RSS Feeds Not Working

ventz’s “solution” is incorrect and will not work. WordPress does not have any “bug” with this section of code, and the feeds work fine. However, other things, such as plugins, can mess them up.

For those of you getting the “XML Parsing Error: xml declaration not at start of external entity” error, then you have the Blank Line problem.

Read this:
https://feedvalidator.org/docs/error/WPBlankLine.html

Thanks otto42 i have disable all plugins and it works

This is still not working for me. I’ve disabled all plug-ins one by one and checked all the files that the feed validator site recommends for extra spaces before or after tags.

I really don’t know what else to look for here. Any ideas?

Interesting.

With all of my plugins off, it does seem to work in Firefox but not in IE.

In IE I end up seeing the actual xml code.

After reactivating, I am seeing it work in Firefox still but unfortunately not IE.

(I’m using IE6)

I also did not find any blank spaces in my php files.

In IE6 I think you’ll always expect to see XML though, right? (RSS is XML) Been a while since I tried to look at a feed with IE6 …

ventz’s “solution” is incorrect and will not work. WordPress does not have any “bug” with this section of code, and the feeds work fine. However, other things, such as plugins, can mess them up.

I don’t agree with you Otto. I have all my plugins disabled, the only thing I have is a custom theme. This is the case on all of the blogs that we run for different faculty and staff at my work. The RSS/Atom feeds do not work under Firefox and Safari. I am not sure under IE as I haven’t personally checked. As soon as we commented out the <?xml line, everyone’s feeds started working. I understand what the bigger problem is, but I didn’t have time to look into it (about the blank lines before the xml declaration). This might not be a “nice” solution, but it is in fact A solution.

I don’t agree with you Otto.

It’s not a matter of agreement or not. His solution does not actually solve the problem at hand.

A feed is an XML document, and so the XML prefix is actually required.

Just because it works without it in some (note, not all) feedreaders does not mean that the problem has been solved. It may get you through some step somewhere, but it doesn’t fix it because your feed is still invalid after you do this.

Yes, you are right, but it’s a working “quick-fix” ?? I do plan on looking into it eventually though. I am assuming here:

<?php
/**
 * RSS2 Feed Template for displaying RSS2 Posts feed.
 *
 * @package WordPress
 */

header('Content-Type: text/xml; charset=' . get_option('blog_charset'), true);
$more = 1;

?>
<?php echo '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="'.   get_option('blog_charset').'"?'.'>'; ?>

Maybe it’s something in the header? I don’t have any plug-ins enabled and I am not sure what else could be putting the empty spaces.

CORRECTION: It’s not, I played with that file. It’s something else that’s calling that one.

Otto,

My apologies. After spending some time and really looking around I found out that it is my theme (beautiful_sunrise) that is doing the “breakage”. I will try to find out why/where and post back.

I Finally found the *real* problem (it was in the Theme).

So in the functions.php (in the Theme “Beautiful Sunrise” you have to find lines: “43”, “70”, and “71” (they are all blank) and remove them. Please find all 3 of them before you remove the 1st, as they will shift ??

This fixes it.

I am assuming that everyone else who has disabled their plugins and is STILL having a problem has the same type of problem with their theme — take a look inside that file. I found that to be a problem with 14 of our users — their functions.php file for their theme contained blank spaces between the <?php … ?> lines.

Yep. A theme, a plugin, your text editor when you edit the wp-config.php file… These are the most common causes of this problem.

Again, read this:
https://feedvalidator.org/docs/error/WPBlankLine.html

The main issue is that wordpress allows third party plugins to play around with the content of the rss feeds. Without a proper validation structure to be sure that the plugins in place are compatible with the current version of wordpress, you get all sorts of weird behaviors.

Basically, any time you have a problem, turn off ALL your plugins and try again, then re-add them one at a time until you find the one that is breaking your stuff.

I didn’t read through all of your posts, but just in case people are still having problems: I had the same problem. It was caused by a captcha plugin and probably my ftp program (I looked at the original file that I uploaded to the server and the garbage text was not there). Go through your files and make sure that there is no garbage text at the beginning of your files or wherever the error says the text is located.

It drove me crazy at first, because it only happened in Opera and I know for a fact that no changes were made to our files. Then, Google started rejecting all of our sitemap files that they had been successfully downloading for some time. I was literally about to start from scratch when I viewed the feed again after disabling the plugin. It was fixed!

My site seems to have the same error. can not read the feed from feedburner and so on.

https://feedburner.jp/fb/a/addfeed?sourceUrl=https://lumo.s67.coreserver.jp/wp/

here is my wordpress
https://lumo.s67.coreserver.jp/wp/

wp 2.51 JP

Thank god! Finding the blank lines and eliminating them fixed my feed. Thank you.