Update: This issue has been worked-around in r706.

For anyone who has recently upgraded to PHP versions 4.4.6, 4.4.7, or 5.2.2 (including pretty much everybody on Dreamhost), running the trunk/development version of SimplePie causes something called a “segmentation fault”, which essentially means that PHP crashes when running the trunk/dev version. This does not appear to affect the current stable release (Beta 3.2), nor does it seem to affect any other versions of PHP. If you’re running a different version of PHP and this is happening, please let us know in the “Bug Reports – Trunk” forum.

For those who care about the nitty-gritty details, it seems that these versions of PHP include a new version of PCRE — the Perl-compatible regular expression engine that is used by SimplePie, and some of the regular exressions (particularly the ones that strip RFC822 comments) are causing servers to return an HTTP 500 error.

We’ve filed a bug report to PHP, and we’ll be working on some sort of workaround for this, however in the meantime you can make the following change to the simplepie.inc file. You’ll find it near line 50.

//define('SIMPLEPIE_BUILD', gmdate('YmdHis', SimplePie_Misc::parse_date('$Date: 2007-02-22 14:03:17 -0800 (Thu, 22 Feb 2007) $')));
define('SIMPLEPIE_BUILD', 12345678901234);

Apologies to everyone who has been affected by this (ourselves included), and we hope to have this worked out ASAP.

We’re wrapping up 1.0 development as we speak. There is still one major feature and a few bugs to take care of, but for the most part SimplePie 1.0 is ready to go! If you’ve got any bugs to report on the development trunk, now is the time to report them! We’ll be releasing the first release candidate shortly along with a refresh of our website (the information is starting to grow larger than the site was built for!).

We’ll also be moving all of our documentation to a wiki so that documentation, tutorials, and tips and tricks can be a community effort. We’ve been fortunate to attract some very knowledgeable users over the last year-and-a-half since our Preview Release, and we want to make room for the power users to be able to contribute more than they’re currently able to.

Our plug-in collection has also grown tremendously in the last year! Not only do we have plug-ins for WordPress, Textpattern, and Mediawiki, but we’ve also got various plug-ins for Joomla, Drupal, MODx, PunBB, CakePHP, and we’ve even been integrated directly into projects such as Dokuwiki (among others)! If you’re a user of one of these plug-ins, thank the awesome members of our community for making it happen!

Anyways, enough of the chit-chat. Back to work for us.

Just for the record, SimplePie and MagpieRSS are not actually merging. Geoffrey and I came up with the idea for the April Fool’s joke on Friday, and I got in touch with Kellan (from the MagpieRSS project). He said he was cool with the joke, but unfortunately wouldn’t have time to update the MagpieRSS site with a similar notice.

There were a few blog posts from around the web that we saw, as well as a new digg! No, NeoPie doesn’t actually exist, and no our teams are not merging. We just thought it’d be a funny prank. 🙂

Thanks to Kellan for being cool about the joke and playing along.