Serendipity – The official Serendipity blog

Since some users occasionaly report having trouble with Spartacus and me having too little debugging information on what's going on, I have updated the Spartacus Plugin to be more verbose.

It now tells you what it's fetching and where it's saving the information. Anyone having trouble, please download the plugin here and save it in your plugin directory.

Here's a list of the reasons why Spartacus usually fails:

• Spartacus has no write privileges to your plugins/ directory. It needs write access to download plugins and store it on your server.
• Your Server's PHP module/firewall settings do not allow a PHP utility to open socket connections to other hosts and download files
• The SourceForge ViewCVS service has sporadic problems and timeouts or does not deliver content
• The plugin is successfully downloaded (so they files are on your server) but the plugin fails to install properly. This may be because your server saves the files without propper read permissions to Serendipity depending on your server setup. Or Safe Mode restrictions do not allow to include a file as the ownership of them differs.

Please alway check those issues above, and then please report any additional problems. I am eager to solve them, but since the problem heavily relies on propper permissions and outgoing connection, it's not always possible for me to fix those errors in the PHP-code.

Thanks for your feedback!

Today I was notified by Marco that there were still some re-occuring problems with our XMLRPC interface, and gave me a link to Tim Putnam, who successfully patched the XML-RPC facility.

I already integrated a patch by him for the 0.8 release, but sadly I was not aware of the forthcoming patches he made so that editing an article should now work via XML-RPC using Ecto, MarsEdit or whatever.

The patch has been committed to our 0.9 SVN Repository. Since I personally do not use the XML-RPC service and like our interface, I'd love to hear some feedback from people who actually use it.

A major thanks of course to Tim Putnam. If you happen to make any more patches, please let me know. :-)

Also requested quite often on the forums was a Voting/Poll plugin. Evan Nemerson did some groundwork on this quite some time ago, but it was lacking granular control over multiple Polls.

I have not committed a majorly revamped plugin which lets you delete and maintain multiple votings. The plugin is very basic, but it can be easily enhanced in the future as it has its own tables.

The new plugin comes with a bundle of a sidebar and an event plugin which should both be installed for full integration into your blog. The plugin has been committed to CVS where it will show up shortly in Spartacus or the usual places.

A new plugin contribution by Andreas Brandmeier adds a new sidebar item to display the top-ranked authors with highest entry-karmas. The points are calculated with a little help from the bundled Karma-Plugin.

Have fun with it. :-)

I have just committed an update to the serendipity_event_staticpage plugin (now version 2.0)

It can now hold indefinite numbers of static pages in a seperate DB table and gives you a new menu item to maintain your static pages. This is both more intuitively, does not crowd the plugins table and therefore is much faster.

If you have suggestions how to further improve the static page plugin, please raise your voice. :-)

After this feature was requested many times on the forums but I always disagreed to it, I finally got over myself and implemented an updated version of a plugin to support that.

The former user self-registration plugin serendipity_plugin_adduser as been enhanced. It can now be configured to add users that are only allowed to log in and maintain their configuration; those users cannot post entries. To support that you will need the latest changes committed to the 0.9 SVN branch.

A new event plugin serendipity_event_adduser has been added as well. This plugin takes care to forbid users posting comments if they are not logged in. Also the plugin directly offers an interface to let users register themselves.

When a new user registers, a pending account will be created for him and he will get an activation Email. As soon as he confirms a link, the author account will be created.

If you enable the feature that only allows posting comments to registered users, only logged in users (cookie needed!) will see the "Post entry" form. Others will see a message to get themselves an account. Also note that even though users may still enter their username and Email, it is resetted to their real username+email they maintain in their profile.

Of course this is a bit beta-ish once again, so I'd love to hear feedback about it.