What’s changed

Wordpress 2.6 compatibility: a bug that sometimes created multiple post revisions has been fixed.
Admin Interface: now looks and behaves like a WP2.6 interface
Ajax bugs: This one was particularly welcomed. The ajax elements on post write and edit pages failed to operate do to some incompatibility. Now fixed.
Formatting Filters: by default, Feedwordpress protects th original formatting of the source content. Now, we can disable this to allow the local Wordpress to apply whatever formatting and filtering it needs.
Tags: when Feedwordpress syndicates a post that has a category not available in the local blog, you can now elect to have that category created as a tag associated with th post.

There are more changes and additions, detailed at the Feedwordpress home page.

Why Feedwordpress?

Thre are a multitude of plugins available to do a similar job, but Feedwordpress has the edge for one particular function. It enables the additional insertion of Custom Fields to each syndicated post. The type and content of such fields are customisable uniquely for each source RSS feed.

This is useful for customised blog themes, such as this one. The SEO WebMonkey theme pulls details about each post from custom fields, and applies certain content and formatting rules based on those fields (the image associated with most posts, for example). For me the ability to add Custom Field content is hugely useful.

Grab Feedwordpress from the developer’s site, or the Wordpress plugin repository.