A couple of years ago I co-founded my first company and that has ended up taking a large portion of my time. As part of that, I’ve also released a new open-source project called CloudFusion (formerly Tarzan) that is beginning to take the Amazon Web Services and Cloud Computing world by storm. Geoffrey has spent a lot of time in school, building tools to help the HTML 5 community, and now has a gig working for Opera. There quite simply isn’t much time for SimplePie anymore — for either of us.

We’ve tried to build a community around SimplePie — one where people can help each other, provide tips and tricks, record screencasts, and eventually take over the development of the project. Parts of this were successful while other parts were not. Geoffrey and I have had the pleasure of working alongside some smart, talented people over the years including Ryan McCue, Michael Shipley, Steve Minutillo and many others, but for whatever reason we never developed enough steam to keep it all going despite Geoffrey and my best efforts and other commitments.

So effective immediately, we are ceasing development of SimplePie and shutting down the project. We will shortly be pushing all code to GitHub. The mailing list will continue to serve users for the time being, but my sincerest hope is that someone will take up the charge to fork SimplePie, fix all of its issues, and continue on with this project that’s been such a huge part of my life for the past 5 years.

I’ll be around for a few more weeks to help ease the transition to GitHub and whatever community springs up around that. I’ll probably continue to keep an eye on the mailing list and help where I can, but that doesn’t mean that I’ll be able to answer everyone’s questions. Geoffrey and I sincerely appreciate all of the users we’ve had over the years, the kind words, and all of the cool Amazon wishlist purchases that have shown up on our doorsteps over the years. I hope someone else will take up the mantle for the RSS/Atom/PHP community like SimplePie and MagpieRSS before it.

SimplePie 1.2 is now available. This release adds a few features that have been requested often, especially caching in MySQL (instead of on the filesystem) and the ability to autodetect more than one feed. Furthermore, a large number of bugs have been fixed, a mixture of low-priority bugs found throughout 1.1’s release-cycle, and a few larger bugs found after 1.1.3’s release.

However, it removes support for hosts that were affected by the libxml2 issue in SimplePie 1.1.1 and below that run PHP versions prior to 5.1.0 (this is as we have a new workaround, which does not subtly change the feed). As a result, any host with a version of libxml2 of 2.7.0 or above with less than PHP 5.1.0 will be broken by this release (however, I expect this accounts for around zero hosts, as I expect those with an up-to-date libxml2 release will equally have an up-to-date PHP release). This leaves our support at better than SimplePie 1.1.1, and (theoretically, at least) worse than 1.1.2 and 1.1.3. Needless to say, this release is API-compatible with previous 1.x releases, so it should be as simple as a drop-in replacement. Feel free to check out the release notes for more details.

The intention after 1.2’s release is to move almost all development work to SimplePie 2 (an announcement concerning that is forthcoming), and as such, lower-priority bug fixes will be accepted into future 1.2.x releases. However, as is the final non-bugfix release of SimplePie 1, regressions are unacceptable, so all patches will have be reviewed by at least one release manager (as of writing, myself and Ryan Parman) and one developer (as of writing, the two RMs and Ryan McCue). One person cannot fulfil both roles for one patch.

Finally, as has been previously announced, SimplePie 2 will require (some as-of-yet undecided version of) PHP 5, so SimplePie 1.2 forms the final feature-release with support for PHP 4. PHP 4, has, however, been unsupported since 2007, so please encourage your host to upgrade (likewise, PHP 5 versions prior to PHP 5.2.10 are unsupported)!

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That is all.

• Introduction to SimplePie — Ryan Parman gives you a solid once-over about setting up SimplePie, merging feeds together, auto-discovery, and a few other popular features.
• Adding RSS Content with SimplePie — Chris Coyier discusses more of the basics from another developer’s perspective.
• Quick Tip: Super SimplePie! — Niki Brown quickly shows you how to drop RSS content into an existing page.
• CodeIgniter and SimplePie — Elliot Haughin shows how to integrate SimplePie into your CodeIgniter projects.
• Extending SimplePie to Parse Unique RSS Feeds — Jeffrey Way dives a bit deeper and talks about how to extend SimplePie’s functionality while playing with a little jQuery.

You can find even more tips, tricks, tutorials, and screencasts in the SimplePie wiki.

That being said, we’ll be shutting down the SimplePie Live! service in the next couple of weeks. This will be the only notice we’ll provide (which probably isn’t a big deal because there are nearly zero users). Instead, I would recommend either using SimplePie (for PHP) or a service like Google AJAX Feed API.

SimplePie 1.1.3 is now available (like 1.1.2, “core” plugin will be updated soon). This is a bugfix-only release that resolves the one major issue that 1.1.2 created (gzip decoding errors while using fsockopen()), and fully resolves the other major issue that 1.1.2 didn’t fully address (a workaround of a libxml2 bug).

Grab the latest release to upgrade!

My departure was never going to be immediate, but I didn’t expect to be doing this (as Ryan always does this); however, the time has come (for me!) to announce the immediate availability of SimplePie 1.1.2 (”core” plug-ins will be updated soon). This is a bugfix-only release that resolves some of the things that weren’t caught until we after released 1.1.1 (including, interestingly, one very major bug that had existed for years — it never ceases to amaze me how rarely the web is sensible enough to do what is obvious and should be done to hit such bugs).

Download the latest release to upgrade!

That being said, I took some time to write down some thoughts about what should go into SimplePie 2, and I would really like to get your thoughts as well. Are there things that SP2 should do that SP1 doesn’t? Would you like to use SimplePie in ways that are currently more difficult than they should be? Are you somebody who has a different design philosophy and you think we should pay better attention to certain things? This is your chance to weigh in with your thoughts, opinions, comments, and other feedback.

Please check out Goals for SimplePie 2. Feel free to edit, change, and improve what’s there. Feel free to argue with what I’ve written. Let’s make this plan better together!

SimplePie supports something called HTTP Conditional Get, which is the process of asking a feed if it has changed before we re-download a fresh copy of the feed. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been noticing a problem with my Twitter status on my personal website, and finally had some time to run a test today to see if my instinct was correct. It was.

When SimplePie asks Twitter for a feed the first time, everything works as expected. However, at the moment, when SimplePie asks Twitter if a feed *has changed*, Twitter says “yes” (whether it has or not), and then sends us a fresh copy of the feed that has *no items in it.*

[Technical: This only seems to be a problem if we send the Last-Modified header as the value for If-Modified-Since in the request. If-None-Match and ETag seem to give the correct response].

I’ve notified Twitter of the issue, so hopefully it will be fixed soon. In the meantime, if Twitter support is critical between now and whenever they fix this bug, you can temporarily workaround this issue. See http://simplepie.org/wiki/faq/problematic_feeds for more information.

http://simplepie.org/wiki/tutorial/how_to_display_a_single_feed_item