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.
