What happens when you are completely out of free time, you are told that the web application that powers your website has a serious security issue, but as soon as you upgrade you discover that something weird is going on with the site feeds? In such situations I can only be sure about one thing: That my free time is going to be wasted mercilessly.

Today, after upgrading to WordPress 2.0.6 early in the morning, I noticed that all of my feeds (Atom 1.0, RSS 2.0, RDF, RSS 0.92) could not be read by my feed reader, liferea. Regardless of the fact that the feeds validated properly, the reader kept indicating that it encountered errors while parsing them. Also, when visiting the feed URL with the browser, a blank web page was displayed.

After searching around for a while, I found out that the 2.0.6 version had an issue with the FeedBurner service. This article explains how to resolve the problem. As you can see, I don’t use feedburner, but I tried this fix in the hope that it would fix my problems with the feeds… and it did! It turns out that WordPress 2.0.6, whenever a feedreader asks whether the feed content has changed or not, sent inaccurate HTTP headers back to the reader, which was the main cause of the problem.

Here is how to fix this: Open wp-includes/functions.php in a text editor and comment (add two forward slashes // in the beginning of the lines: 2231, 2233, 2234.

That’s it.

[UPDATE]: WordPress 2.0.7 is out which contains, among others, a fix for this issue.

WordPress 2.0.6 – Feed Issues Resolved by George Notaras is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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