Serendipity – The official Serendipity blog

The s9y team has opted to deprecate a group of event and sidebar plugins and remove them from the spartacus plugin repository. These plugins use services that no longer exist, are no longer required, no longer maintained etc. We may deprecate more plugins in the future in order to consolidate our plugin base further, but they need to be tested first.

Note that you can still use these plugins if you already have them installed or install them manually, but they will no longer be available through spartacus. You could also volunteer to “save” an umaintained plugin.

See the extended entry for a full list of plugins deprecated in this “wave”.

Our group of developers says "Hi!" from the Linux-Hotel in Essen. We met up for the third time (thanks for hosting us!), and it was entertaining and productive as ever - great to have such a nice community and same-spirited people.

We mainly worked on releasing Serendipity 2.1, addressing some last-minute PHP7 things and went through our open issues.

We also talked a lot about coming features for the next Serendipity version, how we want to implement responsive images, improve on our login/hashing framework and went through all of our plugins to see how we can consolidate some of them and remove deprecated ones.

Sadly a regression slipped into our Serendipity 2.1.0 release, which made it impossible to reset a plugin configuration variable to a FALSE/empty state and indicate the proper state in the plugin configuration. We have fixed this in 2.1.1 and changed the release announcement to point directly to 2.1.1.

We are happy to announce the availability of the final release for Serendipity 2.1.1.

Serendipity 2.1.1 focusses on:

• Rewrites in some older legacy parts of the core (URL routing, template fallback chain, experimental internal caching) as well as PHP 7 compatibility.
• New bundled responsive themes "Timeline" and "Clean-Blog"
• Improved usability of plugin upgrades by combining sidebar and event plugins and upgrading multiple plugins at once
• Permission checks for the dashboard output and comments
• Usability improvements to the media library, bulk moving support
• New API wrapper for URL downloads that plugins can use (serendipity_request_url)
• New Theme "Skeleton" (responsive, mobile first)
• Improved preview iframe handling
• Changes (simplifications) in template file routing for backend/frontend views, new smarty {getFile} function for theme authors
• (new for rc1) Ability to set a default posting category for an author
• (new for rc1) Improved security checks against CSRF attacks (comment moderation, comment toggling
• (new for rc1) Improved security for referrer redirection
• (new for rc1) Improved security for local file hotlinking
• (new for rc1) Fixed sorting media database by filename
• (new for final release) Addressed some more PHP 7.1 issues, fixed bugs with missing token for installing plugins and deleting comments. We mainly tested PHP 7.0 compatibility, but PHP 7.1 should work too.
• (2.1.1) Fixed displaying the proper plugin configuration value when set to false/empty.

Many thanks at this point (in no specific order) for Lee Sheldon Victor, cdxy, Edric Teo and Xu Yue for helping a lot in improving on security aspects of Serendipity.

The next version of Serendipity will focus on supporting UTF8MB4 (for full emoji compatibiliy), responsive image insertion, consolidating our plugins. Our github issue tracker now also holds a new label "easyfix" which could be a great way of interested developers to get started with Serendipity and help us with development.

You can download the release file and unzip it to your installation as usual.

We are happy to announce the availability of the first (and hopefully last) Release Candidate for Serendipity 2.1.

We feel comfortable with suggesting you to try out this release in productive environments (of course always make a backup of your database and files first).

Serendipity 2.1 focusses on:

• Rewrites in some older legacy parts of the core (URL routing, template fallback chain, experimental internal caching) as well as PHP7 compatibility.
• New bundled responsive themes "Timeline" and "Clean-Blog"
• Improved usability of plugin upgrades by combining sidebar and event plugins and upgrading multiple plugins at once
• Permission checks for the dashboard output and comments
• Usability improvements to the media library, bulk moving support
• New API wrapper for URL downloads that plugins can use (serendipity_request_url)
• New Theme "Skeleton" (responsive, mobile first)
• Improved preview iframe handling
• Changes (simplifications) in template file routing for backend/frontend views, new smarty {getFile} function for theme authors
• (new for rc1) Ability to set a default posting category for an author
• (new for rc1) Improved security checks against CSRF attacks (comment moderation, comment toggling
• (new for rc1) Improved security for referrer redirection
• (new for rc1) Improved security for local file hotlinking
• (new for rc1) Fixed sorting media database by filename

Many thanks at this point (in no specific order) to Lee Sheldon Victor, cdxy, Edric Teo and Xu Yue for helping a lot in improving on security aspects of Serendipity.

You can download the release file and unzip it to your installation as usual on our Github release tracker.

Serendipity 2.0.5 is a maintenance security release which addresses these issues:

• [Security] Improve preventing fetching local files, thanks to Xu Yue.
• [Security] Prevent XSS in adding category and directory names, thanks to Edric Teo @smarterbitbybit, CVE-2016-9681.

Alongside a new Serendipity 2.1-beta3 version has been released, with the same fixes plus some more progress on the road to the 2.1 release.

Simply upgrade by unpacking and uploading the release file and confirming our web-based upgrader.