New Serendipity 1.1 Features

The Serendipity 1.0 release progress is advancing - currently we have created new page layouts for the blog, wiki and spartacus pages that acommodate the new logo and our new default theme by contest winner Carl Galloway.

A major new documentation contribution, documenting all Smarty variables has been made by me: CSS classes / Variable Documentation on the Wiki. We are getting things together and finalizing the designs - the Serendipity 1.0 release version can hopefully be uploaded at the end of next week, if everything goes according to plan. Plus, the Serendipity Installation Documentation has been greatly improved and now contains screenshot-guided instructions.

Parallely, work on Serendipity 1.1 is evolving very well. Here are a few new key features:

• Completely overhauled Media Gallery. Serendipity has always been a major player in providing easy media database access, and is now enhancing it for even more usability and flexibility. You can now assign privileges for every media directory. You can now retrieve and store meta properties like descriptions, EXIF-Data, keywords - and filter/search for them easily. Plus, the media gallery is now Smarty Template-driven, so you can customize it to your needs. You can now move images/whole directories within the filestructure, and existing entries will be edited to suit that new location. The media database can now be synchronized on-the-fly with contents on the webspace - means you can upload files via FTP and they will automagically be imported. A explorer-like view on the directories completes the featureset.
  Watch this video:
  
• You can enable/disable certain markup plugins per-entry. Ever wanted to create a Full HTML posting, but were annoyed by automatic nl2br conversion? Now you can turn it off for specific entries.
• Support for Template Options. All Themes can now offer specific configuration options for using a theme, like specifying which colorset you want to use, which navigational items you'd like to see and even fine-control banner options. See Carl Galloways Page for some sneak previews on the functionality to come!
• Finally, you can now use Drag And Drop to re-order your sidebar/event plugins much more intuitively than in the past. It uses enhanced JavaScripts (from Cyberdummy.co.uk / tool-man - great script!), that works on all major browsers. For those browsers that don't offer support for that, or for users without JavaScript, the old method is still working seamlessly. This means, that Serendipity continually strifes to both deliver top-usability to our users, as well as satisfy people who are paying close attention to security issues.
  Watch this video:
  

So, if those features ring any bells inside your bellies, go to the Serendipity Site and try out 1.1 Snapshots. And stay close for the never-ending story of the Serendipity 1.0 release in the next days. :-)