Development - 12 – Serendipity

The Serendipity Anti-Spam plugin allows to utilize the blogg.de IP blacklist service to block spam. Their service seems to have ceased existence, or at least is rejecting connections. This can lead to comments to your serendipity blog to be rejected. You can easily disable the blogg.de blacklist service in your Anti-Spam plugin configuration.

Note that this option is by default disabled in Serendipity since blogg.de announced that they are no longer actively maintaining the blacklist. A well fit alternative to this service is the Akismet API, which the spamblock plugin also supports.

Some while ago, I announced an article about Serendipity in the German PHP Magazine (read here). This article was now made available as a PDF by the publisher, so you can feel free to download and read it:

PHP Magazin Mai 2007: "Blogging mit Biss" von Garvin Hicking (German/Deutsch)

Have fun reading!

Like announced earlier on the serendipity blog, fellow usability expert Joachim Harloff is currently trying to improve the listing of Serendipity Plugins so that they are more accessible to users.

He needs your help to fulfill them. Initially he planned to personally meet with serendipity users, but this proved more complex than initially hoped. Thus he has created a smaller, text-based version of it.

You can download the file at http://www.softuse.com/serendipity_sorting.zip. It contains detailed instructions. You can also feel free to personally contact Joachim about any questions you have.

Joachim estimates this questionnaire to take you about 1,5 hours of your time. You could greatly help to improve the serendipity usability, so please participate! Joachim wants to evaluate your responses starting on September the 8th.

The last call for users in munich didn't result in too terribly many, so we're now broadening the userbase.

Joachim Harloff ist a usability expert and wants to help Serendipity in creating a better overview of plugins. To do so, he needs participants to find out what users needs. And guess what: YOU are those users. :-)

So if you want to help out and give Joachim some feedback, please get in touch with him privately: harloff at softuse dot com. Just refer to this blog entry, and he'll provide you with details on how you can help.

German

Der letzte Aufruf nach Münchner Usern ist nicht ganz so ausführlich ausgefallen, wie wir uns das erhofft hätten. Daher weiten wir das ganze etwas aus, damit sich nun jeder (via E-Mail) beteiligen kann.

Joachim Harloff ist ein Usability-Experte, der angeboten hat, die Pluginsortierung für Serendipity zu optimieren. Dafür benötigt er euer Feedback. Bitte schreibt ihm eine Mail an harloff at softuse dot com und bezieht euch auf diesen Blog-Eintrag, er wird euch dann weitere Details zukommen lassen, wie ihr helfen könnt.

Serendipity 1.1.3 and 1.2-beta2 have been released due to a SQL injection attack reported by Dr. Neal Krawetz today. It is possible to abuse a 'commentMode' variable to inject SQL code that was targeted to the function that fetches comment information. This variable was introduced to Serendipity 1.1 - all prior versions are not affected.

Please update your blogs as soon as possible. If you are using a database backend that allows SQL union queries, the injection could probably lead to disclosure of the stored MD5 password hashes. Because of this, we also suggest to update your blog user account passwords.

It is a good idea to check your server's Access-Logs and search for the 'commentMode' variable to see, if malicious request have been issued to your blog already.

For those people that do not want to upgrade to a whole new version, you can also simply patch the file include/functions_comments.inc.php and replace the single occurence of:

$type = $serendipity['GET']['commentMode'];

to

$type = serendipity_db_escape_string($serendipity['GET']['commentMode']);

We are very sorry for this, but happy to provide a quick fix in short time. You can download the latest files as usual on www.s9y.org. Read the FAQ on how to perform an easy update.

After a long time of development and testing, Serendipity 1.2 is now out in its first release candidate.

There have been quite a lot of changes to the new version. Most important of them all, the authentication and session scheme has been altered to allow easier plugin interaction. Also the backend (master template and template for the entry editor) has finally ben Smartyfied so that they can be changed by template authors.

We would kindly ask all Serendipity users to test this new version to squash any possible showstoppers before the final release.

Please check especially if the login to your admin backend still works flawlessly (especially if you are using https) and if your 'Edit Entry' backend section works just like before. Please report bugs and issues on our Serendipity Forum Board.

Here's a list of other new cool enhancements since Serendipity 1.1:

• Templates for Backend (Entry Editor, Master Template) via Smarty
• New session/login system
• SQLite3, PDO::Postgresql Support
• better IPv6 support
• better HTTP headers to support Caching
• allow to define if a parent category should show entries of child categories on the frontend, or only entries of that exact category
• Bugfix: RSS fullfeed for "let user decide" now properly works
• Bugfix: Saving/sending trackbacks and tracking exit-links works in circumstances involving cached entries
• Bugfix: Place possible dangerous user preference options to group management to prevent unwanted configuration changes

A full list of changes is contained in the docs/NEWS file inside the file archive. Many changes are small bugfixes and user interaction enhancements that all speed up your Serendipity experience.

You can download the latest version on www.s9y.org. And most of all: Have fun!