As an administrator for a WordPress MU install, I’ve been getting comments about the RSS feed in WordPress not fetching the latest feeds. The RSS feed information that appears on the page ranges from a fetch that is a few hours to a day old. I’ve confirmed this is an issue with 2.9. This is an issue for blogs that need to pull alerts from an RSS feed within a timely basis, e.g. every 10 minutes.
The workaround to this is to use the KB Advanced RSS feed plugin instead of the one that’s in WordPress. Replace the RSS Widget in Appearance ->Widgets with the “KB Advanced RSS” widget.
If you are using WordPress 2.8+ and want to set the cache to refresh more frequently, go to /wp-content/plugins/kb-advanced-rss-widget/versions/wp-2.8.php
Find this code:
// Regardless, we’ll flush the cache every hour. (WP should flush hourly on its own, though.)
$cachetime = get_option( $this->md5_option_ts );
if ( $cachetime < ( time() – 3600 ) ){
Change the 3600 to the number of seconds you want the cache to refresh. For instance, 600 for 10 minutes. The plugin uses its own RSS caching system.
I give this plugin 5 out of 5 stars. It works fine with WordPress 2.9.2 and WordPress 2.9.2 MU (even through the documentation states compatibility up to 2.8) Formatting options, conversion to UTF-8, reverse listing option, and well commented code.
References:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/kb-advanced-rss-widget/
