FAQ

Is Airwave free?

Lite is, and it is not a trial — three feeds, one published channel, RSS output, the renderer, the reference tag, the Feed field and the console commands, for nothing. Pro is a one-off $59 with a $29/year renewal.

What is the difference between Lite and Pro?

Lite covers reading feeds and publishing one. Pro removes the feed and channel limits, adds Atom and JSON Feed output, and adds the things you need once you are curating rather than embedding: filters, importing items as entries, full article content, merged multi-feed streams, per-feed refresh intervals, link rewriting and object templates. See Installation for the table.

What happens if my licence lapses?

Nothing breaks and nothing is deleted. Airwave downgrades on the way out: full content serves as summaries, an Atom channel serves RSS, a merged stream serves its first feed. The control panel refuses to save new Pro configuration, but never 404s a URL that has been in subscription lists for a year. Renewing restores exactly what was there.

Does it read Atom and JSON Feed, or only RSS?

All of them — RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0 (RDF), Atom 1.0 and JSON Feed — and it sniffs the document rather than trusting the file extension or the Content-Type, because feeds are served as text/html more often than anyone would like. Everything becomes one internal item shape, so nothing downstream ever asks which dialect it came from.

Can it publish a feed as well as read one?

Yes, and that is the half most feed plugins do not have. A channel publishes RSS, Atom or JSON Feed from any element query — or from the items Airwave has already collected, which is how you publish a curated feed without writing a template.

I am moving off WordPress and I miss Feedzy's shortcode.

Paste {airwave:craft-news:render} into any rich-text field. Craft parses reference tags before the value reaches your template, so it works in CKEditor, Redactor or a plain HTML field with no template changes and no per-editor integration.

Will a slow or broken feed slow down my site?

No. A feed that has never been fetched is read inline once, so the first page load is not empty; after that a stale feed queues a background job and the page renders from what is stored. And if a fetch fails, the stored items stay and keep rendering — a failed refresh never empties a feed.

Is it safe to let editors add feed URLs?

That is what the SSRF guard is for. Airwave resolves every host and refuses private and reserved addresses, and re-validates every hop of a redirect chain, because an open redirect on a public host walks straight past a check that only looks at the URL somebody typed. Allowing private network fetches is a site-wide setting that is off by default.

Is feed HTML sanitised?

Yes, and there is no way around it. Every item goes through HTML Purifier before it can reach a page, and aggregated items are purified again on the way out of a channel — republishing somebody else's markup under your own domain deserves the second pass. Images, links, headings, lists and video embeds are allowed; forms, style blocks, scripts and colliding id attributes are not.

Can I import feed items as real entries?

On Pro, yes. Map item fields onto your entry type's fields with tokens or Twig, preview what would happen, and run it. Nothing is ever imported twice: dedupe is by the record of this item became that entry, so it survives renaming, moving or editing the entry — and deleting the entry does not invite the article back.

Does importing put things straight on my live site?

Only if you tell it to. New entries can arrive disabled, importing is a separate permission from adding a feed, and Show what would be imported writes nothing.

Can I change the markup?

Completely. Put your own template at templates/_airwave/items.twig and Airwave uses it, or skip the renderer and loop over craft.airwave.items() yourself. The shipped stylesheet sets layout and nothing else — no colours, no fonts — so an unmodified feed still looks like the page it is on.

Where are the items stored?

In their own table, not as elements. A feed republished hourly for a year is around 9,000 rows that nobody edits, searches, relates, revises or restores; giving each one an element row, a per-site row and a search index entry would buy nothing and cost a great deal. Items that become entries get real elements — that is what importing is.

How often do feeds refresh?

Hourly by default, per feed on Pro. You can turn front-end refreshing off entirely and drive it from cron with php craft airwave/feeds/refresh --due, which respects each feed's own interval rather than replacing it with the crontab's.

Does it work on a multi-site install?

Yes. Feeds and channels are not localized — a feed is the same feed on every site — but a channel carries a target site, which is the site whose content it broadcasts. That is a different thing from the site it is served from, and it is the setting to check if a second site's feed shows the wrong content.

What are the requirements?

Craft CMS 5.3+, PHP 8.2+, and the standard simplexml, json, libxml and mbstring extensions. There is no feed-parsing library to install.