Ever wonder about why people like me continually rave about the wonders of open source software? One reason is because bugs get fixed really fast. Witness some of the security flaws in Firefox which were reported recently and patched within a few days.
Here is a more personal example. I had been having a problem with the RSS feeds for this blog. Some aggregators worked just fine. Others worked occasionally. Some, like Bloglines and Thunderbird, either refused to recognize when new articles had been posted or gave an error message that the feed was not valid.
Feedvalidator identified the cause, a 304 header (content not modified [recently]) that was confusing some aggregators.
Google located the workaround, posted just two days ago by jrconlin in Mosquito, WordPress’ Mantis bug tracking system.
From the Mosquito issue:
Several popular RSS aggregators (Sage for example) currently don’t handle 304’s correctly. Instead, they report a URL error and toss out the previously gathered content. I’ve filed a like bug with that team, but since I have plenty of bandwidth to burn, I’ve made the 304 report optional:
// wp-blog-header.php
//Line:136
if (!DISPLAY_OLD_CONTENT) { //-- jrc
if ( ($client_last_modified && $client_etag) ?
// ...
header('HTTP/1.x 304 Not Modified');
exit;
}
}
} //Line: 152 --jrc
}DISPLAY_OLD_CONTENT is defined in wp-config.php so I can re-enable it in the future.
WordPress 1.5.1 was released ten days ago with a bug. The workaround was publicly reported eight days later. Two days after that, I needed the fix and was able to find it. Patching my WordPress code took way less time that it is taking to write this article.
Yes, I had to be a bit geeky to figure all of this out. The point is that it was possible.
