Brainstorming Thread – Make Suggestions here !

[feedsapi]

Hi Folks, we are all part of this great WordPress Community and it’s in our interest to make the platform better every single day, so I just created this thread for you guys/girls to make any suggestions you may have for the Most Powerful WordPress Conntent Syndication / Aggregation Plugin: RSS Post Importer .

This is a brainstorming area, what this means is, you can make any suggestion you think will improve the plugin, the UI or UX, the simplicity of your own personal work for your site or your clients site.

I can’t give you a guarantee that we will implement your suggestions, but if they help everybody and I can afford to implement them, I will do so. I can however promise you to take a close look to any suggestion and add it on my roadmap if it turns out to be helpful for the community.

Please to be reasonable and responsible with this option and keep the discussion sane, do not judge other people suggestions (I will do that offline).

The suggestion we consider to be the best suggestion (in terms of: Can we implement this !) will earn the Author a FREE Full Text RSS Licence Key, if there’s something you don’t like or wish to make your suggestion private, feel free to drop me an email at : support@feedsapi.com .

Happy Brainstorming and blogging.

Thank you,
The RSS Post Importer Nerd

https://wordpress.org/plugins/rss-post-importer/

[dwheeler]

Couple of suggestions.

The stats always times out on large databases.

I changed it to only go back a week and the timeouts stoped.

function get_the_oldest_post() {
         $oldyear = date("Y",strtotime("-7 days"));
         $oldmonth = date("m",strtotime("-7 days"));
         $oldday = date("d",strtotime("-7 days"));

			$args = array(
				'posts_per_page' => 1,
				'date_query' => array(
					array(
						'after'		=> array(
							'year'	=> $oldyear,
							'month'	=> $oldmonth,
							'day'	=> $oldday,
						),
						'inclusive' => false,
					),
				),
				'order' => 'ASC',
				'orderby' => 'date',
				'meta_key' => 'rss_pi_source_url',
			);

The posts are an hour off due to Daylight savings time. you might want to add an option for that.

[net]

To automatically assign images to specified category using https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-media-category-management/

[feedsapi]

@isf_crew , Thank you for reaching out. It’s a great suggestion and an idea we’ve been playing with for a while and it’s on our roadmap, we’re still reviewing it at may add it at some point if many people ask for this.

[feedsapi]

@dwheeler , thanks for the head up, that’s awesome. We’ve been experimenting with this in the RC of the 2.1.2 version and have strongly improved the stats, please test the new approach on the 2.1.2 and let me know what you think and if you’re still having the issue. One of the approach we’ve been considering is to cache the charts after fetching them….but like I said, still experimenting and will keep improving this feature.

[feedsapi]

@ivan , thank you very much for reaching out, I’m afraid I didn’t get that. Please elaborate.

[net]

Clarification:

1) In Settings for each feed: Add “Image caption” edit box containing template for image caption, e.g. “Source: {$feed_title}”. Such content would be added to ‘Caption’ field of imported images. This is very important, to attribute the original author of the image.

2) In Settings for each feed: To specify media category for imported images based on “WP Media Category Management” plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-media-category-management/

3) Some filters could be added to be able to alter plugin behavour.

[feedsapi]

@ivan , thanks for clarifying mate, I will add the suggestion 1) to our roadmap and see what can be done, the two others are also great suggestions but way out of the scope of the plugin, they will fail the first goal of the plugin to keep things simple and self explaining (with no extra tutorials)

[net]

I understand. How about adding more apply_filters calls all over the place, so we can extended the plugin ourselves?

[feedsapi]

@ivan , thanks for your suggestion, I’ve take note but I can not promise anything anytime, I will however keep this in mind.

Thanks,
The RSS Post Importer Nerd

[net]

[ Moderator note: code fixed. Please wrap code in the backtick character or use the code button. ]

$post['post_content'] = $dom->saveXML($doc);

inserts <html> and <body> tags.

Add after it:

$post['post_content'] = str_replace( array('<html>', '</html>', '<body>', '</body>'), '', $post['post_content']);

[net]

1) Add search and replace functionality using regular expressions. Some other RSS importers have this feature.

2) Change the location of log file. Instead of wp-content/rsspi-log/log.txt should be wp-content/plugins/rss-post-importer/log.txt or similar.

3) Log should be more verbose. E.g. each line should be: “feed_name (URL): x items imported.”.

4) Log errors. For example, change:

if (is_wp_error($feed)) {
	return false;
}

to:

if (is_wp_error($feed)) {
	rssPILog::log(str_replace("\n", " ", var_export($feed, TRUE)));
	return false;
}

5) Add option to temporarily disable some feed.

[net]

6) It seems there is no reason to add ‘-media-‘ . $count suffix to local images:

$attachment_id = $this->add_to_media($url, 0, $post['post_title'] . '-media-' . $count);

7) Function add_to_media should check does the same image already exist, like we do for posts using function post_exists.

[feedsapi]

@ivan

Thanks for the suggestions. Keep’ em coming , I’m working on the tasks on the roadmap at the moment to push the next version out (the first milestone is under stress-test at the moment) and then get on this, 🙂 . Keep’s coming and thanks again for contributing to make this plugin even better

[net]

Items and URLs being imported should be logged, too, not just number of items.

log() should respect time zone using get_option(‘timezone_string’).

[Andrea Whitmer]

I’d love the ability to assign a custom field to each feed. There are several things I’d love to do in my templates, but I’m limited unless I place each feed in a category all its own (which doesn’t really fit the rest of the site) or use a custom field. Maybe that could be added down the road?