ted serbinski – a blog about drupal, macs, productivity, health, and bmws

That’s right, SimpleFeed, the fastest and easiest to use feed parser for Drupal is finally stable and release worthy!

A few months back (well half a year, but who’s counting, it’s been a busy summer / fall ;-)), I mentioned a release would be soon but didn’t realize it would take so long.

Anyways, here is the run down of the changes since then…

• Complete rewrite of caching layer, now uses file caching and built in SimplePie methods to cache feeds. This has resulted in significant performance increases with a huge drop in memory consumption, an issue that plagued earlier versions of this module.
• Better parsing of feeds, working around common issues and annoyances, along with additional performance tweaks
• The end of SimpleFeed as an API. It does one thing and does it well: parse feeds. If you want to manipulate them, use hook_nodeapi. If that doesn’t do what you want (in most cases it should), then check out FeedAPI. This change not only simplified things but resulted in further performance increases. I have successfully used hook_nodeapi to manipulate feeds in a number of projects so this route really is the easiest and fastest one, IMO.
• Better uninstall routines, along with preserving content so it can be migrated to FeedAPI.
• Easily empty all items in a feed, for easy testing.
• Automatically generate titles when they don’t exist in the feed.
• Added token support.
• New refresh modes: never & manual. Now you can use hook_nodeapi and hook_cron to write your own routines.
• Tons of other bug fixes

Indeed this module has matured quite a bit and I’m please to offer it as a 1.0 release now. Tested and working quite well, with one known instance processing over 300+ feeds every 15 min with no problems.

Enjoy!