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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.

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.

FeedWordPress 2008.1030 is now available for download.

I’ll talk about what’s new in a second. But first, I’m going to ask you for some money. Here’s why.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to concentrate on FeedWordPress development and support, and I’m glad to finally get this release released. The major reasons for this have been related to work: FeedWordPress development has had to take a back seat while I took on other projects as full-time or seasonal work in order to pay the bills. FeedWordPress started out, originally, as itch-scratch-ware for my own purposes, and eventually became a sort of hobby that I was pleased to find a lot of people were finding useful. But I do have rent and bills to pay, and other work has kept me from being able to keep up with FeedWordPress as much as I would like. Since then my circumstances have changed. I am now working as a freelance web developer, which gives me more flexibility over choosing my projects and setting the hours that I work on them. And what I would like is to be able to devote significantly more time to developing and supporting FeedWordPress. Which I will be able to do if my work on FeedWordPress generates enough user donations to free me up from having to spend that time looking for paying gigs. So, if you enjoy FeedWordPress (or at least find it useful), I’d encourage you to figure out how much ongoing development and support for FeedWordPress is worth to you, and consider making a contribution to the project through the project tip jar at http://projects.radgeek.com/feedwordpress/.

O.K. Now, on to the release.

This release of FeedWordPress features a couple of fixes to bugs that have been irritating FeedWordPress users for some time now. It also features some important new features. And a new versioning scheme: rather than call this release 0.994, I have decided that, with these bug fixes in place, and with the number of reasonable version numbers left between 0.993 and 1.0 quickly running out, it is time to drop the beta-status versioning and to adopt a new versioning scheme. Because of the way that FeedWordPress releases work — the basic architecture is likely to remain stable even if there are bug fixes, small or significant changes to internal workings, or the occasional significant new feature added — I think that it will not make much sense to try to follow a standard major.minor.bugfix pattern for version numbers of FeedWordPress. Instead, I’ve decided to adopt release numbers based on the date of the release; since this one is being released on October 30, 2008, we’ll call it FeedWordPress 2008.1030.

Here is most of what has changed since FeedWordPress 0.993:

• WORDPRESS 2.6 COMPATABILITY: FeedWordPress should now be fully compatible with WordPress 2.6, and should work more or less seamlessly with the new post revision system. A bug which caused multiple new revisions to be created for posts on certain feeds, regardless of whether or not the item had been updated, has been fixed.

• INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS: The user interface has been substantially restyled to fit in better with the visual style of WordPress 2.5 and 2.6.

• **YouTube BUG (<object> TAGS STRIPPED FROM SYNDICATED POSTS) FIXED: Due to the way that some versions of WordPress process posts that are inserted into the database when no user is logged in, many users experienced an issue where YouTube videos and other content using the HTML <object> tag would be stripped out of posts that were syndicated during an automatic update. (Posts that were syndicated through manual updates from within the WordPress Dashboard were not affected, because the issue does not arise when an update is executed under a logged-in administrator’s credentials.) This bug has now been fixed; YouTube videos and other content using <object> tags should now appear properly in syndicated posts, regardless of the way in which the post was syndicated.

• AJAX BUGS FIXED: Bugs which blocked the normal operation of WordPress 2.5’s AJAX interface elements when FeedWordPress was activated have been fixed.

• TAG SUPPORT: A couple of features have been introduced to take advantage of the tagging features in WordPress 2.3.x, 2.5.x, and 2.6.x. Now, when unfamiliar categories are encountered for posts on a feed, you can choose for FeedWordPress (1) to drop the category; (2) to drop the category and to filter out any post that does not match at least one familiar category; (3) to create a new category with that name, or, now, you can also have FeedWordPress (4) create a new tag with that name. This option can be set site-wide under Syndication –> Options, or it can be set on a feed-by-feed basis in a feed’s Edit screen.

  In addition, you can now set particular tags to apply to all incoming syndicated posts, under Syndication –> Options, or you can set tags to apply to all incoming syndicated posts from a particular feed in that feed’s Edit screen.

• FORMATTING FILTERS: There is a new option available under Syndication -> Options which allows users to choose whether or not to expose syndicated posts to being altered by formatting filters. By default, FeedWordPress has always protected syndicated posts (which are already in display-ready HTML when they are syndicated) from being reformatted by formatting filters. However, this approach means that certain plugins which depend on formatting filters (for example, to add “Share This” bars or relevant links to the end of a post) are blocked from working on any syndicated posts. If you want to use one of these plugins together with FeedWordPress, you can now do so by changing the “Formatting Filters” setting from “Protect” to “Expose.”

• <atom:source> ELEMENTS NOW INCLUDED IN ATOM FEED: Atom 1.0 provides a standard method for aggregators to indicate information about the original source of a syndicated post, using the <atom:source> element. FeedWordPress now introduces standard <atom:source> elements including the title, homepage, and feed URI of the source from which a syndicated post was syndicated. Cf. http://www.atomenabled.org/developers/syndication/atom-format-spec.php#element.source

• MODULARIZATION OF CODE: The code for different elements of FeedWordPress has been broken out into several modules for easier inspection, documentation, and maintenance of the code.

• VERSIONING SCHEME CHANGED: FeedWordPress’s feature set has proven stable enough that it can now be removed from beta status; a good thing, since I was very quickly running out of version numbers to use. New releases of FeedWordPress will have version numbers based on the date of their release.

If you have put off upgrading to WordPress 2.6.x while you waited for a compatibility-tested version of FeedWordPress, and plan to upgrade WordPress after installing FeedWordPress 2008.1030, 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! 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.

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.