LinkShare AdMix and SEO Friendly Images plugins

If you are a LinkShare affiliate, there a great plugin called LinkShare AdMix that uses the RSS feeds of retailers you have partnered with to automatically insert posts of each item in the feed.  I had to do 2 things to get it to work:

  1. Line 111 of feedwordpress.php, I had to change $fwp_path = ‘feedwordpress’; to $fwp_path = ‘linkshare-admix’; because the code was not finding the install folder correctly.  Changing the folder name from “linkshare-admix” to “feedwordpress” may have worked too, but there is already a FeedWordpress plugin (which this plugin is based on) out there and should you need to install both for some reason, you don’t need them butting heads*.
  2. Be sure you copy the included Magpie RSS  files into your wp-includes folder to get everything to work right.

I noticed that the images the Linkshare feed was posting were not SEO’d – no alt or title tags.

Enter the SEO Friendly Images plugin which adds alt and title tags for you based on the posts title and keywords.  But it didn’t work.

Usually plugin problem lie in an incompatibility with another plugin, so I disabled a plugin one at a time to determine which one was causing the problem.

Guess what?  It was the LinkShare AdMix plugin.

I wondered if the original FeedWordpress plugin had the same problem, so I disabled the LinkShare AdMix plugin and installed the FeedWordpress plugin.  Same problem.  I remember seeing filters were called in the source code, so I searched for “filter” and found a commented paragraph about preserving the feed and not allowing other plugins to change it.  The 2 offending lines of code followed, and I promptly commented them out:

//add_filter(‘the_content’, ‘feedwordpress_preserve_syndicated_content’, -10000);
//add_filter(‘the_content’, ‘feedwordpress_restore_syndicated_content’, 10000);
Update: Yes, I totally missed the built-in option to “Expose sydicated posts to formatting filters” under Syndication options > Post & Links > Formatting >Formatting filters. *facepalm*  But this only works for the FeedWordpress plugin.  LinkShare AdMix plugin does not have this option, so you will need to comment out the 2 lines of code above to get it work with the SEO Friendly Images plugin.
Commenting out that code worked.  Just remember you will need to do this again when the Linkshare Admix plugin gets updated.
In the end, I think I will stick with FeedWordpress instead of LinkShare AdMix because I get more fine tune control and easier to add RSS feeds.
*I think installing both LinkShare AdMix and FeedWordpress would not workout because then need different versions of Magpie RSS.  Some recoding would be required to get them to play nice.