Full-Text RSS 3.9.6: PHP 7.4 compatible

Full-Text RSS version 3.9.6 is now available. Full-Text RSS is used by software developers and news enthusiasts to extract article content from news sites and blogs, and to convert RSS feeds that contain only extracts of stories to full-text feeds.

Existing customers can download the latest version through our customer login.

What’s changed in 3.9.6?

This is mainly a maintenance release. The new version is now compatible with PHP 7.4. You’ll find a full changelog at the end, but here are the main changes.

PHP 7.4 compatible

We removed code that was deprecated in PHP 7.4 and tested this release with PHP 7.4.

Server initialisation script for Ubuntu 20.04

Ubuntu 20.04 was released a few days ago. In this release we’ve added a server initialisation script for this version of Ubuntu. It’s a Puppet file called ubuntu-20.04.pp. The file should be run on a new instance of Ubuntu 20.04 and will install PHP 7.4, Apache, and all the required components for Full-Text RSS 3.9.6.

The easiest way to get Full-Text RSS set up on a new server with Ubuntu 20.04 is to log in to our customer portal and use the ‘Easy Install’ option next to Full-Text RSS.

If you’d like a somewhat more manual approach, you can initialise a new (please don’t run this on an existing server) VPS instance running Ubuntu 20.04 with the following commands:

apt-get -y install puppet
wget https://bitbucket.org/fivefilters/hosting/raw/master/ubuntu-20.04.pp
puppet apply ubuntu-20.04.pp

Full-Text RSS can now be extracted into the /var/www/html/ folder.

Full changelog

  • Compatible with PHP 7.4
  • New Puppet server initialisation script for Ubuntu 20.04 (ubuntu-20.04.pp)
  • HTML5-PHP library updated to version 2.7
  • SimplePie library updated to version 1.5.4
  • Minimum PHP version is now 5.6
  • Minor fixes