Serendipity – The official Serendipity blog

Time again for a new release!

Serendipity 1.0.2 mainly features a XSS injection attack on the admin backend which could happen if registered authors can be tricked into following a specially crafted URL. This bug was detected by the ever-restless Stefan Esser, many thanks for notifying us. Users of previous version of Serendipity are urged to upgrade to be secure. Note though that this bug requires your own interaction and thus exploits of this depend on how well you can stay away from clicking links that you do not know what they do exactly. ;-)

Serendipity 1.1-beta5 features the following new changes since 1.1-beta1:

1. Prevent XSS backend injection attack (see above)
2. Themes can now support custom amounts and positions of any number of sidebars (top, bottom, left, right etc.) (more)
3. Usergroups can now configure which plugins/events a group is allowed to execute (more)
4. Added the options to use HTTP-Authentication for your login, which enables you to use secured RSS-Feeds with login credentials
5. Some permalinks oddities when using % in URLs and some other minor fixes

Serendipity 1.1 is getting very close to getting finalized (targets mid-December). New major features will be added to a 1.2 version branch, so expect no more major changes here. Please help us by trying out the latest version and report bugs/issues!

Upgrading is easy as ever: Download, unpack, go to your Admin panel, done. Read more here: Serendipity FAQ. The download is available here: Serendipity Download Page

Have fun!

I've committed a new plugin to Spartacus that allows users to use a very simply Notification System.

Users can create text (HTML formatting configurable) that will appear on the Admin Backend. A small goodie is a feature that notifications are subject to specific usergroups - only the usergroups for which the creator intentionally posted the message will see it.

The plugin also allows to configure whether normal users are allowed to use the messaging system. In the future this could be enhanced for more granular control, but for the time being it should proove a nice tool. The display of the messages can be controlled via a bundled notes.css CSS file.

CSS formatting also allows to format new incoming messages differently. Now try it out and have fun

The Spartacus services, which was not updating for some time, should now be working again properly. If you still have no access to updated plugins, please let me know.

Carl Galloway has released his port of the Hemmingway Theme for Serendipity.

It's quite bleeding edge and supports various new features of Serendipity 1.1-beta, so check it out! Hooray for Carl. :-)

I'll be leaving for holiday from September 20th to October 1st, and thus not be checking these forums.

So please don't despair, others will surely be active here. If there's anything critical that needs my attention, I'll get right to it after my well-deserved time off. :)

If anything goes terribly wrong with this forum or the s9y servers, please contact Jannis Hermanns (www.jannis.to / jannis -at- gmail).

For ages, Serendipity has given users the flexibility to move around plugins in the left/right sidebar. Two sidebars were a usual concept for blogs in the days past, and for surely some more days to come.

But some themes, like the Hemingway theme give people a different approach to surrounding their blog content. The result of a porting discussion on the forums lead me to patch our plugin API.

Serendipity 1.1 already support custom theme options (like special navigation bars, colorsets etc.), and what came out of my recent patch is the functionality to define multiple custom sidebars.

With this, you can add a "top", "bottom", "middle" or whatever else sidebar locations to your themes, and put them in the smarty templates using the function {serendipity_printSidebar side="XXX"} wherever you like.

It's as easy as adding a config.inc.php file to your template, add a $template_config array value like this:

       
$template_config = array(
     array(
       'var'     => 'sidebars',
       'title'   => 'Sidebars',
       'type'    => 'string',
       'default' => 'left,hide,right,bot'
     )
);

(or modify existing config arrays) and save the file. When you now enter your plugin configuration section, you will see each of the sidebar locations next to another, so that you can move around plugins from one to the other location.

There are two things to watchout: If you use locations other than 'left' and 'right', other templates may not output plugins that were put to a location like 'bot'. So if you switch templates, you must watch out on where you put your sidebar plugins into.
The other thing to pay attention: Only use "," to separate the sidebar item names (no spaces!) and never use more than 6 characters for your locations.

Please have a test with these new possibilities, tell us if you like it, and show us the results you made with it!

This functionality has been implemented into recent Serendipity 1.1 nightlies (currently 1.1-beta4)