Development - 21 – Serendipity

The MoveableType importer has been enhanced to also support importing comments and trackbacks, and has a generally more flexible approach at parsing, which I have verified working with MoveableType 3.17. Support for that was committed to the 0.9 trunk today. You can also use it in conjunction with Serendipty 0.8.x by downloading moveabletype.inc.php and storing that in your include/admin/importers/ directory, overwriting the old importer.

A question: Is there a need for importing the MT-MySQL database? This would also make it possible to import authors and categories and generally be easier to handle than the current mt.dat file import. On the other hand, the current importer does the job and maybe the MT-MySQL storage method isn't that common?

Atom 1.0 support has just been committed to the 0.9 SVN trunk of Serendipity, and (at least for me) fully validates on the feedvalidator.org.

Thanks to some suggestions on the forums, especially by Robert Lender and Marc "Col. Kurtz" Gärtner, I have contributed a plugin that allows basic modification of a category into its own blog.

First off, the changes needs a fresh 0.9 SVN checkout, as some important plugin hooks were added to support the changes. On top of that you will need the new plugin serendipity_event_categorytemplates ("Properties/Templates of categories"), which is put into CVS and will be available via Spartacus shortly. You may also need the serendipity_event_sidebarhider ("Toggle Sidebar state") plugin for some advanced usage.

Now let me describe what the plugin does. It adds three new fields to the properties of each category. There you can now define the individual template used when viewing that category, define the amount of entries to be pulled (fetchLimit) and define whether the category is allowed to show entries of the future or not. All those settings override your global default, when a visitor comes to your page.

You need to enter the relative path for the template into the input box - a select dropdown may get available in the future. You can not only choose a different maintemplate ("blue", "kubrick", "moz-modern" etc.) - you can even select a sub-template of your template. Like "kubrick/category1", "kubrick/category2" and so forth. The directory structure of a "sub-template" is the same as a completely different template. So you have all options to fully tweak your templates dependant on the selected category.

Now, wouldn't it be nice to only show certain sidebar plugins on specific categories? For that, you can use the Sidebarhider plugin. You can toggle a list of categories that is allowed to display each sidebar plugin. That means you might want to show the Calendar plugin in Category A, B and C - but not in category D. Or you might want to show a special HTML nugget only in Category A. No problem. :-)

Of course there might be some bugs popping up, which is why it also requires Serendipity 0.9. Feel free to report errors on our bugtracker, the forums, mailinglist or whatever you prefer. I personally prefer the Sf.Net Bugtracker, though.

This extra flexibility is just another brick in the wall of showing the nice featureset of Serendipity, and what can be achieved with plugins. Be inspired and have fun!

Today I have committed version 0.2 of the cachesimple plugin. It features:

1. Use of Conditional GET to prevent "cache busting"
2. Shortcircuit larger parts of the Plugin API to gain some extra performance.

It is very important for the plugin's full performance that you place the cachesimple plugin as your first plugin in the Event plugin queue. The only plugins that should come before this plugin are

1. serendipity_event_loginform
2. serendipity_event_templatechooser
3. serendipity_event_karma
4. serendipity_event_phpopentracker
5. serendipity_event_filter_entries
6. serendipity_event_randomblogdescription

(if you do not want to loose their functionality, that is)

If the plugin is not first in the queue, it results in all the other plugins being initialised before the cachesimple plugin is able to exit the serendipity Framework.

Feedback, improvements/patches and reports if this breaks any functionality is heartly welcome. The plugin should be available in spartacus tomorrow, you can of course download the diff from the URL location above; this should be available in a few hours.

I have prepared a patch which allows the plugin interface to be a bit more intuitive.

It combines the spartacus/external plugins into the same interface you use to install downloaded plugins, so this is now one large list of plugins. The new list also allows to be grouped by one level of categories.

Some plugins in the list, and some spartacus plugins have been given the new "group" property so that you can play with the patch.

For the interface to load faster I have created an intermediate cache, that stores the plugin metadata and makes it retrievable easier on the interface. The upside of this is that the list of plugins is now much faster created.

This may possibly cause a lot of trouble, so do not apply this patch in a working environment. Only use it for fun and report back to me how you like it.

In a future step, the new (localized!) plugin XML metadata can be used easier on a pear.php.net like interface.

The patch can be found here: http://blog.s9y.org/uploads/plugincat.diff

UPDATE: New diff file http://blog.s9y.org/uploads/plugincat2.diff supports Template downloading via Smartacus, uhm Spartacus. :-)

UPDATE 2: New diff file http://blog.s9y.org/uploads/plugincat3.diff contains support for alternate file mirrors. The list of mirrors will hopefully be updated soon to contain some backup locations.

Some users of the Konqueror-Browser may have noticed that when posting a new entry, the "plus" icon next to the categories selection did not toggle anything.

This functionality was meant to toggle a multiple-select field when clicked, to preserve screenspace on most browsers and make it easier for people that do not want to post in multiple categories.

This functionality did not play well with Konqueror's interpretation of the select-field's properties. I have thus rewritten the JavaScript code to toggle the state of the select field, and it should now work in all major browsers. I have committed the patch to our 0.9 SVN, and it should be contained in the daily snapshot created later today.

I'd be happy for any reports regarding this functionality and whether it's working fine for you. Remember that when toggling from a multi select to a single select, the function will remember the last multi-select of your categories and restore those. So it is considered a feature when you select edit an entry with multiple selected categories, toggle to single select, and then toggle back that all previous categories get re-selected. Thanks for your feedback!