SimplePie Beta 2

Released on 2 June 2006.

• Support for embedded enclosures. This is a different function from the old enclosures code, which is more basic. Utilizes QuickTime for most formats. Also supports Windows Media and Flash. Odeo MP3's utilize the Flash-based Odeo Player. Bypasses issues with the recently released Eolas changes to IE.
• You can now manually configure which tags and attributes are stripped from the feed content. Intelligent defaults are used otherwise.
• Support for namespaces: XML, RSS, RSS 2, RDF, Atom, Dublin Core, Content, and XHTML.
• Errors that occur when a feed cannot be found and when there is a parsing error are now caught in a special error property. Since these are SimplePie-specific errors, these are handled differently than other errors. These error messages can now be styled to fit your particular application.
• Option that allows you to encode potentially dangerous tags instead of stripping them.
• handle_content_type, when placed before any output to the page, will automatically set the proper character encoding for the feed output (UTF-8), as well as the correct mime-type (text/html). A different mime-type can be passed as a string parameter.
• Support for the iconv extension. This brings the total number of supported encodings to 98. See the supported character encodings chart for more details.
• Support for Basic Authentication.
• pcast:// is now a supported protocol.
• Support for stripping certain kinds of advertisements from feeds. Namely Pheedo, AdSense, and the large image ad from InfoWorld.com.
• Compatibility layer that allows existing Beta 1 installations to utilize the Beta 2 library without any rewriting (although moving to the Beta 2 syntax is recommended as Beta 1 is no longer supported).
• SimplePie Compatibility Test that assists users in determining if their webhost supports everything they need to run SimplePie optimally.
• One-click support for Netvibes, Blinklist, and Ma.gnolia.
• Support for xml:base.

• SimplePie is now properly object-oriented. Some of the syntax has been slightly changed (i.e. each item is now an object with properties and methods), but it's all for the best.
• <script> tags have been stripped by default for quite a while. Now, inline event handlers are as well by default.
• get_item_quantity() now accepts a maximum value for the parameter. The function will either return the maximum value or the total number of items/entries in the feed—whichever is less.
• The enclosures property of the item object is now an array that contains all available enclosures.
• All feed output is served as UTF-8. All of it. This allows you to put multiple feeds on the same page without worrying about conflicts between UTF-8, ISO-8859-1, and US-ASCII.
• The image hotlink block bypass is now fully integrated into the core of SimplePie, an is as easy as setting a configuration option.

• Parsing core was completely re-written from scratch to better support Atom and other standards in general.
• Relative URL's in feed content are now resolved back to the originating site instead of the SimplePie implementor's domain.
• Issues with tag and attribute stripping.
• CDATA sections within CDATA sections are now properly supported.
• Images in Yahoo! News feeds are now supported.
• A slew of issues with the Atom 1.0 feed from tbray.org
• SimplePie is now fully RFC3339/ISO8601 complaint (for dates and timestamps and such).
• Some glitches where tags with the same name, even if they are for different purposes, were getting confused with each other.
• Other miscellaneous bugs and support forum issues.

• Does not support the ISO8601 datestamps in Blogger Beta feeds
• Feeds where the items either don't have a datestamp or the datestamp is not understood will sort by oldest to newest, rather than the (better) newest to oldest.
• Self-closing author tags will cause crashes
• get_version is broken
• Lots of bugs with rewritten image URLs for bypassing image hotlink blocks. This feature can be disabled by setting the following configuration option: bypass_image_hotlink(false)
• Invalid dates return 31 December 1969
• Feeds with superfluous spaces in around equals-signs cause parse issues
• Random issues with ISO-8859-1 feeds
• Some strtotime() RFC822 inconsistencies
• Various issues with http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/ongoing.atom

• http://simplepie.org/blog/2006/06/02/simplepie-beta-2-is-now-available/