Serendipity 1.7 released – Serendipity

The Serendipity Team is proud to present the final release of Serendipity 1.7, also known as Rolling Thunder for certain people. This will be the last release before the larger rewrite of 2.0, where many people poured their effort into restructurizing and templating the backend.

Thus, Serendipity 1.7 mainly focusses on stability and compatibility with new PHP 5.3/5.4 versions. In our 1.7 release process we have received feedback from many people to help us improve that Serendipity 1.7 works properly on all PHP setups with at least PHP 5.2. Older PHP versions no longer work with Serendipity 1.7, but are definitely not recommended due to security issues, so please ask your webhoster to upgrade PHP if you are running a lower version (as long as that happens you can stick to older Serendipity versions like 1.6.2).

Other minor bug-fixes and improvements have been implemented in a lot of small places, which you can see in the docs/NEWS file of the release.

Smaller new features are that you can now define defaults for custom entryproperties, the RSS sidebarplugin now also supports Atom-feeds (thanks to the now-bundled Simplepie), Spartacus can now fetch the plugin files also from github and we now use the latest and greatest version of Smarty3.

BEFORE installing the new release, you should upgrade all external (Spartacus) plugins to their latest versions, to ensure that they will operate properly with the latest Serendipity version - if you forgot that, you can also upgrade the files after the upgrade, but it might be that you receive certain PHP error notices.
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. Please be sure to make a backup of your Database prior to upgrading, and read the upgrade pointers on Upgrading Serendipity. Also make sure that your server is running at least PHP 5.2, otherwise Serendipity would no longer run after the upgrade.

A note for developers: If you have created your own, custom event plugins you might see PHP notices when your method variable signature of i.e. the "event_hook" or "introspect_config_item" methods mismatches the one that is defined in the Serendipity Plugin API. Make sure that the list of parameters for i.e. the event_hook() method matches:
function event_hook($event, &$bag, &$eventData, $addData = null) {

Have fun using Serendipity, and let us know on the Forums if you have any issues!

Download here!