Requirements

To use version 0.99 of FeedWordPress, you will need:

1. an installed and configured copy of WordPress 2.3.x, 2.2.x, 2.1.x, 2.0.x, or 1.5.x. (FeedWordPress currently will not work with older versions of WordPress, or with WordPress MU.)

2. FTP or SFTP access to your web host

Installation

To use version 0.991 of FeedWordPress, you will need:

• an installed and configured copy of WordPress version 2.3.x, 2.2.x, 2.1.x, 2.0.x, or 1.5.x. (FeedWordPress will also work with the equivalent versions of WordPress MU.)

• FTP or SFTP access to your web host

New Installations

1. Download the FeedWordPress archive in zip or gzipped tar format and extract the files on your computer.

2. Create a new directory named feedwordpress in the wp-content/plugins directory of your WordPress installation. Use an FTP or SFTP client to upload the contents of your FeedWordPress archive to the new directory that you just created on your web host.

3. Upgrade the copy of MagpieRSS packaged with WordPress by installing the new copies of rss.php and rss-functions.php into the wp-includes directory of your FeedWordPress installation. These files are stored in the MagpieRSS-upgrade directory of your FeedWordPress archive. Strictly speaking, upgrading MagpieRSS is optional; FeedWordPress will run correctly without the upgrade. But if you hope to take advantage of numerous bug fixes, or support for Atom 1.0, multiple post categories, RSS enclosures, or multiple character encodings, then you need to install the upgrade.

4. Log in to the WordPress Dashboard and activate the FeedWordPress plugin.

5. Once the plugin is activated, you can go to Syndication –> Options and set (1) the link category that FeedWordPress will syndicate links from (by default, “Contributors”), and (2) whether FeedWordPress will use automatic updates or only manual updates.

6. Go to the main Syndication page to set up the list of sites that you want FeedWordPress to syndicate onto your blog.

Upgrades

To upgrade an existing installation of FeedWordPress to version 0.991:

1. Download the FeedWordPress archive in zip or gzipped tar format and extract the files on your computer.

2. If you are upgrading from version 0.98 or earlier, then you need to create a new directory named feedwordpress in the wp-content/plugins directory of your WordPress installation, and you also need to delete your existing wp-content/update-feeds.php and wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress.php files. The file structure for FeedWordPress has changed and the files from your old version will not be overwritten, which could cause conflicts if you leave them in place.

3. Upload the new PHP files to wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress, overwriting any existing FeedWordPress files that are there. Also be sure to upgrade the MagpieRSS module by uploading rss.php and rss-functions.php from the MagpieRSS-upgrade directory in your archive to the wp-includes directory of your WordPress installation.

4. If you are upgrading from version 0.96 or earlier, immediately log in to the WordPress Dashboard, and go to Options –> Syndicated. Follow the directions to launch the database upgrade procedure. The new versions of FeedWordPress incorporate some long-needed improvements, but old meta-data needs to be updated to prevent duplicate posts and other possible maladies. If you’re upgrading an existing installation, updates and FeedWordPress template functions will not work until you’ve done the upgrade. Then take a coffee break while the upgrade runs. It should, hopefully, finish within a few minutes even on relatively large databases.

5. If you are upgrading from version 0.98 or earlier, note that the old update-feeds.php has been eliminated in favor of a (hopefully) more humane method for automatic updating. If you used a cron job for scheduled updates, it will not work anymore, but there is another, simpler method which will. See Setting Up Feed Updates to get scheduled updates back on track.

6. Enjoy your new installation of FeedWordPress.

Setting Up Feed Updates

FeedWordPress is now ready to accept posts from its syndication sources. The next thing to do is to make sure it knows when to go get them.

N.B.: If you are upgrading from version 0.981 or earlier of FeedWordPress, the system for checking for new posts has been overhauled, hopefully making it more humane, and also easier to use for people who do not have access to task scheduling tools such as cron. You will need to re-read this section and change your set-up accordingly.

FeedWordPress allows you to choose whether it will check for new posts automatically, or only when you manually request for it to check. By default, FeedWordPress opts for the manual option — so that you can get your feeds set up properly before FeedWordPress begins importing new posts. If you want to use automatically scheduled updates, remember to enable them in Syndication –> Options after you finish setting up FeedWordPress.

Manual Feed Updates

To manually check for new posts, log in to the WordPress Dashboard and go to the main page under Syndication. You can use the “Update feeds now” button to check for new posts on feeds that are due for a scheduled update, or use the checkboxes and “Update Checked Feeds” button to force FeedWordPress to check one or more specific feeds for new posts. FeedWordPress will check the selected feed or feeds for new posts, and import any new content available.

Automatic Feed Updates

If you choose an automatic update schedule, then FeedWordPress will automatically check for new posts based on a schedule you determine. When automatic updates are enabled, FeedWordPress will check for new posts when (1) at least ten minutes have passed since the last update, and (2) a viewer visits your FeedWordPress-enabled blog. (If you want the interval of time to be shorter or longer, you can change the interval in the Dashboard under Syndication –> Options.)

Note that this is not quite the same thing as precisely scheduled updating. If you get at least one viewer every ten minutes, then FeedWordPress will be regularly checking for new posts on schedule; if not, not. But for a relatively active aggregator blog this is probably close enough for government work.

However, if you want to ensure regular updates, and you have access to a task-scheduling tool such as cron, you can use it to schedule regular checks for updates on a fixed schedule. For example, using cron, you can easily ensure that FeedWordPress checks for new posts regularly by adding the following line to your crontab, substituting the actual address of your WordPress installation for “http://www.zyx.com/blog/”:

*/15 * * * * curl http://www.zyx.com/blog/ > /dev/null

If you don’t have direct access to cron or a similar scheduling tool, you can use online tools such as WebCron to schedule a regular fetch of your blog’s front page to much the same effect.

Feed Updates using XML-RPC

FeedWordPress also allows syndicated blogs to notify you of updates using the XML-RPC “recently updated” pings (in the standard format accepted by Weblogs.com, Ping-O-Matic, Technorati, and other blogging services). Most blogging software allows users to add a URI to the list of URIs that get pinged with each new update — see, for example, Options –> Writing –> Update Services in WordPress, or Configuration –> Preferences –> Publicity / Remote Interfaces / TrackBack in Movable Type. If you can get a contributor to add your XML-RPC URI to her list of update services to ping, then whenever she updates her blog, her blogging software will notify your FeedWordPress installation, and FeedWordPress will look up her feed to grab the new posts off of it. (If you have WordPress installed at http://www.zyx.com/blog, say, the URI for her to ping should be http://www.zyx.com/blog/xmlrpc.php).