FeedWordPress Duplicate Post Filter
A FeedWordPress syndicated post filter that checks for duplicates before posting items from your feeds.
The facts
- Active installs
- 100+
- Price
- Free
- Last updated
- 2 Mar 2012
- Added
- Apr 2008
- Requires WP
- 2.8
- Tested up to
- WP 3.3.2
- Downloads
- 42,176
Our analysis
AI-assistedFeedWordPress Duplicate Post Filter is a plugin designed to work with the FeedWordPress plugin. It aims to prevent duplicate posts from being added to your WordPress site by checking for identical content using SHA1 hash matching.
This filter is suitable for users of FeedWordPress who experience issues with duplicate posts. It processes potential posts from feeds and skips those that match an existing post's hash, although it may not catch all duplicates due to variations in HTML markup.
Best for: This plugin suits users of FeedWordPress who need to manage duplicate posts.
What it does well
- ✓Designed specifically for FeedWordPress users
- ✓Uses SHA1 hash matching to identify duplicates
- ✓Free to download from the WordPress.org directory
- ✓Active installation count of 100
Where it falls short
- •Only checks for future syndication posts, not existing duplicates
- •Not 100% accurate; may allow some duplicates to slip through
- •Last updated in March 2012, which may affect compatibility
Verdict
The plugin provides a basic solution for managing duplicates but has limitations in accuracy and scope. It may be useful for those specifically using FeedWordPress.
From the developer
Mark Allen's own description of FeedWordPress Duplicate Post Filter, lightly tidied.
This is a filter for the FeedWordPress plugin. If you don’t use FeedWordPress this plugin will not be useful to you.
I wrote this filter after seeing the same post in my database 32 times. Maybe you’ve had the same problem, and I hope this filter helps you solve it.
The filter works by hooking the “syndicated_post” action of FeedWordPress and the “save_post” action in the core of WordPress.
For each potential post from a feed, the plugin attempts to find an identical SHA1 hash of the first 1024 non-whitespace characters (stripped of HTML tags) of the post content.
If it finds a match the post is skipped. If not, the post is processed and a hash is inserted into the post’s metadata. (Stored as key _dpf.)
NOTE: No filter is going to be 100% accurate. This filter will stop most or some duplicates, but in all likelihood, will not stop all of them.
If you want a filter that stops all duplicates, this isn’t your solution. In my test installation I had 5 posted duplicates out of
125 syndicated posts (4% false negative) out of a corpus of about 300 duplicates. Most of those false negatives were due to slightly different HTML markup
in the post content itself. So my approach isn’t perfect, but it is “good enough” for me.
Important Note
This filter can only check future syndication posts. Whatever duplicates are already present in your WordPress installation you’ll have to remove/clean-up on your own.
License
Copyright (C) 2012 by Mark R. Allen
All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
- Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
- Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
- Neither the name of Mark Allen nor the names of any contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.