Serendipity 1.3-beta1 released – Serendipity

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.

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.

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.