Beta-test Serendipity 1.2

As you might have read in the Serendipity 1.1.1 release announcement, we have a fundamental code change in Serendipity 1.2 concerning the authentication theme.

Those changes were discussed in this forum thread

It basically evolves around those things:

  1. Introduce a new, first event hook that can be fired to authenticate external users.

  2. This new event hook requires to execute a plugin before the whole language system is initialized, and thus language preferences have been fetched. To accomodate this, a new cookie has been introduced that defines the language your used has chosen.

  3. A new HTTP / HTTPS session sharing system is now in effect, which allows you to login via HTTPS and be able to work using the HTTP connection and be recognized as logged-in.

Those changes might introduce new glitches, especially in environments where HTTPS is used, and/or the multilingual plugin features.

Everyone using such an environment, please download a recent Serendipity 1.2 snapshot and try it out on a test-system. You can easily clone an existing installation of yours by copying all files to a second directory, copying the database tables to a different table (or with a different table prefix) and then uploading the Serendpity 1.2 Snapshot to that dummy directory. After your login to that new installation, change the path locations in your Serendipity Configuration and you can test the new install with the data of your production blog.

Your help is much required to ensure the stability of Serendipity. Any problems you face that did not previously show up in older Serendipity versions should please be reported on our forums!

Many thanks go to rrichards_ from the original thread, who implemented the new functionality that will hopefully ultimately lead to OpenID integration into Serendipity. :-)

Serendipity 1.1.1 released

After the well-received Serendipity 1.1 release, we put our ears to the community and searched for any bugs left. Luckily, those were very few (like the IIS server cookie bug) - we didn't at first believe it, so we let some time go by to be absolutely sure there were no other things to fix before issuing a maintenance release.

And here it is now: Serendipity 1.1.1 is a bugfix-only release to fix these reported issues:

  • Windows IIS server cookie/session authentication problem when not running via HTTPS
  • Change execution order of trackbacks to properly send them when a failure occurs
  • Display proper plugin permissionship restrictions when the admin user is not part of the group that is restricted
  • Fixed a bug that some plugins were not able to properly execute in the entry detail view

This is not a security-related upgrade. You only need to apply it if you think you are affected by any of the bugs listed.

Meanwhile, we continue to work on Serendipity 1.2 for feature improvements. Together with helpful users of the forum we are currently working on improving the authentication/plugin API sequence to better support future plugins like OpenID. Any help is appreciated, have a look at the forum thread. Also we are working on improving the Spartacus API, PDO::PostgreSQL support has been added, spamblock plugin improvements and some tweaks to the permalink system.

You can download the new version (or a recent snapshot of Serendipity 1.2) as always on our Download page. Detailed upgrade steps are explained in our FAQ, but it's as simply as: Download, extract, go to the Admin panel. :-)

Have fun!