Thanks to lordcoffee from our forums, we now have his new ported theme (original theme created by Sebastian Schmieg) called Blix in our Spartacus/CVS repository. It should be available within the next few hours. Users who can't wait can already download the theme from the forum's link above.
Many thanks for keeping the theme contributions coming in so many and often, all you guys! It's great to show how great and flexible the Serendipity templating technique actually is. :-)
And now, to complete the trifecta of posting: there has been some recent activity on the Serendipity Wiki, improving the themeing documentation.
First is this Smarty mini-tutorial, covering the basics of Smarty syntax, looping, and {if} statements. It actually answers a question from the forums about adding separators without getting an extra separator at the beginning or end of the list.
Second is Carl's masterpiece, a fully documented stylesheet for the Default theme. This is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in creating new Serendipity themes. Anybody interested in modifying just a portion of their blog can benefit, too.
Let the theming begin!
The first, Softened Cells, is actually two themes in one. The second is its fraternal twin, called Sunset. Both provide rounded corners and include a horizontal CSS-driven menu. Both are taken from a web designer's imagination at Open Source Web Design.
The third theme is also from an OSWD idea, and is called Reflections. It's a nice grey that doesn't feel cold and hard. It's also full of little innovations, including full styling, rounded corners, CSS menus, and a fully commented stylesheet.
You can now add an icon to your Serendipity template without any coding at all. I've extended the kubrickheader plugin -- which already changed the header image in Kubrick and Joshua templates -- to handle the default template as well. Since most templates simply extend one of these three, the plugin should be able to handle just about anything. To reflect these new capabilities, the SPARTACUS title has been changed to "Template Header / Logo Image".
While I was in there, I also added ".gif" to the list of image extensions, so if you specify a directory of images, a random icon will be chosen every time the page is loaded.
You can read the forum post for more information and directions.
There has been a security advisory for TinyMCE which urges you to upgrade your TinyMCE WYSIWYG Editor, in case you are using it.
Serendipity offers a TinyMCE plugin so that you can use the TinyMCE editor. The users who have installed that plugin should remember, that they needed to manually download the TinyMCE package and upload it to their Serendipity plugin directory. This means that the Serendipity project does not bundle and/or have control over the actual TinyMCE editor files and you need to maintain this package manually, by uploading a new TinyMCE editor version.
This might sound a bit complicated, but we do not bundle the TinyMCE plugin because of it's large filebase and possible licensing issues. The good side-effect of this is that if you did not already manually take the route to install and use the TinyMCE plugin, you must not be afraid of any security harms to your Serendipity installation. Other (blog-)applications are now forced to issue a complete new release because of this. ;-)
A few of you have reported problems with the template chooser plugin in the past, where new selected templates would only show their true design after you've manually refreshed the page (F5 in most browsers).
The root of this problem was that browser cached the CSS stylesheet on their own, without making HTTP requests to check for changes. Since serendipity uses URL rewriting to achieve pretty URLs for stylesheets, this interfered with the one-time caching of stylesheets, even though their contents changed.
As a workaround, I've just committed a fix to our repository of the nightlies and an upcoming 0.9.2 maintenance release. This change makes the plugin always use a URL that contains the name of the stylesheet, and thus works around the caching issue by emitting individual stylesheets.