SimplePie Development Shuts Down
I picked up a bit of unfortunate news from my buddy Jeffro at WPTavern yesterday: popular PHP RSS library project SimplePie is shutting down development:
“…big news was published on theSimplePie 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.
This news doesn’t really affect most people outside the development community. As someone who moved from developing exclusively in ASP over to PHP strictly because of the Magpie and subsequent SimplePie RSS libraries, though, I do feel a bit of a twinge as I see support fall away from this library.
I can’t imagine, as popular as it is, that the development path won’t be forked and taken over, either by an independent group or Automattic themselves (as it is highly ingrained in future and some current versions of the popular blogging CMS WordPress).
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