Netmirror.org Outage, Spartacus affected.
Netmirror.org Outage, Spartacus ... Posted by Garvin in Announcements, Development, Plugins at 16:33
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As of today, the netmirror.org server seems to be having a hiccup. The serendipity Plugin Spartacus by default requires this server to provide automatic plugin and theme updates and downloads. The inavailibility of this server can lead to timeouts and not being able to install new plugins.
The issue should resolve itself once netmirror.org is up again. Temporarily you can either reconfigure your Spartacus-plugin to use the SourceForge-Mirrors, or completely disable the Spartacus plugin. Using the s9y.org mirror will not help you, as this server is currently not hosting any files.
I will post an update once the server is up again. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Spamblock and blogg.de blacklist
Spamblock and blogg.de blacklist Posted by Garvin in Development, Infrastructure, Plugins at 10:16
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The Serendipity Anti-Spam plugin allows to utilize the blogg.de IP blacklist service to block spam. Their service seems to have ceased existence, or at least is rejecting connections. This can lead to comments to your serendipity blog to be rejected. You can easily disable the blogg.de blacklist service in your Anti-Spam plugin configuration.
Note that this option is by default disabled in Serendipity since blogg.de announced that they are no longer actively maintaining the blacklist. A well fit alternative to this service is the Akismet API, which the spamblock plugin also supports.
SEO and meta tags for s9y, updated plugin
SEO and meta tags for s9y, updated ... Posted by Carl Galloway in Plugins at 08:54
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The meta description event plugin has been updated by Don Chambers, Jude Anthony and Garvin Hicking, and now provides a separate title, meta keywords, and meta description on a per entry basis, as well as a default title and description for all other pages.
Previously users were only able to adjust the meta keywords and description per entry, and other pages would miss out, leading many users to install the HTML head nugget as well if they wanted meta keywords and descriptions on overview pages.
Don has written up a full description of the updated meta description plugin on his own site, and is promising to continue developing plugins and templates, so bookmarking his site might be a great idea.
Your help in sorting serendipity plugins
Your help in sorting serendipity plugins Posted by Garvin in Announcements, Development, Infrastructure, Plugins at 10:20
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Like announced earlier on the serendipity blog, fellow usability expert Joachim Harloff is currently trying to improve the listing of Serendipity Plugins so that they are more accessible to users.
He needs your help to fulfill them. Initially he planned to personally meet with serendipity users, but this proved more complex than initially hoped. Thus he has created a smaller, text-based version of it.
You can download the file at http://www.softuse.com/serendipity_sorting.zip. It contains detailed instructions. You can also feel free to personally contact Joachim about any questions you have.
Joachim estimates this questionnaire to take you about 1,5 hours of your time. You could greatly help to improve the serendipity usability, so please participate! Joachim wants to evaluate your responses starting on September the 8th.
Serendipity 1.1.4 released, security bug in entryproperties plugin
Serendipity 1.1.4 released, security ... Posted by Garvin in Announcements, Plugins, Security at 11:14
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Thanks to Erich Schubert, we were made aware of a bug and security issue in the Plugin Extended properties for entries. Since this plugin is delivered with the core release, we have created a new Serendipity release for both the current stable 1.1 version tree, as well as a new 1.2 beta version.
Serendipity Users that are using the mentioned plugin do not need to upgrade the full release, they can just fetch the updated version of the plugin through this direct link. Put that updated file into your plugins/ serendipity_event_entryproperties/ serendipity_event_entryproperties.php file.
The actual bug was, that people were able to deliver custom entryproperties settings to the Serendipity Frontend via a HTTP-Request, which made them able to bypass a possibly used passwort protection. Any other restriction of viewability of entries done via category read-privileges were not affected, though.
Bottom line is: If you are using password protection for entries, this security update is mandatory for you. Also if you were generally using the entryproperties plugin (which is not installed by default in Serendipity), you are urged to update your plugin. Only people not using this plugin need not care about this issue.
You can download the new full releases as always on the Serendipity download page.
Show staticpages via smarty function
Show staticpages via smarty function Posted by Garvin in Plugins at 12:37
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I upgraded the staticpage plugin in CVS to version 3.50 yesterday (which should be available via Spartacus now already).
It now supports to use a custom smarty function to show static pages. This can be used in your custom template files (like the userprofile .tpls) to emit specific staticpages depending on variables.
Go ahead and play with it. The API is quite basic and described in the new 'smarty.inc.php' file. It basically works like this:
{staticpage_display template="$TEMPLATE" pagevar="$PAGEVAR" id="$ID" permalink="$PERMALINK" pagetitle="$PAGETITLE" authorid="$AUTHORID" query="$QUERY"}
The API is quite fundamanetal right now. If you want to access more properties/parameters, please let me know, and I'll implement them. Please discuss this feature on our forums in this thread.
