It would appear that someone has brute-forced our admin password, and has been using our webserver to send out a bunch of spam. Dreamhost alerted us of this, and I’ve gone back and changed a bunch of passwords.

If you’ve been receiving spam from people at @simplepie.org email addresses, then we apologize. It’s not us. I’m going to make sure that everything appears kosher, and then re-enable our ability to send email for *good* purposes. 🙂

It has only taken 1 month and 10 days to hit 1000 downloads of SimplePie Beta 2! Thank you all for getting the word out about it by writing blog posts, adding it to delicious and blinklist, and for otherwise linking to us.

I’d like to specifically thank Mr. Bruce McKenzie for his many suggestions for improvement, bug reporting, and all-around pro-SimplePie propaganda! I’d also like to thank Mr. Peter Janes for finding the craziest feeds to test SimplePie with, and reporting the multitude of bugs he’s found. SimplePie is a better product because of you.

Of course that’s not to say that contributions from others are invaluable, just that these two have gone out of their way for this project. We really appreciate it, and we wanted to recognize these two publicly for their work.

Beta 3 is off-schedule, yes, but we’ll be solidifying things as soon as possible. Geoffrey (who works on the parsing core of SimplePie) has just left for a two week vacation in Germany. Meanwhile, he’s just checked in a major reworking of SimplePie that I need to take some time to familiarize myself with. A week after he gets back, I’ll be going on vacation to Southern California. My hope is that we’ll be able to release Beta 3 during that week of overlap.

Some pretty awesome new things are coming in Beta 3 such as improved cache efficiency (via the highly efficient HTTP Conditional Get and support for GZIP compression), better handling of embedded enclosures, more control over character encodings, support for internationalized domain names, more one-click subscriptions/bookmarks, favicon support, lots and lots of bug fixes, cleaner and easier-to-understand code, and more. We’ve also been getting several requests for the Magpie-like ability to dig through XML nodes for a specific element. We’ll look into implementing this in a future release.

So, thanks again for the support, the downloads, the bug reports, the feature requests, and the IRC chats. We appreciate you. 🙂

Since we use Basecamp to manage SimplePie development, we’ve decided to hook directly into our to-do lists for the Beta 3 and RC1 releases, as well as the list for the next version of the plugin engine (which is shared between the WordPress, Textpattern, and Mediawiki plugins).

These to-do lists are live! We have not added any sort of caching even (although this might have to change soon), so the lists in our new Development section are accurate up-to-the-instant. So if you’re interested in what will actually be worked on, check it out. It’ll be automatically updated as we check things off or add new items to the lists.

I don’t think you can be a more transparent open-source project than that! 🙂