WordPress RSS Feed Is Empty [Bug Fix]

Jul 22nd, 2008
Maruf scribbled this post.

I recently upgraded BrightCherry‘s wordpress version from 2.3 to 2.5. As soon as I did that I noticed our RSS feed stopped working. Hmm…strange.

I Googled around and I couldn’t find much on the issue. I found one discussion over at WordPress Trac; where someone else had also experienced the same issue.

However, I don’t know if it’s just me, but I found that discussion beyond difficult to digest. It’s formatted in such a weird way, and everyone is talking in riddles and out of sync. After having spent 30mins trying to work out what the contributors were talking about, I eventually managed to untangle their code and walk away with a fix.

The Problem
Certain rewrite rules were changed in the 2.5 version, so a lot of people that have their blog contained in a sub-dir are only likely to suffer from this problem. For example, if you’re blog is located in http://www.example.com, you should be fine. But if you’re blog is stored in htttp://www.example.com/blog/, you may suffer from this weird empty RSS feed condition.

I’m not entirely sure how wide spread this issue is, but it happened to us, and this is how I fixed it…

The Fix
I downloaded the complete WordPress 2.5 zip file again. I then modified rewrite.php
File location: wp-includes/rewrite.php

From line 809 – 814, you’ll need to modify the following:

From:

$default_feeds = array(

'.*wp-atom.php$'=>$this->index .'?feed=atom',

'.*wp-rdf.php$' => $this->index .'?feed=rdf',

'.*wp-rss.php$' => $this->index .'?feed=rss',

'.*wp-rss2.php$' => $this->index .'?feed=rss2',

'.*wp-feed.php$' => $this->index .'?feed=feed',

'.*wp-commentsrss2.php$' => $this->index . '?feed=rss2&withcomments=1');

[/pre]

To:
$default_feeds = array(

'.*/wp-atom.php$'=>$this->index .'?feed=atom',

'.*/wp-rdf.php$' => $this->index .'?feed=rdf',

'.*/wp-rss.php$' => $this->index .'?feed=rss',

'.*/wp-rss2.php$' => $this->index .'?feed=rss2',

'.*/wp-feed.php$' => $this->index .'?feed=feed',

'.*/wp-commentsrss2.php$' => $this->index . '?feed=rss2&withcomments=1');

[/pre]

The only change was the forward slash (/) after the *. See it? Good.
After that, I uploaded all the WordPress version 2.5 files again (including the newly modified rewrite.php file). Then I run /wp-admin/upgrade.php
Bingo! That seemed to fix the problem, and now our RSS feed is working once again.
Has anyone else suffered from this problem, and did this fix help? Let us know.
										

										
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