The release of this beta brings with it a feature freeze. Any new features will be scheduled for 1.1 and will not make it into 1.0. The majority of development from now until release of 1.0 will focus on bug fixing and stabilising the code.

So, what’s been happening recently in the world of Lilina? I’ve been working on getting Lilina closer to a release, and I think I’m almost ready for a beta of 1.0. Expect that coming in the next week or so, as soon as I fix up some bugs.

Since the last blog post, Lilina has been changed to now keep your items forever in a persistent database. I’m not sure yet whether to add the ability to automatically remove older items, as I’m not sure how much it is actually needed. (This was added a while ago, but I haven’t posted on here in a while either. )

Lilina now also has the ability to update items via a cron job, and also via Ajax. The only template that currently can be updated via Ajax is the Razor template (not included with Lilina at the moment), though I hope to update a few more to be able to work with it too.

So, that’s what has been happening, now on to what’s currently happening. I’m working on stabilising Lilina, which means rigorously testing features, and importing from almost every feed reader known to man. If anyone has any issues at all with importing, please let me know via the forums, as I can’t test every feed.

PHP5 has been around for more than 3 years and it is time to move on and embrace new developments and standards. PHP4 support and critical security updates have been dropped completely, as of 08/08/08 and all hosts are encouraged to upgrade to PHP5.

Going PHP5

As of today, PHP4 compatibility is being dropped from Lilina. We join a whole group of projects who have dropped support for PHP4.

What does this mean for me?

If your host is currently running PHP 5.2, nothing changes for you. If your host is currently running PHP4, 5.0.* or 5.1.*, convince your host to upgrade to PHP 5.2 or change hosts. Lilina will not be supporting PHP4 for future releases. For more information, check out this FAQ, published by GoPHP5.

What does this mean for Lilina?

This decision will enable faster development of Lilina, with many features being easier to achieve and faster. It also enables cleaner code, which can reduce the size of the codebase substantially.

This announcement will have benefits for everyone and I hope that it will have no ill effects on any users.

One of our main logos that we used was a logo designed by NeoRame. This was a great logo and we thank him for his efforts. However, we decided that the logo was too complicated, as we were trying to show simplicity.

I headed back to the drawing board and went through quite a few different revisions of the logo. I finally settled on the current version of the logo.

But, what exactly is the logo? The blue “wave” at the top of the logo is meant to integrate aspects of the feed icon used in Internet Explorer and Firefox. It also takes place of the tittles (dots on the ‘i’s). Further, the ‘ili’ represents a group of servers, with the middle one pushing out content to the other two via the wave.

If you would like to use the Lilina logo in a publication, you can grab the original or one with a brown background (#4D4D4D to be specific).

For the future development of these, we’d like to hear from you: what are you looking for in your reader and how do you read your feeds?

(Further posts will be coming soon, I’ve been extremely busy in my “Real Life”™, however development is still continuing on Subversion)

We should be fully converted by tomorrow and a heap of new template tags will make life easier for templaters, especially those with a WordPress background.

This is just a quick note that we’ve set up an IRC channel on Freenode. You can use this link if your client supports it, otherwise just join the #lilina channel on irc.freenode.net

If no one is there, just post your question anyway. We keep logs and check them daily and will try and contact you.

Also, the forums are currently being looked at and we are trying to decide on what software we will use. We’re currently investigating Vanilla (which we already use), bbPress and PunBB.

So, you may ask, what’s the big problem? Well, after having just looked at their blog (and realising they have released a new version), I noticed that they are moving to PHP5 only. This is a big setback in my opinion. My thoughts pretty much mirror those of Matt’s. However, we also need to consider users who can’t (or won’t) upgrade to PHP5, for various reasons. If SimplePie continues to release PHP4 compatible releases, we will most definitely use them in time.

My thoughts on SimplePie have changed somewhat and I’d now personally rather use SimplePie. Why?

• Active development: I have access to Magpie’s Trac installation and no new updates have been released in a year. This is a major issue for me, as we want to keep this up-to-date so that we can parse everything possible. SimplePie is under active development so this would ensure that we are always up-to-date.
• MySQL caching: Lilina is going to be using a purely MySQL backend from 2.0 upwards (we’ll start introducing support for it after 1.0), so this is a major one for us.
• Friendly developers: The developers seem friendly and genuine (nothing against Kellan, but I don’t trust people who work for Yahoo! )
• A bunch of other stuff I’m sure I’ve forgotten

So, the basic status on SimplePie is: we’d like to, but at the moment we can’t, due to it becoming PHP5 only.

On a semi-related note, the wiki is now open for anyone to edit. Simply login to the forums and then visit the documentation pages to edit them. Some will be locked if needed.

We have also moved our mailing lists. Our latest Subversion commits will now be available from lilina-svn and we’ll be setting up further discussion lists later. You can view a list of all mailing lists too.