SimplePie

Tag Archives: SimplePie

SimplePie Ceases Development

Oct 2, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Coding One Comment

The developers behind the SimplePie RSS parser (the de facto standard for PHP RSS parsing) have announced that they are ending their work developing the project.

…effective immediately, we are ceasing development of SimplePie and shutting down the project. We will shortly be pushing all code to GitHub. The mailing list will continue to serve users for the time being, but my sincerest hope is that someone will take up the charge to fork SimplePie, fix all of its issues, and continue on with this project that’s been such a huge part of my life for the past 5 years.

WP Tavern pointed out that WordPress recently incorporated SimplePie into the core for anything related to RSS parsing (such as Dashboard and sidebar widgets). This means it’s in the WordPress project should definitely be keeping an eye on this issue.

I think that either the SimplePie community needs to take it upon themselves to continue development, or fork the project with long-term intentions. (Perhaps the Automattic people could create a fork and maintain it along with WordPress?)

EDIT: Ryan McCue, an ex developer of SimplePie, has created a new fork and he and Matt Mullenweg are trying to pick up the SimplePie domain name. (Mullenweg has offered to pay for hosting and domain renewals.) So, the short story is: development of SimplePie will continue.

Using SimplePie For Your Sideblog

Nov 4, 2007 by Matt | Posted in WordPress 10 Comments

I’ve previously talked about sideblogs, or asides as they’re often called. The most common way to setup a sideblog in WordPress generally involves creating a second Loop to display posts from a certain category (a plugin is often used to do this). There’s a downside to that approach though.

If you use the Loop/Category approach, you end up with tons of short, two-sentence posts. That means each of your 347 sideblog entries has it’s own permalink page where 97% of the page is just the single.php template. Google doesn’t really like pages with little “original content,” so you could potentially have a problem on your hands. Even if you’re not that worried about what Google thinks of your blog, you still have 347 permalink pages, which could get in the way.

Here’s my solution: