Serendipity 0.9 released

The Serendipity Team is proud to announce the availability of the final version of 0.9 with a largely improved featureset, offering not only one of the best Blog-Engines around, but also as an aid for many CMS-needs you might face. It's multi-user features have been drastically improved, making Serendipity an allround-killer-flexible Web-Application.

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Serendipity 0.9-beta3 released

Serendipity 0.9-beta3 has been released. This should be the last release candidate for Serendipity 0.9, which is scheduled to be out next Friday.

Fixed issues in beta3 are:

  • RSS Feeds no longer show email addresses by default (configured via syndication plugin)
  • Fixed siteConfiguration option was not available for Blog editor group users
  • Fixed bugs with per-author/category RSS feeds when not using URL Rewriting
  • Enhance entryproperties to allow entering custom fields
  • Fix not having fetched properties of entries when displaying search results
  • Fix some PHP 4.4 compatibility issues about returning variables by reference
  • Fix some blog importer problems remaining when the source DB is not the same as the target DB

Updating from any Serendipity version is easy: Backup first, then extract the release files over your old installation, make sure the files .htaccess/serendipity_config_local.inc.php are writable, login to Serendipity and be guided through the automatic upgrade process.

Have a nice weekend, and thanks in advance for reporting bugs to us!

Extended Properties for Entries: Custom Fields

As a response to a Feature Request from Karotte, I have just committed an enhancement to the entryproperties plugin to 0.9-beta3 of our SVN (which will hopefully be turned into a 0.9 final at the end of this month).

The plugin configuration has now been altered so that you can add a comma-separated list of custom fieldnames, which you can then fill in when creating an entry.

That means, you can create two custom fields called Listening and Playing (don't use whitespace or special characters for fieldnames). Create an entry, and fill in values for those two fields. Now edit your entries.tpl template and place the Smarty Codes

Now listening to: {$entry.properties.ep_Listening}
Now playing: {$entry.properties.ep_Playing}

anywhere you like inside the entry loop. Remember to prefix your property keyname with ep_. Then you'll see those fields at the place you configured. You can also add the usual Smarty markup to check if a variable is empty, and add some DIV or other tags to surround your output.

This brings Serendipity a bit closer to CMS-features, once again. :-)

(The SVN nightlies will be built tomorrow, containing the new patch. SVN checkouts contain the change already at this time - users familiar with SVN only need to fetch the plugins/ serendipity_event_entryproperties/ serendipity_event_entryproperties.php file)

Serendipity 0.9-beta2 released

Serendipity 0.9 is still in beta-testing, but getting close to the final release. Thus a 0.9-beta2 version has been released, which mainly fixes two problems with beta1: Spartacus not indicating new plugin versions and the "easy installer" inserting invalid configuration values that lead to the dreadded "function serendipity_mb not found" error.

On top of that, the second beta contains:

  • Per-author XML feeds
  • Enhanced entryproperties plugin that can hide selected entries from the RSS feed
  • Recent Comments plugin can be configured to show comments, trackbacks or both
  • Make Spartacus plugin be able to set configured chmod/chown permissions
  • Improved Spamblock plugin to allow configuring author/url filters straight from the "Comments" interface
  • Category plugin can now use smarty templates and show number of entries
  • Fix Track Exits plugin to properly redirect when used in HTML nuggets
  • Fixed bug in fetchEntry() function that can lead to wrong author/authorid settings in certain cases

Updating from any Serendipity version is easy: Backup first, then extract the release files over your old installation, make sure the files .htaccess/serendipity_config_local.inc.php are writable, login to Serendipity and be guided through the automatic upgrade process.

If all things go smoothly with the 0.9 betas (which it basically seems right now), you can expect a final release at the end of this month. We need your feedback, please testdrive the new version!

Spamblock Integration, Categories Plugin

Surely to the delight of many Smarty-Users, the categories plugin has now been made to work with Smarty templates in latest 0.9 nightlies. It can now also count the numbers of entries per category. Both options need to be enabled in the configuration of the internal categories plugin.

Also new for 0.9 versions, I have modified the Spamblock plugin today. It now allows you to one-click add an author or URL to the content filter from within the "Comments"-Admin section. This allows you to adapt your own list of filters as you go. Also the spamblock configuration is now reachable via the Comments section quite easily.