Change Order of RSS Feed?

Hi Johnathan,

Currently this is not possible, since we’ve never received any demanded for different or customized sorting.

We can add the functionality in the form of a filter. What exactly do yo need for sorting? Is it just reversing the order?

Thanks for getting back to me Miguel. You’re exactly right, we simply need the order reversed.

Try using this filter:


add_filter( 'wprss_display_feed_items_query', 'wprss_reverse', 10, 2 );
function wprss_reverse( $args, $settings ) {
$args['order'] = 'ASC';
return $args;
}


Simply add this to your theme’s functions.php file. Let me know how that goes.

Thanks a ton Miguel. The filter worked great in terms of changing the order. Unfortunately, the plugin is showing events that have already passed even after I change “Limit feed items by age” to be one day. Any idea why that would be or what setting I could use to ensure posts published more than one day ago don’t show?

Have a good one.

Hi Johnathan,

The limit by age option should work, but keep in mind that your use case might require something different.

Setting the option to 1 day means that all feed items that have their date older (i.e. more in the past) than 1 day from today are not imported and if previously imported they are deleted.

You mentioned that you are working with events as feed items. I am right in assuming that the events’ dates are in the future?

It would help me a lot to have the URL of the feed source of the events that you are using, so I can test and determine if this is a problem with our plugin or an issue with the feed.

Thanks for getting back to me Miguel. Here is the URL of the feed source we’re trying to pull from:

https://jewishinstlouis.org/calendar/category/jfed/feed/

I set the option to delete feed items older than one day, but unfortunately it’s still showing events in the past.

Do you have any thoughts on why that would be?

Hi Johnathan,

I’ve tested the feed source and here are my results and observations:

The date and time of importing was 7th Jan at around 17:30.

The feed imported 10 items, each of which had their date in the future, the closest being 12th Jan 19:04.

The first thing I noticed is that WordPress immediately sets these items as “Scheduled” since they have dates in the future, and as such they are not shown when using the shortcode.

How are you able to show these items?

Thanks for getting back to me Miguel. I’m actually able to get them to load only “Scheduled” posts by using the following code which includes the “post_status” parameter:

<?php
add_filter( 'wprss_display_feed_items_query', 'wi_reverse_feed_order', 10, 2 );
function wi_reverse_feed_order( $args, $settings ) {
    $args['order'] = 'ASC';
    $args['post_status'] = 'future';

    return $args;
}
?>

It seems to be working by only pulling events in the future, but I wanted to see if you saw any potential issues with this. Also, do you know any way to target a query for one particular feed?

Thanks for the help.

Hey Jonathan, your filter makes sense and the only caveats I would identify would be the obvious one of relying on what appears to be a bit of a quirk in the way WordPress handles post creation.

Regarding your question about targeting the query: bad news. We create the aggregated list by performing a single WP_Query with all the feed sources at once. As a result, any argument you add is applied on all the feed sources.

Based on your questions, I’ll take a stab in the dark and guess that you’re trying to only apply the “post_status = future” to that one jewishinstlouis.org feed so that that feed’s future content gets shown alongside other feeds’ published content. In that case, using something like $args['post_status'] = array('publish', 'future'); would solve the problem. (And yes, any ordering will be applied globally on all the feed items.)

Does that help at all?

Thanks for getting back to me @doytch. Your notes were really helpful.

Unfortunately, when I change the ‘post_status’ arg to include ‘publish’ as well as ‘future’ the feed starts showing old events even though they are no longer in the RSS feed. Are they saved somewhere? Do you know what might be causing this issue?

Thanks again.

I assume that’s you in another guise, Jonathan? =)

When WP RSS Aggregator fetches a feed, it saves the feed items into the WordPress database. So yes, even when the feed stops containing a story, it’ll still be in the DB unless it was deleted according to the plugin settings.

Does that answer your question? I’ll confess, I’m a little confused by your wording.

Haha. Sorry about the guise. That’s our company account. And I appreciate your explanation of how the plugin saves feed items.

Basically, when wp_query is set to include a ‘post_status’ of both ‘future’ and ‘publish’ posts, the plugin doesn’t actually remove old events (those that are in the past) even though they are no longer contained in the actual RSS feed itself.

It seems like what we need is way to force the plugin to check the feed more frequently and remove posts that no longer exist in the feed. Is that possible? Was my explanation a little more clear this time?

Thanks again for the help.

Hi, I wanted to follow up on my last response to see if you all have had a chance to look at it.

Also, I talked with our client and they’re happy to pay for support if that would allow us to get a faster response.

Thanks a ton and I hope you’re having a good week.

Hi Jonathan,
WP RSS Aggregator currently doesn’t have the ability to “track” an RSS feed so that they contain the same feed items. However, you can try approximating this functionality but using the “Update Interval” and “Delete old feed items” settings on the “Edit Feed Source” page, or by setting the equivalent global settings on the WP RSS Aggregator Settings page.

With a faster update interval (perhaps refreshing every hour?) and matching the “Delete old feed items” to how long the RSS feed in question keeps stories in it, you might get close to what you’re looking for.

Regarding support, we do offer premium email support for customers who purchase the add-ons at wprssaggregator.com.

Cheers

Thanks a ton for the help. Would you mind telling me exactly what you would put for the settings? The two that seem relevant are “Limit feed items by age” and “Feed processing interval”. Are those the two we should be looking at?

As for “Limit feed items by age”, what if each post in the RSS feed is in the future, such as the events we’re trying to list? Will they ever be deleted, even if we set it to 1 or 0 days?

Thanks again.