A little over 5 years ago — July 20, 2004 to be exact — I posted the very first public version of SimplePie as a set of functions that sat on top of MagpieRSS, in an effort to make RSS parsing even easier and more accessible to PHP developers around the world. Since that time, SimplePie has become the de-facto RSS/Atom parsing software for PHP. The software is in use by hundreds of thousands of people all over the world, is integrated into more third-party software than I can keep track of, and has been used in everything from blogs and wikis to sites powered by some of the largest brands in the world.

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)!

We’re now supporting a technology called OpenID for comments. What does that mean for you? It means that you can sign-in and comment on our blog with your existing account from Google/Gmail, Yahoo!, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Windows Live, Hotmail, Flickr, AOL, Blogger, WordPress.com, and others!

If you already have a registered account on our blog for commenting, you can sign-in with your existing account. From there, you can (optionally) add a third-party account that you can login with instead.

That is all.