FeedWordPress Change Log
========================
Changes from 0.991 to 0.992
---------------------------
* AUTHOR RE-MAPPING: FeedWordPress now offers considerable control over
how author names on a feed are translated into usernames within the
WordPress database. When a post by an unrecognized author comes in,
Administrators can now specify any username as the default username to
assign the post to by setting the option in Syndication --> Options
(formerly FeedWordPress only allowed you to assign such posts to user
#1, the site administrator). Administrators can also create re-mapping
rules for particular feeds (under Syndication --> Syndicated Sites -->
Edit), so that (for example) any posts attributed to "Administrator"
on the feed will be assigned to
a user named "Roderick T. Long," rather than a user named
"Administrator." These settings also allow administrators to filter out
posts by particular users, and to control what will happen when
FeedWordPress encounters a post by an unrecognized user on that
particular feed.
* BUG RELATED TO URIS CONTAINING AMPERSAND CHARACTERS FIXED: A bug in
WordPress 2.x's handling of URIs in Blogroll links created problems for
updating any feeds whose URIs included an ampersand character, such as
Google News RSS feeds and other feeds that have multiple parameters
passed through HTTP GET. If you experienced this bug, the most likely
effect was that FeedWordPress simply would not import new posts from a
feed when instructred to do so, returning a "0 new posts" response. In
other cases, it might lead to unpredictable results from feed updates,
such as importing posts which were not contained in the feed being
syndicated, but which did appear elsewhere on the same website. This bug
has, hopefully, been resolved, by correcting for the bug in WordPress.
Changes from 0.99 to 0.991
--------------------------
* WORDPRESS MU COMPATABILITY: FeedWordPress should now be compatible with
recent releases of WordPress MU. Once FeedWordPress is made available
as a plugin, each individual blog can choose to activate FeedWordPress
and syndicate content from its own set of contributors.
* DISPLAY OF MAGPIE WARNINGS: A number of MagpieRSS warnings or error
messages that were displayed when performing an automatic update are
no longer displayed, unless debugging parameters have been explicitly
enabled.
* BUG RELATED TO INTERNATIONAL CHARACTERS IN AUTHOR NAMES FIXED: Due to a
subtle incompatability between the way that FeedWordPress generated new
user information, and the way that WordPress 2.0 and later added new
authors to the database, FeedWordPress might end up creating duplicate
authors, or throwing a critical error message, when it encountered
authors whose names included international characters. This
incompatability has now been fixed; hopefully, authors with
international characters in their names should now be handled properly.
* media:content BUG IN MAGPIERSS FIXED: A bug in MagpieRSS's handling of
namespaced elements has been fixed. Among other things, this bug caused
items containing a Yahoo MediaRSS `` element (such as
many of the feeds produced by wordpress.com) to be represented
incorrectly, with only a capital "A" where the content of the post
should have been. Feeds containing `` elements should now
be syndicated correctly.
* update_feedwordpress PARAMETER: You can now use an HTTP GET parameter
(`update_feedwordpress=1`) to request that FeedWordPress poll its feeds
for updates. When used together with a crontab or other means of
scheduling tasks, this means that you can keep your blog automatically
updated on a regular schedule, even if you do not choose to use the
cron-less automatic updates option.
* Some minor interface-related bugs were also fixed.
Changes from 0.981 to 0.99
--------------------------
Version 0.99 adds several significant new features, fixes some bugs, and
provides compatability with WordPress 2.2.x and 2.3.x.
* WORDPRESS 2.2 AND 2.3 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be
compatible with WordPress version 2.2 and the upcoming WordPress
version 2.3. In particular, it has been tested extensively against
WordPress 2.2.3 and WordPress 2.3 Release Candidate 1.
* 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." For details, see "Automatic Feed Updates" in
README.text.
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
syndicated_item and syndicated_post 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, $fwp_channel and $fwp_feedmeta.
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 syndicated_item and syndicated_post
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
syndicated_post 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 syndicated_post 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.
Changes from 0.98 to 0.981
--------------------------
Version 0.981 is a narrowly targeted bugfix and compatibility release, whose
main purpose is to resolve a major outstanding problem: the incompatibility
between version 0.98 of WordPress and the recently released WordPress 2.1.
* WORDPRESS 2.1 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress is now compatible with
WordPress 2.1, as well as retaining its existing support for WordPress
2.0 and 1.5. Incompatibilities that resulted in database warnings, fatal
errors, and which prevented FeedWordPress from syndicating new posts,
have been eliminated.
* RSS-FUNCTIONS.PHP RENAMED TO RSS.PHP: if you use the upgraded MagpieRSS
replacement that's included with FeedWordPress, be sure to note that
there are now *two* files to upload from the `OPTIONAL/wp-includes`
subdirectory in order to carry out the upgrade: rss-functions.php and
rss.php. **It is necessary to upload both files**, due to a change in
the file naming scheme in WordPress 2.1, and it is necessary to do so
whether you are using WordPress 2.1 or not. If you only upload the
`rss-functions.php` file as in previous installations you will not have
a working copy of MagpieRSS; the rss.php file contains the actual code.
* DATE BUG AFFECTING SOME PHP INSTALLATIONS RESOLVED: due to a subtle bug
in parse_w3cdtf(), some installations of PHP encountered problems with
FeedWordPress's attempt to date posts, which would cause some new posts
on Atom feeds to be dated as if they had apppeared in 1969 or 1970
(thus, effectively, never appearing on front apge at all). This bug in
the date handling should now be fixed.
* PHP SHORT FORM ELIMINATED: some installations of PHP do not
allow the short form for printing PHP values, which was used
extensively in the FeedWordPress interface code. Since this could cause
fatal errors for users with the wrong installation of PHP, the short
form has been replaced with full PHP echo statements, and is no longer
used in FeedWordPress.
* BETTER USER INTERFACE INTEGRATION WITH WORDPRESS 2.x: Some minor changes
have been made to help the FeedWordPress interface pages blend in better
with the user interface when running under WordPress 2.x.
* GLOBAL CATEGORIES BUG RESOLVED: a bug that prevented some users from
setting one or more categories to apply to syndicated posts from all
feeds (using the checkbox interface under Options --> Syndication) has
been resolved.
Changes from 0.97 to 0.98
--------------------------
* WORDPRESS 2.0 COMPATIBILITY: This is a narrowly-targeted release to
solve a major outstanding problem. FeedWordPress is now compatible with
both WordPress 1.5 and WordPress 2.0. Incompatibilities that caused
fatal SQL errors, and a more subtle bug with off-kilter counts of posts
under a given category, have been resolved. FeedWordPress tests for
database schema using the global $wp_db_version variable (if null, then
we presume that we're dealing with WordPress 1.5).
NOTE: I have **not** fully tested FeedWordPress with WordPress 2.0.
Further testing may reveal more bugs. However, you should now be able
to get at least basic FeedWordPress functionality up and running.
* AUTHOR MATCHING: FeedWordPress tests several fields to see if it can
identify the author of the post as a user already in the WordPress user
database. In previous versions, it tested the user login, the nickname,
and tested for "aliases" listed in the Profile (see documentation). FWP
now also matches authors on the basis of e-mail address (*if* an e-mail
address is present). This is particularly helpful for formats such as
RSS 2.0, in which authors are primarily identified by e-mail addresses.
Changes from 0.96 to 0.97
-------------------------
* INSTALLATION PROCEDURE: Some of the changes between 0.96 and 0.97
require upgrades to the meta-data stored by FeedWordPress to work
properly. Thus, if you are upgrading from 0.96 or earlier to 0.97, most
FeedWordPress operations (including updates and template functions)
WILL BE DISABLED until you run the upgrade procedure. Fortunately,
running the upgrade procedure is easy: just go to either Options -->
Syndication or Links --> Syndicated in the WordPress Dashboard and press
the button.
* FEED FORMAT SUPPORT: Support has been added for the Atom 1.0 IETF
standard. Several other elements are also newly supported
(dcterms:created, dcterms:issued, dcterms:modified, dc:identifier,
proper support for the RSS 2.0 guid element, the RSS 2.0 author element,
the use of Atom author or Dublin Core dc:creator constructs at the feed
level to identify the author of individual items, etc.)
N.B.: full support of several Atom 1.0 features, such as categories
and enclosures, requires you to install the optional rss-functions.php
upgrade in your wp-includes directory.
* BUG FIX: Running `update-feeds.php` from command line or crontab
returned "I don't syndicate..." errors. It turns out that WordPress
sometimes tramples on the internal PHP superglobals that I depended on
to determine whether or not the script was being invoked from the
command line. This has been fixed (the variables are now checked
*before* WordPress can trample them). Note that `update-feeds.php` has
been thoroughly overhauled anyway; see below for details.
* BUG FIX: Duplicate categories or author names. Fixed two bugs that could
create duplicate author and/or category names when the name contained
either (a) certain international characters (causing a mismatch between
MySQL and PHP's handling of lowercasing text), or (b) characters that
have a special meaning in regular expressions (causing MySQL errors when
looking for the author or category due to regexp syntax errors). These
should now be fixed thanks to careful escaping of names that go into
regular expressions and careful matching of lowercasing functions
(comparing results from PHP only to other results from PHP, and results
from MySQL only to other results from MySQL).
* BUG FIX: Items dated Decembr 31, 1969 should appear less often. The
function for parsing W3C date-time format dates that ships with
MagpieRSS can only correctly parse fully-specified dates with a
fully-specified time, but valid W3C date-time format dates may omit the
time, the day of the month, or even the month. Some feeds in the wild
date their items with coarse-grained dates, so the optional
`rss-functions.php` upgrade now includes a more flexible parse_w3cdtf()
function that will work with both coarse-grained and fully-specified
dates. (If parts of the date or the time are omitted, they are filled in
with values based on the current time, so '2005-09-10' will be dated to
the current time on that day; '2004' will be dated to this day and time
one year ago.
N.B.: This fix is only available in the optional `rss-functions.php`
upgrade.
* BUG FIX: Evil use of HTTP GET has been undone. The WordPress interface
is riddled with inappropriate (non-idempotent) uses of HTTP GET queries
(ordinary links that make the server do something with significant
side-effects, such as deleting a post or a link from the database).
FeedWordPress did some of this too, especially in places where it aped
the WordPress interface (e.g. the "Delete" links in Links -->
Syndicated). That's bad business, though. I've changed the interface so
that all the examples of improper side-effects that I can find now
require an HTTP POST to take effect. I think I got pretty much
everything; if there's anything that I missed, let me know.
Further reading: [Sam Ruby 2005-05-06: This Stuff Matters] (http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2005/05/06/This-Stuff-Matters)
* BUG FIX: Categories applied by `cats` setting should no longer prevent
category-based filtering from working. In FeedWordPress, you can (1)
apply certain categories to all syndicated posts, or all posts from
a particular feed; and (2) filter out all posts that don't match one
of the categories that are already in the WordPress database (allowing
for simple category-based filtering; just load up WordPress with the
categories you want to accept, and then tell FeedWordPress not to create
new ones). However, the way that (1) and (2) were implemented meant that
you couldn't effectively use them together; once you applied a known
category to all syndicated posts from a particular feed, it meant that
they'd have at least one familiar category (the category or categories
you were applying), and that would get all posts past the filter no
matter what categories they were originally from.
Well, no longer. You can still apply categories to all syndicated posts
(using either Syndication --> Options, or the feed-level settings under
Links --> Syndicated). But these categories are not applied to the post
until *after* it has already passed by the "familiar categories" filter.
So now, if you want, you can do category filtering and *then* apply as
many categories as you please to all and only posts that pass the filter.
* BUG FIX: Other minor typos and HTML gaffes were fixed along the way.
* PERFORMANCE: get_feed_meta() no longer hits the database for information
on every call; it now caches link data in memory, so FeedWordPress only
goes to the database once for each syndicated link. This may
substantially improve performance if your database server resources
are tight and your templates make a lot of use of custom settings from
get_feed_meta().
* API CHANGE: Link ID numbers, rather than RSS URIs, are now used to
identify the feed from which a post is syndicated when you use template
functions such as get_feed_meta(). The practical upshot of this is you
can switch feeds, or change the feed address for a particular syndicated
site, without breaking your templates for all the posts that were
syndicated from the earlier URI.
* API CHANGE: if you have plugins or templates that make use of the
get_feed_meta() function or the $fwp_feedmeta global, note that the
data formerly located under the `uri` and `name` fields is now located
under the `link/uri` field and the `link/name` field, respectively. Note
also that you can access the link ID number for any given feed under the
global $fwp_feedmeta['link/id'] (in plugins) or
get_feed_meta('link/id') (in a template in post contexts).
* FEATURE: the settings for individual feeds can now be edited using a
humane interface (where formerly you had to tweak key-value pairs in the
Link Notes section). To edit settings for a feed, pick the feed that you
want under Links --> Syndicated and click the Edit link.
* FEATURE: The "Unsubscribe" button (formerly "Delete") in Links -->
Syndicated now offers three options for unsubscribing from a feed: (1)
turning off the subscription without deleting the feed data or affecting
posts that were syndicated from the feed (this works by setting the Link
for the feed as "invisible"); (2) deleting the feed data and all of the
posts that were syndicated from the feed; or (3) deleting the feed data
and *keeping* the posts that were syndicated from the feed
setting the Link to "Invisible" (meaning that it will not be displayed
in lists of the site links on the front page, and it won't be checked
for updates; (2) deleting the Link and all of the posts that were
syndicated from its feed; or (3) deleting the feed data but keeping the
posts that were syndicated (which will henceforward be treated as if
they were local rather than syndicated posts). (Note that (1) is usually
the best option for aggregator sites, unless you want to clean up the
results of an error or a test.)
* FEATURE / BUG FIX: If you have been receiving mysterious "I don't
syndicate...", or "(local) HTTP status code was not 200", or "(local)
transport error - could not open socket", or "parse error - not well
formed" errors, then this update may solve your problems, and if it does
*not* solve them, it will at least make the reasons for the problems
easier to understand. That's because I've overhauled the way that
FeedWordPress goes about updating feeds.
If you use the command-line PHP scripting method to run scheduled
updates, then not much should change for you, except for fewer
mysterious errors. If you have done updates by sending periodic HTTP
requests to ,
then the details have changed somewhat; mostly in such a way as to make
things easier on you. See the README file or online documentation on
Staying Current for the details.
* FEATURE: FeedWordPress now features a more sophisticated system for
timed updates. Instead of polling *every* subscribed feed for updates
*each* time `update-feeds.php` is run, FeedWordPress now keeps track of
the last time it polled each feed, and only polls them again after a
certain period of time has passed. The amount of time is normally set
randomly for each feed, in a period between 30 minutes and 2 hours (so
as to stagger updates over time rather than polling all of the feeds at once. However, the length of time between updates can also be set
directly by the feed, which brings us to ...
* FEATURE: FeedWordPress now respects the settings in the `ttl` and
Syndication Module RSS elements. Feeds with these elements set will not
be polled any more frequently than they indicate with these feeds unless
the user manually forces FeedWordPress to poll the feed (see Links -->
Syndicated --> Edit settings).
Changes from 0.95 to 0.96
-------------------------
* FEATURE: support has been added for enclosures in RSS 2.0 and Atom
0.6+ newsfeeds. WordPress already supports adding enclosures to an
item; FeedWordPress merely gets the information on the enclosure
from the feed it is syndicating and plugs that information directly
into the WordPress database so that (among other things) that post
will have its enclosure listed in your blog's RSS 2 newsfeed.
Note that enclosure support requires using the optional MagpieRSS
upgrade (i.e., replacing your `wp-includes/rss-functions.php` with `OPTIONAL/wp-includes/rss-functions.php` from the FWP archive)
* FEATURE: for completeness's sake, there is now a feed setting,
`hardcode url`, that allows you to set the URI for the front page
of a contributor's website manually (that is, prevent it from being
automatically updated from the feed channel link on each update). To
set the URI manually, put a line like this in the Link Notes section
of a feed:
hardcode url: yes
You can also instruct FeedWordPress to use hardcoded URIs by default
on all feeds using Options --> Syndication
* FEATURE: by default, when FeedWordPress finds new syndicated posts,
it (1) publishes them immediately, (2) turns comments off, and (3)
turns trackback / pingback pings off. You can now alter all three
default behaviors (e.g., to allow pings on syndicated posts, or to
send newly-syndicated posts to the draft pile for moderation) using
Options --> Syndication
Changes from 0.91 to 0.95
-------------------------
* BUG FIX: Fixed an obscure bug in the handling of categories:
categories with trailing whitespace could cause categories with
duplicate names to be created. This no longer happens. While I was
at it I tightened up the operation of
FeedWordPress::lookup_categories() a bit in general.
* FEATURE DEPRECATED: the feed setting `hardcode categories` is now
deprecated in favor of `unknown categories` (see below), which
allows you to strip off any syndication categories not already in
your database using `unknown categories: default` or `unknown
categories: filter`. If you have `hardcode categories: yes` set on a
feed, this will be treated as `unknown categories: default` (i.e.,
no new categories will be added, but if a post doesn't match any of
the categories it will be added in the default category--usually
"Uncategorized" or "General").
* FEATURE: You can now set global defaults as to whether or not
FeedWordPress will update the Link Name and Link Description
settings for feeds automatically from the feed title and feed
tagline. (By default, it does, as it has in past versions.) Whether
this behavior is turned on or off, you can still override the
default behavior using feed settings of `hardcode name: yes`,
`hardcode name: no`, `hardcode description: yes`, or `hardcode
description: no`.
* FEATURE: Users can now provide one or several "aliases" for an
author, just as they can for a category. For example, to make
FeedWordPress treat posts by "Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger" and "Pope
Benedict XVI" as by the same author, edit the user profile for Pope
Benedict XVI and add a line like this to the "User profile" field:
a.k.a.: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
You can add several aliases, each on a line by itself. You can also
add any other text you like to the Profile without interfering with
the aliases.
* FEATURE: Users can now choose how to handle syndicated posts that
are in unfamiliar categories or by unfamiliar authors (i.e.,
categories or authors whose names are not yet in the WordPress
database). By default, FeedWordPress will (as before) create a new
category (or new author) and use it for the current post and any
future posts. This behavior can be changed, either for all feeds or
for one or another particular feed.
There are now three different options for an unfamiliar author: (1)
FeedWordPress can create a new author account and attribute the
syndicated post to the new account; (2) FeedWordPress can attribute
the post to an author if the author's name is familiar, and to a
default author (currently, this means the Site Administrator
account) if it is not; (3) FeedWordPress can drop posts by
unfamiliar authors and syndicate only posts by authors who are
already in the database.
There are, similarly, two different options for an unfamiliar
category: (1) FeedWordPress can create new categories and place the
syndicated post in them; (2) FeedWordPress can drop the unfamiliar
categories and place syndicated posts only in categories that it is
already familiar with. In addition, FeedWordPress 0.95 lets you
choose whether posts that are in *no* familiar categories should be
syndicated (and placed in the default category for the blog) or
simply dropped.
You can set the default behavior for both authors and categories
using the settings in Options --> Syndication. You can also set
different behavior for specific feeds by adding the `unfamiliar
author` and / or `unfamiliar categories` settings to the Link Notes
section of a feed:
unfamiliar author: (create|default|filter)
unfamiliar categories: (create|default|filter)
A setting of `unfamiliar author: create` will make FeedWordPress
create new authors to match unfamiliar author names *for this feed
alone*. A setting of `unfamiliar author: default` will make it
assign posts from unfamiliar authors to the default user account. A
setting of `unfamiliar author: filter` will cause all posts (from
this feed alone) to be dropped unless they are by an author already
listed in the database. Similiarly, `unfamiliar categories: create`
will make FeedWordPress create new categories to match unfamiliar
category names *for this feed alone*; `unfamiliar categories:
default` will cause it to drop any unfamiliar category names; and
`unfamiliar categories: filter` will cause it to *both* drop any
unfamiliar category names *and* to only syndicate posts that are
placed in one or more familiar categories.
These two new features allow users to do some coarse-grained
filtering without having to write a PHP filter. Specifically, they
offer an easy way for you to filter feeds by category or by author.
Suppose, for example, that you only wanted to syndicate posts that
your contributors place in the "Llamas" category. You could do so by
setting up your installation of WordPress so that the only category
in the database is "Llamas," and then use Options --> Syndication to
set "Unfamiliar categories" to "don't create new categories and
don't syndicate posts unless they match at least one familiar
category". Now, when you update, only posts in the "Llamas" category
will be syndicated by FeedWordPress.
Similarly, if you wanted to filter one particular feed so that only
posts by (for example) the author "Earl J. Llama" were syndicated to
your site, you could do so by creating a user account for Earl J.
Llama, then adding the following line to the settings for the feed
in Link Notes:
unfamiliar author: filter
This will cause any posts from this feed that are not authored by
Earl J. Llama to be discarded, and only the posts by Earl J. Llama
will be syndicated. (If the setting is used on one specific feed, it
will not affect how posts from other feeds are syndicated.)