Full post RSS feeds can not break at the <!--more--> point

[hexley]

I have my settings to:
For each article in a feed, show : Full text

Every post I have uses <!--more--> as you can see ​http://osxhelp.com/
All posts on the main page are truncated where I have specified them to be.

Any RSS feed, whether atom, rss, or rss 2, do not truncate where they should.
The code:

<description><?php the_content_rss('', 0, '', get_option('rss_excerpt_length')) ?></description>

This is rather mysterious to me, it calls the_content_rss(), which really does not do very much, at least, I do not see anywhere in that function that looks for the pattern <!--more-->

However, the function does nest another call to get_the_content(), which I can not seem to mentally parse out what is it up to. I see the match:

if ( preg_match('/<!--more(.*?)?-->/', $content, $matches) ) {

and in that it stuffs an array of $matches, which has the <!--more--> as item 0 and nothing as item 1 in the array. I see no way at all that this can properly work. I do not know the code well enough to confirm this is a bug.

Its a change in 2.5

If you have it set to "Full Text" for the Feeds, then the feeds are just that, Full text, Ie. it ignores the <!--more--> tag alltogether.

See: (In [6763]) Show full content, including content after the more tag, for feeds. fixes #2582

I'm going to hold off marking this as invalid, Even though you can sit on the fence with it, Some people like that behaviour, Some people dont.

Can you please elaborate. From what I gather, setting it to full text gives my just that, ignoring the <!--more--> point. Setting it to summary will use the hard coded max rss length value.

How do I get back the old behavior? Does this mean going through all posts and setting a summary value, meaning I have to copy and paste from hundreds of posts to get the old behavior back?

Is this noted somewhere so people would know to take this into consideration before upgrading?

• I have an email address set, in trac, and did not get a notification that this issue was replied to, what do I need to do to get email notifications?

I would also like to have the old behaviour back - there is a point having the <!--more--> tag cut the content of the RSS feed.

Would be very easy to accomplish with a plugin and my personal view is that this is plugin territory.

Fine, PI is ok with me. What is wrong, IMHO, is that a change was made, to behavior some people come to rely on, and that was not made clear in upgrade notes or as far as I can tell, in any documentation at all.

I spent 3 hours or so in the code, trying to trace these nested functions here and there, to suspect it was a bug, but it turns out to be an intentional change.

It was briefly mentioned in the development blog:

​http://wordpress.org/development/2008/03/25-sneak-peek/

Well, I do not see it in there, searching for --more-- or RSS. Not that I do not believe you :-)
I just did an update to MySql, they made clear, in the download, in a read me, that if you update from version 4.x to 5.x, the way timestamp works has fully changed. I needed to make code changes to deal with it.

I decided to hold off on that update.

I updated to WP 2.5, and no longer had summary feeds, and no longer could inject paid for ads into them, as functionality changed. There absolutely needs to be a read me in the download, warning people about expected behavior changing.

I do not care that this feature changed, fine, I can always work around it. People need to know ahead of time.

Just a heads-up : the plugin ​Ozh' Better Feed by OZH reenable the functionality of <!--more--> in feeds. I'm using it and it's just like good ole times :)

This is part of a long debate that has gone back and forth for years. The new behavior is the result of interminable discussions and flame wars and will be the way going forward.

Replying to ryan:

The new behaviour should be the result of what people actually need, but anyway...

I know Matt abhors additional options, but this seems like an obvious one to me. That is:

For each article in a feed, show

( ) Full text
( ) Full text, stopping at <!--more-->
( ) Summary

Whatever the discussion was, I completely agree that WordPress should really be more careful about changing established behavior without allowing people to decide.

If you're _fixing_ something, that's great, but this was nothing more than some people preferring A over B. If it's really as much of a debate as Ryan suggests, then it should be an option so each side can just do what they want.

I'll be checking out Ozh's plugin, I guess, but it would have been awfully nice to know about this change this morning. Tooo late now.... :\