Announcements - 19 – Serendipity

The Serendipity Team is still working hard on finding the time to not only work on new features of the 1.1 version of Serendipity (like a new per-template configuration options, a completely redone media gallery and media permissions), but also to finalize the long overdue 1.0 release. We are getting close on settling up the design debate, so stay tuned for an update on this.

It's our goal to have the 1.0 release finally be done this month; the codebase is rock-solid, and the 1.0-beta3 version should be ready for showtime for everyone; there are no open bugs or issues known to us, and this version is to prefer over the old 0.9.1 version currently.

If you are already using 1.0-beta2, there is little reason for you to upgrade. beta3 mainly includes some minor bugfixes as well as some last-minute features to force FeedBurner feed redirection, the most recent updates to the Spamblock plugin, a Pivot importer, missing UTF-8 encoding for Windows-Server date responses. Also two minor security issues were addressed. One being an (hard to do) XSRF-attack on the entry manager page, the other one being able to save PHP code in the serendipity_config_local.inc.php file. Only an Admin can do that, and usually and Admin has other means to save PHP code on your server ;-).

Since those changes remedy a new release candidate before the final 1.0 release, we would be happy for anyone trying out this version and report us possible new issues. beta2 has been very well received so far, and our top priority for the 1.0 release is to have a rock-solid release. Without you fellow users, we can't find all bugs, so it's also up to you to help us. Drop by on the forums to report bugs you found!

Download the release here. To upgrade, please read our FAQ - it's easy and fast. :-)

As some of you might have noticed, the comment/trackback spam is currently improving again. The spamblock plugin currently can catch a lot of spam, but had a slight weakness in terms of processing the ruleset.

Usually, the spamblock plugin walks all MODERATE/REJECT rules, and aborts that checking once the first rule hits on a mail. Recently it showed up that most spam is set to "MODERATE" even before some more aggressive spam detection rules were executed, so you might have received Moderation-Emails quite often for emails that would have been marked as spam later in the ruleset execution flow.

The latest version 1.40 of the spamblock plugin (Download here) will now also perform any other rule checks on a comment/trackback, even if it already had been marked as Moderate. This way, you will have the chance that another rule marks the comment as spam, and then will not infiltrate your mailbox.

Please give us feedback to tell us if this works for you, or if that new behaviour introdues any problems for you!

In the past few days, several people asked for the possibility to quicksearch not only serendipity entries but also static pages and multilingual entries.

I was overwhelmed to see how easy adding support for both was possibly, and did so within the past 30 minutes. I guess this once again proves how flexible the plugin architecture of Serendipity is... :-)

To get quicksearch possibilites in the Static pages, just fetch version 3.30 of the staticpage plugin via Spartacus. It will be online within the next 48 hours. As soon as you've upgraded, the quicksearch will show the results of found staticpages below the usual search results. You can customize the output of course, via the plugin_staticpage_searchresults.tpl template file.

Support for multilingual entries has one caveat: It requires an updated serendipity core file, which I just committed to our SVN 1.1-alpha1 and 1.0 release branch: Patch. This allows version 2.0 of the multilingual plugin (also available on Spartacus the next 48 hours) to fully interoperate with the search facility. It will search all entries in the language you are currently reading in and display the entries completely interface with the usual search results.

Please let me know, if it works out fine for you. Note that fulltext search requires MySQL 4.0 and above - SQLite and postgresql emulate the search with a LIKE search. Expect some performance decrease in that matter.

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. :-)

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:

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

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