Coming Soon: mt-feeds 2.0.

<p>File this one under <q>a lot of effort went into making this look easy</q> or, depending how you feel, <q>it&#39;s about <em>@#?*&amp;!%</em> time!</q> I&#39;m a bit surprised that I haven&#39;t been <a href="http://www.patchworkprogression.com/archives/2004/04/28-the-sting-of-mt-30.php">publicly flogged like some other software developers</a>. (I appreciate every one&#39;s patience.)</p>
<p>I finally threw down the gauntlet and went into near seclusion to reach this point, but I&#39;m nearing completion of mt-feeds 2.0 (formerly mt-rssfeed). This post is too provide a bit of an update and to recruit some alpha testers to collect feedback. If you are interested and a MT3 tester, please click Reply (link above) to let me know. Since I am an army of one, I&#39;ll be keeping the group small to avoid being buried.</p>
<p>This new release represents a complete object-oriented overhaul of the engine that should prove to be more robust, adaptive and flexible so I hopefully never ever ever ever have to go through this again. (I think I may retire if I do.) Since version 1.0 of the plugin was released, both Atom and RSS 2.0 (in its <a href="http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/04/incompatible-rss">many and varying forms</a>) were introduced and put into use adding an exponential amount of complexity (where is the simple? I don&#39;t see it) to republishing syndicated data. In order to better accommodate the sophistication necessary, this project included the development and evolution of 4 CPAN packages &#8211; <a href="http://search.cpan.org/dist/XML-Elemental/">XML::Elemental</a>, <a href="http://search.cpan.org/dist/XML-RSS-Parser/">XML::RSS::Parser</a>, <a href="http://search.cpan.org/dist/XML-RAI/">XML::RAI</a> and <a href="http://search.cpan.org/dist/XML-Atom-Syndication/">XML::Atom::Syndication</a>.</p>
<p>You probably don&#39;t (and shouldn&#39;t) care about that though. What you should care about is what&#39;s new and what&#39;s changed:</p>
<ul>
<li>It&#39;s name to reflect its&#8230;</li>
<li>Atom syndication support.</li>
<li>Additional support and improved mapping of RSS tags including date tags with native MT formatting support. </li>
<li>Easier to configure. (I hope.)</li>
<li>Smarter faster caching of syndication feeds including HTTP ETag support.</li>
<li>Ability to refresh your subscriptions separately or in the background via cron. </li>
<li>Internalization of mt-list functionality.</li>
<li>OPML, <a href="http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/xhtmloutlines">XOXO</a> and CSV support of subscriptions lists.</li>
<li>The ability to render the latest entries from a group of subscriptions.</li>
</ul>
<p>Unfortunately, because of this substantial change in functionality this version is generally backward incompatible. Namely&#8230;</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://search.cpan.org/~byrne/SOAP-Lite-0.60a/lib/XML/Parser/Lite.pm">XML::Parser::Lite</a> support had to be dropped. It was lacked too many features that are crucial to syndication and is not being actively maintained. I toyed with the idea of adding most of the necessary feature myself, but decided that it wasn&#39;t worth the hassle. I had a bit of a tussle with Parser::Lite trying to get 1.0 out over a year ago. (It was a majority of the time I spent in development actually.) Forgive me for not wanting to repeat that experience again. I think that expat and <a href="http://search.cpan.org/dist/XML-Parser/">XML::Parser</a> is broad enough that this shouldn&#39;t be a problem. If this is going to be a problem please contact me to discuss.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>The tags names and structure are significantly different and will require mt-rssfeed templates to be manually edited. Sorry, but with the substantial changes I couldn&#39;t come up with a way to keep things backwards compatible.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>It requires MT3. (Too may new goodies in 3.0 to pass-up.)</li>
</ul>
<p>As before, this plugin will made available under the same terms as MT itself &#8211; a donation is requested for personal and non-profit use. Commercial entities are required to obtain a license. It <strong>is not</strong> open source like many of my prior MT plugins. </p>
<p>OK, back to my cell.</p>
<p><strong>UPDATE:</strong> I opened an announcements mailing list <a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mt-feeds-announce/">here</a> For anyone who wants to know when it launches in addition to receiving occasional messages post-launch regarding this plugin.</p>