2010.0531 is now available for download.(http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/feedwordpress.2010.0531.zip)

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 2010.0528(http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/blogs/radgeek/2010/05/28/feedwordpress-20100528-four-updates-one). 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 me a line(/contact) 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 tip jar(/donate) make ongoing development, quick fixes and timely support for FeedWordPress possible.

2010.0528 is now available for download(http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/feedwordpress.2010.0528.zip).

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 Downgrade(http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/blogs/radgeek/2008/04/18/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

* **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 $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta 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
and
.

* **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 me a line(/contact) to let me know about it.

I want to thank everyone who has contributed to the tip jar(http://projects.radgeek.com/feedwordpress/) 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 support(http://projects.radgeek.com/feedwordpress/), besides being very flattering, goes a long way to help make development, support, and timely fixes possible. Thank you all!