Feed Creator 1.5 is now available. Feed Creator is used to create feeds for sites which don’t offer their own, and also allows feed merging of existing feeds. This is mostly a maintenance update.
Customers of previous versions can download or upgrade to the latest version through our customer login.
What’s new in 1.5?
You’ll find a full changelog at the end, but here are the main changes.
Base URL taken into account when resolving relative URLs
The previous version would resolve relative URLs against the page URL. But some sites use the <base href="[base url]"> element to specify a different base URL. We now take this into account when resolving relative URLs.
PHP 7.3 compatible
We removed code that was deprecated in PHP 7.3 and tested this release with PHP 7.3.
Date format can be specified
Combining the item and item_date parameters allows Feed Creator to pick out the date too when creating a feed. But different date formatting rules can confuse the date parser. The most common report was instances where “day/month/year” were being interpreted as the American “month/day/year” format. PHP’s strotime function has this note explaining why this happens:
Dates in the m/d/y or d-m-y formats are disambiguated by looking at the separator between the various components: if the separator is a slash (/), then the American m/d/y is assumed; whereas if the separator is a dash (-) or a dot (.), then the European d-m-y format is assumed. If, however, the year is given in a two digit format and the separator is a dash (-), the date string is parsed as y-m-d.
In this release you can use the item_date_format parameter to be explicit about the format. To make sure we interpret the date as “day/month/year” you would pass the parameter d/m/Y (URL encoded of course):
&item=.item&item_date=.date&item_date_format=d%2Fm%2FY
Please see PHP’s createFromFormat function for details on what you can use here.
Full changelog
- PHP 7 compatible (tested up to 7.3)
- Take HTML
<base>URL into account when resolving URLs - item_date_format parameter added to let user specify date format when date not recognised correctly
- HTML5-PHP library updated to version 2.6.0
- Improve browser rendering of generated feeds