• A Side Note About Upgrading My Blogs #6-#14 and FeedWordPress Plugin

    0
    scissors
    January 30th, 2007HARTHmmmm Things, Quickies

    I had a major complication that resulted from the upgrade of my blogs within the HART-Network.com domain (the root and 8 sub-folder blogs). I am using this domain strictly as an aggregation of all the feeds for each and every channel of the HART-Empire Network code that you see in all of the sidebars.

    Basically, what I do .. is that all the contributing blogs’ RSS Feeds are syndicated within each channel blog, and entirely in the root blog, and the plugin posts the feed as content in my blog. I have set the posts to link directly to the source and originating blog’s URL. As a result, all the posts of one particular blog might represent only the “Small Business and Finance” channel network of blogs .. and one feed is burned at Feedburner. This is the RSS feed at the bottom of each section of code in the sidebar. Neat, eh?

    Well .. in trying to determine if this plugin will work with the newer version of wordpress 2.1 .. decisions had to be made, because according to the WordPress Codex Compatibility Plugins with version 2.1

    FeedWordPress (projects.radgeek.com/feedwordpress) 2.0 Will work with 2.1 if you apply this patch (wordpress.org/support/topic/54125?replies=8#post-499823)

    The patch is quite simple, as posted by Trent Adams in the above link .. you are basically changing two file references in the plugin to make it to work.

    Line 41 … change:

    require_once (ABSPATH . WPINC . '/rss-functions.php');
    to
    require_once (ABSPATH . WPINC . '/rss.php');

    and on Line 44 … change:

    require_once (ABSPATH . WPINC . '/registration-functions.php');
    to
    require_once (ABSPATH . WPINC . '/registration.php');

    It seems simple enough. But, somehow .. I must have “texturized” the code in my EditPad (instead of NotePad) or placed an extra space somewhere. Bottom line.. it wouldn’t work! All My blogs were crashed. As soon as the plugin was activated, nobody could get into my blog, and the screen would be riddled with error messages relating to stuff like this …

    Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at ....../feedwordpress.php:6107) .... or ..../wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 275

    I tried to leave the author of the plugin a message around suppertime on Saturday evening .. but my post still remains in moderation. I never noticed any more questions about version 2.1 and can only assume that there might be more questions in moderation as well!

    I left a comment at the WordPress Support but after 2 days .. (which is like a lifetime when you are hoping that your upgrade only takes between 15-30 minutes) .. I still have not received any reply.

    So .. late Sunday after midnight .. I decided to email Trent Adams himself, and asked if he would be willing to just forward me HIS working copies of the plugin .. and by 6:45am Winnipeg Time .. I had received copies of the plugin files! By the way .. he’s out near Calgary Alberta, which is 1 hour behind me! I was sure grateful that he was up early!

    So I put the plugin into my folders and blogs and activated them

    It’s not a perfect working fix. Generally, with this plugin, once you have set your syndication to the feeds .. you still have to run the script that retrieves the feeds. This is a file called update-feeds.php in the /wp-content/ folder. Even now – if you run this file separately and myself .. I receive the following error message..

    WordPress database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'ORDER BY link_name' at line 1]
    SELECT * FROM (tablename_links WHERE link_visible = 'Y' AND link_category = ORDER BY link_name

    The posts are still syndicated though. That message is annoying. I, myself .. do not retrieve the posts automatically so I don’t have to worry about error messages or warnings. Instead .. I use CRON JOBS setup directly in my cPanel that calls the script every 2 hours automatically.

    It it all ran perfectly .. except on one blog. This is very strange, but for some reason the “Entertainment” blog HART-Network.com/entertainment/ would not work. I was getting error messages on both the plugin screen and on the Blogging/Syndication screen. It would not recognize any feeds!

    After much more consideration and tinkering, I just decided that the whole purpose was to aggregate all future posts in this channel .. so I didn’t think much to delete it – and start fresh. Which, by the way – I don’t mean create a new directory .. I just changed the tables in my wp-config.php file and installed a new version in the same space. This way .. my changes and templates and scripts remain.

    And, it works now .. although – the modifications under the Presentation Header Image and Widget settings did not stay and were wiped out. It only took me a few minutes to add though.

    As a final note… a “Thank-You” to Lorelle VanFossen who gave me the idea in the comments that I might have messed up the text inside the plugin itself, that gave me the idea that I should just try to get a “untexturized” working copy ..which led me to email Trent Adams in the first place! And, as I’ve always maintained .. (1) it never hurts to ask .. and (2) you never know what you will get if you do ask for something. Generally .. people are nice and quite helpful!

    If you are worried about the FeedWordpress .. there’s another one, that also may or may not work .. wp-autoblog plugin. Please do not abuse these plugin scripts and scrape other people’s contents and steal … but, if you are looking for a way to syndicate a bunch of your own network of blogs into one gigantic feed .. this is the way to go – in my humble opinion.

    HART

    Related Posts with Thumbnails
 

3 responses to “A Side Note About Upgrading My Blogs #6-#14 and FeedWordPress Plugin” RSS icon

  • Hey there… I just found out that feedwordpress gave up on me too since the upgrade to 2.1.

    i realized it so late because the cronjob keept going, fetching feeds. The categories for the new posts weren’t set right. And now I can’t access any configuration interface via the wp options because of ‘An error in the sql syntax’.

    i looked it up, the problem is in feedwordpress.php:

    $results = $wpdb->get_results(“SELECT cat_id, cat_name, auto_toggle FROM $wpdb->linkcategories ORDER BY cat_id”);

    $wpdb->linkcategories is empty while it shouldn’t be. I’m trying to fix but, check our blog later if you like 🙂

  • can someone post the fix here please since other sites are not opening up

  • There’s been an upgrade to FeedWordPress Plugin .. if you are running wordpress version 2.1+ .. use the version 0.981 of FeedWordPress plugin.

    projects.radgeek.com/news/feedwordpress


1 Trackbacks / Pingbacks

  • Feedwordpress Issues with WordPress 2.1 (fix!)

    Today it came to my attention that the feedwordpress plugin we use to aggregate Zhenechs Feed was broken. Apparently since the upgrade to WordPress 2.11. So I went to ask google about it and found a lot of people who have the same problem. The Thread a…

Leave a reply