Serendipity – The official Serendipity blog

It's been a long time, and the Serendipity Team is proud to present the Serendipity 1.5.1 release...

...All bad things come in triplets, except this one, which came in a duplet: First the uploaded release file contained the current development version, the second issue was found due to just 3 mixed up characters, which prevents any plugin that has a HTML/WYSIWYG-Config-item (like the HTML Nugget plugin) to be properly displayed.

The fix is quite easy: include/functions_plugins_admin.inc.php. The cause for this problem was introduced only a few days earlier and sadly slipped by unnoticed. We're awfully sorry for the trouble this may cause you.

Due to this version mixup earlier and this annoying bug, Serendipity 1.5.1 (Codename Colin AKA If everybody else is doing it, why can't we; but well, it could be worse) has been released.

If you're lazy and already upgraded to 1.5, you will only need to download and replace the file found here: include/functions_plugins_admin.inc.php.

Now have a merry christmas, and let's hope that our best friend Murphy has no surprises left for us freezing germans.

The Serendipity Team is proud to present the final release of Serendipity 1.5. While the earlier beta versions are proven to work fine for many people, it was finally time to package up a real release. ;)

This version mainly addresses login security by changing our method how passwords are stored to use salted SHA1 checksums instead of plain MD5 checksums. This makes password retrieval (rainbow attacks, see special blog posting) through the database virtually impossible. Another thing is improved PHP 5.3 compatibility.

For users of our Bundled WYSIWYG-Editor Xinha users now have the ability to easily customize the appearance of this panel through a "my_custom.js" file inside the template directory (a draft of such a file can be found as fallback default in the htmlarea/ subdirectory).

One cool new feature for developers is that now also templates can register themselves inside the plugin API hooks to execute specific things, that don't require installation of an event plugin.

Other news include:

• new event API hooks
• fixed PDF thumbnail generation
• ability to auto-scroll on borders when Drag/Dropping plugins
• UTC server time zone support
• improvements in the Smarty functions to easier use Serendipity as a CMS for individual entry output.
• quicksearch improvements for doing a wildcard-search when too few searchresults were found on a fixed searchterm
• support for Typepad anti-spam server-checks, additionally to Akismet

Minor improvements since the 1.5-beta1 release:

• more PHP 5.3.0 compatibility improvements
• Disallow uploading any files that contain ".php." in the filename for extra security with Apache MimeMagic-Modules
• expermiental PDO:SQlite support
• usability improvements for the comment moderation panel (bottom-navigation, removed border increase)

The current release can be easily installed on any previous Serendipity installation. Just unpack, upload and visit your admin panel to perform possible database upgrades. Upon first login with an old password, Serendipity will store your old password in the new format - please be sure to make a backup of your Database prior to upgrading, and read the upgrade pointers on Upgrading Serendipity.

Have fun using Serendipity, and let us know on the Forums if you have any issues!

Update: Accidentaly, the 1.6-alpha release file was uploaded with the wrong file name. This has been fixed, the real files are now available -- users who had already downloaded this 1.6 release can either re-download the new release bundle, or stay at their current version. 1.6 has only 2 minor changes yet, and is 99,9% identical with 1.5 at this point. The most major difference would only be the version number. ;-)
I'm sorry for this fault, I blame it on the german weather...

Currently the mailserver of the board.s9y.org is malfunctioning, so new board registrations and reply notifications cannot be sent. Jannis is working on migrating the Mailserver so that the unstable behaviour of the mail-sending of the board is hopefully an issue of the past quite soon.

Update 2009-20-12: SMTP should work again now! If anyone still faces problem, please contact garvin(-at)s9y(-dot)org!

Thanks to Niels Provos we have been informed of a security issue in the Serendipity Freetag plugin (serendipity_event_freetag). Versions up to 3.08 contained a bug that was not properly escaping a GET variable used in an SQL statement, leading to a possible SQL injection attack.

The impact of this is considered to be low, as the query used is only for displaying Meta keywords inside a blog entry, and usual mysql-Client libraries to not allow to execute multiple stacked SQL queries to drop tables etc.

Nevertheless, you should upgrade this plugin version. It is available on Spartacus, or for manual download.

Serendipity 1.5-beta1 is the first public beta release of the upcoming Serendipity 1.5 version. Some important things have changed under the hood, that we would like to ask our users to try out and report back to us.

This version mainly addresses login security by changing our method how passwords are stored to use salted SHA1 chacksums instead of plain MD5 checksums. This makes password retrieval (rainbow attacks) through the database virtually impossible. Another thing is improved PHP 5.3 compatibility. See more about this in a special blog posting some time ago.

For users of our Bundled WYSIWYG-Editor Xinha users now have the ability to easily customize the appearance of this panel through a "my_custom.js" file inside the template directory (a draft of such a file can be found as fallback default in the htmlarea/ subdirectory).

One cool new feature for developers is that now also templates can register themselves inside the plugin API hooks to execute specific things, that don't require installation of an event plugin.

Other news include:

• new event API hooks
• fixed PDF thumbnail generation
• ability to auto-scroll on borders when Drag/Dropping plugins
• UTC server time zone support
• improvements in the Smarty functions to easier use Serendipity as a CMS for individual entry output.
• quicksearch improvements for doing a wildcard-search when too few searchresults were found on a fixed searchterm
• support for Typepad anti-spam server-checks, additionally to Akismet

The current release can be easily installed on any previous Serendipity installation. Just unpack, upload and visit your admin panel to perform possible database upgrades. Upon first login with an old password, Serendipity will store your old password in the new format - please be sure to make a backup of your Database prior to upgrading. Apart from that, the current beta release is already in production use on many blogs and there are no known problems/issues with this.

Softaculous is a provider for automatted web-application installations on cPanel/DirectAdmin environments. They have an automatted API for software vendors like Serendipity to be able to setup and install their applications.

Thanks to the hard work of the Softaculous-Team, they have created a package for Serendipity on their own efforts - many thanks for that!

So you can easily install Serendipity on a Softaculous-Platform and be able to upgrade to later installations easily. Check out their Demo site to see an auto-installed Serendipity at work. You can also use this as a free demo of Serendipity, including the backend. Also Softaculous itself has a admin-demo, if you want to have a look on how to automate your installations of web-applications.

On the Serendipity@Softaculous-Site, you can also rate Serendipity or contribute reviews. Currently there are none available, so please feel free to both vote and spread the word on Serendipity there!