Patent Law

WordPress FeedBurner FeedSmith Plugin Test Results

By Erik J. Heels

A combination of plugins is causing the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin to break with WordPress 2.7.1 running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES release 4.

Here's what I know for certain:

1. The current combination of plugins I am using works without breaking FeedBurner's feed.
2. Enabling the Post-Plugin Library plugin broke my FeedBurner feed; disabling it fixed it.
3. Enabling the WordPress Database Backup plugin broke my FeedBurner feed; disabling it fixed it.
4. Your mileage may vary.

I was using 19 WordPress plugins. With 19 plugins, there are 19! (19 factorial) possible combinations of plugins, which is 121,645,100,408,832,000 combinations. If I tested one combination per second, then it would take me 3.9 billion years to test them all. I don't have that kind of spare time.

Other observations:

• Not all plugins behave nicely. Most are administered from the Settings menu, but Akismet is administered from the Plugins, and others from the Tools menu (e.g. Excerpt Editor).
• Excerpt Editor forgets its setting when you disable and then activate it. Excerpt Editor provides the "[click here to read more]" text on the home page so that the full text of each article is not displayed. This should be a built-in feature of WordPress.
• Everything appeared to be working after the last round of updates. Appearances can be deceiving.
• Plugin writers should have their version numbers mirror WordPress version numbers. So if you were using plugin version 2.6, then you'd know that it only works with WordPress 2.6 (and may not work with version 2.7).
• I need a blog platform that doesn't take 3.9 billion years to test.
• I decided not to activate a few plugins that I am no longer using (e.g. Collapsible Categories Widget).

Currently Active Plugins

Currently Suspect Plugins (Disabled)

Inactive Plugins

Full post as published by Erik J. Heels on March 16, 2009 (boomark / email).