FeedWordPress is stable software that I use to run a public, heavily-trafficked website from day to day at FeministBlogs.org. But it’s also software that’s only been public for one cycle, and that exists on top of a lot of layers of other software, including (1) WordPress, (2) PHP, and (3) Apache, among others. So it’s hard to ensure that it works everywhere. These are some known issues with FeedWordPress that have been reported. If you are having trouble with FeedWordPress, feel free to contact me. Please let me know what version of FeedWordPress and WordPress you are running. If you know the version of PHP that you are using and the operating system on your web server, that would help me out a lot too.

I can’t get FeedWordPress to syndicate a shared feed from Google Reader

Problem: When you attempt to syndicate a shared feed from Google Reader, FeedWordPress fails to add the new feed, and displays a mysterious error message, reading “There was a problem adding the newsfeed. [SQL: ].

Solution: This is the result of a bug in versions of FeedWordPress prior to version 0.99, which produced an error when trying to syndicate feeds that do not report any human-readable homepage for their content (such as Google Reader shared feeds). You can fix the bug by upgrading to the latest version of FeedWordPress.

I did get FeedWordPress to add a Google Reader feed somehow, but now the title of the source website gets mashed on to the end of each post’s title.

Problem: In feeds that use the <atom:source> element (such as Google Reader shared feeds), the title of each post has the title of the source website mashed onto the end.

Solution: This is the result of a bug in older versions of the MagpieRSS upgrade included with FeedWordPress. In order to fix the problem, upgrade to the latest version of FeedWordPress, and make sure that you install the optional rss.php and rss-functions.php upgrades.

Categories with duplicate names are created

Problem: FeedWordPress is creating more than one category with the same name. Some posts are placed in two or more of these duplicate categories.

Solution: This is a slightly obscure bug with versions of FeedWordPress prior to 0.97. (It is fixed in version 0.97 and later.) It arises when a category name ends with trailing whitespace characters, or contains certain international characters, or contains characters that have a special meaning in regular expressions. It is the result of a stupid mistake on my part, and some discrepancies between how PHP and some versions of MySQL handle string data; the discrepancy causes PHP to fail to recognize that the category name in the database and the category name it has gotten from the feed are identical, so it creates a new category with the same name. Meanwhile, MySQL treats them as identical, and so it provides the ID number for both the newly created category and the old category with the same name when PHP asks it to look up ID numbers for the category names. The easiest way to solve this problem is to upgrade to the latest version of FeedWordPress.

No options are displayed under Syndication Options

Problem: When I try to set options for FeedWordPress under Syndication –> Options, I get a blank page with no options on it.

Work-Around: This seems to be the result of a bug in WordPress 1.5.0. Some users experience this issue and others do not. You should be able to fix it by upgrading to the latest version of WordPress (currently, WordPress 2.3) and the latest version of FeedWordPress (currently, FeedWordPress 0.99).