Serendipity – The official Serendipity blog

Yesterday, Andyman77 from the forums brought the Thickbox project to my attention. Using his plugin, I intermingled that with the existing lightbox plugin so that you can now choose which JS library to use to format your links. Plus, lightbox2 got also added to the plugin.

What, you don't know what Lightbox is? It's a nifty javascript that will transform links to images into small "popup" links. When you thus link to a thumbnail images (<a href="large.jpg"><img src="thumb.jpg" />), lightbox will take on that image link, and once clicked on it, the large image will be shown on your page instead in a separate browser window. It sounds boring when explained, so just go to the lightbox pages and look at their installations.

The plugin installation is seamless, as all image links in serendipity will get automatically rewritten so that links from thumbnails will show up as lightbox links.

Thickbox brings fun into this thing by offering to also popup HTML links inside neat popups. Just add a 'class="thickbox"' attribute to your HTML links in your entries, and that's it.

Fellow serendipity-user Abdussamad wrote a nice Tutorial on how to add Hijri-dates (arabic) to the blog output. Thanks a lot for your contribution!

Jay took some time to create a Serendipity Debian Release Package! Go and try it out. :-)

Thanks a lot, Jay! We are also still on the lookout for volunteers helping us create a PEAR channel and PEAR packages. *g*

Basically, Serendipity should support the Flock browser.

Sadly, due to a bug in their parsing/sending routine, applications that rely on PEARs XML-RPC extension won't work with flock. Serendipity falls under that category. It would work without flock auto-detecting a blog, but because flock's autodetection is blocking to successfully add Serendipity, this is a devil's circle.

This flock bug had been reported in February, but sadly no progress has yet been made. All the people who'd might like to use their Serendipity Blog and the XML-RPC posting plugin with Flock, please raise your kind voice here:

Flock Bugtracker.

I am pretty sure the nice people of Flock will report to popular demand - I'd really like to see progress in this issue :)

It's pretty hot in germany today with temperatures above 30°C and  it appears that either this server's cooling system is not strong enough or that the air conditioning at our hosting provider is at it's limit. Therefore the CPU speed has automatically been lowered to avoid hardware failure. So if things feel slow or the server explodes soon: You have been warned ;-)

The past weekend, Davey asked me in an IRC chat that he's put off by Smarty and would like to use Serendipity without it for his next blog design. Mostly because of loosing some overhead.

I'm basically split oppinion on this: Smarty Templating is a great way to ease things up and unify a templating language that looks better and is more accessible to newbies. So this is basically an advantage that I, as a programmer, am willing to take. But to any one who's got his looks on grandma's performance pennies might think otherwise, and might think that PHP itself already is a templating language. Which I can understand. :-)

Smarty luckily has a pretty, pretty easy API facing towards the User. Basically all that Smarty needs are the assign and display methods. There are some more convenience functions, but let's disregard those for a moment.

With that in Mind, I was able to create a PHP AND an XML-Templating Engine for Serendipity, which completely bypasses Smarty by still using the same outward-facing API.

"New PHP and XML/XSLT Template Engines implemented" vollständig lesen