RSS Cloud Plugin on daveverse.org

[scotthansonde]

Via @scripting I found your post about your work on this plugin. I help Dave administer daveverse.org and wrote the theme and some plugins for it.

We tried to activate the original plugin at daveverse.org, which is hosted at wordpress.com. We couldn't get it to work. I suspect that wordpress.com is blocking access to port 5337. Since the plugin had not been updated in so long, I assumed it had been abandoned. I ended up writing a workaround as a plugin to ping rpc.rsscloud.io directly instead of setting up RSS Cloud endpoints in the WordPress site.

If you're looking for someone to try out this plugin, either at wordpress.com or on a self-hosted site, I'd be happy to help! 😃

[scripting]

@andrewshell -- scott works with me on various projects including the wordpress side of wordland.

he's offering to help make sure the rssclound stuff works with wordland on wordpress.

[andrewshell]

I have a diff of minor changes, including a fix for the port issue, off to @josephscott for review.

Here are the issues I'm addressing:

Adding support for https via port 443

I've done this in two places.

First, in the output of the cloud tag. This is a bug present on WordPress.com where if your site is https (which they all are) the cloud tag still says port 80 however POSTing to http redirects to https and doesn't pass through the POST causing an error response of "No feed for url1."

Second, if the subscriber is on https and submits port 443 as their port, we now send the pings to https. Currently, if you say you're using port 443 it fails with the error "Error testing notification URL. The URL returned HTTP status code: 400 - Bad Request."

Handle non-standard ports gracefully

The functions wp_safe_remote_get/post by default only allow ports 80, 443, and 8080 so instead of changing them to unsafe variations and losing the other protections I use a temporary http_allowed_safe_ports filter to approve the port the subscriber is expecting to be pinged on.

Right now, if you submit a port (like 1337) you get an error back "Error testing notification URL : A valid URL was not provided."

For instance, Dave's River4/5 software runs on port 1337 by default and in my logs I'm also seeing subscribers on port 1414.

Minor updates

• Escaping and sanitizing submitted values
• Adding direct access guards to PHP files
• Changing URL in readme.txt from rsscloud.org to rsscloud.co