zFeeder: 2004 → 2026
zFeeder is a PHP RSS aggregator written by Andrei N. Besleaga, started in 2003 under the name zvonFeeds and renamed zFeeder for its 1.0 release. Hosted on SourceForge as project zvonnews (registered 27 June 2003), it reached version 1.6 on 25 April 2004, where development stopped. At a time when RSS came in several incompatible versions and there was no standard aggregator, zFeeder let any PHP page show someone else's feed content with a single include line. It stored subscriptions as OPML instead of a database — shared hosting rarely offered MySQL then — cached feeds to flat files, and rendered them through swappable templates. It spread through SourceForge, a three-page article (with cover-CD inclusion) in the German magazine INTERNET PROFESSIONELL in August 2004, and third-party modules for WordPress, PHP-Nuke, XHP and MovableType. By the author's own account, zFeeder ran on more than 20,000 websites over its lifetime — his own recollection, not an audited number. The project site eventually went offline; the SourceForge listing and the original source survive. It has now been rebuilt as zFeeder 2.0: the same architecture and the same feature set, on PHP 8.3, with the 2004-era security holes closed and each closure held open by a test. The full story is in docs/HISTORY.md; what 2.0 defends against is in docs/THREAT-MODEL.md.
Below, each pair sets a February 2004 screenshot — from the project's own shots.php, recovered from the Internet Archive — next to the same view in 2026.
What the 2026 column shows. Every image in it is a capture of the unmodified 1.6 code running on PHP 5.6 in 2026 against live feeds (old/screenshots/02-running-now-php56/). It is not a capture of the 2.0 rebuild. The rebuild exists and is what this repository contains; these images have not yet been retaken from it. The right-hand column therefore answers "does the 2004 code still run?" rather than "what does 2.0 look like?" — for the latter, open the live demo below, or run tools/run-e2e.sh and look in test-results/.
Admin panel
| 2004 | 2026 (1.6 code, PHP 5.6) |
|---|---|
 |  |
Add new feed. Same screen: a site URL for autodiscovery or a direct feed URL, plus the bookmarklet. Functionally unchanged in the PHP 5.6 run. The 2.0 rebuild keeps the same two entry paths and adds what 1.6 had no notion of: a CSRF token on the submission (src/Admin/Auth/Csrf.php) and an address guard that refuses loopback, private and link-local addresses on every redirect hop before anything is fetched (src/Fetch/UrlGuard.php).
| 2004 | 2026 (1.6 code, PHP 5.6) |
|---|---|
 |  |
Subscriptions list. Category selector and the position / subscribed / refresh-time / showed-news columns per channel, identical between 2004 and the 2026 run — the 2026 subscriptions shown here are live feeds (BBC, NYT, LWN, Phoronix, and others) substituted for the dead 2004 demo subscriptions, since the original feed URLs no longer resolve.
| 2004 | 2026 (1.6 code, PHP 5.6) |
|---|---|
 |  |
Config panel. General, feed and display options on one screen. In 1.6 saving this form rewrites config.php as executable PHP built from $_POST. The 2.0 rebuild replaces that file with data/config.json, written through an atomic-rename Config\ConfigWriter: there is no code path in src/ that writes PHP, and Security\S08ConfigIsNotPhpTest asserts it. The 44 options are defined once, in src/Config/Schema.php, and docs/CONFIGURATION.md is generated from it.
Output templates and demo pages
| 2004 | 2026 (1.6 code, PHP 5.6) |
|---|---|
 |  |
Categories, infojunkie template. demo_categories.php: a category menu with fold/unfold per channel. Same template, same behaviour, live 2026 feeds.
| 2004 | 2026 (1.6 code, PHP 5.6) |
|---|---|
 |  |
Three templates, one page. demo_multiple.php: three categories rendered with three different templates side by side, the pattern of including zFeeder more than once on the same page.
| 2004 | 2026 (1.6 code, PHP 5.6) |
|---|---|
 |  |
bluelogos with positioned layers. demo_positions.php: the default template combined with absolutely positioned layers on the page.
| 2004 | 2026 (1.6 code, PHP 5.6) |
|---|---|
 |  |
Frames aggregator. demo_frames.php: a sidebar-and-main-frame layout used as a standalone news reader, referenced from the 1.4 news item as "the aggregator." The 2.0 rebuild retires actual HTML frames and reproduces the layout with CSS grid, at /demos/aggregator on the live demo.
| 2004 | 2026 (1.6 code, PHP 5.6) |
|---|---|
 |  |
RiJ template. A pure-CSS template contributed by a user, one of the few 1.6 templates that came from outside the project rather than from the author.
| 2004 | 2026 (1.6 code, PHP 5.6) |
|---|---|
 |  |
simpleblue template. One of the plainer bundled layouts, shown here from the 2026 template gallery capture rather than from a dedicated demo page.
Links
- Live demo: <https://zfeeder.up.railway.app> — the 2.0 rebuild, with the administration panel in
read-only demonstration mode
- Source: <https://github.com/andreibesleaga/zfeeder>
- Original project: <https://sourceforge.net/projects/zvonnews/>