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)

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.

Categories Plugin using Smarty

Quite a few people have complained in the past, that the output of the categories plugin is not themable. Even though this has its reasons (using smarty for that process is a bit overkill in terms of performance), I took some time to make the categories plugin of the 0.9 branch (beta2, currently) be able to use Smarty templates.

You can now enable this in the configuration of the plugin and make your own "plugin_categories.tpl" just like you can have your own "plugin_calendar.tpl" right now.

Spartacus Outage, Staticpage and other plugins

Because of a problem with accessing our netmirror.org mirror server, the spartacus repository currently only shows listed plugin versions of the last week. New plugins are currently not updated there, so please bear with the service until the trouble is resolved.

We are also working on providing alternate file mirrors, as well as a fellow Serendipity user (MySchizoBuddy) is currently working on PEAR-Channel services for plugins -- many thanks!

On another related note, the staticpage plugin has received an enormous update from Falk Döring today, rectifying a 3.0 version release. This updated version now allows to define custom page types, change the sort order of static pages, fixes some back/previous navigation issues and some more "behind the scenes" stuff. Many thanks to Falk for keeping up his great work.

Another Serendipity supporter that has been overwhelmingly active the last days is Alexander Mieland (dma147). He has provided a boast of cool plugins: A backup plugin, a forum plugin, a downloadmanager and some more: Read the forums.

With your help, Serendipity is able to continue being a great and enhancible blog application. It's great to see the community evolve, keep it up and spread the word! :-)