Quicksearch for Static Pages and Multilingual Entries

In the past few days, several people asked for the possibility to quicksearch not only serendipity entries but also static pages and multilingual entries.

I was overwhelmed to see how easy adding support for both was possibly, and did so within the past 30 minutes. I guess this once again proves how flexible the plugin architecture of Serendipity is... :-)

To get quicksearch possibilites in the Static pages, just fetch version 3.30 of the staticpage plugin via Spartacus. It will be online within the next 48 hours. As soon as you've upgraded, the quicksearch will show the results of found staticpages below the usual search results. You can customize the output of course, via the plugin_staticpage_searchresults.tpl template file.

Support for multilingual entries has one caveat: It requires an updated serendipity core file, which I just committed to our SVN 1.1-alpha1 and 1.0 release branch: Patch. This allows version 2.0 of the multilingual plugin (also available on Spartacus the next 48 hours) to fully interoperate with the search facility. It will search all entries in the language you are currently reading in and display the entries completely interface with the usual search results.

Please let me know, if it works out fine for you. Note that fulltext search requires MySQL 4.0 and above - SQLite and postgresql emulate the search with a LIKE search. Expect some performance decrease in that matter.

Serendipity 1.0-beta2 released

Just to keep you updated: We have not abandoned a 1.0 release. Our busy bees are still working hard on getting the wiki restyled, the text polished. Sadly, real life is taking a hold on all of us developers currently, so you must bear with us a little while longer. To sum it up: The current beta2 release candidate contains a few minor fixes and is the most stable release up to date. The final 1.0 release will most likely not contain any changes to this release. Please read the contained NEWS file for the fixes. The most important ones maybe are: Character transcoding for UTF-8 trackbacks to ISO-8859-x blogs (or vice versa), XHTML compliance fixes for some plugins, translation updates (plus new languages: Tamil and Turkish) and of course the new and polished default theme contest winner by Carl Galloway. Have fun using Serendipity 1.0-beta2, and stay tuned for the big 1.0 party. :-)

German Magazine "Internet Professionell 4/06" about Serendipity

Thanks to HadleyB from the forums I was notified, that the current issue of the german magazine Internet Professionell had some editorial words from the editor in chief about Serendipity.

Here's a snippet of the original text in german and my translation to english:


Multiuser-Blog
"Mehrere individuelle Weblogs, ohne die Blog-Software mehrmals zu installieren: Mit Serendipity und ein paar Tricks klappt das wunderbar"

Ich wollte ein paar Leuten die Möglichkeit geben, auf einer meiner Websites ihr ganz persönliches Weblog zu schreiben. Zum einen wertet das meine Website mit interessanten Geschichten auf, zum anderen stärkt es die Community zu meiner Site. Die User sollten so weit voneinander getrennt sein, dass sie nur auf ihren eigenen Bereich Zugriff haben, und ich wollte die Blog-Software nur ein einziges Mal auf dem Webserver installieren. Überraschenderweise fand ich zunächst kein Open-Source-PHP-Skript dafür, dass auch sonst komfortabel und leistungsfähig ist.

Fündig geworden bin ich letztlich bei Serendipity (www.s9y.org). Mit ein paar einfachen Tricks funktioniert es damit hervorragend, und die User haben sogar individuelle Design-Templates [...].

Insgesamt hat mich Serendipity als Blog-Software reichlich überzeugt, weil es flexibel und sehr einfach anpassbar ist. Und vor allem ist es benutzerfreundlich genug, dass auch weniger erfahrene Blogger damit klarkommen. Probieren Sie's mal aus und schreiben Sie mir, was Sie davon halten.

Franz Neumeier, Chefredakteur. Internet Professionell 04/06.


Multiuser-Blog
"Several individual weblogs, without installing the blog application multiple times: Using Serendipity and some tricks make it happen easily"

I wanted to give some people the opportunity to maintain a personal weblog on my website. On the one hand this adds interesting stories to my website and on the other hand it strengthens the community towards my website. The users should be kept independent from each other, so that they only have access to their specific area, and I wanted the blog application to only have installed once on my webserver. Surprisingly I did not find any Open-Source-PHP-Application that suited my needs and was also comfortable and powerful to use.

I finally found what I needed with Serendipity (www.s9y.org). Using a few tricks, it all works flawlessly and the users have their individual design-templates[...].

All in all, Serendipity has persuaded me in many ways, because it's flexible to use and easy to customize. And most importantly, it is easy to use for even inexperienced bloggers. You should try it and tell me what you think.

Franz Neumeier, editor in chief. Internet Professionell 04/06.

Thanks for these kind words, I think they speak for themselves. :-)