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Geoffrey Sneddon, one of the developers behind the popular syndication plugin called SimplePie has announced that he will be discontinuing his role as an active developer. In a blog post published on the official SimplePie dev blog , Geoffrey explains why it’s time for him to move on. Schoolwork, lack of available time for the project and what free time he has is spent on the HTML 5 specification and Tolerant HTTP Parsing specification. However, a couple of the modules that deal with the SimplePie API will be maintained.

Despite Geoffrey leaving his development duties, he has left himself open to take more of a consulting role with the 1.x SP code base.

The good news? Ryan, the other developer for SimplePie has responded by stating:

1) SimplePie is NOT stopping development. I have big plans for where I want to take SimplePie, and those can’t happen if SimplePie is dead. In posts over the past few months, I’ve talked about where I want SimplePie to go, and that is still the plan, although it may take a little longer.

2) Over the past 3.5 years, SimplePie and it’s community have grown larger than Geoffrey and I could properly handle. It’s certainly larger than I alone can handle. Geoffrey and I will be looking for people in the SimplePie community to get involved with development, support, and other various aspects of the project.

3) I’m expecting to release SimplePie 1.1 in a matter of days. We also have a MySQL-capable branch that was likely to be 1.2, and will now definitely be 1.2. SimplePie 1.5/2.0 are no longer on any kind of timeline, as we need to get new people involved and up to speed first before we really plan those releases out.

As soon Geoffrey and I have time to work out more of the details, we’ll be sure to let you know.

I currently use the SimplePie Plugin for WordPress which provides WordPress bloggers the ability to syndicate RSS and Atom feeds to your blog. It works wonderfully well and is the plugin that powers my link blog. I really hope development continues for SimplePie as it would be a real downer if the project were to disappear.

Do you use SimplePie? If so, be sure to let me know your thoughts on the plugin.