RSS Widget cannot download https URLs

[slyall]

The RSS Widget downloads RSS feeds to display a summary on a wordpress site.

It is currently limited to downloading http URLs. It will not work with https URLs or http URLs that redirect to https.

As websites increasing become https-only the widget works with fewer of them.

For example the 3 sample feeds (wordpress.com, nytimes.com and amazon.com) on the documentation page:

​https://en.support.wordpress.com/widgets/rss-widget/

now all redirect to https and do not work.

The lack of https support is documented on the widgets page:

"Feed URLs that start with “​https://” will not work on our RSS Widget."

but this was less of a problem in the past.

[audrasjb]

Testing HTTPS feed URL

[audrasjb]

Testing HTTP feed on the same URL which is redirecting to HTTPS

[audrasjb]

Both are working fine

[audrasjb]

Hi, welcome to WordPress Core Trac and thanks for opening a ticket,

I tested the issue and everything looks good on my side.
It's working with both https and http in case http is redirecting to https (see screenshot above).

Please note that you linked a WordPress.com documentation URL. On WordPress.org Trac, we are only working on the self hosted WordPress.org open-source project. Their documentation can be out of date.

Closing as worksforme. Feel free to reopen the ticket if you think I missed some use case :-)

Thanks,
Jb

[slyall]

I did some further investigation and my site was broken for both http and https. I had jumped to the conclusion that https was the problem.

Actual problem was that I didn't have php-xml installed.

Setting up php7.2-xml (7.2.19-0ubuntu0.18.04.1) ...
Creating config file /etc/php/7.2/mods-available/dom.ini with new version
Creating config file /etc/php/7.2/mods-available/simplexml.ini with new version
Creating config file /etc/php/7.2/mods-available/wddx.ini with new version
Creating config file /etc/php/7.2/mods-available/xml.ini with new version
Creating config file /etc/php/7.2/mods-available/xmlreader.ini with new version
Creating config file /etc/php/7.2/mods-available/xmlwriter.ini with new version
Creating config file /etc/php/7.2/mods-available/xsl.ini with new version

Once that was installed both https and http worked correctly.

Sorry for wasting your time on this.

[audrasjb]

No worries @slyall !
And thank you very much for the follow up :-)