With the introduction of Zend Framework 1.10, Zend_Feed_Reader's handling of retrieving Authors and Contributors was changed, introducing a break in backwards compatibility. This change was an effort to harmonise the treatment of such data across the RSS and Atom classes of the component and enable the return of Author and Contributor data in more accessible, usable and detailed form. It also rectifies an error in that it was assumed any author element referred to a name. In RSS this is incorrect as an author element is actually only required to provide an email address. In addition, the original implementation applied its RSS limits to Atom feeds significantly reducing the usefulness of the parser with that format.

The change means that methods like getAuthors() and getContributors no longer return a simple array of strings parsed from the relevant RSS and Atom elements. Instead, the return value is an ArrayObject subclass called Zend_Feed_Reader_Collection_Author which simulates an iterable multidimensional array of Authors. Each member of this object will be a simple array with three potential keys (as the source data permits). These include: name, email and uri.

The original behaviour of such methods would have returned a simple array of strings, each string attempting to present a single name, but in reality this was unreliable since there is no rule governing the format of RSS Author strings.

The simplest method of simulating the original behaviour of these methods is to use the Zend_Feed_Reader_Collection_Author's getValues() which also returns a simple array of strings representing the "most relevant data", for authors presumed to be their name. Each value in the resulting array is derived from the "name" value attached to each Author (if present). In most cases this simple change is easy to apply as demonstrated below.

/**
 * Before 1.10
 */
$feed = Zend_Feed_Reader::import('http://example.com/feed');
$authors = $feed->getAuthors();

/**
 * With 1.10
 */
$feed = Zend_Feed_Reader::import('http://example.com/feed');
$authors = $feed->getAuthors()->getValues();