It brings me great pleasure to announce that SimplePie 1.0 Release Candidate is now available! We’re calling this a “Release Candidate” because there are a couple more minor niggles to work out still, but we’ll be doing new release candidates every weekend for the next 2-3 weeks until we get the last of the (minor) issues worked out.

There are a number of new things to talk about for this release:

• A refresh of the website — The homepage was completely revamped and the old WordPress-based documentation has been moved into a new wiki so that we can all contribute valuable information to the community. All of the other pages got a subtle facelift.
• More ways to keep track of development — For the many of you on the bleeding edge, we’re adding Twitter updates to our Subversion notification methods, and we’re also generating a downloadable snapshot of the very latest revision for those who don’t use Subversion tools.
• Integrated “Multifeeds” support — Now, it’s as easy to mash feeds together as it is to parse a single feed. All of SimplePie’s native methods can be used instead of having to hack data arrays together.
• Access ALL tags and attributes in the feed — This was probably the most requested feature of all time. Not only do we make all of the data available, but we have a handful of methods available for easily getting to that data.
• BSD-Licensed — We now have a license that is about as non-restrictive as it gets. You can pretty much do whatever you want with SimplePie — commercial or otherwise — as long as you leave all copyright notices in place.
• Media RSS and iTunes RSS support — We have a 100% complete Media RSS implementation (which I believe is the first one… am I right?), and an 80% complete iTunes RSS implementation.
• Better Podcast/Vidcast/Enclosure support — We’ve added a “widescreen” configuration for video enclosures, as well as a handful of additional methods for better enclosure handling. We’ve also added support for the popular Flash Video format and faster-loading MP3 playback.
• Image and Favicon caching — This feature still needs a tad more polish, but SimplePie now sports improved favicon detection, and caching for both images and favicons using an XSS-safe method.
• Performance Enhancements! — We’ve spent a lot of time fine-tuning our performance by targetting high-cost function calls. And if that wasn’t enough, we’ve added the new set_stupidly_fast() configuration option which trades data cleaning for pure speed. The result is that SimplePie is the fastest it’s ever been, and gives everyone else a run for their money.
• Lots o’ Configurability — We’ve really listened to our hard-core power users, and we’ve implemented more customization than ever before to really allow savvy developers to take their feed-related apps to the next level!
• Add-ons Galore! — Over the next several weeks we’re going to begin seeing lots and lots of SimplePie Add-ons that take advantage of the extensible, configurable nature of SimplePie to allow people to do things they’ve never been able to (easily) do before! The first few will come from the SimplePie team, then I expect to see a number of Add-ons being developed by people like you! Feeds won’t know what hit them!

I’ll be sending emails to a number of plugin developers shortly so that they can get started on updating their SimplePie plugins for use with SimplePie 1.0. We ourselves have not yet updated our own plugins, but we’ll be releasing a 1.2.1 update in the next few days to address this update. If you do decide to upgrade, we changed a handful of method names, so please look over the Upgrade Guidelines as you update SimplePie.

Enjoy! We’ll be fixing bugs this week, and will release the next release candidate this upcoming weekend.

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. 😉

We’re in the process of moving all of our documentation over to a wiki in preparation of our 1.0 launch. There have been requests in the forums for a wiki for a while, and we agree that it’ll be a better way of managing documentation (and allowing it to become a community effort).

We were going through the forums to find frequently asked questions and frequently requested tutorials, and wanted to get your input as well. What questions do you think we should add to a FAQ? What tutorials do you think should be made available? Post about them in the comments, and we’ll get working on them. 🙂