Serendipity – The official Serendipity blog

Carl Galloway

After a very intense "default theme competition" and voting period the last weeks, the winning theme has finally been found.

Carl Galloway has won the competition with his theme. He got 28 votes (5 extra votes through "commenting") and placed first. Second place is David Cummins with 20 votes (3 extra), and scoring last but not least is the proud myself with 19 votes. One vote has been cast on the old default design, for the record.

All three themes will be put into the final Serendipity 1.0 release, with Carl's theme being elected as the default theme. I think a wise decision has been made which puts Serendipity's look more up to par with what it can technically achieve.

Many, many thanks to the contributors of the themes for their enormous efforts complying with the harsh rules. Many thanks for the voters who took the time to constructively criticize the elected themes.

A small "elite group" consisting of Carl, David, Judebert, Jannis and me will now be going through the template and checking minor details and making some adjustments to the design before we release the 1.0 final release. We will not be able to uphold the February 15th release, but keep your heads up for a soon release.

The winning theme can still be seen on themes.s9y.org.

I am currently working on Image directory permissions and including some other "unstable" stuff. I'll need to put it into SVN trunk so that other people can help developing.

Thus I've just created the "1.0" SVN branch point which holds the 1.0 branch and possibly upcoming 1.0.x maintenance releases.

SVN "trunk" is now the new, testing "1.1-alpha1" playground.

Developers, please commit fixes to both the branch AND trunk. Do not check out trunk if you need a stable system.

Users, if you need a stable system, please download the 1.0-beta1 release candidate or wait for the upcoming 1.0 final. Do not use the nightly snapshots if you depend on a stable system. B0rkage could happen, even though we give our best so that it doesn't.

The Serendipity Theme Contest has closed the announced deadline.

Three templates were submitted, by Carl Galloway, David Cummins and Garvin Hicking. They can be viewed for public display (frontend and backend) on http://themes.s9y.org/.

You can VOTE ON THE FORUMS, if you are a registered user to that forum. If you are not, please just drop your vote there as a reply to the entry or as a comment on the blog above. I will collect votes on all three places. You MUST post either your realname or your blog URL for a vote to be officially cast, to prevent duplicate votes. A statement like "I vote for Carl Galloways Design, my name is John Doe" or "I vote for David Cummins Design and my blog is http://blog.s9y.org/" will suffice.

Several participants of the contest mailed me privately that they were unable to meet the deadline anytime soon, and to have the same chances for everyone, the contest has not been delayed. I hope, those announced themes will be put online in the future.

The theme with the highest vote count will be used as the new default template. If vote counts for two templates are the same, a run-off ballot will be made.

Have fun browsing through the submissions. Your oppinion is highly appreciated!

The announced Theme Contest is about to close today. Please send your results as announced in the entry until 23:59 CET today.

The contending templates will be shown for public display on a to-be-installed blog and be announced here soon. Voting will take place on the forums, publically.

I've committed a new plugin called "Free Wiki links for your entries" (serendipity_event_wikilinks) to the CVS repository and thus Spartacus.

This plugin adds a very basic wiki principle to your frontend: You can use links to create new entries. Actually, this functionality is basically also available within the "Wiki Markup" plugin, but I must admit I never got a grasp on that plugin, so I created a new one for that sole purpose.

You can now include links like [[my title]] in your entries. Either they resolve to already existing titles in your blog, or they will show an entry creation link for people which are logged in to the blog.

This plugin currently is only an expermental stub, but maybe already useful for some people. So have fun!

Past week, a request on the Serendipity Forums notified us about the existence of a service called PhoneBlogz.

The basic idea of their service is to allow blogging to your own blog via telephone. No, not via any of these XML-RPC methods with a software running on your phone. It's the "real thing" with "real speech".