source: trunk/www.guidonia.net/wp/wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress/ChangeLog.text@ 44

FeedWordPress Change Log
========================
Changes from 2009.0618 to 2009.0707
-----------------------------------
*       BUGFIX: WORDPRESS 2.8 AJAX COMPATIBILITY ISSUES RESOLVED (blank or
        truncated "Syndicated Sites" administration page): Due to changes in the
        AJAX interface elements between WordPress 2.7 and WordPress 2.8, several
        FeedWordPress users encountered an issue where the front "Syndication"
        page in the FeedWordPress administrative interface would come up blank,
        without the normal "Syndicated Sites" list and "Update" control, or
        sometimes wth the boxes visible but one or both of them truncated, with
        only the title bar. This issue should now be resolved: with the new
        version of FeedWordPress, the compatibility issue that caused the
        disappearance should be eliminated, and if boxes are shown with only
        their handle visible, you should once again be able to drop down the
        rest of the box by clicking once on its title bar.

*       BUGFIX: TAG SETTING WIDGET FIXED. Due to changes in interface elements
        between WordPress 2.7 and WordPress 2.8, people using FeedWordPress with
        WordPress 2.8 found that the widget for setting tags to be applied to
        all syndicated posts, or all syndicated posts from a particular feed,
        no longer displayed "Add" and "Remove" buttons for individual tags. This
        issue has now been fixed, and the tagging widget should once again work
        more or less exactly like the tagging widget for individual posts in the
        normal WordPress admin interface.

Changes from 2009.0613 to 2009.0618
-----------------------------------
*       BUGFIX: MYSTERY ERRORS WITH WITH WP_Http_Fsockopen HTTP TRANSPORT
        ELIMINATED: Thanks to a combination of a subtle bug in FeedWordPress,
        and changes to the HTTP transport code in WordPress, a number of users
        encountered an error in which any time they attempted to add a new feed
        through the FeedFinder interface, FeedWordPress would fail and display
        an HTTP request failure diagnostic message. The subtle bug has been
        fixed, and with it, most of these errors should now be eliminated.
        
        Be sure to upgrade your MagpieRSS to the most recent MagpieRSS version
        after you have insalled FeedWordPress 2009.0618, or this bug fix will
        not take effect.


Changes from 2009.0612 to 2009.0613
-----------------------------------
*       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..

Changes from 2008.1214 to 2009.0612
-----------------------------------
*       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>).

Changes from 2008.1105 to 2008.1214
-----------------------------------

*       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.

*       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.


Changes from 2008.1101 to 2008.1105
-----------------------------------

*       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](http://radgeek.com/contact) 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.

Changes from 2008.1030 to 2008.1101
-----------------------------------

*       INTERFACE BUG THAT PREVENTED ADDING NEW SITES FIXED: The UI reforms in
        FWP 2008.1030 unintentionally introduced a bug that prevents clean
        installations of FeedWordPress from providing an input box for adding
        new feeds to the list of syndicated feeds. This bug has been fixed.

Changes from 0.993 to 2008.1030
-------------------------------

*       WORDPRESS 2.6 COMPATIBILITY: FeedWordPress should now be 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 FIXED: POSTS SYNDICATED THROUGH AN AUTOMATIC UPDATE ARE NO
        LONGER STRIPPED OF `<OBJECT>` TAGS AND CERTAIN OTHER HTML ELEMENTS: 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.

Changes from 0.992 to 0.993
---------------------------

*       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.
        
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 <http://praxeology.net/blog/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 COMPATIBILITY: 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 `<media:content>` 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 `<media:content>` 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 page 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 December 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 <http://your-blog.com/path/wp-content/update-feeds.php>,
        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.)