Newsfeeds 04.00.01 Released

Hi All,

Newsfeeds 04.00.01 has been officially released today. The main reason for the upgrade is dealing with a growing number of feeds that were reported to us that would not show in the module. So the criteria for feeds has been relaxed somewhat in the aggregation engine. The aggregation engine needs to somehow interweave x feeds and does so using the pubDate. So for this to work the pubDate has to be understood by the aggregation engine. This was new to Newsfeeds 04.00.00. Before there was no parsing of the incoming feed and it was passed on untouched. Version 4 changed all this and as a result people started reporting feeds that were being rejected. Mostly this was because of non-standard pubDate fields in the feed. The official specification for Rss 2 stipulates that the pubDate must be RFC 822. So despite testing, it was not until after release we found that many (and among them very respectable) feed publishers were not sticking to this standard. The date restraint has been relaxed and this should help many people. Other changes include:

• Add accept and user agent for web request
• Remove email address constraints
• Add option to not use Ajax rendering in module settings
• Reorganized and rewritten Javascript to allow rendering of multiple News modules on a single page in Ajax mode
• Fix for XHTML issue (div ending with span)

I strongly urge those on 04.00.00 to upgrade. And as always: do this on your staging server first.

Peter