BerliOS closing down, Serendipity moving

Serendipity's code repository is being hosted on BerliOS for several years. Their free service is now closing down, which means that Serendipity will move its versioning control to a new provider.

The current idea is to migrate SVN over to GitHub.com. This might even motivate some new contributors to get accustomed with the Serendipity core code and make contributing patches easier.

We are planning to move the code repository at the end of October and will keep you posted here. If there are people reading this who are well familiar with Git and especially SVN migration, please step up here or in the forums to help us in the process.

Asides from the SVN service, Serendipity is currently using this infrastructure:

  • A self-hosted webserver providing a phpBB board on http://board.s9y.org. This is quite active and will stay in the future.
  • A self-hosted wiki software on http://www.s9y.org/ that allows for a custom navigation and wiki documentation by users. We might switch this to another software, but are not happy with the way MediaWiki handles navigation. We'll see if GitHub is an option to power this.
  • A self-hosted Serendipity installation on http://blog.s9y.org/
  • The http://spartacus.s9y.org/ plugin and theme repository, hosted on SourceForge.Net
  • The code repository for plugins and themes, also hosted on SourceForge.Net and maintained through CVS. Depending on the usage license of GitHub, we are looking into if we can merge plugins/templates and the Core code on GitHub.
  • A issue tracker, hosted on SourceForge.net. We might utilize the GitHub-Tracker for this in the future.
  • A mailinglist, that is not very active anymore, also hosted on SourceForge.Net. Since we favor the s9y forums, we might not further spend time on changing this mailinglist.

Security fix for flash-based cloud in Freetag plugin

MustLive discovered a HTML-injection vulnerability in the tagcloud.swf Flashfile that the Freetag-Plugin bundles and makes optionally available.

The issue is fixed in version 1.23 of the flashfile, which has now been committed to the Serendipity plugin (in version 3.30).

Since the swf-File is always bundled with the update, it is recommended to update to the latest version of the plugin for all users, or to delete that specific .swf file.

Thanks to MustLive for sharing the information with us.

Spartacus plugin: Change in download Mirrors

Christian Boltz notified us and provided a patch to fix the spartacus plugin properly being able to retrieve remote files. This became necessary when SourceForge.net changed their underlying structure.

If you are using Spartacus, you have several possibilities to fix this issue for you:

1: Manually download the updated plugin file plugins/ serendipity_event_spartacus/ serendipity_event_spartacus.php from here: serendipity_event_spartacus.php for Serendipity 1.6 / Development, serendipity_event_spartacus.php for Serendipity 1.5.

2: You can also simply configure your spartacus plugin and enable the use of Netmirror.org, or you can enter a custom mirror: http://php-blog.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/php-blog/|http://netmirror.org/mirror/serendipity/

3: You can also simply edit your serendipity_event_spartacus.php file and replace all 2 occurences of the string *checkout* with viewvc.

Thanks to Christian for notifying us!

serendipity_event_freetag: Plugin update, XSS bug

Thanks to Stefan Schurtz, who reported a XSS issue in the serendipity_event_freetag plugin (SSCHADV2011-004). The issue was fixed in version 3.22 of the plugin, you can fetch the update through Spartacus or download via Spartacus.s9y.org.

The bug was introduced in version 3.20 of the plugin. Users of the plugin should upgrade, as it allows malicious users to trick people into visiting a specially crafted link on your blog to steal cookie login information for example, if you click on such a link.

New Plugin: Disqus comments

Even though the Disqus.com comment integration is easily integratable inside a serendipity template already, the need for a specific plugin was raised on the forums.

serendipity_event_disqus is now available on Spartacus and provides exactly this - a plug and play component to enable disqus comments on your blog, and it even allows you to only use this system for more recent blog entries, so that your old comments can be preserved.

Currently the plugin hides the Serendipity-internal comments and trackbacks through CSS. The plugin provides instructions on how to modify that, if you have a custom template.

Have fun using the plugin, and if you have issues or recommendations for it, feel free to discuss this on the Serendipity forums. :-)

Podcast plugin update

The podcast plugin has recently been improved to offer a much more flexible configuration with custom player and HTML5 audio/video support. The flowplayer has been added as a new, more flexible flash-video player replacement.

You can now specify custom feed options, and the RSS podcast format should now be iTunes compatible., as well as the Flowplayer replacement for Flash-Videos. Also, custom feed options that you can add to the RSS-Feed (rss.php?podcast_format=XXX) allow you to filter the enclosures only to specific file extensions.

The update should be compatible to older versions so that you can simply use the new features. If you customized any of the player files, you can now do that much easier through the configuration; be sure to backup any files you might have changed before upgrading.

Please report any issues you might have with this updates on the forums!