Einträge für Garvin Hicking – Serendipity

Like announced earlier on the serendipity blog, fellow usability expert Joachim Harloff is currently trying to improve the listing of Serendipity Plugins so that they are more accessible to users.

He needs your help to fulfill them. Initially he planned to personally meet with serendipity users, but this proved more complex than initially hoped. Thus he has created a smaller, text-based version of it.

You can download the file at http://www.softuse.com/serendipity_sorting.zip. It contains detailed instructions. You can also feel free to personally contact Joachim about any questions you have.

Joachim estimates this questionnaire to take you about 1,5 hours of your time. You could greatly help to improve the serendipity usability, so please participate! Joachim wants to evaluate your responses starting on September the 8th.

It's finally happening - the first book about Serendipity is going to be published by OpenSourcePress: Serendipity - Individuelle Weblogs für Einsteiger und Profis.

As you can gather by the title of the book, it's going to be in german and will be written by yours truly, Garvin Hicking. I will put a huge effort into getting this book translated to english quickly, though.

The book is scheduled for the beginning of 2008 and will cover hopefully every aspect of Serendipity, both for newbies and developers. I'm very excited to be able to write this book and will keep you posted about the progress.

Thanks to Erich Schubert, we were made aware of a bug and security issue in the Plugin Extended properties for entries. Since this plugin is delivered with the core release, we have created a new Serendipity release for both the current stable 1.1 version tree, as well as a new 1.2 beta version.

Serendipity Users that are using the mentioned plugin do not need to upgrade the full release, they can just fetch the updated version of the plugin through this direct link. Put that updated file into your plugins/ serendipity_event_entryproperties/ serendipity_event_entryproperties.php file.

The actual bug was, that people were able to deliver custom entryproperties settings to the Serendipity Frontend via a HTTP-Request, which made them able to bypass a possibly used passwort protection. Any other restriction of viewability of entries done via category read-privileges were not affected, though.

Bottom line is: If you are using password protection for entries, this security update is mandatory for you. Also if you were generally using the entryproperties plugin (which is not installed by default in Serendipity), you are urged to update your plugin. Only people not using this plugin need not care about this issue.

You can download the new full releases as always on the Serendipity download page.

For the time being, the Netmirror.org servers currently do not update anymore, they seem to be having a problem. We have contacted the maintainers last week and hope to get feedback soon.

Until then, download of some and new plugins via Spartacus through this mirror will not work, and you will need to configure the Spartacus plugin to use the SourceForge.Net mirror servers.

Once the problem is resolved, we will give you a status update here.

UPDATE: Netmirror.org works again, thanks to their technicians :-)

The last call for users in munich didn't result in too terribly many, so we're now broadening the userbase.

Joachim Harloff ist a usability expert and wants to help Serendipity in creating a better overview of plugins. To do so, he needs participants to find out what users needs. And guess what: YOU are those users. :-)

So if you want to help out and give Joachim some feedback, please get in touch with him privately: harloff at softuse dot com. Just refer to this blog entry, and he'll provide you with details on how you can help.

German

Der letzte Aufruf nach Münchner Usern ist nicht ganz so ausführlich ausgefallen, wie wir uns das erhofft hätten. Daher weiten wir das ganze etwas aus, damit sich nun jeder (via E-Mail) beteiligen kann.

Joachim Harloff ist ein Usability-Experte, der angeboten hat, die Pluginsortierung für Serendipity zu optimieren. Dafür benötigt er euer Feedback. Bitte schreibt ihm eine Mail an harloff at softuse dot com und bezieht euch auf diesen Blog-Eintrag, er wird euch dann weitere Details zukommen lassen, wie ihr helfen könnt.

Are there any Serendipity-users out there who live in or near Munich (that is München for our fellow germans)? Those people could help in improving Serendipity by getting in touch with me. Please respond on the forums, thank you.