New plugins: overlib Tooltips, Galleryimage

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.

Category Read/Write Permissions

I just committed support to Serendipity 0.9-alpha5 SVN that allows you to configure read/write support for each category to specific usergroups.

Now you can say "Group A, B and C have access to Category A and B. Only Group D has access to Category C.". And this can also be applied on the frontend, so authors may be able to read all posts in Category A and B, but not C. Note that the last feature is an option that you can toggle in your s9y configuration, because if you enable it it will cause additional SQL lookups to be done.

Note that this feature should play well with the feature of the entryproperties plugin that allows you to grant access to users/groups for individual entries, but this new feature is much easier to handle if you need "per-category" access privileges.

Bundled with that I upgraded that "adduser" ("User Self-Registration") to allow you to define into which user is put when registring to control his privileges. Note that this is only possible with Serendipity 0.9-alpha5.

This new functionality is considered experimental. We largely rely on your feedback for getting the privileges to work nicely.

If this feature goes along without major bugs, expect a Serendipity 0.9 beta release the next weeks, with a final release followed after that.

Now I'm off for my weekend, I'm gonna be the best man at the marriage of a good friend. :-)

Static Blocks ("Include Entry" plugin revised)

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.