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

Theme Contest Closed! View the submissions!

The Serendipity Theme Contest has closed the announced deadline.

Three templates were submitted, by Carl Galloway, David Cummins and Garvin Hicking. They can be viewed for public display (frontend and backend) on http://themes.s9y.org/.

You can VOTE ON THE FORUMS, if you are a registered user to that forum. If you are not, please just drop your vote there as a reply to the entry or as a comment on the blog above. I will collect votes on all three places. You MUST post either your realname or your blog URL for a vote to be officially cast, to prevent duplicate votes. A statement like "I vote for Carl Galloways Design, my name is John Doe" or "I vote for David Cummins Design and my blog is http://blog.s9y.org/" will suffice.

Several participants of the contest mailed me privately that they were unable to meet the deadline anytime soon, and to have the same chances for everyone, the contest has not been delayed. I hope, those announced themes will be put online in the future.

The theme with the highest vote count will be used as the new default template. If vote counts for two templates are the same, a run-off ballot will be made.

Have fun browsing through the submissions. Your oppinion is highly appreciated!

Serendipity 1.0-beta1 released!

The Serendipity Team is proud to issue the first beta release of the upcoming Serendipity 1.0 version.

Serendipity's development has started nearly 3 years ago, and has undergone many fundamental changes in the past. Many feature enhancements and bug fixes have lead to a quite stable product that we feel very well with putting the "1.0" version tag on it. Don't let that version number fool you - other products may not have reached our stableness in their 2.x versions! ;-)

As for the new features since Serendipity 0.9.1, we have focussed on straighting out bugs and improving usability and more flexible templating and plugin handling:

  • Fixed Safari Browser issue with formatting and inserting media items
  • Fix templatechooser plugin to be nicer to browser caching
  • RFE #1387997 - Show amount of entries per archive period (archive sidebar plugin).
  • More abstraction for the serendipity_fetchEntries() call
  • Full PHPDOC function documentation
  • Plugin API: New "multiselect" plugin item type
  • Spamblock plugin improvements: Filter comment body, Check foreign Trackback URLs
  • Templating: New preview_iframe.tpl template for entry previews, new Smarty functions for fetching and printing entries within a template, RSS feeds can be templated
  • Fix not being able to create users of the same userlevel despite being admin
  • Fix bug #1371893: Category write permissions are not properly evaluated when writing into a category.
  • Fix bug #1371630: Write permissions to category are stored with input data of the 'Read permissions' author listing.
  • Plus many more things listed in our docs/NEWS file!

Upgrading from any version (also beta/alphas from previous versions) to Serendipity 0.9 is easy and can be done as before: Just unpack the release files to your existing directory, go to your admin panel and confirm the upgrade process. Serendipity automatically upgrades your database and tells you of important changes. Be sure to read our FAQ on http://www.s9y.org/ if you face any problems.

We are eagerly waiting for positive feedback or any problems you face with this new release on either this blog or via our Forums. The final 1.0 version is scheduled for February 15th.

Now what are you waiting for? Download latest release!

Survey Results of "Wie ich blogge?"

We received this mail from the makers of a survey called "Wie ich blogge" (german), which I'd like to post here:

In late 2005 a friend of mine did a survey on how people in the German speaking area are using Blogs. Over 5000 people participated in this survey. Some questions were also on the used blogging software. There are some facts that are interesting for the serendipity team. Concerning Stand-alone software serendipity is the second most used software and gets the best results in user satisfaction. I think those are quite motivating results for everyone spending his time on serendipity.

Unluckily the research paper is only available in German, but I encourage all German-speakers to have a closer look at it. The results about blogging software are on pages 18ff of the paper.

You might also want to have a look on Dr. Jan Schmidts Blog and the related article on the research paper.

So, how does "best results in user satisfaction" sound to you? Spread the word! :-)