any issues with the release, or any questions I can help answer, or if there is anything that you would like to see included in a future release, please use the comments form or drop me a line to let me know about it. If you have an issue to report, please be sure to tell me what version of FeedWordPress you’re using, what version of WordPress you’re using it with, and try to tell me, as clearly as possible, what you’re trying to accomplish, what you expect to see, and what you see instead when you try to accomplish it (including any error messages you may be seeing). See also Troubleshooting for more details.

Please remember that your generous gifts to the project tip jar make ongoing development, quick fixes and timely support for FeedWordPress possible.

FeedWordPress 2010.0528 is now available for download.

This is a major release with many changes, fixes, and new features. Actually, this post will be covering a lot more than just what went into the most recent public release — if you compared the version numbers in the Download box to the blog posts, you may have noticed that I put out a good three public releases that didn’t have corresponding announcements on the blog. (Versions 2009.1111, 2009.1112, and 2010.0127. The reasons, basically, had to do with major releases being postponed for a couple months while I worked on some major internal overhauls, and then ending up with some important stuff to push out, but not having time to get the package’s ChangeLog up to date. Since the announcement posts are based on the ChangeLog, the announcement posts didn’t go up either.

So, here is my big, fat list of changes since FeedWordPress 2009.0707, the last version that I wrote a blog post about. Some of the most important changes are not obviously visible to end-users, but will make a very big difference: in particular, FeedWordPress is no longer depends on MagpieRSS for feed parsing; it now uses the SimplePie module included with versions of WordPress since version 2.8. SimplePie is much more up to date than MagpieRSS, handles modern feed formats just fine, and is designed with a great deal of flexibility in mind, so the transition should eliminate some common causes of parsing and update errors; it also means that I no longer have to worry about maintaining an unauthorized upgrade to WordPress core modules, and this should eliminate one of the most common causes of sudden unexpected feed errors (the Upgrade Downgrade problem will no longer exist). SimplePie’s greater extensibility will also allow many more options in the future for developing extensions or alternatives for users who prefer different arrangements with regard to feed caching or other tasks related to the parser.

(Don’t worry, if you use existing filters and add-ons that depend on MagpieRSS’s format for feed data. This version includes a compatibility layer that will mock up Magpie’s data format from SimplePie objects, and ensure that existing add-ons and filters do not break.)

Some other important new features include syntax for storing feed meta-data in custom fields for syndicated posts; allowing you to protect manual edits to syndicated posts from being overwritten by updates from the feed; settings to help you control update scheduling; more resilient handling of dates (so that feed formats with unusual or broken date formats should no longer result in posts being dated back to 1969 or 1970), and a number of other interface tweaks, compatibility fixes, and some bug fixes around the edges. Here’s a breakdown of the major changes since the release of FeedWordPress 2009.0707.

• SIMPLEPIE IS NOW USED TO PARSE FEEDS; NO MORE MAGPIERSS UPGRADES NEEDED:
  One of the biggest changes in this release is that FeedWordPress no
  longer depends on MagpieRSS to parse feeds, and has switched to the much
  more up-to-date and flexible SimplePie feed parser, which is included as
  a standard part of WordPress versions 2.8 and later. Using SimplePie will
  hopefully allow for better handling of feeds going further, and will
  allow me greater flexibility in determining how exactly the feed parser
  will operate. It also means that FeedWordPress no longer requires
  special upgrades to the WordPress core MagpieRSS files, and should
  eliminate quite a bit of complexity.

• MAGPIERSS COMPATIBILITY LAYER FOR EXISTING FILTERS AND ADD-ONS: However,
  I have also implemented a compatibility layer to ensure that existing
  filters and add-ons for FeedWordPress which depended on the MagpieRSS
  data format should not be broken by the switch to SimplePie. Going
  forward, I recommend that new filters and add-ons be written to take
  advantage of the SimplePie object representations of items, feeds, etc.,
  rather than the MagpieRSS arrays, but the MagpieRSS arrays will still
  be available and older filters should continue to work as they have in
  the past.

• COMPATIBILITY WITH WORDPRESS 2.9.x and 3.0: This release has been tested
  for the existing WordPress 2.9.x branch and with the upcoming release of
  WordPress 3.0. Changes in the user interface JavaScript between WordPress
  2.8.x and WordPress 2.9 caused the tag box interface element to break in
  the Syndication –> Categories & Tags settings page; changes in the API
  functions for adding new authors caused fatal errors under certain
  conditions in WordPress 3.0. These breakages have been fixed.

• DROPPED LEGACY SUPPORT FOR WORDPRESS PRIOR TO 2.8: Because SimplePie is
  not included with versions of WordPress prior to 2.8, I have chosen to
  drop legacy support for WordPress versions 1.5 through 2.7. If you are
  using FeedWordPress with a version of WordPress before 2.8, you will
  have to upgrade your installation of WordPress in order to take
  advantage of this release.

• PHP 5.3 COMPATIBILITY: A couple of compatibility issues, which were
  causing fatal errors amd ugly warnings for users of PHP 5.3,
  have been eliminated.

Features and Processing

• INTERFACE REORGANIZATION: The interface restructuring, began with
  Version 2009.0612, has been completed. Catch-all settings pages have
  been eliminated entirely for pages that cover each aspect of handling
  a feed: Feeds & Updates, Posts & Links, Authors, Categories & Tags,
  and Back End handling of the database and diagnostic information.
  Extensive new interface hooks allow add-on modules to significantly
  change or extend the FeedWordPress admin interface and workflow.

• STORING INFORMATION FROM THE FEED IN CUSTOM FIELDS: Many users
  have written to request the ability to store information from elements
  in the feed in a custom field on each post. (So that, for example, if
  post includes a itunes:duration element, you could store the contents
  in a Custom Field called duration on the post (for a Theme to access
  later). The Custom Post Settings under Syndication –> Posts & Links now
  allow you to access any item or feed tag, using a syntax similar to
  a much-simplified version of XPath. See Posts & Links settings for
  details.

• UPDATE-FREEZING ON MANUALLY EDITED POSTS: FeedWordPress now allows you
  to mark posts that have been manually edited, so that the changes you
  make will not be overwritten by later updates from the feed. If you make
  manual edits to a particular post, just check the “Manual editing”
  checkbox in order to protect your changes from being overwritten. If you
  want to block all posts from being updated after they are imported
  for the first time, a new “Updated Posts” setting in Posts & Links
  allows you to freeze all posts from a particular feed, or all syndicated
  posts.

• SETTING: FEED-BY-FEED SETTINGS FOR WHERE PERMALINKS POINT TO: You’ve
  always been able to tell FeedWordPress whether permalinks for posts
  should point to the original source of the story or the local copy. Now
  you can choose different policies for different feeds, instead of one
  global policy for all feeds. (Of course, you can still use a global
  default if you prefer.)

• SETTING: USER CONTROL OVER TIMING BASIS. You can now determine the
  schedule on which feeds are considered ready to poll for updates –
  by default feeds become ready for polling after about 1 hour. You can
  now increase or decrease the time window under Syndication –> Feeds &
  Updates. (However, please pay CAREFUL ATTENTION to the recommendations
  and DO NOT set the scheduling lower than 60 minutes unless you are
  ABSOLUTELY SURE that you have specific permission from webmaster who
  provides that specific feed to poll more frequently than that. If you
  set this too low (and about 60 minutes is the polite minimum if you
  haven’t been given a different figure), most webmasters will consider
  the frequent hits on their server as rude, or even downright abusive.

• OTHER SETTINGS: New settings also include the ability to stop FWP from
  resolving relative URLs within syndicated content, and the ability to
  choose whether FeedWordPress should indicate the comment feed from the
  original source, or the local comment feed, when providing the comment
  feed URL for a syndicated post.

Parsing

• BETTER DATE HANDLING — FEWER FLASHBACKS TO 1969 and 1970: FeedWordPress
  has made some bugfixes and some improvements in the logic for parsing
  dates. This should allow FeedWordPress to correctly parse more dates in
  more feeds; and, in the last resort, when FeedWordPress fails to
  correctly parse a date, to fall back to a more intelligent default. This
  should hopefully avoid most or all error conditions that have resulted
  in articles being erroneously dated to the dawn of the Unix epoch
  (31 December 1969 or 1 January 1970).

• FULL-TEXT “EXCERPTS” NOW PROPERLY SHORTENED. Based on a straightforward
  reading of the existing RSS specs, it’s reasonable for the
  rss:description element to be read as a plaintext summary or excerpt for
  the item containing the description — with the full text of the item,
  if available, in another, better-suited element, such as the de facto
  standard content:encoded extension element. The problem is that uses of
  RSS rarely have much to do with anything like a straightforward reading
  of the specs. As a result, many actual RSS producers in the wild put the
  full text of the article in a description element. But since
  FeedWordPress has treated this text as a summary, this produces
  aggregated posts with lengthy “excerpts” containing the full text of the
  article. This release of FeedWordPress fixes the problem by doing a
  little digging before treating rss:description as a summary: if the
  description element is used properly as a plain text summary, then
  FeedWordPress will take the summary provided by the feed, rather than
  recreating its own excerpt from the full text; but if an RSS item has no
  full-text element other than description, FeedWordPress will treat the
  description element as the full text of the article, and generate a
  shortened excerpt automatically from that text.

API

• TEMPLATE API: new template tags get_local_permalink() and
  the_local_permalink() allow you to access the permalink for a post on
  your aggregator site, even when FeedWordPress is rewriting permalinks to
  point to the original source site.

• NEW HOOKS FOR ADD-ONS AND FILTERS: I have added a number of new hooks
  which allow add-on modules to filter more precisely, gather information
  at more points, and to enhance the FeedWordPress admin interface. For
  a list of new hooks and documentation, see the FeedWordPress
  documentation wiki at
  http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/wiki/add-ons-and-filters

• FILTER API: A number of new utility methods have been added to the
  SyndicatedPost class to make it easier for filters and add-ons to

• FILTER API: Globals $fwpchannel and $fwpfeedmeta DEPRECATED. These
  global variables, originally introduced to allow filters access to
  information about the source feed in syndicated_item filters (which
  were passed in through global variables rather than as parameters
  because of a bug in WP 1.5 which was then fixed in 1.5.1) have been
  DEPRECATED. If you have any filters or add-ons which still depend on
  these global variables, 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.

• DIAGNOSTICS: I’ve included a number of new diagnostic options and
  messages, which should allow an experienced user to better investigate
  any problems that may crop up.

Bug Fixes

• BUGFIX: & IN PERMALINKS NO LONGER CAUSING ATOM OR HTML VALIDATION
  ERRORS: Many users reported an issue in which syndicating a feed with
  special XML characters in the URLs (& was the most common, since it is
  used to separate HTTP GET parameters) would cause the aggregator’s
  feeds to produce invalid (malformed) XML. This update addresses the
  issue in Atom feeds. Unfortunately, it has not been technically possible
  to address the problem in RSS 2.0 feeds, due to limitations on
  WordPress’s internal templates for RSS feeds.

• BUGFIX: BROKEN URLS IN “POPULAR POSTS” AND SIMILAR PLUGINS SHOULD NO
  LONGER BE BROKEN. A number of users noticed an issue where plugins and
  templates that listed posts in locations outside of the post loop
  (for example, “Popular Posts”-style plugins that listed posts in the
  sidebar), often produced the wrong URL for post links. (Typically, all
  the posts listed would get the same wrong URL.) This should now be
  fixed. Thanks to Björn for sending in a quick fix!

• MINOR BUGFIXES: This release includes a number of fixes to minor bugs
  and compatibility issues, including: silent failures of the “Syndicate”
  button, “Illegal Offset Type” error messages from MagpieRSS, and others.

Enjoy! As always, if you have any issues with the release, or any questions I can help answer, or if there is anything that you would like to see included in a future release, please use the comments form or drop me a line to let me know about it.

I want to thank everyone who has contributed to the project tip jar over the past several months. Your generous gifts made it possible for me to take a lot of time out from freelance work in order to push through some really major changes to FeedWordPress over the past few months, and your ongoing support, besides being very flattering, goes a long way to help make development, support, and timely fixes possible. Thank you all!

FeedWordPress 2009.0707 is now available for download.

This is a release to fix two bugs, one small and slightly irritating, and the other potentially very irritating, which resulted from changes to the AJAX interface elements between WordPress 2.7 and 2.8.

Let’s start with the more irritating problem which you should be able to eliminate by upgrading to the most recent release:

• BUGFIX: WORDPRESS 2.8 AJAX COMPATIBILITY ISSUES RESOLVED (blank or
  truncated “Syndicated Sites” administration page): Due to changes in the
  AJAX interface elements between WordPress 2.7 and WordPress 2.8, several
  FeedWordPress users encountered an issue where the front “Syndication”
  page in the FeedWordPress administrative interface would come up blank,
  without the normal “Syndicated Sites” list and “Update” control, or
  sometimes wth the boxes visible but one or both of them truncated, with
  only the title bar. This issue should now be resolved: with the new
  version of FeedWordPress, the compatibility issue that caused the
  disappearance should be eliminated, and if boxes are shown with only
  their handle visible, you should once again be able to drop down the
  rest of the box by clicking once on its title bar.

Thank you to the many users who brought this issue to my attention, and supplied some very useful screen shots which helped me reproduce and track down the origin of the problem.

The second problem was with the Tags widget (found under Categories & Tags, where you can set tags to be applied to all syndicated posts, or all posts syndicated from a particular feed). This was also the result of some rather capricious changes to the AJAX interface framework in WordPress 2.8.

• BUGFIX: TAG SETTING WIDGET FIXED. Due to changes in interface elements
  between WordPress 2.7 and WordPress 2.8, people using FeedWordPress with
  WordPress 2.8 found that the widget for setting tags to be applied to
  all syndicated posts, or all syndicated posts from a particular feed,
  no longer displayed “Add” and “Remove” buttons for individual tags. This
  issue has now been fixed, and the tagging widget should once again work
  more or less exactly like the tagging widget for individual posts in the
  normal WordPress admin interface.

Download and enjoy! As always, you have any issues with the release, or if there is anything that you would like to see included in a future release, please use the comments form or drop me a line to let me know about it.

Now that these bug fixes are out of the way, I have some ambitious plans for the next release of FeedWordPress, which I hope to be able to release by early August at the latest. Besides ongoing testing for compatibility with new releases in the 2.8.x and upcoming 2.9 branches of WordPress, I would like to implement a Category Mapping system, similar to the existing Author Mapping system, which would provide users with much more fine-grained, powerful, and sophisticated tools for controlling how categories or tags from feeds are imported into the WordPress database. As I have time to do so, I would also like to include some commonly-requested features, such as allowing users more control over how excerpts are generated and more precise control over the timing of automatic updates. And eventually I hope to be able to replace the aging MagpieRSS feed parser with the more robust, reliable, and flexible SimplePie feed parser that is now shipping with new releases of WordPress.

If you have benefited from the bug fixes that went into this most recent release, or if you are interested in making sure that powerful new features like Category Mapping can be developed for an upcoming release, please remember that it’s your generous gifts to the project tip jar that make ongoing development and support for FeedWordPress possible.

FeedWordPress 2009.0618 is now available for download.

This is a bug fix release. Other than a few mainly cosmetic code clean-ups, there is only one change between this release and the previous release, 2009.0613. But it’s an important one.

After upgrading to WordPress 2.8, many users reported encountering the following error whenever they attempted to add a new feed through FeedWordPress’s feed-finder interface:

HTTP request failure

:

HTTP Transports available:

1. WP_Http_Fsockopen

I reported earlier that this error was the result of some changes in the HTTP request functions provided by FeedWordPress (changes to the order in which different HTTP transports are used; changes which I think were rather ill-considered). After managing to replicate the problem and investigating more deeply, I found out that it was actually the result of a combination of two factors — the changes in WordPress 2.8 (which I still think were a mistake) and also a subtle bug in FeedWordPress’s feed-finder code, which the changes in the HTTP transport code ended up exposing. In any case, the subtle bug has now been fixed, and with it, the source of most of these HTTP request errors should be eliminated.

So, if you’ve been encountering this problem, be sure to download the most recent FeedWordPress. Then, after it’s installed, make sure you also upgrade your MagpieRSS to the version included with the most recent FeedWordPress. The fix is included in the MagpieRSS code, and will not be applied unless and until you upgrade your MagpieRSS to version 2009.0618.

Download and enjoy! As always, you have any issues with the release, or if there is anything that you would like to see included in a future release, please use the comments form or drop me a line to let me know about it.

Please remember that your generous gifts to the project tip jar make ongoing development and support for FeedWordPress possible.

FeedWordPress version 2009.0613 is now available for download.

This is a very minor update, which I guess should not be too much of a surprise, if you take into account the fact that I made a major release just yesterday. However, due to some difficulties that some people have been having, I thought it would be a good idea to push out a release with better diagnostics.

The basic issue is this: until WordPress version 2.7, FeedWordPress used the Snoopy HTTP library (which is included in WordPress) to fetch feeds for updating, and also for the feed finder that helps you subscribe to new feeds in the administrative interface. With WordPress 2.7, however, the WordPress team decided to deprecate Snoopy — so it’s still included with WordPress, but not used internally, and it may be dropped from future releases — and to introduce a new custom API for HTTP requests (the WP_Http class and some wrapper functions that make use of it). So, if you’re using WordPress 2.7.x or 2.8, FeedWordPress uses the new functions rather than the deprecated Snoopy module. One of the advantages of the new code is that it is supposed to be able to make use of any of several different HTTP transport APIs which may be available, depending on your PHP set-up (for example libcurl, fsockopen, URL support in fopen, etc.). But I’ve been noticing problems that many users have had that tie back to problems with the underlying HTTP transports used by WordPress’s new code, and, for reasons that are unclear to me, the WordPress development team decided to make some changes in WordPress 2.8 which make these problems even more likely to occur and even harder to get around. In any case, this is almost certainly the underlying issue if you, like others, are encountering something like this when you try to syndicate a new feed:

Error: I couldn’t find any feeds at <http://example.com/> request error: :. Try another URL

The best solution for you will depend on details about your own hosting situation — in particular, what version of WordPress you are using FeedWordPress with, and whether or not you are able to install new PHP modules on your web host, or, if not, whether or not you have someone who is willing to install new PHP modules for you. Unfortunately it’s not likely to be something that FeedWordPress itself can fix. But I have made some updates so that FeedWordPress will, at least, provide some more useful diagnostic information — which may help you figure out what needs to be done, or which will hep me help you figure it out, if you send the diagnostic information to me along with your support request.

So, anyway, all that said, that’s why I’m pushing out a new release today. (There are also a couple other minor changes included in the release, but I would probably not have bothered with a public release just yet except for the number of support requests I’ve gotten since yesterday’s release, which the diagnostics would help with.) Other than some under-the-hood re-arranging of the code, here are the significant changes between 2009.0613 and the previous releas, 2009.0612:

• INTERFACE/BUGFIX: WORDPRESS 2.8 CATEGORY BOX FIX. Thanks to a subtle
  change in class names between the WordPress 2.7 and 2.8 stylesheets,
  category boxes in the FeedWordPress settings interface tended to overflow
  and have a lot of messy-looking overlapping text under WordPress 2.8.
  This has now been fixed.

• FeedFinder FAILURE DIAGNOSTICS: When FWP’s FeedFinder fails to find any
  feeds at a given URL (for example, when you are trying to add a
  subscription through the administrative interface and you run into an
  error message), FeedWordPress now provides more diagnostic information
  for the reasons behind the failure. If that helps you, great; if not,
  it should help me respond more intelligently to your support request..

Download and enjoy! As always, you have any issues with the release, or if there is anything that you would like to see included in a future release, please use the comments form or drop me a line to let me know about it.

Please remember that your generous gifts to the project tip jar make ongoing development, quick fixes and timely support for FeedWordPress possible.

FeedWordPress version 2009.0612 is now available for download.

Given the recent release of WordPress 2.8 I thought it would be an opportune time to roll up the development I’ve been doing on FeedWordPress over the past few months and push out a new official release. A list of major changes since the last release follows below.

First things first, though. A new version of WordPress has come out, which has caused a number of e-mails — just like every WordPress release does — from people who upgraded WordPress to the latest version, and, in the process, inadvertently downgraded their MagpieRSS to the old, busted version included with WordPress. If you have noticed strange problems with syndicating feeds (especially Atom feeds) immediately after making the upgrade, like those described in my old post about upgrading to WordPress 2.5, then you need to re-copy the MagpieRSS upgrades from your FeedWordPress installation to the wp-includes/ subdirectory of your WordPress installation. Fortunately, if you upgrade to FeedWordPress 2009.0612, one of the new features included in the package is that it will politely remind you to perform this upgrade if it notices that the old version of MagpieRSS is the one that’s loading up.

Now, then. Here are the major changes since the release of FeedWordPress 2008.1214.

• WORDPRESS 2.8 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress 2009.0612 has been tested for
  compatibility with the recent version 2.8 release of WordPress.

• INTERFACE RESTRUCTURING: In order to avoid settings posts from becoming
  too crowded, and to modularize and better organize the user interface,
  new “Posts” and “Categories & Tags” subpages have been created under the
  “Syndication” menu. “Posts” controls settings for individal syndicated
  posts (such as publication status, comment and ping status, whether or
  not to use the original location of the post as the permalink, whether
  or not to expose posts to formatting filters, and so on). “Categories &
  Tags” controls settings for assigning new syndicated posts to categories
  and tags, such as categories or tags to apply to all syndicated posts,
  and how to handle categories that do not yet exist in the WordPress
  database. These subpages, like the Authors subpage, handle settings for
  the global default level and for individual syndicated feeds.

  Corresponding to these new subpages, the old Syndication Settings and
  Feed Settings subpages have been cleaned up and simplified, and now only
  link to the appropriate subpages for options that can be set in the
  Posts, Authors, or Categories & Tags subpages.

• FEATURE: ADD CUSTOM SETTINGS TO EACH SYNDICATED POST: FeedWordPress has
  long had an interface for creating custom settings for each syndicated
  feed which could be retrieved in templates using the get_feed_meta()
  template function. But it had no feature for adding custom fields to
  each individual syndicated post. In response to requests from users, I
  have added the ability to apply custom fields to each individual
  syndicated post, using the new Syndication –> Posts subpage. You can
  set up custom fields to be applied to every syndicated post, or custom
  fields to be applied to syndicated posts from a particular feed.

• FEATURE: MAGPIERSS VERSION CHECK AND UPGRADE: FeedWordPress will attempt
  to determine whether or not you are using the upgraded version of
  MagpieRSS that comes packaged with FeedWordPress. If not, it will throw
  an error on admin pages, and, if you are a site administrator, it will
  give you the option to ignore the error message, or to attempt an
  automatic upgrade (using a native file copy). If the file copy fails,
  FeedWordPress will offer some guidance on how to perform the upgrade
  manually.

• BLANK POSTS PROBLEM NO LONGER OCCURS WITH OLD & BUSTED MAGPIERSS: Due
  to the fact that I relied on a content normalization that occurs in my
  upgraded version of MagpieRSS, but not in the old & busted version of
  MagpieRSS that ships with WordPress, until this version, if you tried to
  syndicate an Atom feed without having performed the (strongly
  recommended) MagpieRSS upgrade, all of the posts would come up with
  completely blank contents. That’s not because MagpieRSS couldn’t read
  the data, but rather because the new Magpie version puts that data in a
  location where the old version doesn’t, and I was only looking in that
  newer location. Now it checks for both, meaning that posts will continue
  to display their contents even if you don’t upgrade MagpieRSS. (But you
  really should upgrade it, anyway.)

• BUGFIX: RELATIVE URI RESOLUTION FOR POST CONTENT RESTORED. Some time
  back, I added support for resolving relative URIs against xml:base on
  feeds that support it to the MagpieRSS upgrade in FeedWordPress. Then I
  took out code that did the same thing from the main FeedWordPress code.
  Of course, the problem is that some people, even though it is clearly
  stupid or evil to do so, still include relative URIs for images or links
  in posts on feed formats that do not adequately support xml:base
  (notably, RSS 2.0 feeds). In response to a user request, I have added
  this functionality back in, so that MagpieRSS will resolve any relative
  URIs that it knows how to resolve using xml:base, and then FeedWordPress
  will attempt to resolve any relative URIs that are left over afterwards.

• BUGFIX: INTERFACE OPTION FOR SETTING SYNDICATED POST PUBLICATION STATUS
  ON A FEED-BY-FEED BASIS HAS BEEN RESTORED: Due to a version-checking
  bug, users of WordPress 2.7.x lost an option from the “Edit a syndicated
  feed” interface which allowed them to determine whether newly syndicated
  posts should be published immediately, held as “Pending Review,” saved
  as drafts, or saved as private posts. (The option to change this
  setting globally remained in place, but users could no longer set it on
  a feed-by-feed basis.) The version-checking bug has been fixed, and the
  option has been restored.

• BUGFIX: “ARE YOU SURE?” FATAL ERROR ELIMINATED AND SECURITY IMPROVED:
  Under certain circumstances (for example, when users have configured
  their browser or proxy not to send HTTP Referer headers, for privacy or
  other reasons), many features in the FeedWordPress administrative
  interface (such as adding new feeds or changing settings) would hit a
  fatal error, displaying only a cryptic message reading “Are you sure?”
  and a blank page following it. This problem has been eliminated by
  taking advantage of WordPress’s nonce functions, which allow the
  security check which ran into this error to work properly even without
  receiving an HTTP Referer header. (N.B.: WordPress’s nonce functions
  were first introduced in WordPress 2.0.3. If you’re using FeedWordPress
  with an older version of WordPress, there’s no fix for this problem:
  you’ll just need to turn Referer headers back on. Sorry.)

• BUGFIX: MANUALLY-ALTERED POST STATUS, COMMENT STATUS, AND PING STATUS NO
  LONGER REVERTED BY POST UPDATES: If you manually altered the post status,
  comment status, or ping status of a syndicated post from what it was set
  to when first syndicated — for example, if you had a feed that was set
  to bring in new posts as “Pending Review,” and you then marked some of
  the pending posts as “Published” and others as “Unpublished” — then
  in previous versions of FeedWordPress, these manual changes to the
  status would be lost — so that, for example, your Published or Unpublished
  articles would revert to Pending Review — if the source feed made any
  upates to the item. This could make the Pending Review feature both
  unreliable and also extremely frustrating to work with. The good news is
  that this bug has since been fixed: if you manually update the status
  of a post, it will no longer be reverted if or when the post is updated.

• BUGFIX: OCCASIONAL FATAL ERROR ON UPDATE ELIMINATED: Under certain
  limited conditions (specifically, when both the title and the content of
  a post to be updated are empty), an attempt to update the post would
  result in a fatal error. This has been fixed.

• INTERFACE: “CONFIGURE SETTINGS” CONVENIENCE LINK ADDED TO CONFIRMATION
  MESSAGE WHEN A NEW FEED IS ADDED: When you add a new subscription to
  FeedWordPress, the message box that appears to confirm it now includes a
  handy link to the feed’s settings subpage, so that you can quickly set
  up any special settings you may want to set up for the new feed, without
  having to hunt through the list of all your other subscriptions to pick
  out the new one.

• INTERFACE: SIMPLIFYING AND CLARIFYING AUTOMATIC UPDATES SETTINGS. I have
  removed an interval setting for the cronless automatic updates which has
  confused many FeedWordPress users. In past versions of FWP, when you
  turned on automatic updates, you would be presented with a time interval
  setting which controlled how often FeedWordPress would check for feeds
  ready to be polled for updates. (That is, it DID NOT control how often
  feeds would be polled; it controlled how often FeedWordPress would
  check for feeds that had become ready to poll. The schedule on which
  feeds became ready for polling was still controlled either by requests
  encoded in elements within the feed itself, or else according to an
  internal calculation within FeedWordPress, averaging out to about 1 hour,
  if the feed did not include any scheduling request elements.) Since many
  users very often (and understandably) confused the purpose of this
  setting, and since the setting is for a feature that’s actually very
  unlikely to require any manual control by the user, I have removed the
  setting; FeedWordPress now simply uses the default value of checking for
  feeds to poll every 10 minutes.

• FEEDFINDER PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT: FeedWordPress’s FeedFinder class
  now uses array_unique() to make sure that it doesn’t waste time
  repeatedly iterating over and polling the same URI. Props to Camilo
  (http://projects.radgeek.com/2008/12/14/feedwordpress-20081214/#comment-20090122160414).

Enjoy! As always, you have any issues with the release, or if there is anything that you would like to see included in a future release, please use the comments form or drop me a line to let me know about it.

Please remember that your generous gifts to the project tip jar make ongoing development and support for FeedWordPress possible.

FeedWordPress version 2008.1214 is now available for download.

The advent of December has seen the release of WordPress 2.7, and I’ve been working to get out a new release of FeedWordPress before I leave to visit family for the holidays, which incorporates the couple of small compatibility fixes. In addition, I’ve added some interface improvements (to help FWP look a bit less out-of-place in the new user interface), and a couple of fixes of bugs reported or detected in the process of testing.

Also, I created a cheesy little logo icon for FeedWordPress to fit in with the general practice in the WordPress 2.7 interface. It’s not actually intended to be a distinctive logo for FeedWordPress (it just takes a syndication icon and the WordPress logo and puts them together), but it should at least visually mark off the FeedWordPress configuration interface from the rest of the Dashboard. Hope you like it.

First things first, though. A WordPress update has come out, which has caused a number of e-mails — just like every WordPress release does –from people who upgraded WordPress to the latest version, and, in the process, inadvertently downgraded their MagpieRSS to the old, busted version included with WordPress. If you have noticed strange problems with syndicating feeds (especially Atom feeds) immediately after making the upgrade, like those described in my old post about upgrading to WordPress 2.5, then you need to re-copy the MagpieRSS upgrades from your FeedWordPress installation to the wp-includes/ subdirectory of your WordPress installation. (The old post discusses this issue, and the steps for fixing it, in more detail.)

Now, then. Here are the major changes since the release of FeedWordPress 2008.1105:

• WORDPRESS 2.7 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress has been tested for
  compatibility with the newly released WordPress 2.7. WordPress 2.7 has
  deprecated the Snoopy library for HTTP requests, which caused a fatal
  error for users who had not installed the MagpieRSS upgrade (or whose
  installation of the MagpieRSS upgrade was overwritten by a recent update
  of WordPress). FeedWordPress now handles things gracefully when Snoopy
  is not immediately available. The 2008.1214 fix also releases a minor interface
  bug experienced when changing link settings under WordPress 2.7. (This was the result of
  some new caching features implemented in 2.7.)

• INTERFACE SPIFFED UP: Interface elements have been updated so that
  FeedWordPress’s management interface fits in more naturally with the
  WordPress 2.7 interface (including a new logo and a number of small
  interface tweaks).

• BUG WITH TAGS FOR SYNDICATED ARTICLES FIXED: Several users encountered a
  bug with the option to add tags to all syndicated posts under
  Syndication –> Settings — if you told FeedWordPress to add more than
  one tag to all syndicated posts, instead of doing so correctly, it would
  add a single tag instead, whose name was composed of the names of all
  the tags you asked it to add. This bug was the result of nothing more
  dignified than a typographical error on my part. It has now been fixed.

• MORE INFORMATION AVAILABLE WHEN FEEDWORDPRESS CAN’T FIND A FEED: When
  you enter a URL for a new syndication source, FeedWordPress uses a
  simple feed-finding algorithm (originally based on Mark Pilgrim’s
  Universal Feed Finder) to try to determine whether the URL is the URL
  for a feed, or, if the URL points to an ordinary website rather than to
  a feed, whether there is a feed for that website. All well and good, but
  if FeedWordPress failed to find a feed, for whatever reason, it would
  typically return nothing more than a nasty little note to the effect of
  no feed found, without any explanation of what went wrong.
  FeedWordPress now keeps track of error conditions from the HTTP
  requests that it uses in the course of looking for the feed, and so may
  be able to give you a bit more information about the nature of the
  problem if something goes wrong.

Enjoy! As always, you have any issues with the release, or if there is anything that you would like to see included in a future release, please use the comments form or drop me a line to let me know about it.

Also, I know that there are a couple of issues that some users have already reported that have not yet been addressed in this release. (For example, I haven’t yet been able to investigate the issue reported by Scot Hacker and mn, as well as some private e-mails. I’m hoping to investigate this issue over the next couple weeks in order to discover what’s going on and how to fix it; if I can catch it in action, then I should be able to push out a release either during downtime on my winter vacation, or else shortly after New Years’.) In any case, please remember that your gifts to the project tip jar make ongoing development and support like this possible.