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.