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Uncategorized — Comments Off on Feedwordpress Advanced Filters 0.6 : Enclosures and links
04
Jul 13

Feedwordpress Advanced Filters 0.6 : Enclosures and links

I’m happy to announce that the new version of Feedwordpress Advanced Filters has just been released. Yesterday I celebrated the 1000th download from the WordPress plugin directory and what better to way to celebrate then releasing a new and better-than-ever version?

faf_downloads_040713

The last month I spend when I had time to test various functions of the plugin, especially the rather complex image filters. This means most filters have undergone some changes to make them more robust and less likely to fail with strange inputs.

New

Included in this release of Feedwordpress Advanced Filters is the ability to add enclosure images from your feed to your local WordPress installation. Also new is the (beta) release of the link filter. You can set external links easily to target=_blank for opening in a new window. Plus a very simple rewrite function which allows you to set URLs to some local script.

RegExp Filter

Also showing the growth of Feedwordpress Advanced Filters are the emerging of user-built filters around, like this simple filter using regular expressions to remove certain parts of the content, by Frank Mahon. If you made a custom filter please share with us to built a wide feature-set of FAF!

Upcoming

For the near future I will be concentrating on making the image filters use the PHP DOM model instead of the regular expression clutter now used for retrieving images. This will also allow for a bunch of new features.

The new link filter already works this way. I’m really curious whether this method works on all servers around there. You can help me by providing reports!

Talking about the link filter. I’m curious to which Link trackers are widely used around the globe for tracking outbound links. Let me know by commenting ( or otherwise ) and I might support the plugin for tracking URLs.

If you are already happy with Feedwordpress Advanced Filters help by spreading the word and of course rating ( or reviewing ) my plugin to help justify to spend more time on FAF ^^

Last, if you have a great idea I should incorporate into the plugin, just let me know. I’m keen to add new features.

Feedwordpress Advanced Filters — Comments Off on Feedwordpress Advanced Filters 0.5.9 : Bug Fixing Release
12
Jun 13

Feedwordpress Advanced Filters 0.5.9 : Bug Fixing Release

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.

Feedwordpress Advanced Filters / Wordpress — Comments Off on Custom filter in Feedwordpress Advanced Filters
20
Apr 13

Custom filter in Feedwordpress Advanced Filters

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
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Feedwordpress Advanced Filters / Wordpress — Comments Off on Feedwordpress Advanced Filters 0.5.5
19
Apr 13

Feedwordpress Advanced Filters 0.5.5

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:

  • Filter for expiring posts. Posts will be unpublished or deleted after a certain time.
  • Filter for checking and fixing URL’s (i.e a www link without http:// resulting in incorrect links )
  • A page where you can overview all your filter settings on all feeds
  • A filter to search for duplicated posts and ignore the new ones based on a certain threshold ( i.e posts who are 99% the same are ignored )

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.

Feedwordpress Advanced Filters / Wordpress — Comments Off on FeedWordPress Advanced Filters version 0.5 released!
09
Apr 13

FeedWordPress Advanced Filters version 0.5 released!

After my november announcement of the plugin I was working on, I’m happy to present a decent version of Feedwordpress Advanced Filters.

feedwordpress_advanced_filters_screen_05

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!

 

 

Plugins / Wordpress — Comments Off on Feedwordpress Filters (announcement)
16
Nov 12

Feedwordpress Filters (announcement)

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.

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Case Study / Plugins / Wordpress — Comments Off on Case study: Nieuwszoetermeer.nl
18
Oct 12

Case study: Nieuwszoetermeer.nl

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.

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Plugins / Wordpress — Comments Off on Feedwordpress – Linking permalinks and comments to local or remote site?
02
Oct 12

Feedwordpress – Linking permalinks and comments to local or remote site?

Feedwordpress is a WordPress plugin which allows easy syndication of RSS-feeds to your blog, sidebar or both.

In Feedwordpress you are presented with the choice between linking to your local post when a excerpt is imported or linking directly to the remote site.

Often you will want to present a link to the original post, but also allow visitors to comments (and ping) on your site. The setting ‘ Point to local comment feeds on this website’ doesn’t seem to do much if you point your permalinks to the original site. This is a quirk which held many, including me, up for a few hours.

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