Plugins – Einträge für September 2005

We have a new volunteer who likes to get his hands a bit more dirty by wading through the cool Serendipity Plugin Architecture.

Alexander already has provided us with the useful Downloadmanager-Plugin and asks on our forums if there are any open plugin requests or ideas.

So it's up to you people - tell us which plugins you still need. Serendipity already has a large repository of many useful plugins, but there might still be a need for more - right? :-)

The plugin serendipity_event_authorpic ("Picture of the author") has been obsoleted. Its functionality is now included in the serendipity_event_userprofiles ("User profiles") plugin.

The reason is that we are trying to not have redundant plugins in our repository that unneccessarily swamp the amount of available plugins. We are not trying to make any "Uber-Plugins" which bundle many functionalities - but in this case, both plugins handle personal user information, and it is just better suitable inside a single plugin.

Users who have that plugin currently installed do not need to do anything. The plugin just is no longer maintained. If anyone is using both plugins in conjunction, he should upgrade to the new userprofile plugin and remove the authorpic plugin then.

I've just added the serendipity_event_httpauth ("HTTP-Authentication") plugin to our CVS, where it will appear shortly and in Spartacus as well.

The plugin is very basic: It authenticates you via HTTP Auth instead of using a HTML form for your login. This plugin is not needed in most environments, but can provide very helpful if you don't want any visitor to see your frontpage already, and thus you can shut out any visitors without access to your installation completely.

People who know what I'm talking about might find this helpful. All others can safely ignore this new plugin ;-)

For quite some time people have requested a plugin to manage (and count) file downloads. Alexander Mieland was so kind to hear those prayers and develop his downloadmanager plugin.

The plugin allows you to attach and upload several files and make them available in a nuke-like category hierarchy. Have a look at Alexanders page to see a demo.

The files have been added to CVS and the version bumped to 0.3 because of some changes to the plugin (bbcode, download counting) made after version 0.2. Have fun and thanks to Alexander!

Some new plugin contributions were added to CVS today:

• serendipity_event_tooltips ("Tooltips") by Enrico Stahn allows you to use overlib for showing alt/title tags and some more.
• serendipity_event_galleryimage ("Markup: Gallery Image") is a custom markup plugin that allows to insert [GImage] markup for inserting images of Gallery (1.x) installations easily. Read Rob A's (Im)personal Blog for details.

Thank you, guys! Plugins are available in Spartacus/CVS the next 1-2 days.

On an unrelated sidenote: People using the alpha5 version should update to the next nightly tomorrow. Spartacus and Permission bugfixes have been committed today.

The plugin Markup: Include entry data/ templates/ blocks (serendipity_event_includeentry) has received a major update to version 2.0 of the plugin.

Formerly, this plugin supported to include portions of already written entries into a new entry via this kind of markup:
[s9y-include-entry:47:body]

Thanks to the very smart suggestion of "Glamourguy", there's now a heap of extra-functionality for the plugin:

• Creates a new menu item called "Template-Blocks". On this page you can administrate two types of content:
  • Templates: Here you can create text (title, body, extended) to use as actual templates for a new entry. You can choose a created template, and you will be forwarded to the "New Entry" screen, with the contents of your template already filled in. This helps you if you always create some kind of review texts or whatever, which you just mangle with actual content.
  • Blocks: This is some kind of "HTML nugget" block. Again you can create some text (title, body, extended). Those block can later be attached to any entry (see the "Extended Options" part when creating a new entry") or even be randomly distributed on the pages of your blog. This feature is very helpful if you want to create ad-blocks, subscription infos, reminders without the need to do lot of copy+paste work and have duplicate content!
• It allows for several new config options:
  • Random block placement: This feature allows you to inject blocks on your blog entry listing randomly. You can define after which entry to start, the amount of articles before the next block appears, and whether a block should also be randomized if an entry already has an attached block.
  • Templated Blocks! The coolest thing about those "static blocks" is that EACH block can use an individual smarty template. The default is to show a block in an entry's design - but you can easily choose a different template for showing a block as an Ad-Block, an iframe, or everything else. You can even abuse the functionality to put actual (surrounding or replacing) content and the usual smarty markup into the block and tweak Serendipity to the max.
  • Category-dependant: You can choose whether to show randomized blocks on the startpage, or any combination of categories. So you can select to only show random blocks on the frontpage, or only in Category X (and Y and Z, but not A and B).
  • Apply Markup transformations to blocks. Of course, each block can use the markup plugins you defined to allow usage of Wiki/Textile/nl2br/smilies/whatever plugins. Or not. It's up to you!
• And of course, it allows a new way of including blocks WITHIN entries (completely smarty-parsed) with this kind of code:
  [s9y-include-block:47] (includes the actual content only)
  [s9y-include-block:47:template] (includes the smarty-parsed content)
  

Did I mention this plugin even works with 0.8 already? Have a look at it and have fun - and report bugs, if you find any. It's still a bit beta-ish. ;-)

The plugin is available throughout the usual suspects: Spartacus (s9y Plugin-Repository) and CVS repository.