We’ve been working hard to wrap up all of the last-minute stuff for our 1.0 launch, including bug fixes, feature tweaks, and writing loads and loads of new documentation and tutorials in an effort to make this the most exciting launch ever! We’ll be releasing the first release candidate sometime over the weekend, and we encourage everyone to upgrade to help us shake out the last-minute niggles.

Oh, and by “everyone”, I mean “not people who are using the official plugins for WordPress, Textpattern, or Mediawiki”. We’re going to be releasing a 1.2.1 version of the plugins at the 1.0 launch so that people can make the move, but development of the 1.3 versions of the plugins will begin AFTER we go live with SimplePie 1.0. v1.3 will be a complete rewrite that will really take the plugins up several notches.

Also, for those of you who are still waiting to play with a preview of the previously-mentioned SimplePie Lite, we decided to hold off of making it public until we could port all of the code from Beta 3 to the new 1.0 codebase. It’s going to take a little more time, but you can bet it’s going to rock the pants off of Google’s AJAX Feed API! It even supports the same new fancy cross-domain AJAX support that’s built into Google’s service, and the API is near-identical to SimplePie for PHP.

Lastly, SimplePie was recently mentioned in an article on InfoWorld.com called “Building a bridge to the future”. Although it was just a quick mention, we’re proud to have even been noted!

Bigger and better things are just around the corner.