Figured out why my RSS feed isn’t displaying the full post anymore. Apparently WordPress now truncates posts that use the <
more> tag in RSS feeds. Funny, it never did that before. I am, now, quite pissed. #
Amen brother. Amen.
I would have written a rant about this, but I just could not be bothered. But anything Christopher says, I agree with 100%. Why would you change core functionality in a point update? It doesn’t make any sense at all. Especially since it actually removes the choice between excerpts and full-length feeds…
I’ve always proudly served full-length feeds, since I firmly believe that excerpted feeds are lame. And now, with this new functionality, I no longer have the choice.
Adding injury to injury, the new ‘excerpt’ doesn’t even indicate to the reader of the feed that they are only seeing the tip of the iceberg!…
First forced rel=nofollow. Then snap. Now this?
Seriously.
I can’t find it this quickly, but I know there’s a plugin out that reverts the feeds to the old functionality. It was written practically immediately after the release of 2.1.
That would be my plugin, Guy. I wrote it because I too am pissed about this change. If they’re going to go ahead and change something, at least provide an option to change it back to its original functionality. Hopefully WordPress will eventually have an update making my plugin obsolute, however it doesn’t look it as WordPress 2.1.1 was released with no change.
See,
this is why wordpress is starting to p*ss me off.. you don’t go change core functionality without bothering to warn people, or at least provide a way to undo it.
Nice work Ron, you’re hired. ;)
I have raised a ticket talking about the behavior of feed is changed before WP 2.1 released. However, the core team said it is the intended behavior and won’t fix it. It made me quite disappointed about their decision and made me look forward to Habari project to replace my WordPress.
Couldn’t agree more. The only reasonable explanation I can come up with is that it was done to minimize the bandwidth needed on wp.com. Which would confirm my worst suspicions.
[quote comment=“100323”]Which would confirm my worst suspicions.[/quote]
That WordPress (the software) is now little more than the community version of WordPress (the .com)? .. ‘cause I can’t help shake the feeling that the community and dev team parted ways a long time ago..
Just one of the reasons why Im still on WP 2.0.X
Talking about WordPress..
Say Michael, How is Habari doing?
There have been too many subtle changes that has pissed a lot of people off, remember when it was about the community? Now it’s more about Automattic and their whims
I, for one, am pissed off they dropped days as an option of displaying the amount of posts
[quote comment=“100344”]Talking about WordPress..
Say Michael, How is Habari doing?[/quote]
I don’t know, I don’t keep track these days.
Whew, and I thought my post was a little on the hasty side. Glad I’m not the only one that sees this as just one more straw on my poor camel’s back.
The thing that really kills me is that the change doesn’t make any sense to me. Why on Earth would I want that to be the functionality? It’s bass-ackwards.
@Ron Heft
Thanks, so much for the plug-in.
I too was burned by this. Had a mini panic attack after my last post went out and I saw the excerpt in my feed reader. WTF, indeed! Had to re-code the latest post on my homepage to get around this. I’ll have to grab Ronald’s plugin. Nice work dude!
I did a post (http://blog.fileville.net/?p=230) about the changing of the WordPress core is causing more problems then helping. Matt replied but I’m not sure if that will happen. BTW: another Well know WordPress developer has gone to Habari, the author of More Smilies and the Installer plugin.
Seriously.
Code is poetry. Who are we to argue with the poets?
I am a long standing user of WP and localized it into German in 2004 (.po files). MY stance back then still holds: you should never put up a mantra you can’t live up to.
I will still use WP, of course. It is a good blogging platform but things like this make the user base angry (don’t get me started on SNAP…).
And yes, thanks Ron.
:S
It was done by popular request. Some folks want more to mean more, even in their feeds, so they can put NSFW and spoilers below the fold. They were pissed off at the way it was, and now others are pissed off at the way it is. Such is the life of a poor open source developer.
Then the inclusion of an option seems like the way to go, wouldn’t you agree? Which, by the way, should default to the previous mode of operation.
Besides, it’s not like excerpted feeds weren’t already available. Hell, the write page in the WP admin has an entire textarea devoted to writing an excerpt…
Previously you could do both excerpted and full feeds, while using MORE. Now you can only do excerpted feeds.
That isn’t an improvement by any measure.
“The only reasonable explanation I can come up with is that it was done to minimize the bandwidth needed on wp.com.”
Assuming bandwidth was an issue, which it isn’t, and this change had any real effect on it, which it wouldn’t, that wouldn’t be any reason for putting it in core. You might as well have said “the only reasonable explanation I can come up with is that Matt beats his wife.”
Michael, you’ve looked at things critically and been involved in reasonable discourse that led to positive changes in the past. Did something change? I have a lot of respect for you, and if you ever want to chat you know how to reach me.
@Matt,
Seeing as I’m the one that started Michael off with my own raving I suppose I should add something.
If it seems that there is un-critical or un-reasonable ranting going on it is more likely to do with a deep seated problem in the WP community that goes far beyond my meager complaint. I’m not privvy to, nor terribly interested in, the goings-on of the more senior members of the WP community and what grievances, if any, they may have.
That said, I do know that there are grievances. This particular issue is just a small spark added to the mounting pile of tinder.
From where I’m sitting, it would appear that the WP community is reaching a critical stage. How the community weathers this stage could have much more to do with understanding how it came to be that so many are upset and much less to do with why. There’s a subtle but important difference there.
Either way, folks are starting to think there’s something rotten in the state of… Texas?
When I go to TX in a few weeks, I’ll check. Just seems like a lot of fuss over a change which logically combines how how the front page and feeds work, has been in the code base for months, has no active bugs in Trac I could find, and is reversible with a 20-line plugin pointed out in the first and second comments.
That’s good to hear. But that doesn’t change the fact that the actual reason given isn’t much better…
As I also said to Ryan, this should have been an option, if anything.
Changing something in the core which will change the way many thousands of blogs publish themselves, without thoroughly thinking it through (which seems to be the case here) represents a major issue for the community.
In this case it’s a multi-tiered problem. First of all, it’s a non-transparent change. Unless you subscribe to your own feed, you’ll never notice any difference. Except of course your subscribers weeding away as they grow tired of your excerpted feed.
Secondly, the feed itself doesn’t tell you that you’re looking at a fragment of a full post. There should be a ‘read the rest of the post’ link in there.
And if people don’t know that their ‘full’ feed is only showing a fragment of their posts, they can’t write introductions that notify their readers that there is more going on back at the ranch.
That alone tells me that this feature was implemented, but not thought through.
Yes. I’ve grown frustrated with seeing lots of actual issues linger for years on end. In the personal spectrum its stuff like Kubrick, which needs some serious love, and Shuttle, which was hapazardly implemented (if you can call it that) with such disregard for everything that it stood for, that you might as well not have done it to begin with.
WP2.1 now has the Shuttle login graphics! Wuptidoo! Shuttle might’ve been a mess, but the half-assed implementation is doubly so.
Hell, just the lack of improvements made to the face of WP in general. The combined design time for Habari’s write page is less than a week or two, and it blows WP out of the water in all areas.
It’s the lack of homogenous template tags (Some echo, some return. Some have hardcoded tags built-in, some don’t).
And searching. Man. The lack of comment-searching, page-searching and search operators.
It’s lack of wanting to be the best.
You may get pissed when people take pot-shots at wp.com. But from where most of us old-timers are sitting, it feels very much as if the desire the be the best died somewhere along the way towards commercialization.
And I don’t say that because I have a problem with going commercial. That’s A-OK with me. But in the community you’re only as good as your latest release.
And when energy is expended on stuff like this, rather than improving the default template, admin or search, all of which are major issues in WP (and have been so for the last 4 years and I have been saying so for just as long), then there is a big damn problem.
And no. Nothing changed. That’s the problem.
The mere fact that it takes something like me, who happens to talk louder than most, vouching my loyalty to Habari, or me writing a post which beats up on WordPress to get a response. That is a problem.
Sure it’s all fixable with plugins. And you should be happy that people are willing to write those plugins, or your userbase might look a lot different today. But so what? These are core concerns.
First off, the question is if it’s logical to combine the two to begin with? And if so, is it worth the cost of no full feed? And following your logic, if it’s reversible with a 20-line plugin, isn’t that how it should have been implemented in the first place?
Secondly, a fraction of the people who use WP use Trac. And it’s all the others you should be more worried about catering to.
And no, I couldn’t just as well have written that you beat your wife, because you’re one of the gentlest people I’ve ever met. But you’re also damn stubborn…
I wish there was a vote comment feature like that on newsvine.com on your blog Michael.
One of the most basic and essential rules when dealing with “community” is you can’t please them all but you should at least try to please as many as possible.
Any “feature” you may want to change for the better for one part of the community you will most likely end up pissing the other part off. You can easily avoid this by giving the user the choice!
As Michael said, these things need to be optional. The choice has to stay with the user. This is a basic design concept, one that can be easily grasped, too. Of course, if you lack the time to make it “optional” then you have to deal with the aftermath.
And “Search” and “WP”… this discussion is what? 2 years old? Lorelle seems to have lost perspective here too, stating
in one of her comments on the number one flaw in WordPress.
A bit lacking? Huh…
In regard of the WP community you surely realize that the wp.org community != wp.com community and you risk alienating both groups further and further until one side will feel as second rate community and the other will just shake their heads with incomprehension.
I have converted I don’t know how many people to use WordPress (and K2 :), I even host different WP blogs on my site for friends, I could have told them to use wp.com, too, but I did not.
In the end, it’s all about choice. If you take the choice away from the users, they will eventually go elsewhere because when it comes to choosing the “user” is particularly finicky.