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Wpematico make me feed good 2. 12

It’s been a while since Make Me Feed Good had a major update — and when it came, it came hard.

Version 2.12 fixes deep-rooted issues that were silently breaking feeds on modern websites, overhauls the Test Area experience from the ground up, tightens security throughout the plugin, and rewrites the entire documentation in the Help tab. This is not a routine patch. If you use Make Me Feed Good, you want this update.

🐛 What Was Broken — and Why

Feeds returning empty items on modern sites

The most impactful fix in this release. Modern websites serve HTML compressed with gzip. The old fetcher wasn’t announcing support for compressed responses, so some servers would cooperate and send uncompressed HTML — but many modern servers compress regardless, sending back raw binary gzip bytes. simple_html_dom would try to parse binary garbage and find zero elements. The feed appeared to work, but every item came back empty.

Fix: The fetcher now sets CURLOPT_ENCODING => '', which tells cURL to advertise and automatically decode gzip, deflate, and brotli responses. The HTML arrives clean, and the parser finds everything it should.

Failed fetches cached as permanent failures

When a fetch failed — timeout, server error, anything — the empty result was cached in a transient. The feed stayed broken until the TTL expired (default: 1 hour), with no way to auto-recover. Every request during that window served a broken feed.

Fix: Failed responses are no longer cached. If the fetch fails, the next request tries again from scratch. The feed also now returns a valid RSS document with a "Feed temporarily unavailable." message on error, instead of broken XML.

Test Area always double-fetching

The Test Area popup and the RSS template were using different transient cache keys — so they never shared cached content. Every Test Area run triggered a fresh fetch, regardless of what was already in cache.

Fix: Both use md5('mmf_' . $mmf_URL . $post_id) as the canonical key. Cache is now shared correctly.

Inspector nonce never actually checked

The nonce verification logic in the Inspector was inverted — it always passed, meaning the security check was effectively bypassed.

Fix: Nonce is now verified correctly on every Inspector request.

✨ Improvements

Modern HTTP User-Agent. The fetcher now sends a Chrome 124 UA string, matching what a real browser sends. This fixes sites that block outdated or non-browser user agents. Filterable via the mmf_curl_user_agent hook if you need to override it per-use.

Better HTTP headers. Accept and Accept-Language headers are now included in feed fetch requests, reducing the chance of servers responding with errors or unexpected content.

Increased fetch timeout. From 20s to 30s — helps with slower servers that were timing out unnecessarily.

Inspector and Test Area now use mmf_curl_request(). Both tools inherit all fetcher improvements automatically, including gzip decoding and the modern UA.

Charset normalization. If the source site is served in ISO-8859-1 or Windows-1252, the Inspector and Test Area now convert to UTF-8 before display. No more garbled ñ, ó, or á characters when inspecting non-English sites.

🎨 UI / UX

Test Area — completely redesigned

Wpematico make me feed good 2. 12 — the biggest update in years 🛠️ - imagefwhkhper1778340972

The Test Area popup has been rebuilt from scratch. The new design shows:

  • Numbered item cards — each result gets its own card
  • URL shown below the title — so you can see exactly what link was extracted
  • Item count summary bar — how many items were found, at a glance
  • Distinct error state (red) and no-results state (yellow) — clear visual feedback when something is wrong vs. when the selector just doesn’t match anything

This makes debugging a broken selector significantly faster.

Feed editor improvements

  • Human-readable TTL values — the Cache TTL fields now display a live equivalent as you type (e.g. “≈ 1 hour”, “≈ 7 days”). No more mental math.
  • New “Advanced Settings” metabox — a dedicated side panel with a “Deactivate scripts in Inspector” option. Use this when the Inspector popup shows a black screen or unexpected overlays on the source site (common with React, Next.js, and other JS-heavy sites).
  • Publish metabox cleanup — “Publish immediately” row is now hidden, since it doesn’t apply to feed CPTs. The Preview button remains to access the public RSS feed URL.
  • Test Area button moved to its own full-width row above the Publish/Trash area — easier to find.
  • Input widths fixed in the Cache and HTTP Authentication side metaboxes.

🔒 Security

  • Missing esc_attr(), esc_url(), esc_html() and esc_js() on multiple admin output fields — fixed
  • Source URL (mmf_URL) now saved with esc_url_raw() sanitization
  • HTTP Authentication user and password fields now sanitized with sanitize_text_field()
  • CSS selector fields now sanitized with sanitize_text_field()
  • CSS selector fields with attribute selectors containing quotes (e.g. a[href^="/path/"]) were being truncated on reload — missing esc_attr() on the input value — fixed
  • A spurious external-link icon was appearing next to CSS selector fields, using the selector text as an href (always invalid) — removed

📖 Documentation

The Help tab inside the feed editor has been completely rewritten. The tutorial now uses wpematico.com/blog as a live working example, walks through the Inspector-first workflow, explains how Permalink and Title selectors work independently, and covers both Full Content usage scenarios (with and without the addon active).

The Cache, Publish Preview, and Main URL Options help tabs have also been updated with improved descriptions and fixed typos.

Who Should Update

Everyone using Make Me Feed Good. Especially if:

  • Your feeds are returning empty items on some sites
  • You’re scraping modern sites (news, blogs, forums) that use gzip compression
  • You use the Inspector or Test Area for setup and debugging
  • You need to scrape sites with non-Latin character sets

If you have an active license, the update is available now in your WordPress dashboard.

👉 Get WPeMatico Make Me Feed Good 2.12 now.

Make Me Feed Good is included in these memberships:

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