Einträge für Garvin Hicking – Serendipity

The Serendipity Team is proud to offer two new releases:

Serendipity 1.0.1 addresses a few minor bugfixes in the otherwise very well-received 1.0 stable release. Those are related to utf8-iconv conversion on older PHP setups, sending comment mails to users without an email address and a WYSIWYG image insertion issue.

The most important fix and reasing for the 1.0.1 release is a security issue that has been reported by Sebastian Nohn using the cool new Security-Scanner Chorizo. The only reported issue by Chorizo was the possibility of Users who could add plugins to the installation (usually only Administrators) to insert file references to other arbitrary PHP files that are then included. We feel this is a minor impact, because usually all administrators already would have full access to the PHP filebase and could include remote files with different means. Also note that users with safemode/open_basedir restrictions would not be affected by this.

Users with multi-users installations, giving plugin access to untrusted users are urged to upgrade to the latest release!

Serendipity 1.1-beta1 brings the long awaited new features to a first public release. The 1.1-alpha versions have been tested in the past quite well and are thought to run quite stable.

The 1.1 version brings those major new features (also see an earlier blog entry for details):

Does the headline sound catchy enough? Gooood. :-)

Now that I have your attention: Check out the recent FLOSS podcast #12. It's a 1-hour podcast with Rasmus Lerdorf, which is both entertaining and informative.

And he mentions he's using Serendipity - in the last quarter of the podcast. He doesn't actually mention much about our software, but of course highlighting all our strengths would've taken up another hour of the podcast.... ;-)

Anyways - we feel quite humbled to be mentioned by the 'Creator of PHP'. Keep on blogging and have fun!

Some time ago, the publisher of the ezine called ITS ART Magazin approached me and asked to do an interview with me about programming Serendipity.

Since I generally enjoy this kind of being able to tell about Serendipity, I couldn't refuse this question of course. :-)

Thus, you can now find this interview in the latest issue #05. The interview culminated into a nice conclusion, so everyone who's interested, have a go at it.

I generally suggest you to check out this ezine, its contained images and featured artists alone are a great source of information and inspiration, and the generall layout is a pleasure to look at. Spread the word about this magazine, it's better than most printed editions you can find at you newsstands!

Also have a look at their blog!

Two new plugins have been added to CVS by me:

serendipity_event_metadesc / "HTML META-Tags" allows you to define meta-description and meta-keywords per entry. Those will then be shown on the detailed entry page within the HTML head. As a nice bonus, if you leave the fields empty, the plugin tries to auto-detect keywords and description based on your text. For that it evaluates Bold/Strong tags in HTML to auto-guess your content.

serendipity_event_cronjob / "Cronjob scheduler" finally offers some cronjob functionality that people have sometimes requested. A lengthy explaination of this plugin follows. :-)

Yesterday, Andyman77 from the forums brought the Thickbox project to my attention. Using his plugin, I intermingled that with the existing lightbox plugin so that you can now choose which JS library to use to format your links. Plus, lightbox2 got also added to the plugin.

What, you don't know what Lightbox is? It's a nifty javascript that will transform links to images into small "popup" links. When you thus link to a thumbnail images (<a href="large.jpg"><img src="thumb.jpg" />), lightbox will take on that image link, and once clicked on it, the large image will be shown on your page instead in a separate browser window. It sounds boring when explained, so just go to the lightbox pages and look at their installations.

The plugin installation is seamless, as all image links in serendipity will get automatically rewritten so that links from thumbnails will show up as lightbox links.

Thickbox brings fun into this thing by offering to also popup HTML links inside neat popups. Just add a 'class="thickbox"' attribute to your HTML links in your entries, and that's it.

Fellow serendipity-user Abdussamad wrote a nice Tutorial on how to add Hijri-dates (arabic) to the blog output. Thanks a lot for your contribution!