SimplePie 1.1.1 is now available (also in a WordPress flavor). This is a bugfix-only release that resolves some of the things that weren’t caught until we released 1.1.

Fixes include the resolution of blank enclosures, “Feed not found” errors when the cache expired, problems with UTF-16LE data in the set_raw_data() config option, and an updated add_to_digg() URL.

Grab the latest release to upgrade!

SimplePie is a tool that I use nearly every single day, in nearly every single project I work on. I use it partially because I work on it, and partially because I really believe that it’s the best tool for the job (when that job is RSS/Atom parsing). At the same time I know that there are things that I do that are very different from what other people are doing with SimplePie, such as processing thousands of feeds at a time, building web-based aggregators, building start pages (a la PopURLs, Original Signal, and others), and doing all sorts of other things that I may or may not even know about.

I know that Geoffrey has talked a bit about SimplePie 2.0’s planned modularity (keeping the fetching, parsing, caching, and API components separate but being able to load them when necessary, or even be able to swap in your own components), and we’d like to see SimplePie 2.0 be better commented and slimmer code-wise, opting to move some of the more superfluous functionality into helpers and other outside classes.

So my big question is: what can we do to make your job easier as it pertains to SimplePie? I know that there are some cool things that we’ve talked about for SimplePie 2.0, but there also things coming in SimplePie 1.2 that are cool. I’ve been thinking about the kinds of things that would make things easier for me and how we could bundle them as on-demand “helpers” instead of necessarily building them into the core (like how our Internationalized Domain Name support is separate).

The first (very simple) thing that comes to mind is a function that that shortens text (e.g. titles and descriptions). This is something that has been asked for hundreds of times and we’ve got some sample code in the wiki for it, but what if we could bundle helpers like this in an on-the-side fashion? What kinds of things would you like to see? What kinds of tasks do you find yourself doing over and over that the community might be able to benefit from?

Perhaps people parsing thousands of feeds might like to have (or contribute) their parsing scripts and/or cron jobs? Perhaps people building feed aggregators would like to see improved HTTP status code messages to know whether they should update a feed URL in a database? Perhaps it’d be nice to have some software-specific helpers for Drupal or CodeIgniter?

Fire away!

This is just a note to let everyone know that the old support site has been officially moved to read-only status. No new registrations will be accepted on the old site, and no one is allowed to post. The site is still searchable, however, so that might be a good place to find answers before posting to the new mailing list. Bug reports should be directed to bugs.simplepie.org, as we finally have some REAL bug tracking software installed (as previously noted).

I know that the move to Yahoo! Groups has been a controversial one, but all-in-all, we’ve got nearly 70 members subscribed in a fairly short period of time. Things seem to be going okay for now, and hopefully things will only get better in the future — although I will miss some of you who are boycotting the new group.

We highly encourage you, if you’re not already, to make use of the mailing list feature of Y! Groups. Putting yourself on the mailing list allows you to see all of the questions AND answers that come through. It’s a great way to learn about SimplePie, even if you don’t post anything, and if you see a question that you can answer, then please do. Having a mailing list where people actually use the mailing list, makes the give and take much better.

Geoffrey, Steve, and I absolutely want everyone who has a question to be able to get an answer, even if we don’t have the time to give those answers ourselves (we’ve also got other jobs, other projects, time with family, and other important things that go on in our lives). This needs to become a support community that is by users, for users. I don’t know if anyone believes in karma, but if you want an answer, make sure you give an answer. Even if you’re new, you can always help another newcomer by pointing them to a tutorial or documentation or something. All of our documentation is in a wiki so that anyone can edit, clarify, improve, and add to the documentation. We encourage it!

Thanks for reading, and we hope that this support community can be even better than the old fora/forums were!