version 2009.0612 is now available for download.[1]
[2]: http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/feedwordpress.2009.0612.zip
Given the recent release of 2.8[3] 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.
2.8: http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_2.8
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 old post about upgrading to WordPress 2.5(http://projects.radgeek.com/2008/04/18/compatability-bugs-and-possible-quick-fixes-for-issues-with-feedwordpress-after-upgrading-to-wordpress-25/), 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
().
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 me a line(http://radgeek.com/contact) to let me know about it.
Please remember that your generous gifts to the tip jar(http://projects.radgeek.com/feedwordpress/) make ongoing development and support for FeedWordPress possible.
