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Hi @plainplow!

I’ve investigated your feed and found out that the problem is that your feed contains this string:

xmlns:itunes="https://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd"

instead of this one:

xmlns:itunes="https://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd"

(https instead of http).

Did you change the feed template? Maybe some plugin does it?

Thank you, Sergiy!

I see what you’re saying. I don’t know what’s causing the https in that URL. I didn’t modify any feed template beyond what the main options allow in the plugin…

I do have other plugins of course but I’m not sure which might be causing this problem. I just inherited managing this site.

I’ll keep searching but I don’t know what next to do.

@plainplow

You can start by checking if there is a feed-podcast.php file in your current theme directory. And if there is, try to rename it to something else.
If not, try to disable plugins one by one and check if it can help.
Or maybe you’ll need a developer to help you with it.
Hope you’ll manage to fix it.

I don’t see any php file with podcast in the name of my theme. I tried deactivating every plugin with no success.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 7 months ago by plainplow.

I even changed the theme temporarily to Twenty Twenty-Three and the https was still in that line.

@plainplow

Do you have access to the server command line? If so, could you run this command from the site folder and tell what are the results?

grep -rnl 'xmlns:itunes='

Also for this one?

grep -rnl 'xmlns:itunes="https'

Also, do you use any type of caching for the site? I can see you run it with WP Engine? Maybe it’s better to ask their support?

Unfortunately I don’t have access to the server…

So, I talked with WP Engine Support and they said: “Those [grep] commands do not work here on the server, there is no output.” ??

They cache the site at the server level with Varnish cache. I cleared it with no success.

They told me, “Yeah they may need to create some sort of NGINX server rule for that [https issue] with the plugin then.”

Thank you so much for your follow-up on this issue.

Hi @plainplow,

Unfortunately, we can’t change the iTunes server rules ??

Maybe they didn’t understand the question. So the problem is that something ( either on the code level or maybe on the server level ), rewrites the feed HTML and replaces ‘xmlns:itunes=”http…’ with ‘xmlns:itunes=”https…’.
I guess it might be related to your hosting features, but I’m not sure.
I would suggest hiring a developer to debug it deeply, or at least try to make a copy of your site and run it with another cheap hosting or your local machine to check if it’s hosting-related or not.

Hope this helps,
Sergiy.