With Beta 3 just hours away, Beta 2 has reached a mammoth 4000 downloads since June — that’s over 25 downloads per day. Not bad for any product, yet alone something with such a limited scope as a PHP library. With such a huge rate of increase of number of downloads, and with Beta 3 coming very soon, we can only hope that that trend continues right up to 1.0 and beyond.

As for Beta 3, there’s very little API breakage, as most of the changes are under-the-hood, so unless you’re modifying SimplePie itself, nothing should be that chaotic. The release notes give an idea of what the more major changes are.

As was mentioned in the previous post, the Trunk (1.0 “Razzleberry”) has introduced some major API changes, so those of you following trunk — be careful! Some of the methods names may well be changed again before release! As was also mentioned, once 1.0 is out, there will be no API breakage until SimplePie 2.0, and there will be at the very least one minor release on the 1.x branch, and more than likely more. See our plans for versioning.

Lastly, for those of you wanting to add new methods to trunk and send in patches (preferably via the forums), phpDocumentor comments have started to be added to the existing codebase (you can see the automatically generated documentation for trunk), and we won’t be allowing any patches from here on in that add members/methods if they do not have phpDocumentor comments for them.

We’ve branched our Beta 3 “Lemon Meringue” release. There’s one more patch to apply to it before we release it, but we didn’t want to hold back work on our 1.0 “Razzleberry” release any more than we had to. Over the next few days we’ll be updating the documentation, testing the plugins, and making sure everything is ready to go for our Beta 3 release!

Some things are changing in Razzleberry that break compatibility with prior trunk builds. If you grab a trunk build today, it won’t work as-is with your existing code, as we’ve made a few changes for the sake of consistency (these are Betas, after all). Once we hit 1.0 we won’t be breaking any existing API’s in the 1.x series of releases. We’ll save API breakage for our 2.0 release (whenever that happens to be).

Rest assured that a new official release will be made public sometime in the next week.

Icy? What that means is that although it’s not outright frozen, the only changes to SimplePie will be in the form of last-minute fixes and tweaks as we get ready to go live with an official Beta 3 release. We’ll be focusing on bug testing as opposed to bug fixing at this point.

If your bug or feature request didn’t make it into this round, don’t worry. We’ll soon be releasing very frequent release candidates in an effort to patch bugs and resolve issues leading up to our 1.0 release. There were a TON of bugs reported on Beta 2, and we’ve gotten to as many of them as we can up to this point, but we need to get a new release out soon, so some things must be left for the next release. If you have questions about what we’ve got on our roadmap as far as features, fixes, and bugs for the upcoming releases, please check out our Development page for more information.

If those of you who are using the development builds think that there’s an outstanding issue with SimplePie that is serious enough to hold back the release, please post about it in the Trunk Builds forum with [BLOCKER] in the subject line. Make sure that you’re using the absolute latest development build before you post, and be prepared to either fight for the blocker status, or come with a patch to fix it. We like patches. We’ll review the ones marked BLOCKER, and if the workload required to fix the bug before this release is justified, we’ll add it to our Beta 3 checklist.

Thank you again to all of you who use SimplePie! We’re working as hard as we can to make it better and better with each new release, and it’s people who report bugs to the forums who help us accomplish that. 🙂