Timestamp shows "45 years ago" on all posts; published date not showing at all

Hi Denise,

Can you kindly give us the URL of the feed source so we can do testing? All our WordPress-generated RSS feeds are working perfectly.

Hi Mekku,

Thanks for your response.

First off… I just went into the site to grab the feed URLS and all the items on my aggregator page were gone. The feeds were still in the Feed Sources, but none of the feed items were being pulled in. That was disturbing. I tried fetching them again, but nothing came in. So I deleted all the feeds that were there and added 2 of them back in and now the items are showing, but still with no published date, and showing “45 years ago”. And… I just noticed that the Authors are not showing either, even though I definitely have the Show Author checkbox checked in my settings.

Here are 2 of the feeds.
https://ercoats.wpengine.com/puppieblog/feed/
https://ercoats.wpengine.com/softdev/feed/

Please note that is a development site, so the content is just junk, but the set up is the same as our soon-to-be-live-production site. I update plugins first on the dev site before I update them on production to make sure everything is ok. Since the 4.6 version of wp-rss-aggregator is not ok, at least for us, I haven’t updated the plugin on production. That is still running the 4.5.3 version, which is displaying the dates and authors fine.

The date and author information is there when I view the XML source of the feeds.

thanks,
Denise

Hi,

I today saw that there was a version 4.6.1 of the plug-in, so I installed it hoping it would fix my “45 years ago – no published date – no author” problem, but alas, it did not.

Denise

Hi Denise,

I just tried it on our server and the items came in fine with the correct dates, see the screenshot:
https://cloudup.com/c3hftQ0INUn

That leads me to think that it might be a server setup issue rather than a plugin issue. Have you tried the plugin on another server by any chance?

Feel free to use our own https://test.wprssaggregator.com

Hi Jean,

I’m sorry I didn’t reply sooner. The email with your response got caught in my spam filter.

I’m sorry if I was not clear in my original description of the problem. It is NOT that dates are not showing up in the Feed Items in the WP RSS Aggregator in my dashboard. They do show up there, as they do in the screenshot you sent. They (along with the authors’ names) are NOT showing up when I display the feeds using the SHORTCODE in a page. The short code is just:
[wp-rss-aggregator]. I just updated the plugin again to version 4.6.2, in hopes that that would fix the issue, but it didn’t

I am also using the WP RSS Aggregator – Excerpts and Thumbnails add-on. I have version 1.6.7 of that running.

Here’s a screenshot of what the page that has the shortcode looks like:
https://bit.ly/1sW6uzM

My site is running on WPEngine, so I don’t have control over the server. As I noted before this was a problem that only showed up with version 4.6 of WP RSS Aggregator. I have version 4.5.3 running on my production site and it displays the feeds, via the same shortcode beautifully.

I’m sorry, but I don’t really think this resolved.

thanks,
Denise

Hi Denise,

I’ve tested it again and gotten correct results, so I’m not sure what the issue is here. My website is on WP Engine as well. Could you try resetting the settings through the Debugging page? RSS Aggregator > Debugging.

Here is my output: https://cloudup.com/it8IAuf8HCt

The versions of the plugins are the same as yours.

Hi Jean,

I have reset the settings and deleted and reimported the feeds and I get the same result. boo.
Here’s a screen shot that shows the page with the shortcode after I did that. I also included what the page with the shortcode on our production site, which has WP RSS Aggregator version 5.4.3 running, looks like (which is the way it should):
https://bit.ly/1rnWJoo

Also here’s the output of the system info, from the Debugging page…from the test site (the problematic one):
https://bit.ly/1rnWVE2

I compared the system info with that of our production install, and it’s exactly the same except for the versions of WP RSS Aggregator AND WP RSS Aggregator – Excerpts and Thumbnails. The test site is running version 1.6.7 of the Excerpts and Thumbnails, and the prod is running 1.8.1. Our test site is not presenting me with the option to update to version 1.8.1. I would update it if I had the option. I actually don’t recall updating to 1.8.1 on prod.. I generally don’t update a plugin on prod until I’ve updated it on test and it works ok. That’s why I haven’t yet updated WP RSS Aggregator on prod.

The plug-in is generally great and your attention to support is great too… just hope we can figure this out.

thanks,
Denise

Hi Denise,

Looks like we’re gonna have to take a look at your site directly. Can you contact us on [email protected] and provide login details to the site so we can check what is happening?

Thanks
Jean

Hi Jean,

As a last ditch effort before contacting you via email, I thought I would try deleting both the main plugin and the Excerpt and Thumbnails add-on and reinstalling them. I went back to the email I got when I purchased the add-on and re-downloaded the zip file… and I saw that it was up to version 1.8.3. So I de-activated the version I had installed (1.6.7) and just for the heck of it, it checked the page with the shortcode and found that the dates and authors were now showing up! So it seems that my issue was some conflict with the 1.6.7 version of the Excerpts and Thumbnails add-on and the 4.6+ version of the main plug-in. So I deleted version 1.6.7 and installed 1.8.3 and now everything thing is good. Here’s a screenshot: https://bit.ly/1w3E5d0

I have gone ahead and updated my production site to version 4.6.2 of WP RSS Aggregator, and everything looks good. The production site is still running 1.8.1 of the add-on. My dashboard did give me notification this morning that the 1.8.3 update was available so I clicked to update that too, but for some reason the update didn’t “take” and the add-on version is still at 1.8.1… everything is working, though. So for the time being I am leaving that alone, though I could update it manually with the zip file I downloaded.

Any idea why the add-on update presented automatically (on WPEngine) wouldn’t take?

But, the main thing is that my display issue is resolved. Yay!

Denise