Conflict with WordPress SEO

Hi, this is still causing problems. My sitemaps (generated fine using WordPress SEO by Yoast) keep breaking unless I disable this plugin, and are thus sabotaging our chances on the search engine results.

mugwumpman we are also in the same boat. Our Churchope theme comes with WordPress SEO, or at least I believe it did. Anyway, I had followed your steps you posted earlier and was able to get a sitemap index, but our podcast feed is not working. The theme introduced its own sermons feature well after we had been using Sermon Manager for some time.
I have read about and applied the recommendation of excluding those post types and taxonomy from the Sitemap. I made sure to check that all post types have a category, even if we don’t use them.
So we currently don’t know if it’s the new version or SM4WP 1.9.4 or WP 4.2.1 or both that’s causing the podcast feed issues.

The feed use to have links to the posts as well as all media files. Now only 2 media files appear, and just the last 10 post items. Our iTunes podcast also backs this up, too.

Due to podcasting being much more valuable to us than SEO, we restored our plugins to a previous working state.

Hi all –

Ran into the same issues with the Sermon Manager plugin while using the WordPress SEO plugin. Was trying to generate a sitemap XML file for Google, and was constantly getting the error:

ERROR: This is not a valid feed template.

Turns out the problem is that the sermon manager plugin has a bad rewrite declaration in the code of the following file:

…/plugins/sermon-manager-for-wordpress/includes/podcast-functions.php

specifically, lines 132-139:

131 // Custom rewrite for podcast feed
132 function wpfc_sermon_podcast_feed_rewrite($wp_rewrite) {
133         $feed_rules = array(
134                 'feed/(.+)' => 'index.php?feed=' . $wp_rewrite->preg_index(1),
135                 '(.+).xml' => 'index.php?feed='. $wp_rewrite->preg_index(1)
136         );
137         $wp_rewrite->rules = $feed_rules + $wp_rewrite->rules;
138 }
139 add_filter('generate_rewrite_rules', 'wpfc_sermon_podcast_feed_rewrite');

The problem is that the rewrite specified on line 135 basically takes over ALL files with an XML extension, which is definitely not right. Personally, I’ve disabled this code on at least one of the sites we manage, as the SEO functionality outweighs a podcast feed.

For a permanent fix, I’d suggest that the plugin should have a hard-set prefix for it’s own podcast XML files? For instance, changing lines 134-135 to be something like:

134                 'feed/smpodcast-(.+)' => 'index.php?feed=' . $wp_rewrite->preg_index(1),
135                 'smpodcast-(.+).xml' => 'index.php?feed='. $wp_rewrite->preg_index(1)

So that it doesn’t interfere with other XML feed files or declarations that people might use… but I’ll leave the choice on that approach vs. another up to the plugin author.

For now, you can also solve this issue by commenting out line 139 (that activates the XML filter being declared), and then re-saving your permalink settings in WordPress.

Hope that helps!
twykr

Nice one, thanks twykr!