Getting started

Installation

About five minutes. You need a WordPress admin account and the plugin ZIP or folder. Before you start, confirm your server meets the requirements — in short: PHP 7.2+ and WordPress 4.0+.

1. Install the plugin

Pick whichever route matches how you got the plugin.

From a ZIP file

In WordPress admin, go to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin.
Choose rss-feed-post-generator-echo-free.zip and click Install Now.
Click Activate Plugin.

By uploading the folder

Unzip the archive locally.
Upload the whole rss-feed-post-generator-echo-free folder into wp-content/plugins/ over SFTP or your host's file manager.
Go to Plugins, find Echo RSS Feed Post Generator Free, and click Activate.

With WP-CLI

The --user flag is required

The plugin's activation hook calls current_user_can( 'activate_plugins' ), and WP-CLI runs with no logged-in user by default. A bare wp plugin activate fails with “You are not allowed to activate plugins!” and the plugin silently stays inactive.

wp plugin activate rss-feed-post-generator-echo-free --user=admin

Replace admin with any administrator's login, email or ID.

2. Confirm activation worked

Activation runs two checks and will refuse to proceed on an unsupported server: PHP below 5.6, or WordPress below 2.7. In both cases the plugin deactivates itself and prints a message.

If activation succeeded you will see a new top-level Echo RSS Feed Post Generator menu in the admin sidebar, with six entries:

Main Settings
RSS to Post Rules
Post to RSS Rules
Crawling Helper
Activity & Logging
Upgrade to Full Version

Only two entries showing?

If you can see just Main Settings and Upgrade to Full Version, the plugin's master switch is off. Open Main Settings, turn on the switch at the top (labelled Echo RSS Feed Post Generator Plugin – Main Switch), and click Save Settings. The other four entries appear immediately.

A first-time activation turns this switch on for you. It stays off only if a previous Echo install — including the paid edition, which shares the same echo_Main_Settings option — left it off. Activation never overwrites settings that already exist.

If the plugin's screens show a warning that the PHP cURL extension is unavailable, core RSS importing still works; only integrations that dial out through cURL are affected. Ask your host to enable ext-curl when convenient.

3. Check your server

Optional but recommended. Go to Echo RSS Feed Post Generator → Activity & Logging and read the System Info panel. Confirm:

PHP Version is 7.2 or higher.
PHP Memory Limit is 256M or more.
PHP Curl says it is available.
PHP DateTime Class is available — rule scheduling depends on it.

4. Turn on logging before your first run

Still in Main Settings, under Plugin Options:

Tick Enable Logging for Rules.
Tick Enable Detailed Logging for Rules.
Click Save Settings.

Logs are written to wp-content/echo_info.log and shown on the Activity & Logging screen. If your first import does not behave as expected, this is where the reason will be. You can turn detailed logging back off once things are running.

Updating this plugin

No automatic updates in this build

The update-checker/ library is bundled but never instantiated, so no update endpoint is configured and the Check for updates link does not appear. See Known documentation discrepancies.

To update: deactivate the plugin, replace the wp-content/plugins/rss-feed-post-generator-echo-free folder with the new version, and reactivate. Your settings and rules live in the database and survive the swap.

Uninstalling

Deactivating clears the plugin's scheduled cron events (echoaction and echoactionclear) and resets the running-rules list. It does not delete your settings, your rules, or any posts that were already imported.

Deleting the plugin leaves the echo_Main_Settings and echo_rules_list options in the database, so reinstalling later restores your configuration.

You are installed. Run your first import — about ten minutes to real posts.