Serendipity 1.1 release cycle

The Serendipity 1.1 release cycle is finally getting ready to be pushed out of the door. It seems to run quite well from the reports on the forums we gathered and we have not heard of any showstoppers or open bugs left in it.

I would like you all to testdrive the latest snapshots (which should run without any problems) and see if you find any remaining bugs/issues. If possible, report them on the forums where we can best discuss about it.

Also, for any possible translator of our language files - we need your help to translate new strings before the release. Please download the snapshots on www.s9y.org and have a look at the contained language files. You can send the translations to the forums or drop a message here and I will commit them.

Special help is required for these languages which have no active maintainer, have not been updated for a long time or no maintainer has been entered in our language files: Tamil, Romanian, Polish, Norwegian, Hungarian, Czech.

The goal is to release Serendipity within the second week of December.

Improved nl2br plugin

For a longe time, people complained that the Serendipity NL2BR plugin (which converts newlines to proper HTML linebreaks) occasionally converted too many newlines. For example, within "code" or "pre" or "table" tags it is not desired to have linebreaks.

For the same amount of long time, the Serendipity developers did not really have a chance to dig into the regular expression magic that was required to fix this. Luckily for us, the awesome Brendon K came around and improved the plugin for us. :-)

We have now committed his code into the official Serendipity SVN trunk, so that it will be contained in tomorrows Snapshots as well as the final Serendipity 1.1 version.

We hope that this will be useful for you, and many thanks to Brendon - we hope there will be many other cool patches you can send to us. :-)

Serendipity 1.0.3 released: Fixes PHP 5.2.0 problem

Because of the issue with PHP 5.2.0 mentioned before, and the 1.1 release not hastily being pushed out the barnyard, the Serendipity Team has decided to release a 1.0.3 version that fixes the mentioned problem.

We have also decided to backport some other bugfixes from the 1.1 release tree:

  1. Fix a problem where spartacus did not properly assign configured permissions to downloaded directories, thanks to danilo from the forums!
  2. Fix possible integer wraparound in comment count leading to a gazillion counter state. Also now show links to the entries within the administration comment panel. Thanks to Julian Finn!
  3. Fix bug with using %username% in author permalinks, thanks to oeli from the forums!
  4. Move trackback sending logic to the end when saving an entry. Should get rid of event plugins not operating when trackbacks painfully fail. Thanks to isotopp.
  5. Fixed bug that prevented native imports from other blog system to recode ISO-charsets into UTF-8. Major thanks to Jan of blog.salid.de.

If you are affected by any of those fixed bugs and/or running PHP 5.2.0, we suggest you to update. Else, you are not required to upgrade your Serendipity 1.0.2 installations and can wait happily ever after until we get the 1.1 release polished for release (hopefully in December). If you are a foreign language speaker and want to contribute to Serendipity, please drop us a line in the Serendipity forums to help us in getting all translations up to date.

Download the new release here

Serendipity 1.0 and PHP 5.2.0

Serendipity 1.0.x an PHP 5.2.0 currently do not go well together because of the new PHP ext/filter extension. In the early PHP 5.2.0 cycles this provided a function 'input_name_to_filter' which was later dropped, but not removed from Serendipity 1.0

Serendipity 1.1 beta versions already use a function_exists() check to prevent this, but it had not made it into the 1.0 release cycle.

Thus, to make s9y work with PHP 5.2.0, you have three options:

  1. Disable the ext/filter extension in your php.ini configuration,
  2. Upgrade to Serendipity 1.1-beta versions or
  3. edit your serendipity include/compat.inc.php file and replace the string "extension_loaded('filter')" with "extension_loaded('xfilter')", which will effectively disable the follow-up code to take effect

The upcoming Serendipity 1.1 final version will of course integrate a more thorough fix. The serendipity Team is sorry for this confusion it may cause for PHP 5.2.0 users.