Serendipity 1.2 released

The Serendipity Team is proud to present the final release and immediate availability of Serendipity 1.2.

This release is a feature consolidation release and focuses on small usability improvements, a shiny new template (bulletproof) as well as backend templating and backend login mechanisms as well as some tighter security restrictions.

Some more changes in depth are:

  • Templates: The new bulletproof template is an awesome example to show off Serendipity's cool template options. This template allows you to easily configure the look of your Serendipity site: Place navigation links, choose sidebar layouts, indicate if you want to use/show trackbacks and comments, pick your custom header image or even custom colorsets. Don Chambers, Matthias Mees and David Cummins as well as other contributors have worked very hard on this template that provides an awesome, unified template structure. Go to their site at http://s9y-bulletproof.com to check out the details!
  • Templates: The admin backend (overview page and entry editor) can now be styled via Smarty and gives you the full flexibility to make a custom look of the backend. Plus, more CSS classes have been added to the default admin theme that make CSS-only changes much easier. Templates now also can have large preview images by clicking on their thumbnail.
  • Usability: Moved the problematic option to withdraw your own privileges from personal configuration to the user configuration panel.
  • Feature: Added SQLite3 and PDO:PostgreSQL support.
  • Feature: Allow to configure whether article overviews for a certain category should include articles of subcategories or not.
  • Performance: Improved SQL performance for archive overview generation and permalink lookups.
  • Plugins: Plugins can now hook in much earlier to make external authentication easier (like trough the OpenID plugin).
  • Spam: Enhanced the spamblock plugin with captcha previews, .htaccess generation and some more options.
  • Security: Stronger autologin cookie encryption and template option handling, thanks (once again) to Stefan Esser. Proper session fixation prevention, thanks to David Vieira-Kurz.
  • Bugfix: Sending pingbacks now properly works.
  • Bugfix: The Track-Exits plugin now properly tracks links in conjunction with the caching of the entryproperties plugin.

The full list of changes can be found in the NEWS-file of the release.

You can download the new release as always on the Serendipity homepage at http://www.s9y.org/3.html. Updating is easy: Just upload the new files, visit your Serendipity installation and let the upgrader do the rest.

After the upgrade you might want to purge your browser's cookies (due to the new authentication mechanism of Serendipity 1.2) to prevent login problems. Detailed upgrade instructions can be found in the FAQ on our website.

Enjoy Serendipity, and thanks to everyone who participated in the release process!

For the team,
Garvin.