This is a very minor update, which I guess should not be too much of a surprise, if you take into account the fact that I made a major release just yesterday. However, due to some difficulties that some people have been having, I thought it would be a good idea to push out a release with better diagnostics.

The basic issue is this: until WordPress version 2.7, FeedWordPress used the Snoopy HTTP library (which is included in WordPress) to fetch feeds for updating, and also for the feed finder that helps you subscribe to new feeds in the administrative interface. With WordPress 2.7, however, the WordPress team decided to deprecate Snoopy — so it’s still included with WordPress, but not used internally, and it may be dropped from future releases — and to introduce a new custom API for HTTP requests (the WP_Http class and some wrapper functions that make use of it). So, if you’re using WordPress 2.7.x or 2.8, FeedWordPress uses the new functions rather than the deprecated Snoopy module. One of the advantages of the new code is that it is supposed to be able to make use of any of several different HTTP transport APIs which may be available, depending on your PHP set-up (for example libcurl, fsockopen, URL support in fopen, etc.). But I’ve been noticing problems that many users have had that tie back to problems with the underlying HTTP transports used by WordPress’s new code, and, for reasons that are unclear to me, the WordPress development team decided to make some changes in WordPress 2.8 which make these problems even more likely to occur and even harder to get around. In any case, this is almost certainly the underlying issue if you, like others, are encountering something like this when you try to syndicate a new feed:

Error: I couldn’t find any feeds at <http://example.com/> [HTTP request error: :]. Try another URL

The best solution for you will depend on details about your own hosting situation — in particular, what version of WordPress you are using FeedWordPress with, and whether or not you are able to install new PHP modules on your web host, or, if not, whether or not you have someone who is willing to install new PHP modules for you. Unfortunately it’s not likely to be something that FeedWordPress itself can fix. But I have made some updates so that FeedWordPress will, at least, provide some more useful diagnostic information — which may help you figure out what needs to be done, or which will hep me help you figure it out, if you send the diagnostic information to me along with your support request.

So, anyway, all that said, that’s why I’m pushing out a new release today. (There are also a couple other minor changes included in the release, but I would probably not have bothered with a public release just yet except for the number of support requests I’ve gotten since yesterday’s release, which the diagnostics would help with.) Other than some under-the-hood re-arranging of the code, here are the significant changes between 2009.0613 and the previous releas, 2009.0612:

• INTERFACE/BUGFIX: WORDPRESS 2.8 CATEGORY BOX FIX. Thanks to a subtle change in class names between the WordPress 2.7 and 2.8 stylesheets, category boxes in the FeedWordPress settings interface tended to overflow and have a lot of messy-looking overlapping text under WordPress 2.8. This has now been fixed.

• FeedFinder FAILURE DIAGNOSTICS: When FWP’s FeedFinder fails to find any feeds at a given URL (for example, when you are trying to add a subscription through the administrative interface and you run into an error message), FeedWordPress now provides more diagnostic information for the reasons behind the failure. If that helps you, great; if not, it should help me respond more intelligently to your support request..

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, quick fixes and timely support for FeedWordPress possible.

Given the recent release of WordPress 2.8 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.

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 my old post about upgrading to WordPress 2.5, 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 (http://projects.radgeek.com/2008/12/14/feedwordpress-20081214/#comment-20090122160414).

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.

The advent of December has seen the release of WordPress 2.7, and I’ve been working to get out a new release of FeedWordPress before I leave to visit family for the holidays, which incorporates the couple of small compatibility fixes. In addition, I’ve added some interface improvements (to help FWP look a bit less out-of-place in the new user interface), and a couple of fixes of bugs reported or detected in the process of testing.

Also, I created a cheesy little logo icon for FeedWordPress to fit in with the general practice in the WordPress 2.7 interface. It’s not actually intended to be a distinctive logo for FeedWordPress (it just takes a syndication icon and the WordPress logo and puts them together), but it should at least visually mark off the FeedWordPress configuration interface from the rest of the Dashboard. Hope you like it.

First things first, though. A WordPress update 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 my old post about upgrading to WordPress 2.5, then you need to re-copy the MagpieRSS upgrades from your FeedWordPress installation to the wp-includes/ subdirectory of your WordPress installation. (The old post discusses this issue, and the steps for fixing it, in more detail.)

Now, then. Here are the major changes since the release of FeedWordPress 2008.1105:

• WORDPRESS 2.7 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress has been tested for compatibility with the newly released WordPress 2.7. WordPress 2.7 has deprecated the Snoopy library for HTTP requests, which caused a fatal error for users who had not installed the MagpieRSS upgrade (or whose installation of the MagpieRSS upgrade was overwritten by a recent update of WordPress). FeedWordPress now handles things gracefully when Snoopy is not immediately available. The 2008.1214 fix also releases a minor interface bug experienced when changing link settings under WordPress 2.7. (This was the result of some new caching features implemented in 2.7.)

• INTERFACE SPIFFED UP: Interface elements have been updated so that FeedWordPress’s management interface fits in more naturally with the WordPress 2.7 interface (including a new logo and a number of small interface tweaks).

• BUG WITH TAGS FOR SYNDICATED ARTICLES FIXED: Several users encountered a bug with the option to add tags to all syndicated posts under Syndication –> Settings — if you told FeedWordPress to add more than one tag to all syndicated posts, instead of doing so correctly, it would add a single tag instead, whose name was composed of the names of all the tags you asked it to add. This bug was the result of nothing more dignified than a typographical error on my part. It has now been fixed.

• MORE INFORMATION AVAILABLE WHEN FEEDWORDPRESS CAN’T FIND A FEED: When you enter a URL for a new syndication source, FeedWordPress uses a simple feed-finding algorithm (originally based on Mark Pilgrim’s Universal Feed Finder) to try to determine whether the URL is the URL for a feed, or, if the URL points to an ordinary website rather than to a feed, whether there is a feed for that website. All well and good, but if FeedWordPress failed to find a feed, for whatever reason, it would typically return nothing more than a nasty little note to the effect of no feed found, without any explanation of what went wrong. FeedWordPress now keeps track of error conditions from the HTTP requests that it uses in the course of looking for the feed, and so may be able to give you a bit more information about the nature of the problem if something goes wrong.

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.

Also, I know that there are a couple of issues that some users have already reported that have not yet been addressed in this release. (For example, I haven’t yet been able to investigate the issue reported by Scot Hacker and mn, as well as some private e-mails. I’m hoping to investigate this issue over the next couple weeks in order to discover what’s going on and how to fix it; if I can catch it in action, then I should be able to push out a release either during downtime on my winter vacation, or else shortly after New Years’.) In any case, please remember that your gifts to the project tip jar make ongoing development and support like this possible.

Update 2008-12-14: FeedWordPress 2008.1105 is now out of date. You can download the latest release — 2008.1214 at the time of this writing — from the project homepage.

As a slightly belated gift for Guy Fawkes Day, here’s the latest release of FeedWordPress, version 2008.1105, now available for download.

(Why 2008.1105 when I’m announcing the release on 6 November 2008? Because the release itself was completed yesterday; all I did this morning was to document the changes and prepare the announcement.)

Besides the beginnings of some re-organization of the interface, the main purpose of this release is to make fixes available for several existing issues that were reported by users. (In particular, thanks to Alan Cordle, RaynerApe, Glenn Marcus, Waldo Jaquith, and several other users for bringing some of these issues to my attention, and for suggesting some of these fixes.

Here are the major changes since FeedWordPress 2008.1101:

• INTERFACE RESTRUCTURING AND SYNDICATION –> AUTHORS PAGE: As a first step towards modularizing and better organizing the user interface, a new “Authors” subpage has been created under the Syndication menu, which controls settings for syndicated authors, both at the global default level and at level of individual syndicated feeds.

• BUG RELATED TO THE ATTRIBUTION OF POSTS TO THE WRONG AUTHOR FIXED: Some users encountered an issue in which posts by different authors on different blogs — especially blogs generated by Blogger — were mistakenly attributed to a single author. The problem was caused by the way in which FeedWordPress matches syndicated authors to user accounts in the WordPress database: normally, if two feeds each list an author with the same e-mail address, they are counted as being the same person. Normally this works well, but it creates an issue in cases where blogging software assigns a single anonymous e-mail address to users who do not want their real e-mail address published. This is, for example, what Blogger does (by giving all users a default e-mail address of noreply@blogger.com if they don’t want their own e-mail address listed). FeedWordPress now allows the user to correct for this problem with a couple of new settings under Syndication –> Authors, which allow users to turn off e-mail based author matching for particular addresses, or, if desired, to turn it off entirely. By default, e-mail based author matching is still turned on, but disabled for a list of known generic e-mail addresses. Right now, the “list” consists entirely of noreply@blogger.com; if you know other addresses that should be added, please contact me to let me know.

  Please note that if you have already encountered this issue on your blog, upgrading FeedWordPress will prevent it from re-occurring in the future, but you still need to do two other things to fix the existing problem on your blog.

  First, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to change the existing author mapping rules to re-map a a syndicated author’s name to the proper target account. Go to Syndication –> Authors, select the feed you want to change from the drop-down list, and then change the settings under the “Syndicated Authors” section. (You will probably need to select “will be assigned to a new user…” to create a new user account with the appropriate name.)

  Second, for each feed where posts have been mis-attributed, you need to re-assign already-syndicated posts that were mis-attributed to the correct author. You can do that from Syndication –> Authors by using the author re-assignment feature, described below.

• AUTHOR RE-ASSIGNMENT FOR A PARTICULAR FEED: The author settings page for each syndicated feed, under Syndication –> Authors, now includes an section titled “Fixing mis-matched authors,” which provides an interface for re-assigning or deleting all posts attributed to a particular author on a particular feed.

• SUPPORT FOR <atom:source> ELEMENT IN SYNDICATED FEEDS: Some feeds (for example, those produced by FeedWordPress) aggregate content from several different sources, and include information about the original source of the post in an <atom:source> element. A new setting under Syndication –> Options allows you to control what FeedWordPress will report as the source of posts syndicated from aggregator feeds in your templates and feeds: you can have FeedWordPress report that the source of a post is the aggregator feed itself, or you can have it report that the source of a post is the original source that the aggregator originally syndicated the post from.

  By default, FeedWordPress will report the aggregator, not the original source, as the source of a syndicated item.

• LOAD BALANCING AND TIME LIMITING FEATURES FOR UPDATES: Some users have encountered issues due to running up against PHP execution time limits during the process of updating large syndicated feeds, or a very large set of syndicated feeds. FeedWordPress now has a feature that allows you to limit the total amount of time spent updating a feed, through the “Time limit on updates” setting under Syndication –> Options. By turning on this setting and adjusting the time limit to a low enough figure to avoid your PHP installation’s time-out setting. (PHP execution time limits are usually in the vicinity of 30 seconds, so an update time limit of 25 seconds or so should provide plenty of time for updates while allowing a cushion of time for other, non-update-related functions to do their work.)

  If feed updates are interrupted by the time limit, FeedWordPress uses some simple load balancing features to make sure that updates to other feeds will not be blocked by the time-hogging feed, and will also make sure that when the interrupted update is resumed, FeedWordPress will skip ahead to resume processing items at the point at which it was interrupted last time, so that posts further down in the feed will eventually get processed, and not get blocked by the amount of time it takes to process the items higher up in the feed.

• guid INDEX CREATION BUTTON: FeedWordPress frequently issues queries on the guid column of the WordPress posts database (since it uses post guid URIs to keep track of which posts it has syndicated). In very large FeedWordPress installations, you can often significantly improve performance by creating a database index on the guid column, but normally you would need to poke around with MySQL or a tool like phpMyAdmin to do this. FeedWordPress can now save you the trouble: to create an index on the guid column, just go to Syndication –> Options, and mash the button at the bottom of the “Back End” section.

Enjoy! 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.

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

Update 2008-11-06: FeedWordPress 2008.1101 is now out of date. You can download the latest release — 2008.1105 at the time of this writing — from the project homepage.

FeedWordPress 2008.1101 is now available for download. This fixes a user interface bug that some users noticed with FeedWordPress 2008.1030, which prevented users from adding new feeds on a clean install (or in any other situation where there are currently no syndicated feeds).

Thanks to David Lindsey, and to the commenter from JB Design and Photo, for pointing out this bug to me.

Enjoy! 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.

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.

Update 2007-11-21: FeedWordPress 0.99 is now out of date. You can download the latest release — 0.991 at the time of this writing — from the project homepage.

The public (non-beta) release of FeedWordPress version 0.99 is now available for download.

There have been changes to the way that FeedWordPress’s code is organized since version 0.98. If you successfully installed either of the beta releases, you don’t need to do anything special to install the current release. However, if you are upgrading from version 0.98 or before, be sure to see the installation instructions below.

Changes since version 0.98

This release provides compatibility with WordPress 2.2 and 2.3. It has been extensively tested against WordPress version 2.2.3 and the version 2.3 release candidate. I think that all the compatibility issues have been hammered out; of course, if you notice any problems, please let me know and I’ll get on a bugfix as soon as possible.

Version 0.99 also includes an overhaul to the user interface, some significant new features, and a number of bug fixes:

• AUTOMATIC UPDATES WITHOUT CRON: FeedWordPress now allows you to automatically schedule checks for new posts without using external task scheduling tools such as cron. In order to enable automatic updates, go to Syndication –> Options and set “Check for new posts” to “automatically.” When this option is turned on, FeedWordPress will check for new posts automatically (1) when someone views your page, (2) if it has been ten minutes (or whatever interval you set) since the last time someone viewed your page. This offers a way to keep FeedWordPress up-to-date without having to schedule a cron script. It also simplifies the process of updating if you do choose to use a cron script — just have curl fetch your home page on a fixed schedule (so, for example, I would execute curl http://feministblogs.org/ every 15 minutes to keep Feminist Blogs up-to-date). Note that this is not the same thing as precisely scheduled updates — at a minimum, FeedWordPress will not check for new posts unless and until the next time somebody views your page. But for practical purposes it does allow you to keep your aggregator updated without having to run cron, and it is as close to precisely scheduled updates as you can get without using real scheduling tools such as cron.

  An important side-effect of the changes to the update system is that if you were previously using the cron job and the update-feeds.php script to schedule updates, you need to change your cron set-up. The old update-feeds.php script no longer exists. Instead, if you wish to use a cron job to guarantee updates on a particular schedule, you should have the cron job fetch the front page of your blog (for example, by using curl http://www.zyx.com/blog/ > /dev/null) instead of activating the update-feeds.php script. If automatic updates have been enabled, fetching the front page will automatically trigger the update process.

• INTERFACE REORGANIZATION: All FeedWordPress functions are now located under a top-level “Syndication” menu in the WordPress Dashboard. To manage the list of syndicated sites, manually check for new posts on one or more feeds, or syndicate a new site, you should use the main page under Syndication. To change global settings for FeedWordPress, you should use Syndication –> Options.

• FILE STRUCTURE REORGANIZATION: Due to a combination of changing styles for FeedWordPress plugins and lingering bugs in the FeedWordPress admin menu code, the code for FeedWordPress is now contained in two different PHP files, which should be installed together in a subdirectory of your plugins directory named feedwordpress. (See README.text for installation and upgrade instructions relating to the change.)

• MULTIPLE CATEGORIES SETTING: Some feeds use non-standard methods to indicate multiple categories within a single category element. (The most popular site to do this is del.icio.us, which separates tags with a space.) FeedWordPress now allows you to set an optional setting, for any feed which does this, indicating the character or characters used to divide multiple categories, using a Perl-compatible regular expression. (In the case of del.icio.us feeds, FeedWordPress will automatically use \s for the pattern without your having to do any further configuration.) To turn this setting on, simply use the “Edit” link for the feed that you want to turn it on for.

• REGULAR EXPRESSION BUG FIXED: Eliminated a minor bug in the regular expressions for e-mail addresses (used in parsing RSS author elements), which could produce unsightly error messages for some users parsing RSS 2.0 feeds.

• DATE / UPDATE BUG FIXED: A bug in date handling was eliminated that may have caused problems if any of (1) WordPress, or (2) PHP, or (3) your web server, or (4) your MySQL server, has been set to use a different time zone from the one that any of the others is set to use. If FeedWordPress has not been properly updating updated posts, or has been updating posts when there shouldn’t be any changes for the update, this release may solve that problem.

• GOOGLE READER BUGS FIXED: A couple of bugs that made it difficult for FeedWordPress to interact with Google Reader public feeds have been fixed. Firstly, if you encountered an error message reading “There was a problem adding the newsfeed. [SQL: ]” when you tried to add the feed, the cause of this error has been fixed. Secondly, if you succeeded in getting FeedWordPress to check a Google Reader feed, only to find that the title of posts had junk squashed on to the end of them, that bug has been fixed too. To fix this bug, you must install the newest version of the optional MagpieRSS upgrade.

• FILTER PARAMETERS: Due to an old, old bug in WordPress 1.5.0 (which was what was available back when I first wrote the filter interface), FeedWordPress has traditionally only passed one parameter to syndicateditem and syndicatedpost filters functions — an array containing either the Magpie representation of a syndicated item from the feed, or the database representation of a post about to be inserted into the WordPress database. If you needed information about the feed that the item came from, this was accessible only through a pair of global variables, $fwpchannel and $fwpfeedmeta.

  Since it’s been a pretty long time since WordPress 1.5.0 was in widespread usage, I have gone ahead and added an optional second parameter to the invocation of the syndicateditem and syndicatedpost filters. If you have written a filter for FeedWordPress that uses either of these hooks, you can now register that filter to accept 2 parameters. If you do so, the second parameter will be a SyndicatedPost object, which, among other things, allows you to access information about the feed from which an item is syndicated using the $post->feed and the $post->feedmeta elements (where $post is the name of the second parameter).

  NOTE THAT THE OLD GLOBAL VARIABLES ARE STILL AVAILABLE, for the time being at least, so existing filters will not break with the upgrade. They should be considered deprecated, however, and may be eliminated in the future.

• FILTER CHANGE / BUGFIX: the array that is passed as the first argument syndicatedpost filters no longer is no longer backslash-escaped for MySQL when filters are called. This was originally a bug, or an oversight; the contents of the array should only be escaped for the database after they have gone through all filters. IF YOU HAVE WRITTEN ANY syndicatedpost FILTERS THAT PRESUME THE OLD BEHAVIOR OF PASSING IN STRINGS THAT ARE ALREADY BACKSLASH-ESCAPED, UPDATE YOUR FILTERS ACCORDINGLY.

• OTHER MINOR BUGFIXES AND INTERNAL CHANGES: The internal architecture of FeedWordPress has been significantly changed to make the code more modular and clean; hopefully this should help reduce the number of compatibility updates that are needed, and make them easier and quicker when they are needed.

Installation instructions

To upgrade an existing installation of FeedWordPress to version 0.99:

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 wp-includes/rss.php and wp-includes/rss-functions.php if you use the optional MagpieRSS upgrade, or don’t use it yet but do want to syndicate Atom 1.0 feeds.

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.

Update 2007-11-21: FeedWordPress 0.99b1 is now out of date. You can download the latest release — 0.991 at the time of this writing — from the project homepage.

It’s been a long time, for several different personal reasons that don’t bear going into here, but the good news is that I am at long last coming back to active development on FeedWordPress. There are some bug fixes and a lot of feature requests that have been waiting for quite some time; and I will be able to start cleaning these out over the course of the next few days.

Toward that end, I am putting out a beta release of the next version of FeedWordPress. By beta, I really mean beta, not one of those Web 2.0 perpetual beta releases. The point is to put it out there for you all to test out. You should not count on this release being in full working order. There are features due for this release that I haven’t implemented. I will implement them later. Those that I have implemented all seem to be in working order on my end of things, but everyone’s Apache/PHP/MySQL/WordPress/etc. stack is so different that it’s hard to make any promises about how it will work for you, until y’all have had some time to test it. With that pre-amble out of the way, if you are interested in testing out the beta release, you should feel free to download FeedWordPress 0.99b1, read the installation instructions below, give it a test run, and let me know how it works for you.

So, what’s new? Well, a fair amount has changed under the hood, much of it things that you won’t notice, but which will hopefully clean up the code a bit and make compatibility releases quicker and easier to put out in the future. But there are a couple of significant changes that you will notice.

1. First, FeedWordPress functions have been moved to their own top-level menu, currently called Syndication. To syndicate new feeds, change settings on existing feeds, change global options for FeedWordPress, or to manually instruct FeedWordPress to check for new posts, use the Syndication top-level menu and its submenus.

2. Second, I am changing the way that FeedWordPress checks for new posts. Specifically, I am making the process somewhat less arcane, and making it possible (more or less) to keep up automatic updates even if you do not have access to cron. To turn this feature on, go to Syndication –> Options and tell FeedWordPress to check for new posts automatically. (This option is currently not on by default.)

   When this option is turned on, FeedWordPress will check for new posts automatically (1) when someone views your page, (2) if it has been ten minutes (or whatever interval you set) since the last time someone viewed your page. This offers a way to keep FeedWordPress up-to-date without having to schedule a cron script. It also simplifies the process of updating if you do choose to use a cron script — just have curl fetch your home page on a fixed schedule (so, for example, I would execute curl http://feministblogs.org/ every 15 minutes to keep Feminist Blogs up-to-date). Note that this is not the same thing as precisely scheduled updates — at a minimum, FeedWordPress will not check for new posts unless and until the next time somebody views your page. But for practical purposes it does allow you to keep your aggregator updated without having to run cron, and it is as close to precisely scheduled updates as you can get without using real scheduling tools such as cron.

3. I have had several questions about compatibility between FeedWordPress and WordPress 2.2. I have checked this beta release with the latest release of WordPress 2.2 on my testbed server and I have encountered no problems. I do not know of any changes between WordPress 2.1 and 2.2 which would introduce an incompatibility. But please let me know if you have any compatibility issues with WordPress 2.2.

   Note that if you are using the beta release of WordPress 2.3, there are changes to the WordPress category system that probably will cause compatibility problems with FeedWordPress. This should hopefully be fixed in the next beta release, which should be out sometime within the next few days.

4. As mentioned, I have re-organized a bit. Please make sure you follow the installation instructions below.

Installation instructions: You may have noticed that I have reorganized the file structure of the plugin. Because of this, if you have an older release of FeedWordPress installed, and intend to install the beta release over the older release, first you are going to need to go to your old installation and delete two of the old installation’s files (wp-content/update-feeds.php and wp-content/feedwordpress.php). Once this is done, create a new directory in your plugins directory, wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress/, and copy the new release’s plugin files to this directory. If you don’t delete the old files, then they will not get overwritten and there may be a conflict between the old and new versions. If you do not install the new files in their own directory, the menus will probably not work correctly.

Enjoy, and let me know how it works for you!