A new plugin called serendipity_event_assigncategories ("Category Assignment") has been added to CVS. It allows to easily change the category assignemnts of all articles. It can be very helpful if you decide to add a new category to your blog and would like to sort special entries to those new categories.
The plugin will be available in Spartacus soon and has already been committed to CVS.
Most of you have noticed the slight unavailibility of s9y.org between June 3rd and today. This was due to the fact that my old provider, the one where I registered s9y.org, stopped his business but at the same time did not stop being the admin-c of s9y.org. On June 3rd s9y.org expired, and the expiration-notice, warnings and reminders were sent into the great nowhere, as there was no provider responsible for s9y.org. All apologies to you guys, who couldn't download fresh s9y snapshots.
Thanks to a lot of Vitamin-B and efforts from the cool guys of InterNetX and De-Punkt, GPF and absynth, the domain s9y.org has been magically gone through an instant-recovery from it's PENDING DELETE state back to shiny availibility. Thanks, guys. As the domain is finally completely moved from the old provider everything should go much smoother now.
Blog on...
The static page Plugin in version 2.1 has been upgraded to allow password protected, static pages. The password is not remembered in a cookie currently, so you have to enter it time and again.
I hope this new feature is useful for somebody. ;-)
I've spent some time to improve the Serendipity User management.
The result of this is a patch which create Usergroups. You can give each usergroup a set of permissions the members are able to perform (like "Maintain Entries", "Maintain Users", ...). The privileges can easily be enhanced. An author can be member of more than one group.
This kind of obsoletes the old "Userlevel" mechanism we have, but I've tried to incorporate the patch in a way so that old plugins depending on the Userlevel should still work, because the 'userlevel' column is not yet dropped.
This mechanism seems to work fairly well, I've also upgrade the entryproperties plugin so that you can define by which usergroups an entry can be read.
Volunteers please try out the patch here: usergroup.diff. Please report any problems you face and if you like the direction where it's headed at. The diff is made against 0.9-alpha2 and will eventually be committed to SVN somewhen next week, depending on the feedback. :-)
Have fun!
Thanks to Matthew Maude we now have a bundle of two new plugins to integrate with the Coppermine-Gallery:
I myself do not use the Coppermine Gallery, but Matthew's plugins look very promising. Feel free to look into the plugins if you're using Coppermine and report your experiences! :-)
Plugins should be available via Spartacus or CVS: plugin_coppermine and event_cpgselector.
The debugging modifications I described recently helped to identify a problem with our Spartacus Remote Repository Tool
The problem occured only in a bunch of plugins. Our plugins repository sometimes contains directories with both a sidebar plugin AND an event plugin in that same folder. Even though the Spartacus Plugin properly fetches the files, it would only transfer the name of the directory depending on whether you first installed the event plugin or the sidebar plugin.
An example for this is the My Calendar plugin. In our repository, the files are in a folder called "serendipity_event_mycalendar". If you now installed that plugin via the Sidebar Plugin Manager, Spartacus would create a folder "serendipity_plugin_mycalendar" and of course fail when later trying to load the plugin from that directory.
Thus, an updated version 1.2 of Spartacus now fixes the problem, and returns the right target directory.
Note that you could also bypass the wrong behaviour of Spartacus in earlier versions by just installing the "other" plugin. That means if you tried to install the Calendar as Sidebar plugin, just try it again via the Event plugin.
If you care to notice why we often have plugins as both Event and Sidebar plugins: Basically we enforced a strict separation of those two plugins to make it easier for the user to differ if a plugin is shown in a sidebar, or if it enhances the flexibilities of Serendipity. And because only Sidebar plugins can be "moved around" graphically (via left/right side and placement) it would be hard to make an Event plugin have a Sidebar component and move that around.