FeedWordPress 0.95 is now available for download.

0.95 squashes a bug that I discovered, to my irritation, in the field at Feminist Blogs, and adds some significant features that may be of interest. Author aliases are now supported, and you can now decide whether or not FeedWordPress will create new authors or new categories when it encounters author names or category names that are not yet in the WordPress database. These features can even be used to provide some simple filtering functionality without having to write a PHP filter. For more information, see the change log and the online documentation.

We are slowly moving towards 1.0 (which, incidentally, I don’t intend to call 1.0 — because, roughly, once it reaches that point it will be mature software and will be unlikely to make any milestone changes of the sort that would make a major version number make sense; the version will most likely be named after the date that it was released).

Here’s a rough outline of what there is left for me to do between now and the 1.0 release:

1. Bug fixes (investigating bugs that users are reporting to me now, and squashing any new ones that come up)

2. Adding some more global options (e.g., allowing users to globally set the default post status, comment status, and ping status for syndicated posts)

3. Support for RSS enclosures.

4. Adding a proper interface for editing FeedWordPress-specific settings for Contributor links; this special editing interface would be reached through the “Edit” link under Links –> Syndicated.

Is there anything important that I’m missing? Let me know what you think.

Change Log: from 0.91 to 0.95

• 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.

• 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”).

• 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.

• 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:

  a.k.a.: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
  

  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.

• 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.

  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.

  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.

  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:

  unfamiliar author: (create|default|filter)
  unfamiliar categories: (create|default|filter)
  

  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.

  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.

  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:

  unfamiliar author: filter
  

  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.)