Serendipity 1.5-beta1 released
Serendipity 1.5-beta1 is the first public beta release of the upcoming Serendipity 1.5 version. Some important things have changed under the hood, that we would like to ask our users to try out and report back to us.
This version mainly addresses login security by changing our method how passwords are stored to use salted SHA1 chacksums instead of plain MD5 checksums. This makes password retrieval (rainbow attacks) through the database virtually impossible. Another thing is improved PHP 5.3 compatibility. See more about this in a special blog posting some time ago.
For users of our Bundled WYSIWYG-Editor Xinha users now have the ability to easily customize the appearance of this panel through a "my_custom.js" file inside the template directory (a draft of such a file can be found as fallback default in the htmlarea/ subdirectory).
One cool new feature for developers is that now also templates can register themselves inside the plugin API hooks to execute specific things, that don't require installation of an event plugin.
Other news include:
- new event API hooks
- fixed PDF thumbnail generation
- ability to auto-scroll on borders when Drag/Dropping plugins
- UTC server time zone support
- improvements in the Smarty functions to easier use Serendipity as a CMS for individual entry output.
- quicksearch improvements for doing a wildcard-search when too few searchresults were found on a fixed searchterm
- support for Typepad anti-spam server-checks, additionally to Akismet
The current release can be easily installed on any previous Serendipity installation. Just unpack, upload and visit your admin panel to perform possible database upgrades. Upon first login with an old password, Serendipity will store your old password in the new format - please be sure to make a backup of your Database prior to upgrading. Apart from that, the current beta release is already in production use on many blogs and there are no known problems/issues with this.