SimplePie 1.0 Beta will be a very exciting release for us! We’ve been hard at work fixing bugs in 1.0 PR, and SimplePie is a better quality product because of it. We’ve also been working on a few new features for this release that we’re pretty happy about. The ones that have already been implemented are:

• Multilingual Support: Out of the box, SimplePie 1.0 Beta will support all of the character sets that PHP supports by default. These include UTF-8, ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-15, Windows-1251, Windows-1252, cp866, KOI8-R, BIG5, BIG5-HKSCS, GB2312, Shift_JIS, and EUC-JP.
• Ultra-Liberal Feed Locator: We’ve been working to replicate Mark Pilgrim’s Ultra-Liberal Feed Locator (points 1-6) in PHP. We’re still doing some bug hunting on it, but we believe that this is a solid replacement of standard RSS Auto-Discovery (points 1-2).

There are a few other features that we’ve been working on, but they’re not finished yet, so we’ll comment on them later. We hope that you’re as excited about this next release as we are and, assuming all goes well, we’re expecting to release the 1.0 Beta on Monday, January 23rd.