Following quickly after Beta 3.1 comes our 3.2 release. Bugfix releases are coming more quickly these days so that people like you and me don’t have to wait 5 months for the next release to fix a bug that was discovered the day after the current release came out (we ended up doing that for Beta 2, and it sucked).

Beta 3.2 fixes two bugs in the current Beta 3 release:

1. Bug 403 – Occassionally, PHP4’s XML parser will choke on characters that are not part of the current character set, while PHP5’s XML parser will pass them as question marks.
2. Bug 431 – If a title tag is embedded inside another title tag, or if there are multiple title tags inside of a feed item, SimplePie will use the latter of the two.

Meanwhile, one of the coolest features of Beta 3 is the ability to extend and override the built-in SimplePie classes (parsing, auto-discovery, feed cleaning, etc.). Documentation for those should come shortly. 🙂

We’re very happy about how few bugs have been reported about our recent Beta 3 release! There have been a few, however, so we wanted to fix them and get them out to you before too long. As we learn about new bugs that can be reasonably fixed on the current branch code, we’ll get bugfix releases out to resolve them in regular intervals. Some issues are a bit bigger and will be fixed in our 1.0 release.

What was fixed here? Mostly just two bugs — both related to our gzip support. One was an issue related to how fsockopen() handles gzipped data, the other was how cURL handles gzipped data. There was also some tweaking to improve support for handling a bug in how Microsoft IIS/6.0 sends gzipped data. This isn’t a MUST HAVE update, but if you’ve been encountering issues with gzipped feeds or “incorrect headers”, this should squash those issues.

SimplePie 1.0 Beta 3 is now available! This release took much longer than initially expected to wrap up, but we wanted to make sure we had as stable a release as possible. There are very few API changes, no breakages, and lots of additions. Check out the Function Documentation for all of the new functions, the Upgrade Guide for changes you might want to be aware of, the Release Notes for Beta 3, and the Credits where we make note of people and software whose efforts have made SimplePie possible!

Beta 1 had over 1300 downloads, and Beta 2 had over 4000 in the same timeframe! Future releases will have shorter development cycles, but we’d love to see the same kind of success for future versions as we did with Beta 2! Thanks again to all of our users. It is your feedback, patches, bug reports, and other comments that have made SimplePie as successful as it is. We truly appreciate your support!