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

SimpleFeed 2.1

SimpleFeed 2.1 has been released, grab it while it's hot!

This release fixes a number of outstanding issues and greatly improves the robustness of SimpleFeed. Highlighted fixes include:

* Critical update, fixes updating of feed items to use the new unique identifier, before it only made it through 50 items, causing duplicate headaches
* Unique identifier for feed items now relies on a combination of title & link, which will pave the way for updating changed feed item bodies later
* Support for much longer length URLs
* Improved database indices
* Fix expiration of feed items so it can run properly as anonymous user cron

SimpleFeed was released a little over 4 months ago and has been working out very well. However, it still wasn’t fast enough—-at least for me. It could work faster, it could be more efficient. So over the past month or two I’ve really reworked some of the internal logic, making things much more efficient. I also borrowed a tip from FeedAPI about hashing entire feeds to check for updates faster and simplified the unique hash of each feed item to be much faster to compute and compare.

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…

Out of frustration with aggregator module in core and the lack of any clean, easy to use, and easy to extend [e.g., feed api/hooks] contrib modules that parse feeds, I embarked upon a quest to build a Drupal module that did feed parsing correctly.

And with that, I’m pleased to announce SimpleFeed, which has now stabilized [e.g., no more planned major database changes, nor code shuffling] and is slated for a 1.0 release quite soon (a couple minor bugs to fix).