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.

It would appear that this is the season for SimplePie screencasts! In the past two days, I’ve discovered a few new SimplePie-related screencasts, and I want to share them (and a couple of older ones) with you.

• 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.