Feed Broken

My feed is also broken. It was working just fine yesterday and today it is not.

You can see the error on both headlinepolitics.com and thepoliticalinsider.com

Same problem here… I tried other IDs and none of them worked. Is it a problem on the Facebook end?

Go into /wp-includes/feed.php and look around line 532 for:
$feed = new SimplePie();
Add this line immediately after:
$feed->force_feed(true);

Facebook screwed up the MIME-type of the feeds, sending them as “application/xhtml+xml”
They very likely boogered it up on purpose, with the express intent to foul up rss grabbers such as SimplePie.

No! Never, ever, edit WordPress core scripts. And do not encourage others to do so. Editing core scripts can bring down your entire site and/or open security holes for hackers to use.

I agree, I would rather not muck around in /wp-includes.

Can this be done any other way? Like in functions.php of the theme or something? Or by editing the plugin code?

Not that I’m aware of. One of the issues that is being faced by FB plugin developers is that FB are constantly moving the goalposts – continually breaking plugins and making it difficult to those plugins to be continually maintained. That said, are there any similar plugins that you could try instead?

The “other way” would be informing SimplePie that their RSS reader is too damn picky, or sit back for an indeterminate amount of time and wait for FB to fix the feed MIME-type, while explaining to clients that Facebook did it and it can’t be fixed until Facebook fixes it.

Alternately, it should be possible to bypass WP’s obfuscation of SimplePie’s too-damn-picky parser, and redo the entire way FBF Facebook Feed Widget fetches and processes RSS.

Or, just add a single line to a core file.

This is exactly why I always discourage throwing social network feeds into websites: They break all the damn time.

We do not ever recommend edit core WordPress files.

Then please kindly forward the request to the wordpress devs to add that one line to feed.php in the next WP update.
SimplePie is unreliable without it, thus any plugin relying fetch_feed() is also unreliable.

Thanks.

Since the issue is a faulty MIME type at FB’s end, I don’t see any changes being made in WordPress core specifically to support this. The has been ongoing discussion in Trac about whether it would be possible to modify feed fetching but, thus far, I haven’t heard of any major changes planned.

OK thanks Esmi.

Does anyone know of a way to get a Facebook feed into a WP page/widget area then? I tried a couple other RSS plugins but got the same result.

The issue is that Facebook now include two “Content-Type” headers in their feed (which is quite legitimate according to W3C standards) and SimplePie only expects one. When there are two, the variable in SimplePie which should contain a single string actually contains an array of two strings.

I’m afraid I altered the SimplePie code to check whether the header was an array, and if so only to use the first one. This appears to be compatible with the W3C specification, which states that Content-Type headers must appear in the order in which they apply.

I judged that since SimplePie is common, any other feed it got which had multiple Content-Type headers would also fail, so it was justifiable to change the script to cope with that.

The Facebook feed now works fine.

I was having the same issue with BETTER RSS (it uses simplepie)

but noticed KB ADVANCED RSS WIDGET was working (uses magpie)

I replaced Better RSS with RSS SHORTCODE and it works fine.

So there are two viable options for you without having to alter any core code. Hope that helps.

Any hope for an update to the plugin to fix this?