[wp-hackers] Mike Little's Blog...

[Computer Guru]

On 12/22/06, Kimmo Suominen <kimmo+key+wordpress.c4f53f at suominen.com> wrote:
> SimplePie:  http://simplepie.org/
>
> > The Magpie project really shouldn't die out - the original codebase is
> > excellent. Why coud improve it in the WP core, and then submit patches
> > to the original project you know...
>
> MagpieRSS seems to give up too easily on parsin a feed.  I'm not sure
> if that's more PHP's fault than MagpieRSS's, but that's one of the
> issues I have with it.
>
> I think I've heard a few other projects talking about SimplePie as well,
> but off the top of my head I can only name Gregarius.  The Gregarius
> devs have already made changes to their copy of MagpieRSS, and before I
> switched to using Gregarius, I used their MagpieRSS in my own projects
> to improve feed parsing.
>
> Best regards,
> + Kimmo

http://simplerss.sourceforge.net/

That's what I was looking at - totally different project. I hate it
when products have the same name!

But simplepie.org looks awesome, I'm going to have to give it a shot.

Then again, think about it. SimplePie isn't a RSS *creation* engine,
it's a parser.
WordPress doesn't parse much. Besides the dashboard, AFAIK Magpie
really only exists so *plugins* that parse don't have to bundle with
it.

In my experience, MagpieRSS is just fine given a properly validating
feed on a 100% proper set up.

However, I'm going to switch to SimplePie simply because it has
complete multi-lingual support:

/*********************************************************************\

Whether it's the UTF-what's-it or the ISO-who's-it, SimplePie has it
handled. The new SimplePie comes with significantly improved support
for non-Latin languages. Specifically, it supports 98 different
character sets. It also has much better support for detecting what
character set the feed is being published with, so that the feed can
be displayed in the proper language.

So whether it's English, French, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish,
Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, or just about any other
language, SimplePie can handle it.

/*********************************************************************\

When I type my titles, I encode apostrophes and quotation marks.
&#39; &rdquo; &ldquo;

MapieRSS breaks on the latter two, it breaks on an un-encoded
apostrophe, so your stuck because you either encode or you don't, and
Magpie can't seem to decide which it wants.

I took a brief look the code for SimpliePie, it seems much cleaner. I
can already see something that could be changed - that's the beauty of
Open Source :-)

-- 
Computer Guru
Founder
NeoSmart Technologies
http://neosmart.net/blog/