simplepie

WPWeekly Episode 74 – SimplePie Disappears – Leaves Crumbs Behind

By Jeffro on September 30, 2009

wordpressweekly1 Wow, this episode of WordPress Weekly is a long one so be prepared to have some time set aside to listen to it, or break it up into two sections. In this episode, we talk about what the implications are for WordPress with SimplePie ceasing development, big changes coming to users of Woopra, the winner of the 2009 plugin competition hosted by Weblogtoolscollection.com and one of the last topics we discussed dealt with the feud between WPMU.org and Matt Mullenweg.

Ad Copy:

This episode of WordPress Weekly is sponsored by WebDevStudios.com. WebDevStudios would like to announce the launch of their new project, WPClassroom.com! WPClassroom.com is dedicated to providing high quality professional WordPress training using the most powerful online training software powered by Cisco WebEx. Reserve your seat today at WPClassroom.com! By the way, use the coupon code wptavern when signing up and that will take off $5.00 on the next class on October 6th.

Stories Discussed:

SimplePie Disappears
Big Changes To Woopra
WeblogToolsCollection.com Plugin Competition Winner Announced
WordPress.com – Image Widget and Support Improvements
Matt And WPMU.org Go At It Again

WordPress Tavern Listener Poll:

Last weeks poll question was: Who’s Responsible For Keeping Your WordPress Site Up To Date?

Out of a total of 74 votes, 50 of you said the end user, 9 people voted for the new world order, at least seven of you said Matt Mullenweg, 6 voted for WordPress while 2 people voted for Automattic.

This Weeks Poll Question Is: Who has the craziest WordPress upgrading story?

Picks Of The Week:

Jeff – What it means to use WordPress as a CMS

David – Styling Posts

This Weeks Trivia Question

What is the template tag that was introduced in WordPress 2.3 which provided one of the major feature additions in WordPress themes?

WPWeekly Meta:

Next Episode: Tuesday October 6th, 2009 8P.M. EST

Subscribe To WPWeekly Via Itunes: Click here to subscribe

Length Of Episode: 1 Hour 43 Minutes

Download The Show: WordPressWeeklyEpisode74.mp3

Listen To Episode #74:

WordPress RSS Parser SimplePie Ceases Development

By Jeffro on September 28, 2009

Over the weekend, some big news was published on the SimplePie development blog where it was announced that development for the RSS Parser would cease effective immediately. While the first version of SimplePie was built ontop of MagpieRSS, it quickly became the de-facto RSS/Atom parsing software for PHP. WordPress uses SimplePie to parse the RSS feed for the dashboard widgets such as Other WordPress News, WordPress News, etc.

Beginning in WordPress 2.8, MagpieRSS was beginning to be phased out in exchange for SimplePie due to the lack of development taking place around Magpie. Unfortunately, the same thing has happened to SimplePie leaving WordPress with a few options. First, hope that a fork of SimplePie is created which WordPress can then use. Second, continue the development of SimplePie to fit the needs of WordPress only or third, look for another actively developed RSS parser for PHP. It’s worth noting that in WordPress 2.9, SimplePie has been upgraded to version 1.3.

This doesn’t mean that dashboard feeds in WordPress will fail to be parsed as SimplePie is not a third party service. However, there are a ton of plugins in the repository that were built with the default RSS parser in WordPress both when it was Magpie and then SimplePie so this development affects those as well.

The WordPress development team is well aware of this announcement and it looks like it may be a topic of discussion for this weeks WordPress development meeting.