Development - 19 – Serendipity

The Serendipity Team is proud to announce the first maintenance release for Serendipity, version 0.9.1.

This release mainly addresses a few minor bugs of the 0.9 version.

The most important fix is found in the Spartacus Plugin, which didn't allow updating Plugins correctly over the web. Also an important fix is making the media upload form work in MacOS Safari again. As a feature cereal, we can now gladly offer half-automatted blogger.com import!

Other fixes/features include:

• New Feature: Added blogger.com importer by Jawish Hameed
• Fix configuration for non-admins to not properly store values like blog Title (important for hosted multi-user setups)
• Fix RSS import's timezone detection for ISO-8601 dates
• Fix htmlarea when using UTF-8 charset on a ISO-8859-1 language
• Fix spartacus plugin to not properly indicate updatable versions of plugins
• Fix multi-media upload in Safari browser
• Fix mod_rewrite rules to not differentiate on case-sensitivity for authors, archives and category URLs
• Fix a bug in the serendipity_currentURL function when Serendipity is installed in your HTTP root. This bug only effects the plugins karma, entrysplit and multilingual on these installations.
• Fix showing preview image of hotlinked images.
• Fix visitor tracking in statistics plugin
• Fix incorrect entry count in categories sidebar plugin (was also counting drafts)
• Fix correct reply-to name when sending comment mails
• Fix renaming authors and categories to also properly update permalinks that have no %id% column

An update is recommended, but only required if you are affected by one of the bugs above.

The Serendipity Team is already working on the 1.0 release version of Serendipity, since the current maturity of the 0.9 version is reported to be quite well. Current nightlies contain a few more fixes for current code, which are non-critical and have to be QA-tested before releasing them. A major new feature of the upcoming 1.0 version are customizable RSS/ATOM/Whatever-Feeds through the Smarty Templating facility.

Download the release here, and upgrade as mentioned in our FAQ!

From time to time, pleople offer their help for working on Serendipity, but seldom we can tell specific things to improve.

Now, we have had several requests to improve ordering categories, to which I personally have no time to investigate. I'm a dumbo in regard to Nested Tree SQL sets. :-)

So that's why I posted this "Help!"-Request on the forums. Please have a look at it, if you want to help improving Serendipity. Credit is given, where credit is due, of course! :-)

The Serendipity Team is proud to announce the availability of the final version of 0.9 with a largely improved featureset, offering not only one of the best Blog-Engines around, but also as an aid for many CMS-needs you might face. It's multi-user features have been drastically improved, making Serendipity an allround-killer-flexible Web-Application.

Serendipity 0.9-beta3 has been released. This should be the last release candidate for Serendipity 0.9, which is scheduled to be out next Friday.

Fixed issues in beta3 are:

• RSS Feeds no longer show email addresses by default (configured via syndication plugin)
• Fixed siteConfiguration option was not available for Blog editor group users
• Fixed bugs with per-author/category RSS feeds when not using URL Rewriting
• Enhance entryproperties to allow entering custom fields
• Fix not having fetched properties of entries when displaying search results
• Fix some PHP 4.4 compatibility issues about returning variables by reference
• Fix some blog importer problems remaining when the source DB is not the same as the target DB

Updating from any Serendipity version is easy: Backup first, then extract the release files over your old installation, make sure the files .htaccess/serendipity_config_local.inc.php are writable, login to Serendipity and be guided through the automatic upgrade process.

Have a nice weekend, and thanks in advance for reporting bugs to us!

As a response to a Feature Request from Karotte, I have just committed an enhancement to the entryproperties plugin to 0.9-beta3 of our SVN (which will hopefully be turned into a 0.9 final at the end of this month).

The plugin configuration has now been altered so that you can add a comma-separated list of custom fieldnames, which you can then fill in when creating an entry.

That means, you can create two custom fields called Listening and Playing (don't use whitespace or special characters for fieldnames). Create an entry, and fill in values for those two fields. Now edit your entries.tpl template and place the Smarty Codes

Now listening to: {$entry.properties.ep_Listening}
Now playing: {$entry.properties.ep_Playing}

anywhere you like inside the entry loop. Remember to prefix your property keyname with ep_. Then you'll see those fields at the place you configured. You can also add the usual Smarty markup to check if a variable is empty, and add some DIV or other tags to surround your output.

This brings Serendipity a bit closer to CMS-features, once again. :-)

(The SVN nightlies will be built tomorrow, containing the new patch. SVN checkouts contain the change already at this time - users familiar with SVN only need to fetch the plugins/ serendipity_event_entryproperties/ serendipity_event_entryproperties.php file)

Serendipity 0.9 is still in beta-testing, but getting close to the final release. Thus a 0.9-beta2 version has been released, which mainly fixes two problems with beta1: Spartacus not indicating new plugin versions and the "easy installer" inserting invalid configuration values that lead to the dreadded "function serendipity_mb not found" error.

On top of that, the second beta contains:

• Per-author XML feeds
• Enhanced entryproperties plugin that can hide selected entries from the RSS feed
• Recent Comments plugin can be configured to show comments, trackbacks or both
• Make Spartacus plugin be able to set configured chmod/chown permissions
• Improved Spamblock plugin to allow configuring author/url filters straight from the "Comments" interface
• Category plugin can now use smarty templates and show number of entries
• Fix Track Exits plugin to properly redirect when used in HTML nuggets
• Fixed bug in fetchEntry() function that can lead to wrong author/authorid settings in certain cases

Updating from any Serendipity version is easy: Backup first, then extract the release files over your old installation, make sure the files .htaccess/serendipity_config_local.inc.php are writable, login to Serendipity and be guided through the automatic upgrade process.

If all things go smoothly with the 0.9 betas (which it basically seems right now), you can expect a final release at the end of this month. We need your feedback, please testdrive the new version!