Welcome to the second installment of WordPress Bug Friday. You may have noticed that it’s Monday, but … uh … weekends don’t count. Yeah, that’s the ticket! Furthermore, it’s almost the end of Daylight Saving Time, so I’m just getting a head start on rolling back the clocks.
Until I saw it in my web site logs, I didn’t even realize that my blog had an Atom feed. Incidentally, I’m a bit surprised that my logs are filled with requests from NetNewsWire. I am the developer of Vienna after all! Where are you, Vienna users? Anyway, the WordPress template for Atom is obsolete. We’re talking Edsel, Betamax, Eric Clapton obsolete here. The template, contained in the file wp-atom.php, is based on Atom 0.3, which has been deprecated.
The other issue I had was that I revised the post Build settings for Xcode projects on Sunday, but the post didn’t show up as revised in Vienna, which has a neat little feature I added that gives revised articles a green dot to distinguish them visually from blue-dotted new articles. (If you prefer, you can turn the feature off with defaults write uk.co.opencommunity.vienna2 CheckForUpdatedArticles -bool no.) Neither the Atom nor the RSS 2.0 feed showed the post as revised. Indeed, I was getting the dreaded HTTP 304 response (Leave me alone, I’m playing Doom!).
The bug with the (obsolete) Atom feed was that the template calls the same function, get_post_time, for both the (obsolete) issued and (obsolete) modified fields. The correct post creation and modification dates are listed in the blog’s database, so I could use get_post_time for one and get_post_modified_time for the other. With the RSS 2.0 feed, in contrast, it wasn’t clear that there was a bug, because RSS 2.0 has only one default field for item dates, pubDate. I wanted post revisions to show up in the feed, so I replaced get_post_time with get_post_modified_time for pubDate in the WordPress RSS 2.0 template file, wp-rss2.php.
If your WordPress posts have date-based permalinks, do not, I repeat, DO NOT edit the timestamp of an already published post in order to change the date in the feed. (And don’t sit with your back to any doors.) Editing the timestamp will not only change the date in the feed but also change the URL of the post! You’re a very bad man, Jerry, for suggesting this. Fortunately, I was able to repair the damage quickly. Even if your posts don’t have date-based permalinks, editing the timestamp could mess up your archives. To change the date in the feed, use my method of calling get_post_modified_time in the feed template.
I’ve updated my blog’s wp-atom.php file to conform to the Atom 1.0 specifications and made it available for download at wp-atom.txt (the extension has been changed from php to txt). You might want to consider using the attribute type="xhtml" rather than type="html" for the content and summary fields, depending on how your posts are formatted. One element that’s missing from the template is the recommended rel=self link to the feed itself, because I didn’t know how to request the feed link. I’d appreciate help from WordPress experts out there.
Tune in next week, same bat time, same bat channel, for the next exciting installment of WordPress bug Friday! Or maybe some other bat time.