Einträge für Garvin Hicking – Serendipity

The plugin Markup: Include entry data/ templates/ blocks (serendipity_event_includeentry) has received a major update to version 2.0 of the plugin.

Formerly, this plugin supported to include portions of already written entries into a new entry via this kind of markup:
[s9y-include-entry:47:body]

Thanks to the very smart suggestion of "Glamourguy", there's now a heap of extra-functionality for the plugin:

• Creates a new menu item called "Template-Blocks". On this page you can administrate two types of content:
  • Templates: Here you can create text (title, body, extended) to use as actual templates for a new entry. You can choose a created template, and you will be forwarded to the "New Entry" screen, with the contents of your template already filled in. This helps you if you always create some kind of review texts or whatever, which you just mangle with actual content.
  • Blocks: This is some kind of "HTML nugget" block. Again you can create some text (title, body, extended). Those block can later be attached to any entry (see the "Extended Options" part when creating a new entry") or even be randomly distributed on the pages of your blog. This feature is very helpful if you want to create ad-blocks, subscription infos, reminders without the need to do lot of copy+paste work and have duplicate content!
• It allows for several new config options:
  • Random block placement: This feature allows you to inject blocks on your blog entry listing randomly. You can define after which entry to start, the amount of articles before the next block appears, and whether a block should also be randomized if an entry already has an attached block.
  • Templated Blocks! The coolest thing about those "static blocks" is that EACH block can use an individual smarty template. The default is to show a block in an entry's design - but you can easily choose a different template for showing a block as an Ad-Block, an iframe, or everything else. You can even abuse the functionality to put actual (surrounding or replacing) content and the usual smarty markup into the block and tweak Serendipity to the max.
  • Category-dependant: You can choose whether to show randomized blocks on the startpage, or any combination of categories. So you can select to only show random blocks on the frontpage, or only in Category X (and Y and Z, but not A and B).
  • Apply Markup transformations to blocks. Of course, each block can use the markup plugins you defined to allow usage of Wiki/Textile/nl2br/smilies/whatever plugins. Or not. It's up to you!
• And of course, it allows a new way of including blocks WITHIN entries (completely smarty-parsed) with this kind of code:
  [s9y-include-block:47] (includes the actual content only)
  [s9y-include-block:47:template] (includes the smarty-parsed content)
  

Did I mention this plugin even works with 0.8 already? Have a look at it and have fun - and report bugs, if you find any. It's still a bit beta-ish. ;-)

The plugin is available throughout the usual suspects: Spartacus (s9y Plugin-Repository) and CVS repository.

The just committed version 0.3 of the Plugin Properties/Templates of categories (serendipity_event_categorytemplates) now contains support to password-protect single categories.

The authentication is currently based on HTTP auth. Internal routines may get added later, but for the time being this allows for simple protection of entries set within categories. Usually you can already hide entries from special users (and groups), but those entries can only be seen when a user is logged in to Serendipity and it has to be set per-entry time and again.

With the new password protection you can effectively hide ALL entries in a special category from those users. Once they enter the category view for the protected category, the need to enter the right password (username does not matter) and then the users will see the entries of that category.

Have fun with the new plugin, which should be available in CVS and Spartacus within the next 24 hours. NOTE that this is a plugin for Serendipity 0.9! You will need to have the latest snapshot created tomorrow - on earlier 0.9 versions the calendar will no longer show entries once the plugin is activated!

Serendipity 0.8.4 has been released today. As mentioned in this blog post, this release addresses the security issues with the PEAR:XML_RPC library.

If you already deleted your serendipity_xmlrpc.php file, an upgrade is not required. If you do not want to upgrade, just delete your current serendipity_xmlrpc.php file and you will not be affected by security issues.

Anyone who wants to use XML-RPC posting to Serendipity will now need to install the XML-RPC posting plugin, as discussed in the blog entry mentioned above.

This release also addresses a few other minor issues:

• Fix the problem that sometimes calendar images are displayed too large in the Internet Explorer
• Hide title of an entry when an entry is a draft (Bug #1260667)
• Allow Serendipity to use an existing PEAR installation on the server. Set "$serendipity['use_PEAR'] = true;" in your serendipity_config_local.inc.php or serendipity_config.inc.php file. The required packages can be found in the bundled-libs/.current_version file.
• Append the comment id to the mail that is sent to subscribers of an entry, so that they can jump to the submitted comment immediately.

You can download the release here: Download. SVN (tags/0.8.4) and CVS (HEAD) repositories have also been updated.

Have fun with Serendipity!

Thanks to Ziyad Saeed from the forums, I have just committed his two plugins to our CVS repository that allows you to use the Xinha or FCKEditor WYSIWYG editors with serendipity. Together with htmlarea (bundled default) and TinyMCE, we now have a boast of WYSIWYG editors to use as your liking.

Note that the plugins only work with current 0.9 versions of Serendipity and you need to additionally download the WYSIWYG editor's. There are installation notes that tell you exactly what to do within the plugins. The plugins will be downloadable from CVS and Spartacus within the next 24 hours.

Thanks a lot, Ziyad!

As you might have heard already, the XML-RPC Package by PEAR has received a major update that deals with another possible security issues in the execution of remote procedure calls.

In the current development version of Serendipity, we have unbundled the XML-RPC API functions from the release version and made the functionality to post entries via XML-RPC (MT/Blogger API) calls available as a additional plugin called Post via XML-RPC (serendipity_event_xmlrpc).

The reason for this is that very few people use XML-RPC posting to our experience, and it is a inherent security risk to have this functionality available if you don't use it, as the past has proven. To overcome this possible vulnerability, you need to now actively install the mentioned plugin to make XML-RPC posting available. Sending and receiving trackbacks is NOT affected by this, only the "Server"-Part of that API is.

The URL for the API endpoings will not change; if you have not installed the plugin, you will see an error message displayed. Outsourcing this functionality as a plugin allows the Serendipity Team to respond easier to new issues with the plugin and make enhancements to the XMLRPC module.

A general advice for Serendipity 0.8.3 users is to remove the serendipity_xmlrpc.php file if you do not use XML-RPC entry posting.