Serendipity - Templates

Serendipity 1.2 released

mail@garv.in (Garvin) — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 13:37:00 +0200

The Serendipity Team is proud to present the final release and immediate availability of Serendipity 1.2.

This release is a feature consolidation release and focuses on small usability improvements, a shiny new template (bulletproof) as well as backend templating and backend login mechanisms as well as some tighter security restrictions.

Some more changes in depth are:

Templates: The new bulletproof template is an awesome example to show off Serendipity's cool template options. This template allows you to easily configure the look of your Serendipity site: Place navigation links, choose sidebar layouts, indicate if you want to use/show trackbacks and comments, pick your custom header image or even custom colorsets. Don Chambers, Matthias Mees and David Cummins as well as other contributors have worked very hard on this template that provides an awesome, unified template structure. Go to their site at http://s9y-bulletproof.com to check out the details!
Templates: The admin backend (overview page and entry editor) can now be styled via Smarty and gives you the full flexibility to make a custom look of the backend. Plus, more CSS classes have been added to the default admin theme that make CSS-only changes much easier. Templates now also can have large preview images by clicking on their thumbnail.
Usability: Moved the problematic option to withdraw your own privileges from personal configuration to the user configuration panel.
Feature: Added SQLite3 and PDO:PostgreSQL support.
Feature: Allow to configure whether article overviews for a certain category should include articles of subcategories or not.
Performance: Improved SQL performance for archive overview generation and permalink lookups.
Plugins: Plugins can now hook in much earlier to make external authentication easier (like trough the OpenID plugin).
Spam: Enhanced the spamblock plugin with captcha previews, .htaccess generation and some more options.
Security: Stronger autologin cookie encryption and template option handling, thanks (once again) to Stefan Esser. Proper session fixation prevention, thanks to David Vieira-Kurz.
Bugfix: Sending pingbacks now properly works.
Bugfix: The Track-Exits plugin now properly tracks links in conjunction with the caching of the entryproperties plugin.

The full list of changes can be found in the NEWS-file of the release.

You can download the new release as always on the Serendipity homepage at http://www.s9y.org/3.html. Updating is easy: Just upload the new files, visit your Serendipity installation and let the upgrader do the rest.

After the upgrade you might want to purge your browser's cookies (due to the new authentication mechanism of Serendipity 1.2) to prevent login problems. Detailed upgrade instructions can be found in the FAQ on our website.

Enjoy Serendipity, and thanks to everyone who participated in the release process!

For the team,
Garvin.

Backend Templating

mail@garv.in (Garvin) — Thu, 31 May 2007 12:43:00 +0200

For Serendipity, only the frontend (what the visitors see) could be subject to Smarty-Templating. One reason for not utilizing these features in the backend was to maintain stability, ease of change for core developers and reduce migration woes so that the Admin Backend would always be accessible.

What we have now added to the Serendipity 1.2 snapshots (that will soon become public beta and a final release in late Summer) is functionality that allows you to template the backend layout as well as the 'New/Edit Entry' screen. Other functions like category manager, plugin manager etc. will remain hardcoded and eventually changed, because most of their look can already be controlled with CSS only.

To maintain stability and prevent migration problems where Smarty might not be initialized, Serendipity can fall back to the usual PHP-only backend. This is done using a tricky session variable scheme - when Smarty cannot be loaded, a session variable is set, and on the next page call, this variable will force the Serendipity framework to use the fallback routines. Nifty stuff. :-)

Please try out the new theming possibilites and give feedback. The default admin stylesheet can be found in the templates/default/admin/index.tpl and templates/default/admin/entries.tpl templates, and can be copied to your own theme directory as usual.

New theme: Adaptation

mail@garv.in (Garvin) — Sun, 06 May 2007 16:35:25 +0200

Alp Uckan has released his theme Adaptation (german page, layout can be seen on his site). It's a "content-first" based theme with advanced Serendipity 1.1 design options such as choosing color- and fontsets. It evolves around full CSS and XHTML compatibility and thus providing accessibility options being set by the user in his browser (fontsize, colors etc. are based on browser setup).

Have a look at this clean template, it's now also being added to Spartacus! Thanks a lot to Alp for providing his theme to the public.

Carl Galloway releases Hemmingway-Theme port

mail@garv.in (Garvin) — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 10:31:46 +0200

Carl Galloway has released his port of the Hemmingway Theme for Serendipity.

It's quite bleeding edge and supports various new features of Serendipity 1.1-beta, so check it out! Hooray for Carl. :-)

Customizable Plugin Sidebar locations

mail@garv.in (Garvin) — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 22:37:00 +0200

For ages, Serendipity has given users the flexibility to move around plugins in the left/right sidebar. Two sidebars were a usual concept for blogs in the days past, and for surely some more days to come.

But some themes, like the Hemingway theme give people a different approach to surrounding their blog content. The result of a porting discussion on the forums lead me to patch our plugin API.

Serendipity 1.1 already support custom theme options (like special navigation bars, colorsets etc.), and what came out of my recent patch is the functionality to define multiple custom sidebars.

With this, you can add a "top", "bottom", "middle" or whatever else sidebar locations to your themes, and put them in the smarty templates using the function {serendipity_printSidebar side="XXX"} wherever you like.

It's as easy as adding a config.inc.php file to your template, add a $template_config array value like this:

       
$template_config = array(
     array(
       'var'     => 'sidebars',
       'title'   => 'Sidebars',
       'type'    => 'string',
       'default' => 'left,hide,right,bot'
     )
);

(or modify existing config arrays) and save the file. When you now enter your plugin configuration section, you will see each of the sidebar locations next to another, so that you can move around plugins from one to the other location.

There are two things to watchout: If you use locations other than 'left' and 'right', other templates may not output plugins that were put to a location like 'bot'. So if you switch templates, you must watch out on where you put your sidebar plugins into.
The other thing to pay attention: Only use "," to separate the sidebar item names (no spaces!) and never use more than 6 characters for your locations.

Please have a test with these new possibilities, tell us if you like it, and show us the results you made with it!

This functionality has been implemented into recent Serendipity 1.1 nightlies (currently 1.1-beta4)

How to add Hijri dates

mail@garv.in (Garvin) — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 16:48:15 +0200

Fellow serendipity-user Abdussamad wrote a nice Tutorial on how to add Hijri-dates (arabic) to the blog output. Thanks a lot for your contribution!

New PHP and XML/XSLT Template Engines implemented

mail@garv.in (Garvin) — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 09:30:31 +0200

The past weekend, Davey asked me in an IRC chat that he's put off by Smarty and would like to use Serendipity without it for his next blog design. Mostly because of loosing some overhead.

I'm basically split oppinion on this: Smarty Templating is a great way to ease things up and unify a templating language that looks better and is more accessible to newbies. So this is basically an advantage that I, as a programmer, am willing to take. But to any one who's got his looks on grandma's performance pennies might think otherwise, and might think that PHP itself already is a templating language. Which I can understand. :-)

Smarty luckily has a pretty, pretty easy API facing towards the User. Basically all that Smarty needs are the assign and display methods. There are some more convenience functions, but let's disregard those for a moment.

With that in Mind, I was able to create a PHP AND an XML-Templating Engine for Serendipity, which completely bypasses Smarty by still using the same outward-facing API.

All that is needed is a "Smarty Emulation Layer". This one fakes the $serendipity['smarty']-Object in a way that will preserve the same method calls for other template APIs.

For Serendipity, this ended up in a new "template_api.inc.php" file: SVN Repository.

This file gives you a new class that the Serendipity-Frontend needs to instanciate, and which should be used in your PHP TEmplates then. The existing Smarty-Object calls in the Serendipity-PHP-Code will still be called as usual. Just by putting the variables into the global namespace, you can later access them in the usual *.tpl files. Those can then execute any PHP Code you want. It's actually pretty much like a Smarty-compiled template, but easier readable. Such a file would then look like this.

And - yes, I DO think this looks a lot more uglier than the nice Smarty-Themes. But there's an advantage - several serendipity API calls (like the plugin API) no longer needs to be wrapped through Smarty calls, but can be executed instantly. And that's good. ;-)

The other engine I initially talked about is the XML output. The class you need for that is also existing in the new template_api.inc.php file, and is even simpler than the PHP output. All assign() method calls will simply echo their variable to the browser as raw XML.

This might not sound so terribly exciting at first, but the possibilies are quite interesting: Via (browser- or PHP-based) XSLT transformations you can turn your XML into any XHTML you'd like. Even a simple XSL-Stylesheet might help you out with it already. And it gets really cool if you use different XSL/XSLT files to transform the raw XML to the proper display depending on the User Agent (think mobile application, fat client application - all with the same data base).

So much for the concept - practically I never had that much of a time with XSLT. Which means this part of the code is more a "proof of concept" part. Anyone who'd like to have a stab at it, please do so and report me. Boris from the Forums already got together a small XSLT file which I'll try to understand and make available soon. One disadvantage of the current XML transformation is that you cannot use the PHP language constants or plugin API calls in XML. For that you'd need to make your template's template.inc.php file call the PHP functions and relay the output to the XML element output. That's not hard, actually, but it's some work you'll have to go through. ;)

On a completely related side post, thanks to a comment from Falk I got down and change the assign() calls in Serendipity to assign_by_ref() in cases where it makes sense. This will then pass template variables by reference instead by value, which boils down to this: It saves memory. The memory footprint of my playground installation dropped from 5 MB to 3.4MB. This might possibly introduce some problems, especially with plugins, so if any of those get obvious (like missing output, wrong output, PHP errors) please notice me about that.

The files were committed to SVN trunk, the 1.1 alpha nightlies. And even if this work is completely redundant: It only took an hour. *g*

Have fun experimenting!

(This post was originall written in german on my personal blog.)

SourceForge CVS / Spartacus functional again

mail@garv.in (Garvin) — Sat, 13 May 2006 11:07:48 +0200

The last month has been a hard time for developers on SourceForge.net, because their CVS service went down for good also for developers, and anonymous access was not updated for the time being.

The Serendipity Spartacus plugin by default uses the SourceForge Servers for downloading plugins and files, and thus this had not worked properly the past month. The first way to fix that problem was to use the "Netmirror.org" file mirror.

Because of the changes made by the SourceForge team to CVS, their new infrastructure will no longer work with the Spartacus plugin, because they changed Domain and URL locations. Users should either use the Netmirror.org file mirror, or use the latest version of the Spartacus plugin with the new path location: serendipity_event_spartacus.php + lang_en.inc.php. The patch is fairly easy and just replaces the URL of the server.

Attention for Plugin Developers using CVS access: SourceForge.net has changed the CVS server from "cvs.sourceforge.net" to "php-blog.cvs.sourceforge.net". You will either need to check out that new repository, or else use this bash command to search+replace all the old paths to the new paths:

find -name "Root" -exec sed -e "s:@cvs:@php-blog.cvs:g" -i {} \;

(Many thanks to lars for pointing this out to me)

Read the Sf.Net docs for details on the new CVS project service. Other good news is that anonymous CVS access will no only lag 2 hours, not 24 hours.

Let's see how this will work out, and my thanks to the SourceForge.Net team who has surely not an easy job providing free access for thousands of projects.

May Template Madness

carlgalloway@gmail.com (Carl Galloway) — Fri, 12 May 2006 21:07:50 +0200

May is shaping up to be a month to be remembered, with four new templates released this month already, two of them coming from fresh new designers to the world of Serendipity. Let's start with our new designers, Bex and Abdussamad. Both of these designers have created templates that I'm sure will really appeal to people because of their graphical component, Bex01 being a two column template with an eyecatching header and sidebar graphics, while Stained Paper is exactly that, a sheet of old parchment forming the background image. If you like either of these designs please comment on the authors sites and give them the encouragement to keep designing. Myself and Dave have also released new templates this month, Dave with his popular Matrimony design, and myself with 1024px, a conversion Andreas Viklund's html template of the same name. Are there any other designs we should know about, we really should keep up the momentum in May, why don't we set a target of ten new templates for this month?

Andreas06 Theme released for Serendipity

carlgalloway@gmail.com (Carl Galloway) — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 22:06:05 +0200

I'm very pleased to announce the release of Andreas06 to the Serendipity community. Andreas06 is a conversion of the very popular OSWD template by Andreas Viklund. The theme features a breadcrumb trail, and a disappearing right column in detail view. Read more and download Andreas06. It will be added to Spartacus, and should be available over the next 48 hours.

And the winner is...

mail@garv.in (Garvin) — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 22:32:06 +0100

Carl Galloway

After a very intense "default theme competition" and voting period the last weeks, the winning theme has finally been found.

Carl Galloway has won the competition with his theme. He got 28 votes (5 extra votes through "commenting") and placed first. Second place is David Cummins with 20 votes (3 extra), and scoring last but not least is the proud myself with 19 votes. One vote has been cast on the old default design, for the record.

All three themes will be put into the final Serendipity 1.0 release, with Carl's theme being elected as the default theme. I think a wise decision has been made which puts Serendipity's look more up to par with what it can technically achieve.

Many, many thanks to the contributors of the themes for their enormous efforts complying with the harsh rules. Many thanks for the voters who took the time to constructively criticize the elected themes.

A small "elite group" consisting of Carl, David, Judebert, Jannis and me will now be going through the template and checking minor details and making some adjustments to the design before we release the 1.0 final release. We will not be able to uphold the February 15th release, but keep your heads up for a soon release.

The winning theme can still be seen on themes.s9y.org.

Have fun, Garvin

Theme Contest Closed! View the submissions!

mail@garv.in (Garvin) — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 12:04:45 +0100

The Serendipity Theme Contest has closed the announced deadline.

Three templates were submitted, by Carl Galloway, David Cummins and Garvin Hicking. They can be viewed for public display (frontend and backend) on http://themes.s9y.org/.

You can VOTE ON THE FORUMS, if you are a registered user to that forum. If you are not, please just drop your vote there as a reply to the entry or as a comment on the blog above. I will collect votes on all three places. You MUST post either your realname or your blog URL for a vote to be officially cast, to prevent duplicate votes. A statement like "I vote for Carl Galloways Design, my name is John Doe" or "I vote for David Cummins Design and my blog is http://blog.s9y.org/" will suffice.

Several participants of the contest mailed me privately that they were unable to meet the deadline anytime soon, and to have the same chances for everyone, the contest has not been delayed. I hope, those announced themes will be put online in the future.

The theme with the highest vote count will be used as the new default template. If vote counts for two templates are the same, a run-off ballot will be made.

Have fun browsing through the submissions. Your oppinion is highly appreciated!

Theme Contest Closing

mail@garv.in (Garvin) — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 09:54:51 +0100

The announced Theme Contest is about to close today. Please send your results as announced in the entry until 23:59 CET today.

The contending templates will be shown for public display on a to-be-installed blog and be announced here soon. Voting will take place on the forums, publically.

New Template: Ladybug

judebert@judebert.com (Judebert) — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 04:25:43 +0100

Ladybug is a Search Engine Optimized, content-first template. It is built around a ladybug theme, as the name implies, so expect lots of pink, with red and black splashes.

Besides putting the content before the sidebars (so search engines give your content greater value), Ladybug includes some nice finishing touches: drop shadows, themed archive bars, and rounded corners for Mozilla FireFox users. I like it, but of course, I made it.

Ladybug is available through SPARTACUS.

Theme Contest!

mail@garv.in (Garvin) — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 12:43:00 +0100

Hello fellow Serendipity Users!

The time for releasing Serendipity 1.0 is coming close. What we are now in desperate need of, is a pretty and nice looking new default theme to make Serendipity more distinct and pretty, to visually underline the flexibility and large featureset of the Serendipity Blog. This theme shall replace the current "Serendipity v2.3" Theme that is shipped with Serendipity.

Because of this, we want to have a Serendipity Theme Contest. Designers can submit their designs to us, and we will display them to the public for voting on them. Since Serendipity is an Open Source project without any funding, we cannot offer commercial benefits. But we will of course fully credit your work for display within the Theme, and publically announce the winning theme properly.

We want to schedule the release of Serendipity 1.0 for February 15th. Designers will have time until February 7th, and then the voting starts until February 14th. Once the theme is chosen without dispute, we will include it for the release. If there are any technical problems with the winning design, the release date might get rescheduled, though. Our primary goal is to have a stable and nice Serendipity, so we will bend any scheduling to adjust to that.

Having said this, these are the the "rules":

The new theme must be unique. It may not be a 1:1 port of existing themes. It must be BSD licensed.
The new theme should create a visual distinction of Serendipity, but preserve the template association with Serendipity. People who see that theme should not confuse it with themes that are distinct for other blog applications.
You are free to choose whatever colors are fit. Beware though, that the somewhat etablished colors of Serendipity are blue-greyish.
The new theme should consist of a Frontend and Backend visual style (or play well with the current default Backend style). Frontend customizations can be done using any technique you like (Smarty, JavaScript, CSS). Backend customizations can only be done via CSS styling (themes/default/admin/style.css).
Creating a new logo for Serendipity is not yet part of the deal. We are looking for a default theme to be distributed with Serendipity, so it should be a style that people can use on their own blog without giving the impression that it is the official Serendipity Blog.
The new theme shall pay attention to be accessible and not require JavaScript for important operations. It shall be cross-browser compatible (MSIE, Firefox, Opera, Safari) and validate as XHTML (Transitional at least). The main CSS should also validate; any additional and browser specific CSS codes are not required to be validatable.
Many Themes depend on the default theme, so it needs to be considered that important HTML selectors (.serendipity_entry, .serendipity_entry_date) etc. are only changed in a way that is backwards compatible. You are allowed to change the Smarty .tpl files any way you see fit.
Plugins that output HTML (like: Categories, Syndication, Calendar, Static Pages...) should still work fine in the new default theme.
Standard HTML styles such as code, acronym, bold etc should be supported in the stylesheet if the browser default isn't acceptable (in particular the code tag is often reduced in size to become unreadable)
All images including media manager images, emoticons, xml buttons and just plain images inserted into posts or the sidebar should work as expected - the danger is in assuming the browser will adequately deal with images but often margins and paddings change and if this isn't tested weird results can show up after the theme is released.

We know this are certainly many rules listed, but when reading through them you will find most of them very clear. The Serendipity Project has always well cared about backwards compatibility, integration and valid markup - and so it shall continue in the future.

The future goal of the new default template is to create a unique variation that will be used for the official Serendipity Blog, and to apply a similar theme to the Serendipity Wiki.

But for now: Let the fun begin! Questions will be answered here. Send your final designs in ZIP or TGZ format to Garvin: serendipity{@}supergarv{.}de. It would be nice that if you intend to submit a theme, that you tell me via mail about that, so that we can see how many people are working on it and if the deadline is sufficiently set.

Technical help about theming can be found on our Forums or in the Technical Documentation.

Update #1 - Rule #7 has been bent a little. It was formerly suggested to only make minor modifications to the Smarty files.