Serendipity - Announcements

Serendipity 1.4.1 released

mail@garv.in (Garvin Hicking) — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 11:33:05 +0100

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.

Smarty problem with Serendipity 1.4

mail@garv.in (Garvin Hicking) — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 11:15:15 +0100

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.

Serendipity 1.4 released

mail@garv.in (Garvin Hicking) — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 10:43:00 +0100

The Serendipity-Team is proud to provide the final release of Serendipity 1.4, conveniently codenamed "Post-Christmas-Monk-Miles-Moondog".

There have been some larger improvements since the 1.4-beta release, so these are the highlights of this release in short:

(new since 1.4-beta1) References to online plugin documentation have been added (if existing) and the display of the short plugin names has been added to the plugin configuration menus.
(new since 1.4-beta1) Firefox now no longer autoremembers passwords at the wrong places
(new since 1.4-beta1) Added SMF importer
(new since 1.4-beta1) Added a new %parentname% permalink option for category links
(new since 1.4-beta1) Fix to properly, longer (30 days) sstrong>remember the user settings in cookies, like for media insertion
Improvements in the now Double-Opt-In comment subscription (plus support for fulltext comment notifications)
new bundled default WYSIWYG editing component (Xinha, the successor of HTMLArea). This new component is more reliable and cross-browser capable than the old version, by still supporting everything that worked with HTMLArea previously.
The Entryproperties plugin now uses the new widget-style configuration option to allow for custom arrangement of the entry-related features of this plugin to your liking.
The bulletproof template has been enabled as the new default template. The frontend imitates the look of Carl Galloways Serendipity 1.0 relaunch template, while the backend is much improved with a fresh, distinct look.
The Remote RSS-Feed sidebar plugin now is templated, so that you can achieve distinct look for certain feeds on the sidebar.

Serendipity also addresses some minor bugs usually only affecting very special environments. Other changes include new PostgreSQL ts_vector fulltext search, comment approval-by-mail for the spamblock plugin, better HTTP header status updates for CGI environments. For developers, some API improvements and new variables/parameters have been added. The performance of the entryroperties plugin can be enhanced by new configuration options that let you fiddle with the involved SQL generation.

The complete list of all changes is documented within the docs/NEWS file of the release. This serendipity release is also the first one to include checksums to verify your installation integrity.

Updating is easy and documented online: Just upload the new files onto your web, possibly refresh/purge your browser cache (and if you upgrade from Serendipity older than 1.2, you might need to purge your old cookies), go to the admin panel and you're done. For shared installations, make sure all deployed htmlarea directories are updated with the new files (if not, the old htmlarea will still be there, not Xinha).

Also, the new version contains release checksums. This makes sure that the files you uploaded correspond with the checksums generated through the release. This way, bad FTP uploads will no longer be driving you nuts. If this makes any trouble for you, try to upload the files in BINARY mode in your FTP client.

For the future, Serendipity is still planning on minor and major features. We always keep a close ear to the wishes of our users, some of those that cannot be solved instantly have been documented here: Future of Serendipity. If you're a developer or designer, and want to help in proving that Serendipity is a flexible and easy to use Blogging/CMS-application - your help is needed and appreciated! Speaking of which: Many thanks to all current developers and forum users, especially Don Chambers, YellowLED and Judebert. Your help has been, and is vital to the project.

On behalf of the team: Happy new year and have fun with the release,
Garvin

Serendipity 1.4-beta1 released

mail@garv.in (Garvin Hicking) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 14:48:00 +0100

The first release candidate for Serendipity 1.4 can now be downloaded.

Serendipity 1.4 mainly addresses improvements in the now Double-Opt-In comment subscription (plus support for fulltext comment notifications) and ships with a new bundled default WYSIWYG editing component (Xinha, the successor of HTMLArea). This new component is more reliable and cross-browser capable than the old version, by still supporting everything that worked with HTMLArea previously.

Things that are visually noticeable include a new "widget-style" configuration option for the "Entryproperties"-Plugin, so that you can arrange and enable/disable each feature of that plugin to your own liking. Also you can now configure each sidebar plugin directly from your frontend.

Also, the Bulletproof has now been promted as new default template, imitating the design of the previous default template - but offering a now completely new distinct default look to the admin panel.

The Remote RSS-Feed sidebar plugin now is templated, so that you can achieve distinct look for certain feeds on the sidebar.

Serendipity also addresses some minor bugs usually only affecting very special environments. Other changes include new PostgreSQL ts_vector fulltext search, comment approval-by-mail for the spamblock plugin, better HTTP header status updates for CGI environments. For developers, some API improvements and new variables/parameters have been added. The performance of the entryroperties plugin can be enhanced by new configuration options that let you fiddle with the involved SQL generation.

The complete list of all changes is documented within the docs/NEWS file of the release. This serendipity release is also the first one to include checksums to verify your installation integrity.

Also, the new version contains release checksums. This makes sure that the files you uploaded correspond with the checksums generated through the release. This way, bad FTP uploads will no longer be driving you nuts. If this makes any trouble for you, try to upload the files in BINARY mode in your FTP client.

Please report any trouble with this new release candidate on the Serendipity Forums or here on this blog. Even though we find this release quite stable and generally believe it production ready, feedback is much required. If all goes well, the final version will be released in december.

Serendipity at FrOsCon 2008

mail@garv.in (Garvin Hicking) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:08:31 +0200

I will be holding a talk about Serendipity's Multi-User and Shared-Install-Capabilites at this year's FrOscon in St. Augustin, Germany.

I'd be happy to meet any of the fellow Serendipity user's at the weekend of 23./24. August 2008. Also have a look at the other very interesting panels at this convention!

Die Sieger des Gewinnspiels zum Serendipity Handbuch

mail@garv.in (Garvin Hicking) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 10:20:25 +0200

(Announcement of the winners for the german book - this will be the last german entry for some time!)

Das Gewinnspiel zum Serendipity Handbuch: Individuelle Weblogs für Einsteiger und Profis ist nun beendet. Herzlichen Dank an alle Teilnehmer, die mit Interesse und Begeisterung auf das Erscheinen des Buches reagiert haben, und auch vielen Dank für die persönlichen Glückwünsche. Es freut mich sehr zu sehen, dass die neue umfangreiche Dokumentation so angenommen wird, wie ich mir das erhofft habe.

Kommen wir daher direkt zum offiziellen Teil: Die Bekanntgabe der Gewinner!

Als glückliche Gewinner eines Serendipity-Buches wurden ausgelost:

Weitaus schwerer war es, aus den vielen Beiträgen die originellsten zu bestimmen. Letztlich fiel die Wahl auf:

Alle Gewinner möchte ich bitten, mir ihre Post-Anschrift per E-Mail an gh %at% faktor-e.de zukommen zu lassen. Diese werde ich ausschließlich an den Verlag Open Source Press weiterleiten, damit die Bücher den richtigen Weg zu euch finden.

Serendipity-Handbuch

mail@garv.in (Garvin Hicking) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 11:20:27 +0200

(Announcement for the german book. English users have to please stay patient for a possible translation!)

Nach beinahe einem Jahr harter Arbeit kann nun die umfassende Dokumentation zu Serendipity sowohl online wie auch beim netten Buchhändler um die Ecke bestellt werden:

Serendipity: Individuelle Weblogs
für Einsteiger und Profis
(ISBN 978-3-937514-54-3, Amazon).

Das Buch behandelt auf 750 Seiten sowohl die ersten Schritte mit Serendipity (inklusive Installation und Bedienungsanleitung) als auch die Benutzung von Plugins, Templates und einer sehr ausführlichen API-Dokumentation. Ein gutes Schlagwortregister hilft zudem beim täglichen Nachschlagen.

Ein Probekapitel sowie das vollständige Inhaltsverzeichnis kann unter dem oben angegebenen Link eingesehen werden.

Kurzum, ein Buch dass sich jeder deutschsprachige Serendipity-Enthusiast einmal ansehen sollte. Leser des Buches sind natürlich herzlich eingeladen, ihre Meinung oder konstruktive Kritik zu dem Buch im Serendipity-Forum, mir persönlich oder als Amazon-Rezension mitzuteilen.

Zur Feier der Veröffentlichung gibt es ein Gewinnspiel mit 5 Exemplaren des Buches, die uns vom Verlag Open Source Press zur Verfügung gestellt werden. Um ein solches Exemplar kostenlos zu ergattern, könnt ihr folgendes tun:

Bloggen.

Wenn ihr ein eigenes Blog habt, erstellt einfach einen Beitrag bei dem ihr bitte folgenden Link einbaut:

<a href="http://blog.s9y.org/archives/195-Serendipity-Handbuch.html">
Serendipity-Handbuch
</a>

Dadurch wird, falls in eurem Blog aktiviert, auch automatisch ein Trackback gesetzt. Falls das nicht klappt und ihr eure URL hier nicht sofort seht, hinterlasst bitte hier im Blog einen Kommentar mit eurer URL (ohne HTML-Code, hier ist nur BBCode zugelassen).
Kreativ sein.

In eurem Artikel könnt ihr die folgenden zwei Fragen beantworten. Wer kein Blog besitzt, kann die Fragen auch gerne hier als Kommentar beantworten:

Aus welchem Grund sollte man sich das Buch eigentlich kaufen, wenn man es nicht gerade gewinnt?

Was gefällt euch am besten an Serendipity?
Gewinnen.

Der Einsendeschluss ist am 18.06.2008, der Rechtsweg ist ausgeschlossen. 3 Gewinner werden zufällig ausgelost, 2 Gewinner werden anhand der subjektiv originellsten Antworten auf die Fragen entschieden. Die Gewinner werden hier im Blog angekündigt und gebeten, mir ihre Post-Adresse per E-Mail zuzusenden. Teilnahme per Pseudonym ist vollkommen okay, eure Postdaten werden ausschließlich an den Verlag zur Versendung der Gewinne weitergegeben und danach wieder gelöscht.

Viel Spaß und Erfolg,
Garvin Hicking

Netmirror.org Outage, Spartacus affected.

mail@garv.in (Garvin Hicking) — Fri, 16 May 2008 16:33:42 +0200

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.

Serendipity 1.3.1 released

mail@garv.in (Garvin Hicking) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 10:37:00 +0200

Serendipity 1.3.1 has been released. This is a bugfix and security related release, basically adressing a potential XSS issue within the Top Referrers plugin as well as hypothetical XSS issues with the installer.

This release also adresses some basic PostgreSQL8 related problems, because implicit type casts have been removed from this version, causing breakage with several Serendipity core features. The fix for this is only partial and will still happen in (less common) functions of Serendipity. There is no ultimate solution to this because implicit type casts are required for certain entryproperty operations. Maybe the PostgreSQL8 team will think about if implicit type casts are not also quite helpful. ;-)

The only new feature addition is the exposition of a new smarty {serendipity_getImageSize} function.

This upgrade is recommended for users that use the Top Referrers plugin and new installations of Serendipity. Many thanks to Hanno Böck, once again, for reporting (and fixing) the two XSS issues (CVE-2008-1385 and CVE-2008-1386)!

You can find the new release on the s9y.org download page. Upgrade by simply uploading the deflated archive files to your webspace.

Serendipity 1.3 released (addresses security)

mail@garv.in (Garvin Hicking) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 10:11:50 +0100

Serendipity 1.3 has finally been released. The new release is mainly a feature consolidation release, but also contains XSS security fixes:

The karma rating plugin has been upgraded to support nice, CSS-based rating graphics (see this post) and an overall rehaul on the its coding.
Make the Spartacus plugin be able to use FTP upload, a workaround for SafeMode PHP restrictions. Also add a remote backend for plugin update checks.
An importer for phpNuke and lifetype has been added.
Support for pingbacks has been improved a lot. Trackbacks can now be blocked based on Sender IP checks.
Add better CSS styling for some internal plugins and the embedding of images. Also made the Remote-RSS plugin to be capable of Smarty-Templating.
Increased Smarty templating features for the {serendipity_fetchPrintEntries} function, to be able to check for entry properties.
Add support for SQRelay.
Minor CSS and graphic updates to the Bulletproof template.

The full list of 41 changes to this release are documented within the NEWS file.

Regarding Security, the bundled Smarty library has been updated to version 2.6.19 and adresses an issue in environments where the PHP security mode is required. Also, the new Serendipity release contains tighter backend XSS checks so that environments with untrusted authors can be more secure - many thanks to Hanno Böck for addressing this. Most importantly, an issue with XSS attacks within received trackbacks has been discovered by Peter Hüwe and was fixed.

The update is easy as usual, and recommended for Serendipity users - especially if you do not regularly moderate or check your incoming trackbacks.

Upgrade pointers can be found in the FAQ and is as easy as just to upload the new files.

Have fun!

Serendipity 1.3-beta1 released

mail@garv.in (Garvin Hicking) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 11:53:00 +0100

Serendipity 1.3-beta1 has been released. This beta is considered a release candidate before the final 1.3 release, which is scheduled to be released at the end of this month.

The new release is mainly a feature consolidation release:

The karma rating plugin has been upgraded to support nice, CSS-based rating graphics and an overall rehaul on the its coding.
Make the Spartacus plugin be able to use FTP upload, a workaround for SafeMode PHP restrictions. Also add a remote backend for plugin update checks.
An importer for phpNuke and lifetype has been added.
Support for pingbacks has been improved a lot. Trackbacks can now be blocked based on Sender IP checks.
Add better CSS styling for some internal plugins and the embedding of images. Also made the Remote-RSS plugin to be capable of Smarty-Templating.
Increased Smarty templating features for the {serendipity_fetchPrintEntries} function, to be able to check for entry properties.
Add support for SQRelay.

The full list of 35 changes to this release are documented within the NEWS file.

Please test this release and give us feedback here or on the forums so that we can further improve this upcoming version. The files are available on the s9y.org Downloads page. Upgrade pointers can be found in the FAQ and is as easy as just to upload the new files.

Freetag plugin updated to prevent XSS

mail@garv.in (Garvin Hicking) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 14:49:00 +0100

The Freetag plugin has been updated to version 2.96 to fix a possible XSS to the tagcloud output.

XSS attacks can be used by visitors to display foreign HTML or JavaScript to visitors of the blog, if they visit specially crafted URLs. This attack basically allows for cookie stealing.

Users of the freetag plugin should upgrade to the latest version; upgrading via Spartacus-Plugin or Spartacus.s9y.org is just a matter of a few minutes. Thanks to Alex from Bitsploit.de for reporting this issue to us.

German: Serendipity-Handbuch jetzt vorbestellen

mail@garv.in (Garvin Hicking) — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 13:57:04 +0100

(This posting is written in german, as it currently only has relevance for german readers)

Wie man jetzt in meinem Blog auf der linken Seite erkennen kann, ist das von mir geschriebene offzielle Serendipity-Handbuch seit kurzem vorbestellbar.

Rund 700 Seiten liegen dem Verlag derzeit zur Korrektur und Verfeinerung vor, prall gefüllt mit ausführlichen Beschreibungen von allem, was mit Serendipity zu tun hat.

Viel Herzblut und Freizeit ist in das Buch geflossen, und ich hoffe damit sehr, den Nutzern endlich eine vollständige Dokumentation in die Hand geben zu können. Gleichermaßen ist es auch für Neulinge zum System gedacht, da alle Aspekte des Systems beschrieben werden.

Wer jetzt vorbestellt, kann dafür sorgen, dass das Buch etwas zügiger erscheint - und ihr es auch direkt in den Händen halten könnt. Der derzeitige Veröffentlichungstermin ist für Mai 2008 angepeilt. Vorbestellungen werden sowohl über Amazon, OpenSourcePress als auch bei jeder Bücherei angenommen.

Serendipity 1.2.1 released

mail@garv.in (Garvin Hicking) — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 16:33:52 +0100

Serendipity 1.2 has been well received by the community, there were only very few minor bugreports. Those have been addressed in the Serendipity 1.2.1 maintenance release, available now.

The new Serendipity version also includes some new Bulletproof Theme options (user-customized stylesheets) and addresses some very minor browser quirks. If you're using Bulletproof, it is suggested you perform the update.

Also this new version addresses a security issue in the Remote RSS sidebar plugin (reported by Hanno Böck), which did not properly treat links coming from an RSS feed, which could lead to possible XSS attack vectors, if you are showing foreign feeds that might distribute malicious content to you. If you're using this plugin with an unsafe RSS feed, you should upgrade Serendipity.

Serendipity 1.2.1 features a new WPXRSS importer and can import the new WordPress 2.3 database structure All bug fixes have also been applied to our current 1.3-release tree. This release currently features some new Smarty-Templating convenience features, a remote spartacus version information interface, full pingback support, a LifeType blog importer and support of SQLRelay.

Upgrading Serendipity is very easy, have a look at the FAQ. The new version is available on the Serendipity download page.

Enjoy Serendipity and have a nice Christmas time!

Back for good!

jannis@gmail.com (Jannis) — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 18:06:05 +0100

The nightly snapshot versions of the serendipity development branch are back (for good)! Sing along!