However, in some cases you may have multiple blogs on the same domain and wish to allow these posts. Currently there is no user interface setting for this, although we will add that in a future release. In the meantime, you can allow posts from your own domain by editing autoblogged.php.

To do this, open autoblogged.php in a text editor and search for this line:

define(“ALLOW_OWN_DOMAIN”, false);

and change it to this:

define(“ALLOW_OWN_DOMAIN”, true);

Once this file is updated, AutoBlogged will not try to skip posts from your own domain. Note that if you make this change, you will need to edit autoblogged.php every time you update the plugin.

WordPress by default uses UTF8 for creating posts, but MySQL may be configured to use another character set, such as latin1. This can cause special characters to display incorrectly and in some cases can also prevent AutoBlogged from identifying duplicate posts.

AutoBlogged version 2.7 and later will show character set information for WordPress, MySQL, and your web server. To view this, go to the AutoBlogged support page in WordPress and click on the View AutoBlogged Diagnostics link.  At the bottom of the pop up screen you should see something like this

Character Sets

WordPress:
DB_CHARSET: utf8
DB_COLLATE:
wp_posts table: latin1

MySQL:
character_set_client: utf8
character_set_connection: utf8
character_set_database: latin1
character_set_filesystem: binary
character_set_results: utf8
character_set_server: latin1
character_set_system: utf8
character_sets_dir: /usr/share/mysql/charsets/

Web Server:
HTTP_ACCEPT_CHARSET: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
default_charset:

Notice that the wp_posts table shows that is is using the latin1 character set, but WordPress is using the DB_CHARSET utf8.  Since these two character sets do not match,  you will likely run into problems.

Here are the steps to fix this problem:

1. Before you do anything, be sure to backup your database! The following steps do have a high risk of corrupting all of your posts.

2. Try installing and running the Convert WP Database to UTF-8 plugin.

3. If this does not fix your problem, check the results in the diagnostics above and work with your web hosting company (or server administrator) to resolve any conflicts.

4. If none of these steps, help, you may be able to use the UTF8 Sanitize plugin as a workaround.

Problem
The issue is caused because when MySQL is running in strict SQL mode, MySQL raises an error when a default value is not provided but TEXT data types don’t support default values. This is a MySQL bug documented at http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=47901. On some Windows configurations, MySQL runs in strict SQL mode by default.

The value of sql-node can be checked with the following commands:

SELECT @@GLOBAL.sql_mode;

SELECT @@SESSION.sql_mode;

Solution
To change the SQL mode in Windows, you need to edit your my.ini file. To do this, open my.ini in a text editor and find this line:

sql-mode="STRICT_TRANS_TABLES,NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION"

Change the value to this:

sql-mode="NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION"

If this line does not exist can add it under the [mysqld] section of the my.ini file.

However, if you only pull content from trusted sources, you can configure AutoBlogged to allow certain tags. This is useful, for example, to include content such as videos embedded using the OBJECT tag.

To include these tags, you need to open autoblogged.php in a text editor and search for this code block:

define("ALLOW_OBJECT_AND_EMBED_TAGS", false);  // Allows object, embed, param
define("ALLOW_FORM_TAGS", false);  // Allows form, input
define("ALLOW_FRAME_TAGS", false); // Allows frame, iframe, frameset
define("ALLOW_SCRIPT_TAGS", false); // Allows class, expr, script, noscript...

These settings allow you to include specific sets of tags by changing the false to true. For example, if you want to include videos that use the OBJECT or EMBED tags, change the first line to this:

define("ALLOW_OBJECT_AND_EMBED_TAGS", true);  // Allows object, embed, param

After editing these settings, save the file and upload the changes to your server.

It is important to note that if you use the %excerpt% variable in your post template, these settings will have no effect. This is because the %excerpt% variable is simply a text-only excerpt of the content. If you wish to include these HTML tags, you should use other variables such as %content%, %description%, or %content:encoded%, depending on how your feed is configured.  Note also that AutoBlogged may not automatically recognize certain embedded videos, so the %video% variable may not work properly.

Right below this section there are also two other related settings:

// This turns off all HTML tag and attribute filtering.
define("ALLOW_ALL_TAGS", false);

If you set this value to true, all HTML tags will be included in each post. We certainly do not recommend this setting.

// Set the next line to true if you want HTML tags encoded rather than stripped out
define("ENCODE_INSTEAD_OF_STRIP", false);

This setting will include all HTML tags, but will encode these tags to deactivate them. Encoded HTML will display as part of the content. This is useful, for example, when the content contains unencoded code samples.

AutoBlogged automatically adds the custom fields image and thumbnail that contain the HTML IMG tag to display the image. However, some themes or thumbnail plugins also uses this custom field but expect it to contain a relative path to the image file.

For example, the image custom field might contain something like this:

<img src=”http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/xxxxxxxxxx.jpg” />

But your theme expects to see something like this:

/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/xxxxxxxxxx.jpg

Using the AutoBlogged custom fields feature you can easily change the format of the image or thumbnail custom fields to provide the image format you need. You may need to review the documentation for the theme or script to determine which custom field name it is looking for and how it wants image paths formatted.

Using Custom Fields

Depending on how your theme or thumbnail script expects to see the image path, you can use different custom field settings. Below are the three most common cases we see.

Note that depending on your theme or script, you may need to use a different custom field name such as Image, Thumbnail, etc. Keep in mind that in WordPress, case is important so a field named image is not the same as one named Image.

1. The script expects a full HTTP URL to the image

Set up a custom field with these values:

Custom Field: image

Custom Field Value: %image_url%

2. The script expects a file path relative to your web root

First, check the feed setting Save local copies of all images in the feed and uncheck the setting Create local thumbnails for each image. Then set up a custom field with these values:

Custom Field: image

Custom Field Value: %image_path%

3. The script expects a file path relative to the WordPress uploads directory:

First, check the feed setting Save local copies of all images in the feed and uncheck the setting Create local thumbnails for each image.

Next, set up a search and replace with these values:

Search for: /wp-content/uploads/

Replace with:  /

Then set up a custom field with these values:

Custom Field: image

Custom Field Value: %image_path%

The Custom Field Value uses the same syntax as post templates, so you can use any variable that you would use there. Here are the image-related variables available:

%image% – The full HTML IMG tag to display an image, for example <img src=”http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2712/xxxxxxxx.jpg” />

%image_url% – The full URL to the image, for example http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2712/xxxxxxxx.jpg

%image_path% – The relative path to the image, normally useful only if you cache images locally, for example /wp-content/uploads/2010/02/xxxxx-150×93.jpg

%thumbnail% – The full HTML IMG tag to display the locally created image thumbnail, for example <img src=”http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/xxxxx-150×93.jpg” />

%thumbnail_url% – The full URL to the thumbnail, for example http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/xxxxx-150×93.jpg

%thumbnail_path% – The relative path to the thumbnail, normally useful only if you cache images locally, for example /wp-content/uploads/2010/02/xxxxx-150×93.jpg

If you come across any situations where you need to set up custom fields to get your theme or plugins to work correctly, we’d like to hear about them in the comments below.

Problem

In our research of this issue, we have determined that the entire post is intact when we pass it on to the WordPress API. The cutoff occurs during WordPress’ handling of the post. Although this is technically a WordPress issue, we do know that the problem is due to non-breaking spaces so we can just trim those off before we pass the post to WordPress. We will address this issue in our next AutoBlogged update.

In the meantime, however, we have identified a workaround that does fix this issue.

Solution

Until our next AutoBlogged update, you can use the following workaround to deal with this issue:

First, go into the settings for your feed and scroll to the Search and Replace section at the bottom of the page. In the Search for box, enter &nbsp; and in the Replace with box type a single space as shown below:

After you set up this search and replace, you need to modify your post template, replacing all instances of %excerpt% or %content% with %description%.

For example, your new post template may look like this:

<p>%description%</p>

%if:video%<p>%video%</p>%endif:video%
%if:thumbnail%<p>%thumbnail%</p>%endif:thumbnail%

[Read more here|Read the original here|Read more from the original source]
<a target="_blank" href="%link%" title="%title%">%title%</a>

After making these changes, you should no longer have issues with truncated posts.

By default, AutoBlogged uses the following post template:

<p>%excerpt%</p>
%if:video%<p>%video%</p>%endif:video%
%if:thumbnail%<p>%thumbnail%</p>%endif:thumbnail%
[Read more here|Read the original here|Read more from the original source|
Continued here|Read more|More here|View original post here|More|See more
here|See original here|Originally posted here|Here is the original post|See
the original post|The rest is here|Read the rest here|See the rest here|Go
here to read the rest|Go here to see the original|See the original post here
|Read the original post|Original post|Read the original|Link|Excerpt from|
View post|Visit link|Follow this link|Continue reading here|See the article
here|Read this article|Read more]:[<br />| ]
<a target="_blank" href="%link%" title="%title%">%title%</a>

To give all external links the nofollow tag, simply change the last line of the post template to the following:

<a target="_blank" href="%link%" title="%title%" rel="nofollow">%title%</a>

Note that there are a number of WordPress plugins that also allow to control nofollow tags across your entire blog.

To do this, create a new custom field named title (note that it is lower case). For the Custom Field Value, you can enter anything you want. What makes this feature so powerful is that you can use the full AutoBlogged Post Template syntax here to include variables, use random values, or even use conditional values.

Here are some examples:

If you have come up with any cool title templates, please comment below, we’d love to see what you have!

We have certified the Arthemia Premium theme for use with AutoBlogged and highly recommend it! You can see the Arthemia Premium theme in action at http://mspatchwatch.com.

AutoBlogged Integration

Arthemia Premium will automatically create a thumbnail for each post based on the value of the Image custom field as described in this article. AutoBlogged will automatically perform all these steps for you and create the Image custom field when it encounters an image in a post. The Arthemia theme will use this field to display post thumbnails if they exist.

Implementation Notes

• To use the auto thumbnail feature you must check the Save local copies of all images in the feed box under each feed’s settings.
• Under the Arthemia options page you must set the Thumbnail Assignment setting to Post Custom Field.
• The auto thumbnail feature currently only supports JPG images.
• Because the theme creates its own thumbnails you should remove %if:thumbnail%<p>%thumbnail%</p>%endif:thumbnail% from the post template.

Embedded Videos

The Arthemia theme currently only supports the automatic embedding of YouTube videos. If using an YouTube feed, you can take advantage of Arthemia’s built-in video support through AutoBlogged by creating a custom field in your feed settings named Video with the value %Video_URL%.  Note that if you do this, you should remove %if:video%<p>%video%</p>%endif:video% from your post template.

When browsing the tag options page, you see an error message like the following:

Warning: implode() [function.implode]: Invalid arguments passed in
/home/public_html/wp-content/plugins/AutoBlogged/ab-admin.php on line 762

This is an error introduced in a recent version of AutoBlogged and will be fixed in our next update. This error message has no impact on the operations of AutoBlogged and only shows because of an error trying to display tags that you have not set yet. You can safely ignore this message or follow one of the solutions below.

Solution

Although this error message does not affect the operation of AutoBlogged, you can make the error go away with one of the following solutions:

1. Enter a tag where it says Add new tag and click on the Add button.

2. Directly above the error message there is an X in a circle. Click on this X.

After either of these steps save your changes and you will no longer see the error message.