Development - 20 – Serendipity

Surely to the delight of many Smarty-Users, the categories plugin has now been made to work with Smarty templates in latest 0.9 nightlies. It can now also count the numbers of entries per category. Both options need to be enabled in the configuration of the internal categories plugin.

Also new for 0.9 versions, I have modified the Spamblock plugin today. It now allows you to one-click add an author or URL to the content filter from within the "Comments"-Admin section. This allows you to adapt your own list of filters as you go. Also the spamblock configuration is now reachable via the Comments section quite easily.

Quite a few people have complained in the past, that the output of the categories plugin is not themable. Even though this has its reasons (using smarty for that process is a bit overkill in terms of performance), I took some time to make the categories plugin of the 0.9 branch (beta2, currently) be able to use Smarty templates.

You can now enable this in the configuration of the plugin and make your own "plugin_categories.tpl" just like you can have your own "plugin_calendar.tpl" right now.

Because of a problem with accessing our netmirror.org mirror server, the spartacus repository currently only shows listed plugin versions of the last week. New plugins are currently not updated there, so please bear with the service until the trouble is resolved.

We are also working on providing alternate file mirrors, as well as a fellow Serendipity user (MySchizoBuddy) is currently working on PEAR-Channel services for plugins -- many thanks!

On another related note, the staticpage plugin has received an enormous update from Falk Döring today, rectifying a 3.0 version release. This updated version now allows to define custom page types, change the sort order of static pages, fixes some back/previous navigation issues and some more "behind the scenes" stuff. Many thanks to Falk for keeping up his great work.

Another Serendipity supporter that has been overwhelmingly active the last days is Alexander Mieland (dma147). He has provided a boast of cool plugins: A backup plugin, a forum plugin, a downloadmanager and some more: Read the forums.

With your help, Serendipity is able to continue being a great and enhancible blog application. It's great to see the community evolve, keep it up and spread the word! :-)

The Serendipity Team is very proud to present the first beta release of Serendipity 0.9. This version has been in development for about half a year, and alpha version nightlies/snapshot have been available ever since. Thus, many people already got a hang of the large feature improvements since Serendipity 0.8.

The nightlies have been reported as quite stable, and there are no open bugs known to us - so now it's your turn to have a try!

Upgrading from any version 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. If you are upgrading from a version prior to Serendipity 0.8, be sure to read this upgrade pointer: http://www.s9y.org/index.php?node=63

With the same method you can later upgrade to the 0.9 final release, so you won't put yourself in danger when trying out the release.

Now here's a list of major new changes since Serendipity 0.8:

• Flexible usergroup management. Authors can now be grouped inside usergroups and can have certain privileges (edit entries, upload images, maintain plugins, ...). An author can be a member of more than one groups, inheriting all privileges of each group he is a member of. You can also now adjust read/write permissions for each category.
• Custom Permalink support. Allows to configure the URL path structure from all important permalinks to suit your needs - you can now use /oldEntries/2005/10/28/Garvins-Birthday.html as entry permalink format or any other structure you may like.
• UTF-8 support for all languages and bundled/additional plugins. Be sure to read http://www.s9y.org/index.php?node=46 for migrating an non-UTF-8 blog to UTF-8
• Improved performance of Plugin API, introduce validation of config items within the API
• Improved Spartacus Online Repository. Less memory usage, now also fetch templates over the web, plugin groups and better integration with the plugin backend
• Better usability: Multiple fileupload at once, media manager remembers last used settings, when deleting entries/comments you return to the overview immediately, foundation to support other WYSIWYG editors via plugin (TinyMCE, Xinha, FCKEditor)
• Atom 1.0 Feed support
• Improved MoveableType import, recognizing comments and trackbacks
• Support of MySQL boolean fulltext search
• More smarty templating options: Added new CSS classes in the default template to support styling trackback/comment/commentform/search-results easier. Localized "Reply" string. Optimized performance of accessing constants.
• Support frontend viewing of multiple selected categories and allowing the entryproperties plugin to hide certain entries from the frontpage.
• Support Gregorian/Jalali calendar
• New translations: Swedish, Hungarian, European Portuguese
• Bugfix: Category selector will now act correctly in Konqueror and Opera
• Bugfix: Importers can now import from tables that are not inside the same database as Serendipity

And those are only the highlights! See the docs/NEWS file in the release file for the full list of changes.

Now what are you waiting for? Download latest release!

I just committed support to Serendipity 0.9-alpha5 SVN that allows you to configure read/write support for each category to specific usergroups.

Now you can say "Group A, B and C have access to Category A and B. Only Group D has access to Category C.". And this can also be applied on the frontend, so authors may be able to read all posts in Category A and B, but not C. Note that the last feature is an option that you can toggle in your s9y configuration, because if you enable it it will cause additional SQL lookups to be done.

Note that this feature should play well with the feature of the entryproperties plugin that allows you to grant access to users/groups for individual entries, but this new feature is much easier to handle if you need "per-category" access privileges.

Bundled with that I upgraded that "adduser" ("User Self-Registration") to allow you to define into which user is put when registring to control his privileges. Note that this is only possible with Serendipity 0.9-alpha5.

This new functionality is considered experimental. We largely rely on your feedback for getting the privileges to work nicely.

If this feature goes along without major bugs, expect a Serendipity 0.9 beta release the next weeks, with a final release followed after that.

Now I'm off for my weekend, I'm gonna be the best man at the marriage of a good friend. :-)

In the current development version of Serendipity, we have unbundled the XML-RPC API functions from the release version and made the functionality to post entries via XML-RPC (MT/Blogger API) calls available as a additional plugin called Post via XML-RPC (serendipity_event_xmlrpc).

The reason for this is that very few people use XML-RPC posting to our experience, and it is a inherent security risk to have this functionality available if you don't use it, as the past has proven. To overcome this possible vulnerability, you need to now actively install the mentioned plugin to make XML-RPC posting available. Sending and receiving trackbacks is NOT affected by this, only the "Server"-Part of that API is.

The URL for the API endpoings will not change; if you have not installed the plugin, you will see an error message displayed. Outsourcing this functionality as a plugin allows the Serendipity Team to respond easier to new issues with the plugin and make enhancements to the XMLRPC module.

A general advice for Serendipity 0.8.3 users is to remove the serendipity_xmlrpc.php file if you do not use XML-RPC entry posting.