Maintained? Not tested w/last 3 MAJOR WP versions! Google News Lite DEPRECATED!!

  • www.ads-software.com reports:

    This plugin hasn’t been tested with the latest 3 major releases of WordPress. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.

    Also, Google deprecated its old RSS news feed URLs as of December 1, 2007. Here we are exactly two full months later and this plugin still hasn’t been updated to use the new format, breaking every site it’s used on.

    The most recent support thread before mine is two years old! In it, you say:

    Hey there!

    You can be safe knowing I’d never hold anyone ransom for a pro version to fix errors ??

    Except that appears to be exactly what you’re doing now, since the pro version has apparently been fixed for this yet the free version has not two months after Google’s announced-well-in-advance deadline.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
  • Thread Starter Joel MMCC

    (@joel-mmcc)

    Found a workaround for those using the Google News Lite widget and getting the “<b><i>This RSS feed URL is deprecated</i></b>” message from Google News as the first returned result.

    Basically, you have to replace all instances of “PROPER Google News Lite” widget with the “PROPER RSS” widget instead, and manually paste in the correct RSS URL. To get that, go to Google News, search for the string that was the “Keyword or phrase” of the PROPER Google News Lite widget, then when you see that feed being displayed, scroll to the footer and right-click on “RSS” (first item in the footer links) and Copy its URL or Link or Shortcut (depending on browser), then paste that into the PROPER RSS widget URL box. Set Title and other parameters as desired (un-check the “Blurbs” checkbox if you want it to look more like the PROPER Google News Lite widget and not take up more vertical space with usually redundant repeated text beside admittedly handy thumbnails of the featured photo or other image from the linked article).

    You have to repeat this process for each such widget in use. Or, better yet, PROPER could just fix their Google News Lite widget to use the new-format URLs. If you can’t wait for that, though, use this workaround or find another plugin (one that’s, er, PROPERly maintained).

    One difference with this workaround is that unlike PROPER Google News Lite, the PROPER RSS plugin will not display the source of the link, only the title. For instance, where PROPER Google News Lite might’ve displayed something like, “<b><i>Cool News Article Posted with Clever Headline</i></b> — <b><i>Example News Online</i></b>”, PROPER RSS would leave off the em dash and everything following it, leaving just “<b><i>Cool News Article Posted with Clever Headline</i></b>” and not mentioning which website the linked article came from.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
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