Magpie improperly parses Google ATOM feeds

[karlkatzke]

#2683

See this forum post: ​http://wordpress.org/support/topic/164824?replies=4#post-725697

I specifically want to point out:

​http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/2683#comment:5

We all know what assume means, right?

Therefore, Magpie needs to be updated and/or the bugs need to be fixed so that Gdata atom feeds are properly consumed and parsed.

#2683 is rather old, what you should be looking at are past tickets like #4547.

We need to dump Magpie entirely. It's dead, Jim.

And no, I still don't understand why matt is so dead set against including a library that doesn't suck instead of including one that does.

I think it's just a matter of providing back compat.

2.5 broke a LOT of back-compat in a lot of admin places, etc. I'd say we should toss this in as a "2.6 breaks it" feature.

It's OK to provide back-compat and keep Magpie in the chain, but for god's sakes provide an easier way to use something different.

One of these days, we'll all get to stop supporting PHP4 and actually get to use abstraction and all that other good OOP stuff in PHP5. That'd make maintaining backwards compatibility and maintaining multiple libraries/plugins for things like parsing PHP a snap.

Err, for parsing RSS.

Replying to karlkatzke:

Err, for parsing RSS.

'Sokay, my neural parser was in error correcting mode -- I think I actually read 'RSS' though you typed PHP. Dunno about anyone else.

*grin*

The newer versions of Magpie do a great job at lots of feed types and don't break the existing uses of the old version of the library in wp. the feedwordpress plugin (an aggregator) asks you to upload two files into wp-includes that overwrite the existing magpie with an updated version and it works fine. see this article about it:
​http://projects.radgeek.com/2008/04/18/compatability-bugs-and-possible-quick-fixes-for-issues-with-feedwordpress-after-upgrading-to-wordpress-25/

I think using those files would be great for wp as a whole and for encouraging people to use those libraries like they use jquery rather than including a whole other library just for the plugin. it would also be nice to not have to re upload them each time there's an upgrade.

If that's not an option then +1 for abstracting it out a bit so that plugins can at least overwrite the library in favor of their own without overwriting the files (FWP could then just use the newer version on their own time but keep the wrappers and stuff).

Even the newer Magpie is still pretty poor at Google feeds. I did the same thing with one of my older plugins (dropped in a newer Magpie). But the simple fact is that Magpie is a dead project.

The latest version of it is three years old: ​http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=55691

We should use software that is actively supported and maintained.

As far as backward compatibility goes, that's easy. We leave the rss-functions.php file there as is, and use some other file instead. Add the deprecated tags and function calls to it. Change all the internal bits of WordPress to use the new library. Remove Magpie after a few versions. No problem.

What library do you suggest?

The most popular and active one seems to be SimplePie.

Milestone 2.5.2 deleted

As an official developer for SimplePie, I'm up for integrating SimplePie if you're willing to accept a patch for it.

See #4547. This was previously marked as WONTFIX.

Everybody who feel the way, can freely integrate SimplePie. See #4547, all rss routines can be overloaded within the wordpress API. Just create a SimplePie Wordpress Plugin, a official one would be nice. If you need help with that, just drop me a line.

We now use SimplePie. see #9198