Lilina News Aggregator

As you may have noticed, two of Lilina’s major dependencies, SimplePie and HTML Purifier are becoming PHP5 only, with HTML Purifier’s latest releases being available for PHP4 only. I’ve posted previously on SimplePie’s availability for PHP5 only and how we could not switch to it. I later went back and completely backtracked, adding SimplePie to Lilina. It has now been used in Lilina for quite a while, mostly for the better. An old branch of HTML Purifier, 2.*, is used in Lilina and its new 3.* branch has a wealth of new features. Lilina is unable to utilise these at the moment for PHP4 compatibility. This disadvantages our PHP5 users, who could be getting faster and better parsing from HTML Purifier.

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.

We’ve changed our logo a few times now but we’ve finally settled on the current one. I’d like to take a brief moment to explain the reasoning behind it.

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).

As you may know if you’re following the development on Subversion, we’re experimenting with a few different templates.

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)

Firstly, happy new year and holidays to everyone! We hope your holidays have been especially fun and we wish you a prosperous and joyful new year.

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.

This was originally to be a list of what was wrong with SimplePie, however the more I thought about it, the more I considered that it probably was a better solution. It’s under constant development, it’s got a few features we currently have our own code for and, best of all, it’s got an IRC chat room, which is always a help.

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! :P)
• 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.

As you may have noticed, we’re now operating from GetLilina.org. This will now operate as the permanent home for Lilina.

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.

I’ve gone through and removed all accounts on the blog here. They aren’t needed for commenting and as there’s no other reason for them, I’ve disabled signups as well.

I will be setting up integration with the forums so that if you are logged in there, your name, email and URL will be autofilled in the comments form. This should help with a few things I’ll be setting up soon, such as a central place to subscribe to feeds so sites can add “Subscribe to Lilina” buttons.

I added jQuery into the mix today. It should be able to replace all of the functions currently used in engine.js

As an example, expanding and collapsing items. Up until the revision 89, around 45 lines were used for working out what was clicked and changing it and the background. It took every click and checked whether it was needed. If it was, it went through complicated processes working out what to do.
With jQuery, it’s all handled for us, and the only code we need is:
$(document).ready(function() {
$(".title").click(function(){
$(this).next().next().slideToggle().parent().toggleClass("c1").toggleClass("c2");
});
});

Review: We cut down 45 lines to 3 lines! Everything is handled for us now by jQuery and is about 4 times faster. Plus, it’s ultra easy to add new features, like the removal of date headers. Thanks jQuery!

I just tested Lilina on my laptop which had a few programs running, just to get a fairly accurate time on the loading (my computer is bogged down).

The results were amazing:

• 3.12 seconds on the first go
• 1.07 seconds on reload

These times are incredible compared to old loading times of 10 seconds for one feed.

There are some important things to note however:

• HTMLPurifier uses a lot of CPU and memory resources
  • As the author says: “Precisely why you need to cache HTMLPurifier’s output”
  • However, Lilina does not cache HTMLPurifier’s output. This must be fixed
• Lilina isn’t finished yet, so the times may be inaccurate.
• Loading times are dependant on the speed of the server’s connection:
  The faster the server, the less time needed to load

Now, once I get the OPML import up and running, I will be able to test for security flaws.

Happy New Year to all Lilina users!

With the new year, I thought I’d give a run-down of the new features in Lilina 1.0:

• New admin panel
• Plugin & Templating system
• Faster loading times
• Support for enclosures and podcasts
• Abilty to rename feeds
• Configuration via a web-interface
• Default configuration kept in inc/core/conf.php
• User settings kept in settings.php
• RSS and Atom output
• Caching of the front page
• XHTML Output
• Sanitizing feeds - No platypuses turning up in the middle of your pages
• Proper OPML importing: Doesn’t overwrite your current feeds
• Database support (Note: not full support, but support)

Plus more