Development

It's been a long time, and the Serendipity Team is proud to present the Serendipity 1.5.1 release...

...All bad things come in triplets, except this one, which came in a duplet: First the uploaded release file contained the current development version, the second issue was found due to just 3 mixed up characters, which prevents any plugin that has a HTML/WYSIWYG-Config-item (like the HTML Nugget plugin) to be properly displayed.

The fix is quite easy: include/functions_plugins_admin.inc.php. The cause for this problem was introduced only a few days earlier and sadly slipped by unnoticed. We're awfully sorry for the trouble this may cause you.

Due to this version mixup earlier and this annoying bug, Serendipity 1.5.1 (Codename Colin AKA If everybody else is doing it, why can't we; but well, it could be worse) has been released.

If you're lazy and already upgraded to 1.5, you will only need to download and replace the file found here: include/functions_plugins_admin.inc.php.

Now have a merry christmas, and let's hope that our best friend Murphy has no surprises left for us freezing germans.

The Serendipity Team is proud to present the final release of Serendipity 1.5. While the earlier beta versions are proven to work fine for many people, it was finally time to package up a real release. ;)

This version mainly addresses login security by changing our method how passwords are stored to use salted SHA1 checksums instead of plain MD5 checksums. This makes password retrieval (rainbow attacks, see special blog posting) through the database virtually impossible. Another thing is improved PHP 5.3 compatibility.

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

Minor improvements since the 1.5-beta1 release:

• more PHP 5.3.0 compatibility improvements
• Disallow uploading any files that contain ".php." in the filename for extra security with Apache MimeMagic-Modules
• expermiental PDO:SQlite support
• usability improvements for the comment moderation panel (bottom-navigation, removed border increase)

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, and read the upgrade pointers on Upgrading Serendipity.

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

Update: Accidentaly, the 1.6-alpha release file was uploaded with the wrong file name. This has been fixed, the real files are now available -- users who had already downloaded this 1.6 release can either re-download the new release bundle, or stay at their current version. 1.6 has only 2 minor changes yet, and is 99,9% identical with 1.5 at this point. The most major difference would only be the version number. ;-)
I'm sorry for this fault, I blame it on the german weather...

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.

Since quite some time, Serendipity uses old-fashioned md5 hashes to secure your passwords for logins to the backend.

Because mechanisms to crack md5 hashes with rainbow tables or even "dictionary hash"-lookups are getting more and more popular, we have decided to finally take the step to raise the serendipity hashing mechanism to something salted, and more secure (SHA1). Even though md5 hashes are still reasonably(!) safe when you use long, randomized passwords, the old-style hashing is a one-way route to hell.

Serendipity has always been had high tributes to backwards compatibility and ease-of-use and ease-of-upgrading, we have decided to take the "soft" upgrade approach. That means, new Serendipity versions will accept your old MD5 login ONCE, and then will use your user-specified password to create the safer hash and store that to the database.

This will help in hypothetical attack situations, where someone might have gotten hand on your hash values stored inside the database, because he will no longer be able to reverse-engineer your original password.

We could need help from any developer or betatester trying out the new functionality. Upgrading to the latest snapshot (get it from the s9y nightly downloads) with Serendipity 1.5-alpha2 will deploy the necessary database upgrades. Note that the one-time MD5-login is only possible in the first 6 months after you performed the installation of this serendipity version (through a saved timestamp in the database), and after that timespan, you can no longer login with the old password and must reset your password through the Administrator (or manual means, if you are the administrator).

Once you perform the update (do not try this on production blogs currently), everything should continue as usual. If it does not, please report your exact problems here or in the Forums. It is suggested that once you have the new serendipity version you change your password, so that nobody that might have already gotten your old md5 hash can use the reverse-engineered password to login again with the new hash created from the same original password.

Feedback is appreciated. The current mechanism is subject to change and currently more a proof-of-concept - feedback will most definitely lead to improvement. :-)

Serendipity 1.4.1 has been released. This is mainly a bugfix release for the updated of the bundled Smarty library, which fixes issues with Serendipity 1.4.

Other small fixes include better antispam checks for pingbacks (they were too strict before), an update to the sql index key creation of the statistics plugin and removal of error messages on open_basedir enabled servers.

You only need to upgrade to Serendipity 1.4.1 if one of the mentioned bugs affect you. Updating is easy and documented online.

Due to some feedback on the forums, we were made aware of a bug of the bundled Smarty templating engine that can happen in some PHP environments and lead to PHP warning/error messages.

If this occurs for you, please simply download an updated version of the file bundled-libs/Smarty/libs/Smarty_Compiler.class.php and upload it to your blog directory. Of course we will integrate this update to a future point release of Serendipity.