We’ve gotten a handful of questions about how SimplePie version numbers have worked in the past, and how we plan to manage them in the future, so let’s go into it. There’s a geek in all of us, I suppose.

• SimplePie 0.8: I thought I was almost done with it, so I released a Public Beta. People said that it was easy, but very slow. Need to rewrite parts of it to be faster.
• SimplePie 0.9-0.96: What SimplePie 0.1 – 0.7 should have been in the first place. This was just a matter of not understanding what I was getting into before I jumped in head-first with my eyes closed.
• SimplePie 1.0 Preview Release: We completely rewrote the entire parsing core for this release. While we were working on it, we were calling it 0.97. We moved from 0.8 to 0.9 when I rewrote the parsing core, so by the same logic we should have moved to 0.10 when we rewrote the core again. But 0.10 is a really ugly version number. We we decided to release it as a pre-beta beta… a preview release.
• SimplePie 1.0 Betas: These are pretty straightforward. They’re public betas that are mature, and getting better and better with each release. We’ve already had a Beta 1 and 2, and Beta 3 is coming shortly.
• SimplePie 1.0 (RC1, RC2, etc.): This is a release that we would consider fully production-ready. At this point, we will freeze the feature set. We will release it as RC1, and then fix bugs that get reported, and release an RC2 (if necessary). Once we’re pretty bug-free (from what we can tell), we’ll release 1.0 final.
• SimplePie 1.0.1, 1.0.2, etc.: These are what we call “point-point releases”, and will exclusively be bug fix releases. In development terms, we will create a 1.0 “branch” and apply all bug fixes to both the branch (which is otherwise unchanged) and the trunk (which is where all new development will happen). No new features or functionality will be added in these releases.
• SimplePie 1.1, 1.2, etc.: These are what we call “point releases”, and will be new features and additional functionality. In development terms, this will be the cumulation of all of the work that has happened on the trunk since the last release. All bug fixes that get put into the point-point releases will also end up here.

Hopefully this answers any questions anybody has about our planned versioning for post-1.0 releases. It mostly follows the Mac OS X style (sticks to the v10, each new release is a point release, and bugfixes are point-point releases), and is similar to the Linux kernel style, except that we don’t have alternating point-releases for stable and development releases.

Although we weren’t planning to do a Beta 3 (we were just going to go straight into 1.0 RC1 next), we’ve made some under the hood changes to SimplePie that might need additional testing. This should not affect anybody’s existing Beta 2 code, so no worries about that, but we just want more of an opportunity to gather some bug reports. So we’ve decided to shuffle our schedule to meet that need.

Additionally, many of the new features in 1.0 revolved around the ability to read and set HTTP Headers. This code will be landing on the trunk shortly, and then we’ll start working on everything that was dependent on this code. Most of it is relatively simple stuff, but will make SimplePie that much better and more reliable. So, instead of releasing a Beta 2 Bugfix release now, and having everything else wait for 1.0, we’ve decided to release a Beta 3 which will include all of our bugfixes from Beta 2, as well as several features that were originally scheduled for RC1.

We’ll be releasing Beta 3 in the first weekend in July. We’re gonna get as much done as possible until then (which will hopefully be all of it), and will release what we have completed at that time. Anything we miss will be pushed to RC1 (which will be feature-frozen — only bugfixes will be allowed between RC1 and 1.0 final).

Read about what we’re planning for our “Lemon Meringue” release (otherwise known as Beta 3).

Never one to be content with where we are, we’ve gone ahead and added a new member to our SimplePie family of plugins: the SimplePie Plugin for Textpattern.

It’s as easy to install as the WordPress and Mediawiki plugins, and has near-identical syntax as the Mediawiki plugin (where, again, we’ve focused on flexibility and ease of use). SimplePie is considered by many to be one of the best PHP-based feed parsers available, and now you can have that speed, flexiblity and ease-of-use in an easily installable plugin.

So if you’ve got a Textpattern blog, check it out!