Plugins

Since the core Serendipity project is now maintained on github.com and every developer is quite happy about that, we decided to go the jquery-plugins route and delete all Serendipity plugins.

No, just kidding. We actually imported all data from the SourceForge.net CVS servers into the github infrastructure. The short version for normal end-users: Nothing should change for you!

https://github.com/s9y/additional_plugins

https://github.com/s9y/additional_themes

All current Serendipity developers also have access to those repositories to contribute code. Developers now no longer should commit code to CVS (actually, they can't, because I took all their committing karma *eg*).

The harder task for the Spartacus infrastructure service is the actual publishing of data. The Spartacus plugin operates on a PEAR-like XML format for each plugin, which luckily is automatically generated by a small shellscript which runs once daily on one of our webservers (emerge.sh). That script iterates on a checkout of all plugins and templates, creates the XML and uploads it to all mirror servers (currently netmirror.org, s9y.org and now also github.com).

Downloading the files also either works via the files that are uploaded daily to netmirror.org and s9y.org, or you always could use the SourceForge.net server, that published the file via a nasty ViewVC oddity. The spartacus plugin of the current github core code (version 2.25) now can also retrieve those files from the Github.com servers.

For all users that currently use the Spartacus plugin with the SourceForge.Net mirror, our daily script now pushes all changes in the GitHub tree also to CVS, so that both repositories *should* be kept in sync. This is done via the gitclone.sh and gitclone.php scripts in the additional_plugins repository, for anyone that's interested.

Most likely, something in this script won't work properly, so in the next days it might be that some glitches in the matrix can occur. In that case, please report issues and remain seated. Or buy christmas presents for your beloved. Or your beloved developers.

MustLive discovered a HTML-injection vulnerability in the tagcloud.swf Flashfile that the Freetag-Plugin bundles and makes optionally available.

The issue is fixed in version 1.23 of the flashfile, which has now been committed to the Serendipity plugin (in version 3.30).

Since the swf-File is always bundled with the update, it is recommended to update to the latest version of the plugin for all users, or to delete that specific .swf file.

Thanks to MustLive for sharing the information with us.

Christian Boltz notified us and provided a patch to fix the spartacus plugin properly being able to retrieve remote files. This became necessary when SourceForge.net changed their underlying structure.

If you are using Spartacus, you have several possibilities to fix this issue for you:

1: Manually download the updated plugin file plugins/ serendipity_event_spartacus/ serendipity_event_spartacus.php from here: serendipity_event_spartacus.php for Serendipity 1.6 / Development, serendipity_event_spartacus.php for Serendipity 1.5.

2: You can also simply configure your spartacus plugin and enable the use of Netmirror.org, or you can enter a custom mirror: http://php-blog.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/php-blog/|http://netmirror.org/mirror/serendipity/

3: You can also simply edit your serendipity_event_spartacus.php file and replace all 2 occurences of the string *checkout* with viewvc.

Thanks to Christian for notifying us!

Thanks to Stefan Schurtz, who reported a XSS issue in the serendipity_event_freetag plugin (SSCHADV2011-004). The issue was fixed in version 3.22 of the plugin, you can fetch the update through Spartacus or download via Spartacus.s9y.org.

The bug was introduced in version 3.20 of the plugin. Users of the plugin should upgrade, as it allows malicious users to trick people into visiting a specially crafted link on your blog to steal cookie login information for example, if you click on such a link.

Even though the Disqus.com comment integration is easily integratable inside a serendipity template already, the need for a specific plugin was raised on the forums.

serendipity_event_disqus is now available on Spartacus and provides exactly this - a plug and play component to enable disqus comments on your blog, and it even allows you to only use this system for more recent blog entries, so that your old comments can be preserved.

Currently the plugin hides the Serendipity-internal comments and trackbacks through CSS. The plugin provides instructions on how to modify that, if you have a custom template.

Have fun using the plugin, and if you have issues or recommendations for it, feel free to discuss this on the Serendipity forums. :-)

The podcast plugin has recently been improved to offer a much more flexible configuration with custom player and HTML5 audio/video support. The flowplayer has been added as a new, more flexible flash-video player replacement.

You can now specify custom feed options, and the RSS podcast format should now be iTunes compatible., as well as the Flowplayer replacement for Flash-Videos. Also, custom feed options that you can add to the RSS-Feed (rss.php?podcast_format=XXX) allow you to filter the enclosures only to specific file extensions.

The update should be compatible to older versions so that you can simply use the new features. If you customized any of the player files, you can now do that much easier through the configuration; be sure to backup any files you might have changed before upgrading.

Please report any issues you might have with this updates on the forums!