Serendipity

I have just committed an update to the serendipity_event_staticpage plugin (now version 2.0)

It can now hold indefinite numbers of static pages in a seperate DB table and gives you a new menu item to maintain your static pages. This is both more intuitively, does not crowd the plugins table and therefore is much faster.

If you have suggestions how to further improve the static page plugin, please raise your voice. :-)

After this feature was requested many times on the forums but I always disagreed to it, I finally got over myself and implemented an updated version of a plugin to support that.

The former user self-registration plugin serendipity_plugin_adduser as been enhanced. It can now be configured to add users that are only allowed to log in and maintain their configuration; those users cannot post entries. To support that you will need the latest changes committed to the 0.9 SVN branch.

A new event plugin serendipity_event_adduser has been added as well. This plugin takes care to forbid users posting comments if they are not logged in. Also the plugin directly offers an interface to let users register themselves.

When a new user registers, a pending account will be created for him and he will get an activation Email. As soon as he confirms a link, the author account will be created.

If you enable the feature that only allows posting comments to registered users, only logged in users (cookie needed!) will see the "Post entry" form. Others will see a message to get themselves an account. Also note that even though users may still enter their username and Email, it is resetted to their real username+email they maintain in their profile.

Of course this is a bit beta-ish once again, so I'd love to hear feedback about it.

While working on migrating some blog design I discovered, we had no calendar/event scheduling plugin to easily add upcoming events.

I've now patched up a plugin called "serendipity_event_mycalendar" and committed it to CVS; there you can add events, their dates and a possible referring URL which will be displayed in the sidebar plugin.

Maybe I'll think about a upload form to import CSV separated events or whatever some time. As I'm not using any calendar application, that may not happen easily though. :-)

Thanks to Isotopp I discovered today that the load_plugin() method of the Plugin API did perform some unneccessary SQL queries when loading/searching for a plugin.

I have created this patch (can be applied to both 0.9 SVN and 0.8.1) - it will properly detect the plugin path setting and now only perform the SQL query when needed.

This should cut down one SQL query per plugin that is loaded; in a standard install with 14 plugins this is 14 less SQL queries. But thanks to MySQL and other caching systems, the impact of those superfluous small queries is not that large.

The patch will be part of a possible 0.8.2 release and has been committed to the CVS backport and SVN branches already.

(Update: Some more changes to the patch)