Since SimplePie 1.0 Preview Release 1 was released back in January 2006, we’ve used the fora (running PunBB) as a bug tracker — mainly because of my hatred of the usability of almost all bug trackers. A few weeks ago, I came across Redmine: the first bug tracker I’ve ever been happy using. I admit, I’m not overly pleased with 0.6.3 (the current release), as the link to submit a new issue is amazingly hidden, and it is impossible to upload anything from Safari 3 (and from other browsers in some circumstances).

However, the current development copy is far better, and removes all the issues I had with it. Submitting a new issue is now very obvious (a “New Issue” tab within the project), and the other was fixed in twenty minutes (now that is what I wish every project was like — but we aren’t there ourselves).

The new bug tracker has all issues that are scheduled to be (or already are) done in 1.1.1 and later. I think I’ve got all the bugs that currently affect SimplePie in it: if I haven’t, could you please either reply to a current thread on the fora about the bug, or add it to the new bug tracker?

I hope this is far less controversial than the move of the support fora, but to defend that: I have posted far more to it than I would have if the support was still dealt with through fora. I believe moving the bug tracking will be universally helpful to everyone either using SimplePie, or developing it.

Oh, and yes, this does mean I’m still around: I didn’t just disappear off the face of the earth at the end of December. I’m still around. I will be development lead of SimplePie 2 until it ships, and be involved with it for far longer than that (though doing very little development). My departure from SimplePie is far from immediate (though I have for the most part left SimplePie 1 development, following the release of 1.1 last month), and I knew without question that SimplePie would survive: there are enough people who want it to continue to keep it from dying, and there are plenty of people who already know the SimplePie 1 codebase well (such as Steve, who is now himself a developer) that I knew would help, if asked (myself and Ryan had discussed adding other developers around a year ago, before there was even any thought about me leaving). Myself stepping down really doesn’t mean that much in terms of the future of SimplePie. The decision wasn’t sudden, either: I first thought about leaving SimplePie back in November, and first spoke to anyone about doing so in mid-December — I want SimplePie to succeed more than most, I expect, despite not even having used it myself since 2006.

In the last post, I talked a little about transition. SimplePie is growing, and is the most popular it has ever been! This means two things:

1. We’ve got to keep building the best RSS/Atom software available for PHP (and AJAX, and Mobile, and WordPress), and…
2. We’ve got a LOT of users to support, with a LOT of questions to answer.

Personally, I’m currently in the process of wrapping up some work with the Yahoo! Messenger web team, and then ramping up fast on my company’s WarpShare project to try to have a technology preview ready in time for South by Southwest: Interactive. I’ve been swamped for the last two weeks, then I open up my feed reader this morning, and there are over 70 new SimplePie support requests. Quite frankly, I can’t keep up.

I’ve already reached a point where I’m barely able to do any development on SimplePie because of all of the support and maintenance I’ve been doing, and I really want to get back to developing more. I’ve spent hours and hours and hours writing tutorials, FAQs, documentation, and example code. We moved all of our docs over to a wiki so that the community could more effectively contribute. I know that some of you help answer questions for others, and that’s appreciated more than you know. But as a whole, I don’t know if anyone but the development team is subscribed to the RSS feeds for the forum, and can help answer questions more effectively. And I can’t keep taking on this kind of load primarily by myself.

So… in an effort to more effectively push support into the hands of those who are capable of helping, I’m going to begin the process of shutting down new registrations and posts on the existing support forum (thereby turning it into an archive), and opening up a new Yahoo! Groups mailing list/forum. Yahoo! Groups is pretty good, they’ve got a web-based forum-like view, but most importantly they’ve got mailing list support.

In my experience, those who are subscribed to a mailing list are able to get more information, and are more capable of contributing to the discussions. And that’s what we want: more people contributing to the discussions.

Again my schedule is a bit jumbled right now, so this will probably happen sometime over the next few weeks, but it’s coming. By spreading the SimplePie support load more effectively, we’ll have one more developer who can devote more time to improving SimplePie… and really, I think that’s what we all want.

As I’m sure you’re aware by now, SimplePie is in a bit of a transition. The project is growing, and we’re up to 4 public products right now (SimplePie, SimplePie Live!, SimplePie for WordPress, and SimpleReader Mobile), we’ve got a good product in SimplePie 1.1, and we’ve got our sights set on SimplePie 2.

As we’ve previously discussed, we’re looking for some new development help. Particularly, people who can help us grow toward our vision — not people who want to maintain old PHP 4.x releases after we’ve moved to pure PHP5. The first person to come to mind when we started looking was Steve Minutillo.

Steve is the developer of a web-based feed aggregator called Feed on Feeds that is currently based on SimplePie, so he has experience in using SimplePie for complex projects. Steve has been a very valuable patch contributor up to this point, and he accepted our invitation to join the SimplePie development team.

We’re still looking for a few more developers to help us grow this project out more. Particularly if you’ve got experience with PHP, RSS/Atom, mobile apps, JSON web service APIs, and the like, we’d love to have you on our team. The best way for us to notice you is to provide detailed bug reports with patches, so if you’re itching to get more involved in your spare time as a contributor/developer, this is the way to do it.

Please take a moment to welcome Steve to the SimplePie team!