Dashboard RSS errors not handled well

[DD32]

The Dashboard RSS items do not handle errors very well.

For example, Upon an error occuring in fetching the Feed, The Feed URL will be set to 'Error: could not find an RSS or ATOM feed at that URL.' with no feedback to the UI that an error has occured (other than that its blank).

It appears that the main cause for the error in my case, was the magpie fetch time limit of 2 seconds being too slow for my connection, increasing it to 10 allows it to fetch the entire RSS feed, but that is hopefully only a issue on home-hosted installs.

dump of the widget_options:

  'dashboard_secondary' => 
    array
      'title' => string 'Other WordPress News' (length=20)
      'url' => string 'Error: could not find an RSS or ATOM feed at that URL.' (length=54)
      'link' => string '' (length=0)
      'items' => int 15
      'error' => string 'Error in RSS 0' (length=14)
      'show_summary' => int 1
      'show_author' => int 1
      'show_date' => int 1

This really should be fixed. The big problem is that if there is an error *once*, the URL for the feed is overwritten with the error message. The error should *display*, but certainly not overwrite the actual feed URL setting. The way it is, a one-time error becomes permanent.

There are two distinct problems here:

1) The RSS feeds aren't updating properly. Possibly a timeout issue.

2) When there *is* a problem, the actual URL setting is overwritten with an error message, after which the feed will *never* work unless the URL is manually reset.

the same annoyance applies to feed widgets. Personally, I ended up adding a define to lengthen the timeout, but it's nonetheless annoying. At the very least, the url shouldn't get overwritten.

The main issue here is feed functionality, not UI, so I'm changing the component to feeds and will start a separate ticket about error messaging under UI.

[10697] might help here.

The move to SimplePie + [10697] will probably have made a difference, I'll have to test this out again later and see if anything needs doing to fix this ticket

I've got a patch ready to go after commital of 9273.2.diff on #9273

Ok, There we go.

I couldnt work out how to get the RSS widget to auto-open when JS was in use.. So a message is displayed at the top of the page and in the widget itself, or just in the widget (as it should be open already) when JS is not in use.

(In [10742]) Better error handling and display in the RSS widget, props DD32, fixes #8495