SimplePie 1.0 Beta will be a very exciting release for us! We’ve been hard at work fixing bugs in 1.0 PR, and SimplePie is a better quality product because of it. We’ve also been working on a few new features for this release that we’re pretty happy about. The ones that have already been implemented are:

• Multilingual Support: Out of the box, SimplePie 1.0 Beta will support all of the character sets that PHP supports by default. These include UTF-8, ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-15, Windows-1251, Windows-1252, cp866, KOI8-R, BIG5, BIG5-HKSCS, GB2312, Shift_JIS, and EUC-JP.
• Ultra-Liberal Feed Locator: We’ve been working to replicate Mark Pilgrim’s Ultra-Liberal Feed Locator (points 1-6) in PHP. We’re still doing some bug hunting on it, but we believe that this is a solid replacement of standard RSS Auto-Discovery (points 1-2).

There are a few other features that we’ve been working on, but they’re not finished yet, so we’ll comment on them later. We hope that you’re as excited about this next release as we are and, assuming all goes well, we’re expecting to release the 1.0 Beta on Monday, January 23rd.

Just hours after we released version 1.0PR, one of our beta testers discovered a bug that could potentially throw PHP into an infinite loop causing crashes and such. Because of this, we’ve released an update that fixes this critical issue. If you’ve already downloaded the Preview Release, please upgrade to this version ASAP.

Dreamhost (our webhost) as informed us that SimplePie.org will be down for scheduled maintenance for about an hour beginning Tuesday, Jan 10 at 11:00pm (Pacific; GMT-8:00).

Across timezones, this is: London: Wednesday, Jan 11 at 10:00am (GMT), and Melbourne: Wednesday, Jan 11 at 5:00pm (GMT+10:00). Everyone else should be able to figure out where they fall in that schedule.

If you have support issues, or simply can’t wait to download SimplePie again, please wait until after this window has passed. Thanks.