• Feature: I have added a new shortcode, [backref name="..." /], which allows you to refer back to an established footnote if you gave it a unique name. So, for example:

  This is footnoted.[ref name="source1"]Source 1[/ref]
  
  So is this.[ref name="source2"]Source[/ref]
  
  And this one comes from the same source as the first.[backref name="source1"]
  

  The third paragraph will include a footnote that points back to the first source.

  Props for suggesting this feature go to Jesse Taylor.

• Feature: If you don’t like my default styling for the footnote list (each footnote in an individual box with a little header marking it as a note), you can now easily override it by supplying your own class for the list of footnotes. Here’s how:

  This is a test.[ref]Lewis (2000).[/ref]
  
  <h3>Notes</h3>
  
  [references class="compact" /]
  

  … which will produce the following HTML:

  <p>This is a test.<sup>[<a href="#test-n-1" class="footnoted"
  id="to-test-n-1">1</a>]</sup></p>
  
  <h3>Notes</h3>
  <ol class="compact">
  <li class="footnote" id="test-n-1"><strong><sup>[1]</sup></strong> Lewis
  (2000). <a class="note-return" href="#to-test-n-1">&#x21A9;</a></li>
  </ol>
  

  Since the default styling is based on children of ol.footnotes, those default styles will not apply, and you can apply whatever styles you wish to the class that you’ve created.

• WordPress 3 Compatibility: JavaScript functionality to make floating note bubbles appear did not work correctly in WordPress 3.0 in the earlier version. The current version of the plugin has been tested, fixed, and confirmed to work on, versions of WordPress up through 3.0.1.

• Bugfix: There was a bug, which has now been fixed, in the handling of unique ids, which could cause the plugin to break if you attempted to create more than one footnote section in your post:

  Test[ref]Source 1[/ref]
  
  [references /]
  
  Test 2.[ref]Source 2[/ref]
  
  [references /]
  

  In earlier versions, the use of [references /] would cause the unique IDs to reset, creating duplicate IDs and breaking the plugins. This should now be something you can pull off without a hitch.

Download and enjoy! As always, if 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 drop me a line to let me know about it. And if you find Footnotes for WordPress useful, please remember that a small tip in the project tip jar goes a long way towards helping keep little projects like this up and running.

1. ^[1] If you like to write long posts where you’d like to break up the footnotes into more than one section. ↩

This is a small compatibility release. It does not add any new features over those offered by version 2009.0730. (Like I said, Supported and mature.) But it does include a small but important change to the order of execution that Add Attribution requests, which will help it play nicer with other filters designed to work with FeedWordPress. (In particular, this update is necessary in order to avoid potential conflicts with the newly-released FWP+: Limit size of posts add-on module. If you want to use both Add Attribution and Limit Size Of Posts together, you’ll need this update in order to ensure harmonious coexistence.)

Download and 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 drop me a line to let me know about it.

This release adds one significant new feature — the [original-url] shortcode — and also fixes a small group (swarm? nest? hive?) of bugs originally reported by Ato which have to do irregularities in the way that WordPress parses dashes in shortcode names. Changes:

• Feature: If you want your attribution boilerplate to contain a link back to the original post that this post is a syndicated copy of, you can now do so using the [original-url] shortcode.

• Bugfix: Due to problems in the way that WordPress parses shortcodes with dashes in their names, the [source-name] and [source-url] shortcodes in previous versions might erroneously display the same link that was supposed to be displayed by [source], and [author-name] might erroneously display the same link that was supposed to be displayed by [author]. This problem has now been fixed, and each shortcode should display its proper contents.

• Documentation: Shortcodes are now more thoroughly documented; the helper box in the Attribution Boilerplate section now contains a full list and short description of all available shortcodes.

• Interface and bugfixes: Some miscellaneous AJAX changes, styling improvements, and minor bug fixes.

Download and 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 drop me a line to let me know about it.

This release fixes a bug in the initial release, reported by Stephanie, which caused PHP to throw a fatal error if you attempted to use the [author] shortcode in your attribution boilerplate. The problem is now fixed, and [author] should display the author’s name, and if attached to the post content, a link to the archive of articles by that author. (That is, articles that have been syndicated on your site. If you want a link to the author’s original homepage, use the [source] shortcode.)

Download and 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 drop me a line to let me know about it.

This is a release to fix two bugs, one small and slightly irritating, and the other potentially very irritating, which resulted from changes to the AJAX interface elements between WordPress 2.7 and 2.8.

Let’s start with the more irritating problem which you should be able to eliminate by upgrading to the most recent release:

• BUGFIX: WORDPRESS 2.8 AJAX COMPATIBILITY ISSUES RESOLVED (blank or truncated “Syndicated Sites” administration page): Due to changes in the AJAX interface elements between WordPress 2.7 and WordPress 2.8, several FeedWordPress users encountered an issue where the front “Syndication” page in the FeedWordPress administrative interface would come up blank, without the normal “Syndicated Sites” list and “Update” control, or sometimes wth the boxes visible but one or both of them truncated, with only the title bar. This issue should now be resolved: with the new version of FeedWordPress, the compatibility issue that caused the disappearance should be eliminated, and if boxes are shown with only their handle visible, you should once again be able to drop down the rest of the box by clicking once on its title bar.

Thank you to the many users who brought this issue to my attention, and supplied some very useful screen shots which helped me reproduce and track down the origin of the problem.

The second problem was with the Tags widget (found under Categories & Tags, where you can set tags to be applied to all syndicated posts, or all posts syndicated from a particular feed). This was also the result of some rather capricious changes to the AJAX interface framework in WordPress 2.8.

• BUGFIX: TAG SETTING WIDGET FIXED. Due to changes in interface elements between WordPress 2.7 and WordPress 2.8, people using FeedWordPress with WordPress 2.8 found that the widget for setting tags to be applied to all syndicated posts, or all syndicated posts from a particular feed, no longer displayed “Add” and “Remove” buttons for individual tags. This issue has now been fixed, and the tagging widget should once again work more or less exactly like the tagging widget for individual posts in the normal WordPress admin interface.

Download and 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 drop me a line to let me know about it.

Now that these bug fixes are out of the way, I have some ambitious plans for the next release of FeedWordPress, which I hope to be able to release by early August at the latest. Besides ongoing testing for compatibility with new releases in the 2.8.x and upcoming 2.9 branches of WordPress, I would like to implement a Category Mapping system, similar to the existing Author Mapping system, which would provide users with much more fine-grained, powerful, and sophisticated tools for controlling how categories or tags from feeds are imported into the WordPress database. As I have time to do so, I would also like to include some commonly-requested features, such as allowing users more control over how excerpts are generated and more precise control over the timing of automatic updates. And eventually I hope to be able to replace the aging MagpieRSS feed parser with the more robust, reliable, and flexible SimplePie feed parser that is now shipping with new releases of WordPress.

If you have benefited from the bug fixes that went into this most recent release, or if you are interested in making sure that powerful new features like Category Mapping can be developed for an upcoming release, please remember that it’s your generous gifts to the project tip jar that make ongoing development and support for FeedWordPress possible.

This is a bug fix release. Other than a few mainly cosmetic code clean-ups, there is only one change between this release and the previous release, 2009.0613. But it’s an important one.

After upgrading to WordPress 2.8, many users reported encountering the following error whenever they attempted to add a new feed through FeedWordPress’s feed-finder interface:

HTTP request failure

:

HTTP Transports available:

1. WP_Http_Fsockopen

I reported earlier that this error was the result of some changes in the HTTP request functions provided by FeedWordPress (changes to the order in which different HTTP transports are used; changes which I think were rather ill-considered). After managing to replicate the problem and investigating more deeply, I found out that it was actually the result of a combination of two factors — the changes in WordPress 2.8 (which I still think were a mistake) and also a subtle bug in FeedWordPress’s feed-finder code, which the changes in the HTTP transport code ended up exposing. In any case, the subtle bug has now been fixed, and with it, the source of most of these HTTP request errors should be eliminated.

So, if you’ve been encountering this problem, be sure to download the most recent FeedWordPress. Then, after it’s installed, make sure you also upgrade your MagpieRSS to the version included with the most recent FeedWordPress. The fix is included in the MagpieRSS code, and will not be applied unless and until you upgrade your MagpieRSS to version 2009.0618.

Download and 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 drop me a line to let me know about it.

Please remember that your generous gifts to the project tip jar make ongoing development and support for FeedWordPress possible.

Update 2008-11-06: FeedWordPress 0.993 is now out of date. You can download the latest release — 2008.1105 at the time of this writing — from the project homepage.

FeedWordPress version 0.993 is now available for download.

There are a few new features that I am in the midst of working on for an upcoming release of FeedWordPress, but I have released version 0.993 now in order to resolve the critical compatability issue with WordPress 2.5.1. I am still doing compatibility testing to see whether there are any kinks in compatibility with WordPress 2.5.x, but upgrading to this release should eliminate the fatal error that prevented 2.5.1 users from accessing the Syndication Options and the feed settings pages from within the WordPress pages. There are some small bug fixes and the beginning groundwork for some features that will become more fleshed out in the upcoming, more feature-rich release, which aren’t worth going into in detail; besides those, here is what’s new since FeedWordPress 0.992:

• WORDPRESS 2.5.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with WordPress 2.5.1.

• WORDPRESS 2.5 INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: FeedWordPress’s Dashboard interface has undergone several cosmetic changes that should help it integrate better with the WordPress Dashboard interface in WordPress version 2.5.x.

• SYNDICATED POSTS CAN BE MARKED AS “PENDING REVIEW”: WordPress 2.3 users can now take advantage of WordPress’s new “Pending Review” features for incoming syndicated posts. Posts marked as “Pending Review” are not published immediately, but are marked as ready to be reviewed by an Administrator or Editor, who can then choose to publish the post or hold it back. If you want to review syndicated posts from a particular feed, or from all feeds, before they are posted, then use Syndication –> Syndicated Sites –> Edit or Syndication –> Options to change the settings for handling new posts.

• AWARE OF NEW URI FOR del.icio.us FEEDS: Previous releases of FeedWordPress already automatically split del.icio.us tags up appropriately appropriately when generating categories. (del.icio.us feeds smoosh all the tags into a single <dc:subject> element, separated by spaces; FeedWordPress un-smooshes them into multiple categories by separating them at whitespace.) Unfortunately, del.icio.us recently broke the existing behavior by changing host names for their feeds from del.icio.us to feeds.delicious.com. Version 0.993 accounts for the new host name and un-breaks the tag splitting.

If you have put off upgrading to WordPress 2.5.1 due to this bug, and plan to upgrade after installing FeedWordPress 0.993, please remember that after you upgrade WordPress, you will need to reinstall the FeedWordPress MagpieRSS upgrades in order to keep your feed parsing from getting broken.

Enjoy! As I mentioned, I’m actively working on a release, probably due sometime before the end of the month, including bug fixes and a few significant new features, so let me know about any ongoing issues that you may still have.

That said, one of the most common sources of error reports when new versions of WordPress are released come not from a real compatability issue, but rather from the fact that, if you’re not careful, upgrading your copy of WordPress will downgrade your copy of MagpieRSS from the newer version shipped with FWP to the very old and busted version that WordPress continues, for whatever reason, to ship with new releases of WordPress.

Diagnosis

Here are the most common symptoms of this problem:

• Some feeds (notably, feeds produced by Blogger and other Atom 1.0 feeds) stop syndicating post contents. You get the headline of the post and nothing else.
• Some feeds (notably, those produced by blogs hosted at WordPress.com (!)) start appearing with just the capital letter A as the content of the post.
• Categories stop being properly syndicated. Everything is placed in Uncategorized or in bizarre, mashed-up categories (only one per post) that seem to contain several category names.
• Podcast attachments are no longer syndicated.

And so on, and so forth. If you notice these problems with your feeds just after you’ve upgraded your copy of WordPress, it’s probably because you need to re-install the MagpieRSS upgrade.

Cure

Here’s how you do that. In the FeedWordPress plugin directory (wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress/, relative to your WordPress installation), there is a directory called MagpieRSS-upgrade, which contains, or at least at one point contained, two files, rss.php and rss-functions.php. If you still have these files, you need to copy them to your WordPress wp-includes directory, where they will overwrite the older version of MagpieRSS that ships with WordPress. If you do not (because, for example, you moved them rather than copying them when you first installed FeedWordPress), then you can get new copies of these files by downloading the latest version of FeedWordPress, and extracting these two files from the archive.

Etiology and pognosis for the patient

The reason that this happens is that every installation of WordPress includes a very old version of MagpieRSS, the library that FeedWordPress uses to parse the feeds that it syndicates. As of the 2.5 release, WordPress still ships with a package derived from MagpieRSS 0.51, which is the same version it shipped with when I started work on FeedWordPress three years ago. This version of MagpieRSS is adequate for what WordPress needs it to do (basically, fetch headlines for the Dashboard from a select few feeds), but it was already outdated three years ago, and it is especially outdated now–it could not handle multiple categories; it could not handle enclosures, it could not translate feeds in alternate encodings; and, importantly, it cannot correctly handle Atom 1.0 feeds (now the default for Blogger feeds) or feeds with MediaRSS extensions (now the default for WordPress.com feeds). Unfortunately, since there is a version of MagpieRSS, which is loaded every time you load WordPress, it is hard to drop in a newer version which can do these things without causing errors from the collision in function and class names.

The solution I settled on was the bundled MagpieRSS upgrades, which in the past I sometimes described as optional, but which now really are mandatory if you hope to do any serious syndication in the modern environment. Users can avoid collisions by copying the upgrade so that it just overwrites the older version in wp-includes. Problem solved for the time being.

But the downside of this solution is that every time an upgrade of WordPress comes out, it comes out with older versions of the MagpieRSS package included, and when you overwrite all the files in wp-includes with the newer files from the WordPress release, one of the things you overwrite is your upgraded copy of rss.php. Meaning that, unless you remember to re-upgrade MagpieRSS every time you upgrade WordPress (something which is easy enough to forget), it breaks your syndication until you remember, or I remind you, to re-do the upgrade.

I frankly consider this a design flaw in FeedWordPress, but it’s not a flaw that is easy for me to fix. I am considering different ways of getting around it, and honestly the most likely solution at this point is probably simply to abandon MagpieRSS and package another feed parsing package (such as SimplePie) in the feedwordpress plugin directory, where upgrades to the WordPress core code cannot interfere with it. But doing that will involve pretty dramatically refactoring some of FeedWordPress’s internal workings, and that may take a while. In the meantime, if you have a working aggregator, you should probably apply this quick fix and see how many of your problems it solves.