Serendipity 1.0-beta1 released!

The Serendipity Team is proud to issue the first beta release of the upcoming Serendipity 1.0 version.

Serendipity's development has started nearly 3 years ago, and has undergone many fundamental changes in the past. Many feature enhancements and bug fixes have lead to a quite stable product that we feel very well with putting the "1.0" version tag on it. Don't let that version number fool you - other products may not have reached our stableness in their 2.x versions! ;-)

As for the new features since Serendipity 0.9.1, we have focussed on straighting out bugs and improving usability and more flexible templating and plugin handling:

  • Fixed Safari Browser issue with formatting and inserting media items
  • Fix templatechooser plugin to be nicer to browser caching
  • RFE #1387997 - Show amount of entries per archive period (archive sidebar plugin).
  • More abstraction for the serendipity_fetchEntries() call
  • Full PHPDOC function documentation
  • Plugin API: New "multiselect" plugin item type
  • Spamblock plugin improvements: Filter comment body, Check foreign Trackback URLs
  • Templating: New preview_iframe.tpl template for entry previews, new Smarty functions for fetching and printing entries within a template, RSS feeds can be templated
  • Fix not being able to create users of the same userlevel despite being admin
  • Fix bug #1371893: Category write permissions are not properly evaluated when writing into a category.
  • Fix bug #1371630: Write permissions to category are stored with input data of the 'Read permissions' author listing.
  • Plus many more things listed in our docs/NEWS file!

Upgrading from any version (also beta/alphas from previous versions) to Serendipity 0.9 is easy and can be done as before: Just unpack the release files to your existing directory, go to your admin panel and confirm the upgrade process. Serendipity automatically upgrades your database and tells you of important changes. Be sure to read our FAQ on http://www.s9y.org/ if you face any problems.

We are eagerly waiting for positive feedback or any problems you face with this new release on either this blog or via our Forums. The final 1.0 version is scheduled for February 15th.

Now what are you waiting for? Download latest release!

Add an icon to your serendipity page

You can now add an icon to your Serendipity template without any coding at all. I've extended the kubrickheader plugin -- which already changed the header image in Kubrick and Joshua templates -- to handle the default template as well. Since most templates simply extend one of these three, the plugin should be able to handle just about anything. To reflect these new capabilities, the SPARTACUS title has been changed to "Template Header / Logo Image".

While I was in there, I also added ".gif" to the list of image extensions, so if you specify a directory of images, a random icon will be chosen every time the page is loaded.

You can read the forum post for more information and directions.