better error reporting and instructions when simplepie.inc is missing

blank screen is usually caused by a PHP error, we need to find out the PHP error message in order to figure out what's wrong.

please read this handbook page. once you figure out the error message pate it in a reply here.

I'll also need to know which parser you are using.

ahah.

yes Drupal CVS rules don't allow us to distribute the simplepie.inc file anymore so you have to manually download it yourself from http://simplepie.org and place the simplepie.inc file in the parsers/simplepie directory

I put some instructions in the INSTALL.txt file, but since english isn't my first language maybe the instructions aren't very clear.

maybe we should no longer default to simplepie.

and we should also check if simplepie.inc exists and present a user friendly error message with instructions if not.

BTW if you're using PHP5 you might want to try the simplexml parser, it uses less RAM and so is able to parse more feeds per cron run (simplepie library leaks memory due to this PHP bug

We can't default to anything now probably.
The external parser is still not mature enough. simplepie won't work out of the box and simplexml requires php5. Maybe we need to default to nothing and force the admin to select one ?

fixed