Announcements - 12 – Serendipity

Serendipity 1.5-beta1 is the first public beta release of the upcoming Serendipity 1.5 version. Some important things have changed under the hood, that we would like to ask our users to try out and report back to us.

This version mainly addresses login security by changing our method how passwords are stored to use salted SHA1 chacksums instead of plain MD5 checksums. This makes password retrieval (rainbow attacks) through the database virtually impossible. Another thing is improved PHP 5.3 compatibility. See more about this in a special blog posting some time ago.

For users of our Bundled WYSIWYG-Editor Xinha users now have the ability to easily customize the appearance of this panel through a "my_custom.js" file inside the template directory (a draft of such a file can be found as fallback default in the htmlarea/ subdirectory).

One cool new feature for developers is that now also templates can register themselves inside the plugin API hooks to execute specific things, that don't require installation of an event plugin.

Other news include:

• new event API hooks
• fixed PDF thumbnail generation
• ability to auto-scroll on borders when Drag/Dropping plugins
• UTC server time zone support
• improvements in the Smarty functions to easier use Serendipity as a CMS for individual entry output.
• quicksearch improvements for doing a wildcard-search when too few searchresults were found on a fixed searchterm
• support for Typepad anti-spam server-checks, additionally to Akismet

The current release can be easily installed on any previous Serendipity installation. Just unpack, upload and visit your admin panel to perform possible database upgrades. Upon first login with an old password, Serendipity will store your old password in the new format - please be sure to make a backup of your Database prior to upgrading. Apart from that, the current beta release is already in production use on many blogs and there are no known problems/issues with this.

Softaculous is a provider for automatted web-application installations on cPanel/DirectAdmin environments. They have an automatted API for software vendors like Serendipity to be able to setup and install their applications.

Thanks to the hard work of the Softaculous-Team, they have created a package for Serendipity on their own efforts - many thanks for that!

So you can easily install Serendipity on a Softaculous-Platform and be able to upgrade to later installations easily. Check out their Demo site to see an auto-installed Serendipity at work. You can also use this as a free demo of Serendipity, including the backend. Also Softaculous itself has a admin-demo, if you want to have a look on how to automate your installations of web-applications.

On the Serendipity@Softaculous-Site, you can also rate Serendipity or contribute reviews. Currently there are none available, so please feel free to both vote and spread the word on Serendipity there!

Serendipity 1.4.1 has been released. This is mainly a bugfix release for the updated of the bundled Smarty library, which fixes issues with Serendipity 1.4.

Other small fixes include better antispam checks for pingbacks (they were too strict before), an update to the sql index key creation of the statistics plugin and removal of error messages on open_basedir enabled servers.

You only need to upgrade to Serendipity 1.4.1 if one of the mentioned bugs affect you. Updating is easy and documented online.

Due to some feedback on the forums, we were made aware of a bug of the bundled Smarty templating engine that can happen in some PHP environments and lead to PHP warning/error messages.

If this occurs for you, please simply download an updated version of the file bundled-libs/Smarty/libs/Smarty_Compiler.class.php and upload it to your blog directory. Of course we will integrate this update to a future point release of Serendipity.

The Serendipity-Team is proud to provide the final release of Serendipity 1.4, conveniently codenamed "Post-Christmas-Monk-Miles-Moondog".

There have been some larger improvements since the 1.4-beta release, so these are the highlights of this release in short:

• (new since 1.4-beta1) References to online plugin documentation have been added (if existing) and the display of the short plugin names has been added to the plugin configuration menus.
  
  
• (new since 1.4-beta1) Firefox now no longer autoremembers passwords at the wrong places
  
  
• (new since 1.4-beta1) Added SMF importer
  
  
• (new since 1.4-beta1) Added a new %parentname% permalink option for category links
  
  
• (new since 1.4-beta1) Fix to properly, longer (30 days) sstrong>remember the user settings in cookies, like for media insertion
  
  
• Improvements in the now Double-Opt-In comment subscription (plus support for fulltext comment notifications)
  
  
• new bundled default WYSIWYG editing component (Xinha, the successor of HTMLArea). This new component is more reliable and cross-browser capable than the old version, by still supporting everything that worked with HTMLArea previously.
  
  
• The Entryproperties plugin now uses the new widget-style configuration option to allow for custom arrangement of the entry-related features of this plugin to your liking.
  
  
• The bulletproof template has been enabled as the new default template. The frontend imitates the look of Carl Galloways Serendipity 1.0 relaunch template, while the backend is much improved with a fresh, distinct look.
  
  
• The Remote RSS-Feed sidebar plugin now is templated, so that you can achieve distinct look for certain feeds on the sidebar.

Serendipity also addresses some minor bugs usually only affecting very special environments. Other changes include new PostgreSQL ts_vector fulltext search, comment approval-by-mail for the spamblock plugin, better HTTP header status updates for CGI environments. For developers, some API improvements and new variables/parameters have been added. The performance of the entryroperties plugin can be enhanced by new configuration options that let you fiddle with the involved SQL generation.

The complete list of all changes is documented within the docs/NEWS file of the release. This serendipity release is also the first one to include checksums to verify your installation integrity.

Updating is easy and documented online: Just upload the new files onto your web, possibly refresh/purge your browser cache (and if you upgrade from Serendipity older than 1.2, you might need to purge your old cookies), go to the admin panel and you're done. For shared installations, make sure all deployed htmlarea directories are updated with the new files (if not, the old htmlarea will still be there, not Xinha).

Also, the new version contains release checksums. This makes sure that the files you uploaded correspond with the checksums generated through the release. This way, bad FTP uploads will no longer be driving you nuts. If this makes any trouble for you, try to upload the files in BINARY mode in your FTP client.

For the future, Serendipity is still planning on minor and major features. We always keep a close ear to the wishes of our users, some of those that cannot be solved instantly have been documented here: Future of Serendipity. If you're a developer or designer, and want to help in proving that Serendipity is a flexible and easy to use Blogging/CMS-application - your help is needed and appreciated! Speaking of which: Many thanks to all current developers and forum users, especially Don Chambers, YellowLED and Judebert. Your help has been, and is vital to the project.

On behalf of the team: Happy new year and have fun with the release,
Garvin

The first release candidate for Serendipity 1.4 can now be downloaded.

Serendipity 1.4 mainly addresses improvements in the now Double-Opt-In comment subscription (plus support for fulltext comment notifications) and ships with a new bundled default WYSIWYG editing component (Xinha, the successor of HTMLArea). This new component is more reliable and cross-browser capable than the old version, by still supporting everything that worked with HTMLArea previously.

Things that are visually noticeable include a new "widget-style" configuration option for the "Entryproperties"-Plugin, so that you can arrange and enable/disable each feature of that plugin to your own liking. Also you can now configure each sidebar plugin directly from your frontend.

Also, the Bulletproof has now been promted as new default template, imitating the design of the previous default template - but offering a now completely new distinct default look to the admin panel.

The Remote RSS-Feed sidebar plugin now is templated, so that you can achieve distinct look for certain feeds on the sidebar.

Serendipity also addresses some minor bugs usually only affecting very special environments. Other changes include new PostgreSQL ts_vector fulltext search, comment approval-by-mail for the spamblock plugin, better HTTP header status updates for CGI environments. For developers, some API improvements and new variables/parameters have been added. The performance of the entryroperties plugin can be enhanced by new configuration options that let you fiddle with the involved SQL generation.

The complete list of all changes is documented within the docs/NEWS file of the release. This serendipity release is also the first one to include checksums to verify your installation integrity.

Updating is easy and documented online: Just upload the new files onto your web, possibly refresh/purge your browser cache (and if you upgrade from Serendipity older than 1.2, you might need to purge your old cookies), go to the admin panel and you're done. For shared installations, make sure all deployed htmlarea directories are updated with the new files (if not, the old htmlarea will still be there, not Xinha).

Also, the new version contains release checksums. This makes sure that the files you uploaded correspond with the checksums generated through the release. This way, bad FTP uploads will no longer be driving you nuts. If this makes any trouble for you, try to upload the files in BINARY mode in your FTP client.

Please report any trouble with this new release candidate on the Serendipity Forums or here on this blog. Even though we find this release quite stable and generally believe it production ready, feedback is much required. If all goes well, the final version will be released in december.

For the future, Serendipity is still planning on minor and major features. We always keep a close ear to the wishes of our users, some of those that cannot be solved instantly have been documented here: Future of Serendipity. If you're a developer or designer, and want to help in proving that Serendipity is a flexible and easy to use Blogging/CMS-application - your help is needed and appreciated!