Bob Aman did a review of SimplePie and several other feed parsers a while back. The version of SimplePie he reviewed was Beta 1. Bob’s comments were very helpful in letting us know what was important from software in SimplePie’s genre, and we were able to go back and improve SimplePie Beta 2 significantly because of his feedback.

When we released Beta 2, I sent Bob an email asking him to take another look at SimplePie. Here was my message:

Bob,

I’d invite you to check out and evaluate the latest version of SimplePie, Beta 2. (http://simplepie.org)

We’ve gone back and added support for most of the things you mentioned in the comments from http://sporkmonger.com/articles/2006/02/27/directory-of-feed-parsers (among many other things). We’re still going through the feedparser.org unit tests though, but we’d be interested in your thoughts as a critic.

Thanks!

Shortly after I sent him the message, he replied with:

Heh, I pwned it on my first try:

http://www.???.com/feed

🙂

I tried it on less scary feeds though, it looks like you guys have made a lot of improvements. Good job. Much appreciated.

Cheers,
Bob Aman

Bob additionally had this to say on his blog:

“It’s probably one of the best choices for PHP-based parsers.”

Thanks Bob! But I digress…

Ah boy. Internationalized Domain Names (IDN). When I first saw this, I realized it would be an important feature, but knew that for the kind of work that’d take, we would probably have to push it off to SimplePie 1.1. After Googling around a bit, I found a PHP library that can translate IDN’s into friendlier domain names that SimplePie (and more specifically, the CURL extension) can handle.

I decided that with the size of the library, it probably wasn’t something that we’d build directly into SimplePie (especially considering how few people are likely to use it), but if you download and include the library, and enable the enable_idn() configuration option, the latest SimplePie trunk build will utilize the functionality without a hitch.

The necessary files are being bundled with the SimplePie trunk build. We’ve also added Bob’s “scary” feed to the demo page for you to check out. As usual, we test the bleeding edge trunk and branch releases for PHP 4 and PHP 5 on our development domain. For all you bleeding edge folks, happy IDNing!

We want to thank you all for what we consider a fairly successful launch of our Beta 2 release! In our first week, we had 208 downloads of SimplePie, which is good considering how little-known our project is up to this point.

We’d love to see where SimplePie is being used! If you could drop us a line and let us know how you’re using it — even if you think it’s in a boring way — we’d love to hear about it. Also, although adding a link back to us is definitely not required, we would certainly appreciate it. The more people using this product, and the more feedback we get, the better we can make SimplePie!

Thanks again for a great launch!

We’ve gotten some feedback on our new WordPress and Mediawiki plugins, so we’ve made a couple of updates.

First is that both of these are better at handling things when a feed is unavailable or unparsable… essentially, it’s better contingency design. The second part is that they both now take an “error” keyword/attribute. This is a plain text error message to display when the error occurs. If you leave it out, it will simply use SimplePie’s built-in messages.

Upgrade now!