Version History

New Features

• Support for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN)
• Vastly improved character set detection (HTTP Headers, Unicode BOM, Prologue, default to UTF-8)
• Support for outlookfeed: for Outlook 2007
• Support for HTTP Conditional Get
• Support for GZIP-encoded feeds
• Override the input encoding
• Allow custom output encoding
• Expose all data that we use for items and feeds. These should be accessible directly as $item→data['summary'], etc.
• Implemented get_favicon()
• One-click Bookmarks: Wists, Simpy, Blogmarks, Smarking, Segnalo
• One-click subscriptions: Feedlounge, Feedster, Feedfeeds, Gritwire, Eskobo
• Strip attributes: bgsound, expr, onfinish, onerror
• $feed→errors also catches errors about lots of other things.
• When embedding A/V podcasts, if the content type doesn't exist in our list of supported mime-types, check the file extension and make an educated guess before giving up.
• Atom 1.0 Categories
• native_embed() which uses the (invalid) embed-only method of embedding multimedia content, which bypasses issues with the object tag in IE.

Changes in this Release

• Cached filenames as SHA1 hashes.
• Change fix_protocol() to replace any scheme which is not http or https with http (of course keeping current checks to allow local URLs)
• bypass_image_hotlink() is disabled by default due to security and compatibility issues.
• Rewrote external JavaScript code for embedded podcasts using the more efficient heredoc syntax
• To fetch remote files, we now try curl, then fsockopen

Fixes in this Release

• Fixed some issues with handling gzipped feeds (Beta 3.1)
• Feeds where the items either don't have a datestamp or the datestamp is not understood now sort by newest to oldest.
• Problems with self-closing author tag
• Unable to modify ini_set for user agent string
• Various issues with relative links
• Problems with get_version()
• Rewritten image URLs for bypassing image hotlink blocks
• RSS 0.9 namespace
• Invalid dates should return false
• SVG issues
• Issues with strip_ads()
• Superfluous spaces in prologue
• TRANSLIT patch * Multiple link tags in Atom feed. * strtotime() RFC822 inconsistency. * Various issues with tbray.org * Base64 encoding in Atom 1.0 (patch by Peter Janes) * Fix some of the quirks in the embed() function * Improved support for more specific ISO8601 datestamps (tested with Blogger Beta feeds). * Lots and lots and lots of Beta 3-specific, pre-release bugs. :) ===== 1.0 Beta 2 (2006-06-02) ===== New Features * Support for embedded enclosures. This is a different function from the old enclosures code, which is more basic. Utilizes QuickTime for most formats. Also supports Windows Media and Flash. Odeo MP3's utilize the Flash-based Odeo Player. Bypasses issues with the recently released Eolas changes to IE. * You can now manually configure which tags and attributes are stripped from the feed content. Intelligent defaults are used otherwise. * Support for namespaces: XML, RSS, RSS 2, RDF, Atom, Dublin Core, Content, and XHTML. * Errors that occur when a feed cannot be found and when there is a parsing error are now caught in a special error property. Since these are SimplePie-specific errors, these are handled differently than other errors. These error messages can now be styled to fit your particular application. * Option that allows you to encode potentially dangerous tags instead of stripping them. * handle_content_type, when placed before any output to the page, will automatically set the proper character encoding for the feed output (UTF-8), as well as the correct mime-type (text/html). A different mime-type can be passed as a string parameter. * Support for the iconv extension. This brings the total number of supported encodings to 98. See the supported character encodings chart for more details. * Support for secured feeds (https). * pcast: is now a supported protocol.
• Support for stripping certain kinds of advertisements from feeds. Namely Pheedo, AdSense, and the large image ad from InfoWorld.com.
• Compatibility layer that allows existing Beta 1 installations to utilize the Beta 2 library without any rewriting (although moving to the Beta 2 syntax is recommended as Beta 1 is no longer supported).
• SimplePie Compatibility Test that assists users in determining if their webhost supports everything they need to run SimplePie optimally.
• One-click support for Netvibes, Blinklist, and Ma.gnolia.
• Support for xml:base.

Changes in this Release

• SimplePie is now properly object-oriented. Some of the syntax has been slightly changed (i.e. each item is now an object with properties and methods), but it's all for the best.
• <script> tags have been stripped by default for quite a while. Now, inline event handlers are as well by default.
• get_item_quantity() now accepts a maximum value for the parameter. The function will either return the maximum value or the total number of items/entries in the feed—whichever is less.
• The enclosures property of the item object is now an array that contains all available enclosures.
• All feed output is served as UTF-8. All of it. This allows you to put multiple feeds on the same page without worrying about conflicts between UTF-8, ISO-8859-1, and US-ASCII.
• The image hotlink block bypass is now fully integrated into the core of SimplePie, an is as easy as setting a configuration option.

Fixes in this Release

• Parsing core was completely re-written from scratch to better support Atom and other standards in general.
• Relative URL's in feed content are now resolved back to the originating site instead of the SimplePie implementor's domain.
• Issues with tag and attribute stripping.
• CDATA sections within CDATA sections are now properly supported.
• Images in Yahoo! News feeds are now supported.
• A slew of issues with the Atom 1.0 feed from tbray.org
• SimplePie is now fully RFC3339/ISO8601 complaint (for dates and timestamps and such).
• Some glitches where tags with the same name, even if they are for different purposes, were getting confused with each other.
• Other miscellaneous bugs and support forum issues.

New Features

• Add to Digg, Furl, My Web 2.0, and Reddit
• One-click subscribing to My AOL, MSN, Newsburst, Odeo, and Podnova
• Support for podcast: protocol * Ultra-Liberal Feed Locator * Support for iPhoto 6 photocasts * Ability to bypass image hotlink blocking when reading feeds. * Full support for feeds encoded as: UCS-4, UCS-4BE, UCS-4LE, UCS-2, UCS-2BE, UCS-2LE, UCS-32, UCS-32BE, UCS-32LE, UCS-16, UCS-16BE, UCS-16LE, UTF-7, UTF7-IMAP, UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32, ASCII, EUC-JP, EUCJP-win, Shift_JIS, SJIS-win, ISO-2022-JP, JIS, ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-2, ISO-8859-3, ISO-8859-4, ISO-8859-5, ISO-8859-6, ISO-8859-7, ISO-8859-8, ISO-8859-9, ISO-8859-10, ISO-8859-13, ISO-8859-14, ISO-8859-15, byte2be, byte2le, byte4be, byte4le, BASE64, HTML-ENTITIES, 7bit, 8bit, EUC-CN, EUC-TW, EUC-KR, BIG5, GB2312, BIG5-HKSCS, Windows-1251, Windows-1252, KOI8-R, HZ, ISO-2022-KR, CP866, CP936, CP959, and CP949. Changes in this Release * Handling of entities from htmlentities() to html_special_chars() which significantly helped in supporting international character sets. * DOCTYPEs in feeds are now stripped out, since we don't do anything with them. * User-Agent has again changed to the following format: SimplePie/1.0 Beta (Feed Parser; http://www.simplepie.org/; Allow like Gecko) Build/20060118 Fixes in this Release * Fixed an issue where cache files would stay for hours instead of minutes. * Fixed an issue where extraneous space in a closing tag could crash the feed. * Fixed a few other miscellaneous bugs ===== 1.0 Alpha (2006-01-10) ===== New Features * Added support for Atom 1.0. * Added support for cURL for webhosts which have allow_url_fopen disabled. * Added a timeout for remote feeds, so that slow servers don't hold up the page load for too long… * Added support for PHP 5.x. * Added support for one-click subscribing to several online aggregators. * Added support for one-click adding to del.icio.us and Newsvine. * Added support for one-click searching for linkbacks on Technorati. Changes in this Release * The User-Agent has changed: SimplePie/1.0PR (Feed Parser; http://www.simplepie.org) Build/20060108 * Re-wrote the XML parsing core. No longer relies on XMLize. This significantly helps with feed processing. * Revamped the caching system to use serialized caching. * SimplePie is now object-oriented. This will make it easier to implement, and have fewer conflicts with other software. Fixes in this Release * Line breaks in <pre> tags are respected. * You can leave opened tags open in “example”-type tags like <code> and <pre>. * Caching can be disabled. * Resolved an issue with feeds being cached for any amount of time other than 60 minutes. * Resolved an issue where PHP could potentially go into an infinite loop if the cache file either can't be opened or is empty. ===== 0.96 (2005-01-08) ===== New Features * The <dc:description> and <longdesc> tags are now supported in get_item_description() (although I know that <longdesc> isn't actually a valid tag.). * Many more tags now get CDATA wrapped around them, including tags that SimplePie doesn't even parse. This aids compatibility in reading malformed feeds. Changes in this Release * Changed how the XML Dump features works. Rather than dump the processed XML at the top of the source code, it now dumps the XML to the page and quits. Serves the XML as text/xml. * SimplePie now tries to grab data at 2kb at a time (the recommended size), rather 1MB at a time. * SimplePie will now clear the cache folder after 1 day by default, rather than after 7 days. This can still be changed using the appropriate simplepie() parameter. * Rather than convert all &, <, >, and other characters automatically before the feed gets parsed, this is now handled by PHP's html_entity_encode() function in the get_item_description() function. * Changed the process by which CDATA sections are (re-)applied to tags. Fixes in this Release * Resolved a glitch in how certain dates are handled. * Resolved an issue with having &copy; inside a <copyright> tag. * Resolved an issue where encoded angle brackets were being resolved as tag endings. * SimplePie now wraps CDATA around ALL of the elements that it tries to parse, rather than just a select few. ===== 0.95 (2004-10-10) ===== New Features * Item/Entry dates (pubDate, dc:date, issued) can now be formatted using standard PHP date() values via a new parameter in the get_item_date() function. Fixes in this Release * Got the speed back to normal. * Resolved glitches in the “bad feed compatibility mode” so that it doesn't jack up valid feeds. * All markup inside <code> tags now displays properly. For various other compatibility reasons, all &lt;, &gt;, &quot;, and &amp; entities are converted to their real values. Entities inside <code> tags are now re-converted back to entities. * Content inside <pre> tags now obeys linebreaks, rather than displaying everything on a single line. * The “Byte Order Mark” prelude in UTF-8 documents now gets stripped out when parsing feeds, which significantly improves feed compatibility. ===== 0.94 (2004-09-23) ===== New Features * Implemented much better code for parsing and displaying non-English characters in feeds. * Support for automatically deleting cache files that have been unused for 7 days (can be changed via a parameter in the simplepie() function). * application/xml is now in the auto-discovery list (as this is what Mozilla.org uses). Changes in this Release * As per Mark Pilgrim's suggestions on how to improve the security of RSS, SimplePie now strips out the following tags prior to parsing: !doctype, html, body, meta, style, script, noscript, embed, object, param, blink, marquee, frameset, frame, iframe, form, input, and font * It also takes the time to remove the following attributes from all tags: style, class, and id Fixes in this Release * Made significant improvements in parsing not-well-formed RSS feeds by rewriting CDATA sections in feeds. ===== 0.93 (2004-09-02) ===== New Features * Added sp_build() to expose the build date, and sp_useragent() to expose the user agent string. * A debug toggle in simplepie() that controls whether caching is used. Defaults to true. * Transforms relative-to-the-root URL's (/archives/) into absolute URL's. Web browsers do this, and now SimplePie does too for links and images in the content. * Support for <content:encoded> in RSS feeds. * Support for the auto-discovery of RSS and Atom feeds. SimplePie will load whichever is the first feed listed (for sites who offer multiple feeds). Changes in this Release * The project build date is now in the user agent string: SimplePie/0.93 (RSS Parser; http://www.skyzyx.com/projects/simplepie/) Build/20040902 * Changed fix_protocol to allow URL's with no protocol to be handled as absolute URL's provided that they begin with www.. * Local (relative URL) files are no longer cached, since cache files and local files are essentially the same thing. There's no sense in having two copies of the same file on the same server now, is there? Fixes in this Release * Improved support for certain types of poorly formatted RSS feeds. ===== 0.92 (2004-08-29) ===== New Features * Implemented a simple caching system that refreshes feeds older than 1 hour. Initial loads are about as fast as v0.91 speeds, while subsequent loads are as fast as v0.9 speeds (100-200 times faster than v0.8). * The project name, version, and URL can all be displayed through functions. This is useful for auto-updating “Powered by …” messages. * Better support for characters that are not part of the Latin-based alphabet. * A User Agent: SimplePie/0.92 (RSS Parser; http://www.skyzyx.com/projects/simplepie/) * A debug toggle in simplepie() that dumps the feed contents to the screen. Defaults to false. Changes in this Release * Removed functionality where SimplePie wrapped a CDATA section around <title>, <link>, and <description> values. * Swaps out certain “smart” characters for their safer ASCII counterparts. This seems to resolve “The Dunstan Issue”. ===== 0.91 (2004-08-28) ===== New Features * Added support for reading local (relative URL) files. Changes in this Release * Now wraps a CDATA section around <title>, <link>, and <description> values. Fixes in this Release * v0.9 processed feeds so fast that it didn't give itself a chance to completely read the XML file prior to parsing. This would frequently cause errors to occur. v0.91 makes a local copy of the feed before trying to parse it, but also slows it down a tad. ===== 0.9 (2004-08-02) ===== Changes in this Release * Re-wrote software from scratch. * Dropped dependency on Magpie RSS, and built software around XMLize. * Removed all external dependencies (all necessary functions are built-in). * Maintained functional backwards compatibility with v0.8. * Increased the RSS processing speed by 100 to over 200 times, depending on the power of the hosting server. * Slimmed down overall RSS parsing package size by more than 75%. * Created online demo to show speed differences between old architechture and new. ===== 0.8 (2004-07-20) ===== Features * First public release. * Works on top of MagpieRSS. * Shortened name from “Simple API for Magpie” to “SimplePie”.