[isf-wifidog] Switching from Magpie to SimplePie

[Benoit Gregoire]

On Monday 10 July 2006 23:42, François Proulx wrote:
> Since magpie is getting pretty old, has a couple of bugs and is not
> so PHP5 friendly, I would suggest we investigate if we could switch

Any examples of such bugs or PHP5 issues?  I wasn't aware of any.

> to SimplePie. It's a robust, full-featured RSS / Atom parser that
> supports RSS enclosure (podcasts) and is completely object oriented.
> They also provide a few examples of an AJAX-enabled RSS agregator for
> Del.icio.us bookmarks.

Looking at their bug reports lists, it seems to still have problems magpie 
fixed a while ago (dates and international characters mostly).

I read through the API doc, it's slightly more abstract than magpie (simplepie 
is actually a format-independent RSS abstraction layer +  various blog 
specific functions that have little to do with RSS itself, while magpie was a 
format independent RSS parser).

On the plus side, it would allow RssPressReview to get rid of some painfull 
stuff to maintain (the fallback cascades for dates and authors mostly), and 
would allow RssPressReview do expose a documented API instead of it's 
internal data structures.

On the minus side, it would make it impossible to fix bugs other than 
upstream, which is definitly a problem looking at their open bug list:  it's 
still a little green.  (With magpie, RssPressReview could do it's own  
parsing when needed, which it did in the past).  It would also make it harder 
to store our extra attributtes for processing (especially problematic for 
dates in the ranking algorithm).  And finally it would require a really 
extensive refactoring of RssPressReview (as we used magpie internal structure 
extensively).

I think it would be a good idea to implement it once they hit 1.0.  It's API 
is really clean (though aparently heading in a big melting por of RSS and 
blog service functions) and well documented (once you get past their really 
annoying self promotion).

Switching will neither make it easier or harder to make the output more 
customizeable however.