Plugins

Google seems to have changed their URLs where pings to the sitemap webmaster helper tool are sent to.

Thus, the Serendipity Google Sitemap plugin requires you to either manually update to the right URL. The updated plugin in Spartacus has been committed today and should be available tomorrow.

The new URL to use is: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=%s (see this thread)

I've committed a new plugin to Spartacus that allows users to use a very simply Notification System.

Users can create text (HTML formatting configurable) that will appear on the Admin Backend. A small goodie is a feature that notifications are subject to specific usergroups - only the usergroups for which the creator intentionally posted the message will see it.

The plugin also allows to configure whether normal users are allowed to use the messaging system. In the future this could be enhanced for more granular control, but for the time being it should proove a nice tool. The display of the messages can be controlled via a bundled notes.css CSS file.

CSS formatting also allows to format new incoming messages differently. Now try it out and have fun

Despite my downtime, I was able to find the time to commit some changes I was having up my sleeve to the 1.1 beta version.

It involves, what many people have asked for: Specify, which user/usergroups are able to have access to certain plugins. My standpoint until now was, that plugins should implement the versatile permission management of Serendipity, available since version 0.9.

However, reality got me when I saw that no plugin was really ported yet to use that permission management setup to provide custom permission sets. But people wanted to have the ability to say "The staticpage plugin is only available to user XY".

Thus, I implemented a rather hackish way into the groupmanagement: You can now specify complete plugins, or specific event hooks which are forbidden for a usergroup. This way, you can say that group X is not allowed to execute a 'Staticpage' plugin.

This approach should work quite well for many usage scenarios - the upside is, that all old plugins are supported instantly. However, the neater approach of course is to modify plugins so that they provide their own permissions for more granulate control of what you want to achieve.

To enable this functionality you must first enable the option "Enable Plugin ACL for usergroups" in the serendipity configuration. The reason why you must explicitly enable this is, because those plugin checks decrease the performance of the plugin API. Every executed plugin hook must be checked against the blacklist, and those checks would hurt bloggers that do not intent to use this feature. To satisfy everyone, you have an option for this.

You can try the feature in the nightly builds created today, or using an SVN checkout. The feature is contained in 1.1-beta4.

Two new plugins have been added to CVS by me:

serendipity_event_metadesc / "HTML META-Tags" allows you to define meta-description and meta-keywords per entry. Those will then be shown on the detailed entry page within the HTML head. As a nice bonus, if you leave the fields empty, the plugin tries to auto-detect keywords and description based on your text. For that it evaluates Bold/Strong tags in HTML to auto-guess your content.

serendipity_event_cronjob / "Cronjob scheduler" finally offers some cronjob functionality that people have sometimes requested. A lengthy explaination of this plugin follows. :-)

Yesterday, Andyman77 from the forums brought the Thickbox project to my attention. Using his plugin, I intermingled that with the existing lightbox plugin so that you can now choose which JS library to use to format your links. Plus, lightbox2 got also added to the plugin.

What, you don't know what Lightbox is? It's a nifty javascript that will transform links to images into small "popup" links. When you thus link to a thumbnail images (<a href="large.jpg"><img src="thumb.jpg" />), lightbox will take on that image link, and once clicked on it, the large image will be shown on your page instead in a separate browser window. It sounds boring when explained, so just go to the lightbox pages and look at their installations.

The plugin installation is seamless, as all image links in serendipity will get automatically rewritten so that links from thumbnails will show up as lightbox links.

Thickbox brings fun into this thing by offering to also popup HTML links inside neat popups. Just add a 'class="thickbox"' attribute to your HTML links in your entries, and that's it.

Basically, Serendipity should support the Flock browser.

Sadly, due to a bug in their parsing/sending routine, applications that rely on PEARs XML-RPC extension won't work with flock. Serendipity falls under that category. It would work without flock auto-detecting a blog, but because flock's autodetection is blocking to successfully add Serendipity, this is a devil's circle.

This flock bug had been reported in February, but sadly no progress has yet been made. All the people who'd might like to use their Serendipity Blog and the XML-RPC posting plugin with Flock, please raise your kind voice here:

Flock Bugtracker.

I am pretty sure the nice people of Flock will report to popular demand - I'd really like to see progress in this issue :)