Serendipity – The official Serendipity blog

After a long time of development and testing, Serendipity 1.2 is now out in its first release candidate.

There have been quite a lot of changes to the new version. Most important of them all, the authentication and session scheme has been altered to allow easier plugin interaction. Also the backend (master template and template for the entry editor) has finally ben Smartyfied so that they can be changed by template authors.

We would kindly ask all Serendipity users to test this new version to squash any possible showstoppers before the final release.

Please check especially if the login to your admin backend still works flawlessly (especially if you are using https) and if your 'Edit Entry' backend section works just like before. Please report bugs and issues on our Serendipity Forum Board.

Here's a list of other new cool enhancements since Serendipity 1.1:

• Templates for Backend (Entry Editor, Master Template) via Smarty
• New session/login system
• SQLite3, PDO::Postgresql Support
• better IPv6 support
• better HTTP headers to support Caching
• allow to define if a parent category should show entries of child categories on the frontend, or only entries of that exact category
• Bugfix: RSS fullfeed for "let user decide" now properly works
• Bugfix: Saving/sending trackbacks and tracking exit-links works in circumstances involving cached entries
• Bugfix: Place possible dangerous user preference options to group management to prevent unwanted configuration changes

A full list of changes is contained in the docs/NEWS file inside the file archive. Many changes are small bugfixes and user interaction enhancements that all speed up your Serendipity experience.

You can download the latest version on www.s9y.org. And most of all: Have fun!

For Serendipity, only the frontend (what the visitors see) could be subject to Smarty-Templating. One reason for not utilizing these features in the backend was to maintain stability, ease of change for core developers and reduce migration woes so that the Admin Backend would always be accessible.

What we have now added to the Serendipity 1.2 snapshots (that will soon become public beta and a final release in late Summer) is functionality that allows you to template the backend layout as well as the 'New/Edit Entry' screen. Other functions like category manager, plugin manager etc. will remain hardcoded and eventually changed, because most of their look can already be controlled with CSS only.

To maintain stability and prevent migration problems where Smarty might not be initialized, Serendipity can fall back to the usual PHP-only backend. This is done using a tricky session variable scheme - when Smarty cannot be loaded, a session variable is set, and on the next page call, this variable will force the Serendipity framework to use the fallback routines. Nifty stuff. :-)

Please try out the new theming possibilites and give feedback. The default admin stylesheet can be found in the templates/default/admin/index.tpl and templates/default/admin/entries.tpl templates, and can be copied to your own theme directory as usual.

Due to a bug in PHP 5.2.2, the Serendipity XML-RPC plugin will no longer work, because PHP does not initialize a required variable correctly.

The bug is listed on PHP.net here and has been fixed in their CVS already. To fix the problem in Serendipity you will need to either update your PHP installation, or downgrade to the previous version.

Since this bug happens at a place where Serendipity has no possibility to interact, the bug cannot be circumvented by the XML-RPC posting plugin, and your provider definitely needs to upgrade PHP as soon as it will be out officially.

This month's german PHP magazine features an article introducing Serendipity and its capabilities, as well as some looks into thecode- written by yours truly, Garvin Hicking. The article is titled "Blogging mit Biss"

The article was written with newbies to Serendipity in mind, but also targetted at eager developers who might want to contribute to Serendipity. When the next PHP magazine issue comes out, we'll see to publishing the article on s9y.org.

If you've read the article and want to share your opinion, feel free to comment here.:-)

rrichards from the forums published his first public OpenID-Plugin results. Check out this thread on the forums. If you're interested in testing the plugin or are interested in OpenID, please give it a look and report about it.

Many thanks to rrichards and all volunteers!

Alp Uckan has released his theme Adaptation (german page, layout can be seen on his site). It's a "content-first" based theme with advanced Serendipity 1.1 design options such as choosing color- and fontsets. It evolves around full CSS and XHTML compatibility and thus providing accessibility options being set by the user in his browser (fontsize, colors etc. are based on browser setup).

Have a look at this clean template, it's now also being added to Spartacus! Thanks a lot to Alp for providing his theme to the public.