How to Improve FeedWordpress

FeedWordPress is the best free plugin to syndicate posts from WordPress RSS feeds. Syndication is not the best practice, but it suits the needs of a client and their site network.

However, there is some minor issues. There is no built in duplicate post detection. This can create a mess when syndicating multiple feeds that may contain the same posts. Also, a default category is not assigned to posts if there is no matching category on your site. Place the below filter in your themes functions.php file to correct these issues.

/**
 * FeedWordPress - Detect duplicates and prepare the syndicated post.
 *
 * @param array $post
 * @param SyndicatedPost $syndicatedpost
 * @return array|null
 */
add_filter('syndicated_post', function (array $post, SyndicatedPost $syndicatedpost) {

    // --- Duplicate Detection

    if (!$syndicatedpost->fresh_content_is_update()) {
        global $wpdb;

        $duplicate_post = $wpdb->get_row($wpdb->prepare("
            SELECT ID FROM $wpdb->posts
            WHERE post_status = 'publish' AND post_type = 'post' AND post_title = %s
            AND ( post_date BETWEEN DATE_SUB( %s, INTERVAL 2 HOUR ) AND DATE_ADD( %s, INTERVAL 1 HOUR ) )
            LIMIT 1
        ", [
            $post[ 'post_title' ],
            $post[ 'post_date' ],
            $post[ 'post_date' ]
        ]));

        // Is it a duplicate post?
        if (!empty($duplicate_post)) {
            return null;
        }
    }

    // --- Prepare Syndicated Post

    // Assign the default category when a post has no categories.
    // No idea why FeedWordPress doesn't do this by default.
    if (empty($post[ 'tax_input' ][ 'category' ])) {
        $post[ 'tax_input' ][ 'category' ][] = intval(get_option('default_category'));
    }

    // Syndicated posts will include a 'read more' from the source site at the
    // end of their excerpts. Strip that out.
    $post[ 'post_excerpt' ] = preg_replace("/(&hellip;|&#8230;) <a href=.+<\/a>/", '', $post[ 'post_excerpt' ]);
    $post[ 'post_excerpt' ] = preg_replace("/\\[&hellip;\\]/", '', $post[ 'post_excerpt' ]);
    $post[ 'post_excerpt' ] = trim($post[ 'post_excerpt' ]);

    return $post;
}, 10, 2);

Lastly, we don’t want search engines to index these articles, they aren’t original content on our site. I also make use of Yoast WordPress SEO, we’ll use that to our advantage.

/**
 * Yoast WordPress SEO - Hide Syndicated Posts, and Sign Up form from Search Engines.
 *
 * @return void
 */
add_action('template_redirect', function (): void {
    if (!function_exists('YoastSEO')) {
        return;
    }

    $noindex = false;

    // Don't index Syndicated posts from FeedWordpress
    $is_syndicated = false;
    if (function_exists('is_syndicated')) {
        $is_syndicated = is_syndicated();
    }

    if (is_single() && $is_syndicated) {
        $noindex = true;
    }

    if ($noindex) {
        add_filter('wpseo_robots_array', [ YoastSEO()->helpers->robots, 'set_robots_no_index' ], 10, 2);
    }
});