Today I will be releasing a new version of Feedwordpress Advanced Filters, version 0.5.9. Yes, it’s really close to number 0.6 and initially I was hoping I wouldn’t have to include another release before that, but I have encountered lately a number of important bugs that needed fixing.
Most important fix is that in a number of circumstances posts would filter normally when called manually, but would fail when a cron was doing the updating. Another important one is the category keyword filter that would fail when multiple keywords where being used.
Apart from that I can announce a few new cool things in Feedwordpress Advanced Filters. On request ( I was pointed in this way by a comment on this blog, thanks! ) it’s now possible to add images from your feed to the WordPress ‘Featured Image’ functionality. It’s now also possible to exclude several images from processing or remove them.
Unit Testing
To prevent serious bugs from roaring their ugly heads in the feature I’m setting up a Unit Testing infrastructure which I hope will guard the quality of the plugin.
Give your feeds and feedback
Parsing feeds is often a struggle between not being able to control what the input is like ( and often including a lot of garbage ) and needing your output to be perfect. Myself I’m testing with various mutilated feeds to ensure even exceptions are not a breaking point for Feedwordpress Advanced Filters.
Help development by reporting weird occurrences, feeds that might not break things and of course if you have cool ideas about what should be included in the plugin; you are more than welcome.
I already posted earlier that Feedwordpress Advanced Filters now supports the possibility to add your own custom filters.
One of the core features of FAF has always been to be able to easily extend the feature set. With the most recent version it’s easy to drop your own filter into FAF. This post will also serve as the beginning of some public documentation.
Warning! After this it will get a bit technical
Continue reading →
Feedwordpress Advanced Filters version 0.5.5 has been released. This is mainly a bug fixing release. Important to know is that the option to add you own custom filter is now enabled. I will write about this new feature in a later post.
See the changelog for the bugs fixed.
You can get the latest version via the WordPress auto-update or download the plugin from the WordPress site.
For the next version I have a multitude of enhancements and new features on my list:
Since of course my time is also limited I’m wondering which of these to do first or maybe concentrate on something totally different ( multi-language support for instance ). You can help me by providing feedback of which features you are dearly waiting for by commenting or contacting me. Or just to say ‘yeah’ of course.
After my november announcement of the plugin I was working on, I’m happy to present a decent version of Feedwordpress Advanced Filters.
Decent that is with a nice interface, everything working and fairly stable. I have been using the plugin in development for a while already and a few people were interested at testing the alpha-versions as well. For me it works like a charm, so I’m pretty excited about releasing this plugin today.
You can get the plugin and view information about it at the plugin page!
Update: Feedwordpress Advanced Filters has been released, see this page.
Avid readers of this blog (hi mom!) know that I dive a lot into the Feedwordpress plugin. But still some things are not satisfying enough for me.
RSS is a great technique to get data, but unfortunately some of the sites I gather my feeds from are, let’s say, not very good. A lot of feeds out there need editing and molding to make it decent. This is one of the reasons I need Feedwordpress filters to shape the content a little bit.
A word of warning. I just updated to PHP 5.4 which broke my installation because call-time-pass-by-reference has been removed in this version. See: passing by reference.
Along with some other functions you shouldn’t be using anymore anyway. See the incompatible list.
For up-to-date plugins and software this shouldn’t be a problem since it was deprecated for a while already.
For me it notably breaks the Feedwordpress plugin in WordPress and gives a fatal error, which is annoying. A simple solution is present but you need to dive into the code and replace a few lines. See the solution here.
I fear older plugins of various kinds are also vulnerable for this problem, so I advice to check your installation locally against a new php version to see if any problems arise before your host decides to upgrade their installation!
In ‘case studies’ I will every now and then write about a specific site, it’s purpose and what you might learn from this. This could be own work or if I see fit some other pages on the web.
The purpose of NieuwsZoetermeer ( translated: News (from) Zoetermeer ) is to bring all sorts of local news to one page. In my former city local news is scattered around some local paper publications ( with horrible sites ) and ‘amateur’ sites bringing their own local news.
Besides there is no good source for information about the political situation. Like everywhere the traditional media is outside of elections not really interested. For a person who is not bound to one single party this would mean surfing across 10 sites already, just to see if there is local news.
In this post I will explain more about the techniques used behind this site and why.
WordPress features and ‘pseudo’ cron function which loads at a certain interval when people visit your site. The Cron function is modeled after the linux/unix cron function which runs on most servers and check regularly for scheduled jobs to do.
The problem with the WordPress Cron is when nobody for a while visits your site. Or if you have a lot of heavy scheduled work to do this will slow down the user experience of your site.
There is a solution.
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