Fixing RSS retrieval/display issues in WordPress

Jan 21st, 2009   1:00 pm

WordPress v2.7 uses an older version of Magpie RSS (v0.51) which has some bugs that may prevent your RSS feed displaying in your WordPress blog/theme.

I happen to use KB Advanced RSS Widget, on the IrelandOffline site, but I believe most RSS widgets/plugins for WordPress use.

The issue in my case, was a a simple apostrophe, on a vBulletin forum, being converted to a fancy apostrophe (character \x92).

The most recent Magpie RSS version (v0.72 at time of writing) handles this OK. So to update your WordPress installation to use this most recent release of Magpie RSS, do the following:

  • Download Magpie RSS from here.
  • Extract the contents, and rename/copy rss_fetch.inc to rss.php.
  • Copy that new rss.php file, all the *.inc files, the extlib directory, and scripts directory to the directory wp-includes within your WordPress base install directory.
  • Make sure file and directory permissions are OK (usually 644 and 755, respectively). Also make sure you pass on the license information, for Magpie RSS, if required to do so!

Bear in mind that this might affect future WordPress updates, or exploit checking (because you’ve modified the base rss.php installed).

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