Serendipity – The official Serendipity blog

There is yet work to be done!

We are trying to move Serendipity to properly utilizing composer and being installable via composer, as well as allowing official Docker images for Serendipity, so that it can be easily tried out or maintained.

That is a lot of work, and we can use any help we get.

Please check out the GitHub issue about this and the Git Repository with README on the planned changes.

The easiest way to get in touch with us about this is via the GitHub issue, if you are interested. Cheerio, onward and upward! To Serendipity and beyond! .... the class? anyone? anyone? Bueller?

We are very happy to announce the availability of the final release for Serendipity 2.5.0, our new stable version! 2.5.0 contains the changes that were part of the 2.5-beta1, plus some additional changes.

With this version 2.5.0, Serendipity works with PHP 7.4 up to and including PHP 8.2. We also got positive reports about the compatibility with PHP 8.3, but this newest PHP version is not yet officially supported by us. The compatibility with PHP 8.2 is the main purpose of this release.

In this version, we further worked on how the bundled dependencies are managed. They got updated for PHP 8.x support, including some legacy dependencies where it was missed before, and more of them are now managed by the dependency management system composer. For those changes the file placement under bundled-libs/ has changed a bit, with wrappers added for compatibility. Despite those wrappers for backwards compatibility, authors of custom plugins that relied manually on files under bundled-libs/ are advised to check that their plugins still work.

The release contains some additional changes to 2.4.0, like bundling the webfonts used by the default theme 2k11, to avoid legal issues in Germany, fixes for an incompatibility with MySQL 5.7, fixes for the usergroup permission display and an improved russian translation.

It also fixes a potential security issue discovered for this project by @hannob, by removing the prior included composer.phar. That file was only useful for developers, but could be misused in some specific server environments. Though the necessary conditions for the attack are not a given, since this is a security fix a timely upgrade to 2.5.0 is highly recommended to all existing serendipity installations. As another possible mitigation, you can safely delete the file "composer.phar" in your root directory.

Upgrade hints: If you see errors when extracting this release archive that mention bundled-libs/, delete said folder in your old installation and extract the archive again. If you run an older version of serendipity than 2.4.0 and/or if you are not using PHP 8.x yet, please have a look at the PHP 8 upgrade guide.

If you encounter bugs, please report an issue here at Github or open a thread in our forum. The forum is also the right place for general questions and support.

The project thanks all contributors to the release, including the testers and issue reporters.

MD5: 1dfb1f34483038179ac511666de60b8f

Link: https://github.com/s9y/Serendipity/releases/tag/2.5.0

The project is happy to announce a first beta for Serendipiy 2.5, featuring compatibility with PHP 8.2.

Serendipity 2.5-beta1 is the first release of Serendipity that targets compatibility with PHP 8.2. Unlike when version 2.4 initiated support for PHP 8, this time the code changes are minor - but still important to let Serendipity blogs run properly with PHP 8.2.

Besides various fixes, some significant changes to the latest stable 2.4.0 are:

• PHP 8.2 compatibility for the core
• Fixes for the multi-language support
• Local hosting of webfonts in 2k11
• Fix for the usergroup permission display, a setting you should check in the admin backend if you saved those permissions with 2.4.

If you currently still use PHP 7, please read the PHP 8 upgrade hints in the Github wiki. Especially if you jump from 2.3.x to this version, that would be a big upgrade.

We would love to get feedback from our users! Please help us in reaching full support for PHP 8.2 by running this version with PHP 8.2 and report bugs (also and especially for plugins) in the forum or the Github issue tracker. Keep in mind that this is still a beta though, so production blogs should have a proper backup and you should be prepared that we might ask you to apply patches, or that we might have to release a new beta with fixes soon.

Please see the release statement on GitHub for more (technical) details.

You can download the release file and unzip it to your installation as usual.

After a long beta, we release Serendipity 2.4.0, featuring PHP 8 compatibility and database upgrades to enable full unicode input!

Serendipity 2.4.0 is the release you want to install when you need compatibility with PHP 8. Like its beta did, it changes a lot of code in the core of Serendipity that triggered warnings with recent versions of PHP 8, but now the changes saw more testing and more plugins got equally fixed.

Besides various fixes, some significant changes to the latest stable 2.3.5 are:

• PHP 8 compatibility for the core, current themes and many plugins hosted on Spartacus
• Split date/time input in the editor, enabling browser support for entering time and date
• Notifications for plugin updates
• Fixes and enhancements for the multi-language support
• Move MySQL databases from MyIsam and UTF8 to InnoDB and utf8mb4, enabling full unicode input

This version has seen a lot of testing, but it is also a very big release, especially concerning PHP 8 compatibility, database changes and multi-language support. So please have a backup ready if you upgrade from an older Serendipity version. Also please read the PHP 8 upgrade hints in the Github wiki for details on how to manage the transition from PHP 7.

We would love to get feedback from our users! If you still encounter bugs when running this on your production blog, let us know in the forum or on Github - and more than ever, pull requests with patches to plugins you rely on would be welcomed (Spartacus plugins live in this repository).

Please see the release statement on GitHub for more (technical) details.

You can download the release file and unzip it to your installation as usual, or update from within Serendipity using the Serendipity Autoupdate Plugin (serendipity_event_autoupdate).

Long time no see - after about a year and a half, we're back with the first beta release of Serendipiy 2.4, featuring PHP 8 compatibility and database upgrades to enable full unicode input!

Serendipity 2.4-beta1 is the first release of Serendipity that targets compatibility with PHP 8. It changes a lot of code in the core of Serendipity that triggered warnings with recent versions of PHP 8. At the same time, the Serendipity team fixed many compatibility issues in plugins and themes.

Besides various fixes, some significant changes to the latest stable 2.3.5 are:

• PHP 8 compatibility for the core, current themes and many plugins hosted on Spartacus
• Split date/time input in the editor, enabling browser support for entering time and date
• Notifications for plugin updates
• Fixes and enhancements for the multi-language support
• Move MySQL databases from MyIsam and UTF8 to InnoDB and utf8mb4, enabling full unicode input

This version of Serendipity has already seen production use in multiple blogs, but it's still a beta with rather large changes, especially concerning PHP 8 compatibility, database changes and multi-language support. So please handle it with care! Also please read the PHP 8 upgrade hints in the Github wiki.

We would love to get feedback from our users! Please help us in reaching full support for PHP 8 by running this version with PHP 8 and report bugs (also and especially for plugins) in the forum or the Github issue tracker. But please be sure to try out the new release just on test/development blogs yet. If you absolutely want to test it on production blogs, make sure to have a backup (of your files, your media and your database) available.

Please see the release statement on GitHub for more (technical) details.

You can download the release file and unzip it to your installation as usual.

About a month has passed since our last patch release - and here we are again, releasing Serendipity 2.3.5 with some fixes for new as well as longstanding bugs.

We now truncate the file extension of media items to 5 characters - more will not fit in the database anyway, and PostgreSQL really didn't like longer extensions. Sometimes Serendipity didn't show upgrades for your plugins even though Spartacus already had them ready; that's no fun, is it? On the other hand you sometimes could spot some funny characters in the backend entry overview, as Serendipity really meant well and double-encoded special characters; which it doesn't do any longer. And we stopped CK-Edit, our graphical editor, from dropping some HTML elements (<details> and <summary>).

Last but not least we fixed a regression and some longstanding bugs in three bundled plugins: serendipity_plugin_history started throwing database errors when displaying archive pages after our 2.3.3 release, and extended properties from serendipity_event_entryproperties got lost in quite a lot of corner cases (and, for example, when publishing an entry from your backend dashboard) for a really long time. (The latter bug affected several other plugins, too, which were already updated via Spartacus.) Finally serendipity_plugin_comments will now work together nicely with serendipity_event_unstrip_tags (from Spartacus) which will keep HTML tags from comments for your sidebar display.

Please see the release statement on GitHub for more (technical) details.

You can download the release file and unzip it to your installation as usual, or update from within Serendipity using the Serendipity Autoupdate Plugin (serendipity_event_autoupdate).