"Autosave" Plugin

Jay Bertrandt has created a very helpful plugin called Autosave. It helps you to make your browser auto-save entries you are creating to save you some trouble when the browser or your system crashes - which happens to the best of us. :-)

The plugin works with a lot of AJAX magic, and Jay would appreciate some feedback. Detailed descriptions and the plugin itself can be found on Jay's blog. Please test it - if it works as intended, he will shortly commit it to our Spartacus repository!

Serendipity 1.0-beta2 released

Just to keep you updated: We have not abandoned a 1.0 release. Our busy bees are still working hard on getting the wiki restyled, the text polished. Sadly, real life is taking a hold on all of us developers currently, so you must bear with us a little while longer. To sum it up: The current beta2 release candidate contains a few minor fixes and is the most stable release up to date. The final 1.0 release will most likely not contain any changes to this release. Please read the contained NEWS file for the fixes. The most important ones maybe are: Character transcoding for UTF-8 trackbacks to ISO-8859-x blogs (or vice versa), XHTML compliance fixes for some plugins, translation updates (plus new languages: Tamil and Turkish) and of course the new and polished default theme contest winner by Carl Galloway. Have fun using Serendipity 1.0-beta2, and stay tuned for the big 1.0 party. :-)

German Magazine "Internet Professionell 4/06" about Serendipity

Thanks to HadleyB from the forums I was notified, that the current issue of the german magazine Internet Professionell had some editorial words from the editor in chief about Serendipity.

Here's a snippet of the original text in german and my translation to english:


Multiuser-Blog
"Mehrere individuelle Weblogs, ohne die Blog-Software mehrmals zu installieren: Mit Serendipity und ein paar Tricks klappt das wunderbar"

Ich wollte ein paar Leuten die Möglichkeit geben, auf einer meiner Websites ihr ganz persönliches Weblog zu schreiben. Zum einen wertet das meine Website mit interessanten Geschichten auf, zum anderen stärkt es die Community zu meiner Site. Die User sollten so weit voneinander getrennt sein, dass sie nur auf ihren eigenen Bereich Zugriff haben, und ich wollte die Blog-Software nur ein einziges Mal auf dem Webserver installieren. Überraschenderweise fand ich zunächst kein Open-Source-PHP-Skript dafür, dass auch sonst komfortabel und leistungsfähig ist.

Fündig geworden bin ich letztlich bei Serendipity (www.s9y.org). Mit ein paar einfachen Tricks funktioniert es damit hervorragend, und die User haben sogar individuelle Design-Templates [...].

Insgesamt hat mich Serendipity als Blog-Software reichlich überzeugt, weil es flexibel und sehr einfach anpassbar ist. Und vor allem ist es benutzerfreundlich genug, dass auch weniger erfahrene Blogger damit klarkommen. Probieren Sie's mal aus und schreiben Sie mir, was Sie davon halten.

Franz Neumeier, Chefredakteur. Internet Professionell 04/06.


Multiuser-Blog
"Several individual weblogs, without installing the blog application multiple times: Using Serendipity and some tricks make it happen easily"

I wanted to give some people the opportunity to maintain a personal weblog on my website. On the one hand this adds interesting stories to my website and on the other hand it strengthens the community towards my website. The users should be kept independent from each other, so that they only have access to their specific area, and I wanted the blog application to only have installed once on my webserver. Surprisingly I did not find any Open-Source-PHP-Application that suited my needs and was also comfortable and powerful to use.

I finally found what I needed with Serendipity (www.s9y.org). Using a few tricks, it all works flawlessly and the users have their individual design-templates[...].

All in all, Serendipity has persuaded me in many ways, because it's flexible to use and easy to customize. And most importantly, it is easy to use for even inexperienced bloggers. You should try it and tell me what you think.

Franz Neumeier, editor in chief. Internet Professionell 04/06.

Thanks for these kind words, I think they speak for themselves. :-)

Spartacus Plugin Overview Page

I had a couple of hours spare time today - recovering from the german karneval - , so I spent it hopefully usefully on this Page:

http://php-blog.sourceforge.net/

(will be available as http://spartacus.s9y.org/ shortly)

The design is temporary, it's the content that matters. It's an auto-generated snapshot and download page of the Serendipity Plugin and Template repository. Something like pear.php.net, but a bit more light-weight.

It should serve well for people that cannot run Spartacus or who want to look at our repository.

Please consider that page as experimental. The core texts are not translated, only the plugin descriptions are.

Any feedback is appreciated. If you face bugs, please let me know.

The page will be refreshed about ever 24 hours, but expect a delay of max. 48 hours in terms of anonymous CVS lagging.

Apply markup plugins per-entry

In the past, several users wanted the ability to tell Serendipity that specific markup plugins shall not be applied to specific entries.

Until now, Serendipity applied markup plugins globally to every entry, without any distinction. Today I have committed a patch that enhances the "Extended options of Entries" plugin to specify, if specific markup plugins should NOT be applied to an entry.

This now enables you to create entries where you don't want to use the nl2br or Wiki markup. Plus, with some basic coding skills you can add new markup plugins which don't affect past entries, if you create the required entryproperty for those past entries that disable the markup plugin.

The feature has been committed to the SVN 1.1-alpha trunk and also to the affected plugins in our Spartacus repository. The change is backwards compatible, so nothing will change if you either don't use the functionality or do not make any settings to the list of disabled markups.

And the winner is...

Carl Galloway

After a very intense "default theme competition" and voting period the last weeks, the winning theme has finally been found.


Carl Galloway has won the competition with his theme. He got 28 votes (5 extra votes through "commenting") and placed first. Second place is David Cummins with 20 votes (3 extra), and scoring last but not least is the proud myself with 19 votes. One vote has been cast on the old default design, for the record.

All three themes will be put into the final Serendipity 1.0 release, with Carl's theme being elected as the default theme. I think a wise decision has been made which puts Serendipity's look more up to par with what it can technically achieve.

Many, many thanks to the contributors of the themes for their enormous efforts complying with the harsh rules. Many thanks for the voters who took the time to constructively criticize the elected themes.

A small "elite group" consisting of Carl, David, Judebert, Jannis and me will now be going through the template and checking minor details and making some adjustments to the design before we release the 1.0 final release. We will not be able to uphold the February 15th release, but keep your heads up for a soon release.

The winning theme can still be seen on themes.s9y.org.

Have fun, Garvin