SimplePie: Weblog

SimplePie 1.1 is now available! 2 Jan 2008

SimplePie 1.1 is now available. This release adds some features that we’d wanted to put into 1.0, but didn’t have the time to. It also squashes lots of miscellaneous bugs. This release is API-compatible with previous 1.0.x releases, so it should be as simple as a drop-in replacement. Feel free to check out the release notes for more details.

It should also be noted that PHP 4.x has been officially end-of-life’d, so as per previous discussion on the topic, we’ll be phasing out PHP 4 support over the next release or two, and we’ll be nudging all of you still on PHP 4 to either upgrade to PHP 5 or change hosts (shameless plug: sign up for Dreamhost with the SIMPLEPIE promo code, and get $20 USD off the 1-year plan).

We’re also looking at a much shorter schedule for the 1.2 release. In the meantime, if you’re interested in helping develop SimplePie as Geoffrey begins to transition off the project, please get in touch ASAP so we can begin getting you up-to-speed and working out the details.

Update: We’re keeping track of known issues, if you want to see the list.

Posted by Ryan Parman at 4:02 pm. Comments (4)

ByePie 28 Dec 2007

Having put a lot of thought into the matter over the past several weeks, I’ve made my decision to leave development of SimplePie.

“Why!? Oh Why!?”, you scream (well, maybe not, but I’m not a telepathic seer). For a start, I haven’t actually really used SimplePie myself since early 2006 (now almost two years ago), and I now have less and less to do with PHP at all (and I totally hate it ? a recent bug in SP was caused by the fact that “0” == false ? and have therefore moved to (mainly) Python).

Furthermore, over the past year, since March/April, my time has become increasingly limited, and SP has de-facto been one of the things that I have cut a long time ago (the reason for the lack of commits from me much) ? the majority of my time is now spent on schoolwork, with what is left over being spent working on various specs (predominantly HTML 5 and Tolerant HTTP Parsing).

However, what does the future of SP hold? Well, various decisions need to be made about the future direction ? do you try and improve 1.x further (it was already stretched to breaking point at 1.0, mainly held back by PHP itself ? a sad state to be in), or do you start on the vision of SP2? To take the former option, I doubt you could get much further than what is currently planned for 1.2 with the current 1.x base ? any further development requires a large amount of reworking the internals of SP (to the extreme of being questionable about whether there is any point of not starting from scratch). The latter option is probably the best (though ideally get 1.1 out as soon as it can be).

One of the aims of SP2 is true modularity ? it should be possible to use (and load) nothing more the parser itself (i.e., give it raw XML data, and it gives you an API to access the title, description, etc. as they are in the feed without sanitising them at all) ? which has several advantages for deciding any successor to myself: get people to write various modules for it against pre-existing specs (most of which are only drafts and so will need further development over time). What exactly those modules will be I am mainly undecided (though it won’t, I assure you, be the more complex parts of the API itself ? the design of them is mainly unwritten and comes from knowledge of successes/failures from SP1’s API). I will myself continue maintaining a couple of the modules (namely, the Unicode and IRI ones, both of which I use outwith of SP ? though more may be added to that list).

I’m more than willing to be around in a consulting role for a while ? my contact details are in the footer of my site, and I’ll stay around in the IRC channel for a while ? as well as helping people around the SP1 codebase (though I’d like to see that totally feature frozen come the end of January, with a final non-bugfix release from it in February) ? which is horrifically uncommented in parts, and uses stupidly complex algorithms in others that without prior knowledge of them make no sense (I’ve had issues with some myself when coming back to them having not touched them in a while 🙂 ).

Alas, there’s too much to write about the vision of SP2, so that will have to be done in another post; until then, g’nite.

Posted by Geoffrey Sneddon at 3:23 pm. Comments (11)

Status Update 9 Nov 2007

I just wanted to give everyone a status update about SimplePie:

SimplePie 1.1: We were wanting to have SimplePie 1.1 done a few weeks ago, but it was suggested that we hold the release back a bit to catch more bugs first. At the same time Geoffrey and I have both been swamped with other things, so commits to the trunk have been more sparse. We are planning to release SimplePie 1.1 as soon as we can, however, and here are a few things to look forward to:

You can now get a feed-level author. This has been requested several times over the years, and it’s finally made it in.
Atom contributors are now supported.
Atom’s <source> tag is now supported, and works just like the rest of SimplePie.
We have a working patch for PHP’s memory leak. We have the details about the leak on our FAQ page.
mbstring and/or iconv support is optional again.
An array of other bug fixes and such.

SimplePie Plugin for WordPress: About a month ago, we decided to really begin driving forward with our most popular plugin, the SimplePie Plugin for WordPress. We’ve gotten many excellent comments from users of the new version 2, and we’re getting ready to make it even better with our upcoming 2.1 release. WordPress, currently the world’s most popular blogging software, is going to be a major platform for SimplePie in the future, and things are already looking very bright.

SimpleReader Mobile: When we first launched SimpleReader Mobile over a year ago, we nearly canceled the project because of the seemingly tepid response. Now, SimpleReader Mobile is gaining usage with a number of different devices, and we believe this boost was launched by the release of Apple’s iPhone. We now have our SimpleReader Mobile page on Apple’s webapp directory, and we hope to see continued growth with this product.

SimplePie Live! SimplePie Live! is currently a beta-quality product, and is is essentially SimplePie geared for JavaScript and AJAX development. Again, the response thus far has been relatively tepid, and we haven’t done much to promote it just yet, but that marketing push is coming. We’re working on making it better, more useful, and eventually more consumer-friendly. With how popular widgets are these days, as well as the mass of AJAX-oriented websites, we think that this will become a very valuable tool as the word gets out more and more.

Plans for the Future: Since the first release of SimplePie was launched in July 2004, we’ve grown rather significantly. Not only are we now considered one of the world’s best feed APIs, but we’re growing as a platform as well. Nobody can deny the Facebook platform, and recently Google announced the OpenSocial platform. Netvibes has a Universal Widget API which allows you to write a widget once, and have it work across several platforms on the desktop AND the web. In the future, we expect SimplePie to be an important component in this new world. We’re also wanting to re-invest time and energy into platforms like Textpattern and Mediawiki that we’ve had to leave behind for the time being, as well as new platforms that we haven’t yet explored. In order to do that successfully, we need more people. In order to get more people, we need to have money.

Because of that, we’re planning to build a corporation around SimplePie. We’re going to create a non-profit Foundation to manage that portion. The Corporation will manage anything we do that makes money (similar to how the Mozilla Foundation/Corporation are set up). In the future, we plan to launch products that make money. It’s perfectly reasonable to make money from the hard work you put into something, and eventually I want SimplePie to be my full-time job. Although that time isn’t now, it’s getting closer as the days go by.

Now before anyone freaks out, let me explain. The core SimplePie API for PHP — the one we all know and love — will always remain open-source. Geoffrey and I are in complete agreement on that, and we think it’s going to be very important for us moving forward to ensure that people like you can continue building awesome stuff with SimplePie without having to worry about an associated cost as a barrier to entry.

So there you have it! SimplePie is moving along nicely, and we have some great plans for the future. Hopefully, Geoffrey will be able to stay alive long enough to make it through the oh-so-painful time of his life known as high school (well, here in the US it’s called high school anyway), and once he graduates he’ll be the CTO of a fledgling company. 🙂

Posted by Ryan Parman at 8:44 am. Comments (0)

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