Development - 6 – Serendipity

The latest maintenance version of Serendipity (1.7.2) has just been released. It addresses some mostly minor issues reported in 1.7. The most relevant fixes are:

• Serendipity will switch to mysqli if PHP >= 5.5 is used (mysql is deprecated in that version)
  UPDATE 1.7.2 - This code had a bug in the 1.7.1 release, which lead to an immediate 1.7.2 release to address this. Sorry for this, but at leat 1.7.1 has only been on the air for a few hours ;)
• Upgrade Smarty to 3.1.14
• The outdated browsercompatibility plugin will be uninstalled
• Properly migrate a "baseURL" option which might be set to an empty value on installations where the configuration has never been saved after the update.
• The name of a authorgroup was empty when editing a usergroup

As usual, you can upgrade easily by uploadint the files to your server and then going to your Blog, to accept the upgrader confirmation.

Download the release here.

The Serendipity Team is proud to present the final release of Serendipity 1.7, also known as Rolling Thunder for certain people. This will be the last release before the larger rewrite of 2.0, where many people poured their effort into restructurizing and templating the backend.

Thus, Serendipity 1.7 mainly focusses on stability and compatibility with new PHP 5.3/5.4 versions. In our 1.7 release process we have received feedback from many people to help us improve that Serendipity 1.7 works properly on all PHP setups with at least PHP 5.2. Older PHP versions no longer work with Serendipity 1.7, but are definitely not recommended due to security issues, so please ask your webhoster to upgrade PHP if you are running a lower version (as long as that happens you can stick to older Serendipity versions like 1.6.2).

Other minor bug-fixes and improvements have been implemented in a lot of small places, which you can see in the docs/NEWS file of the release.

Smaller new features are that you can now define defaults for custom entryproperties, the RSS sidebarplugin now also supports Atom-feeds (thanks to the now-bundled Simplepie), Spartacus can now fetch the plugin files also from github and we now use the latest and greatest version of Smarty3.

BEFORE installing the new release, you should upgrade all external (Spartacus) plugins to their latest versions, to ensure that they will operate properly with the latest Serendipity version - if you forgot that, you can also upgrade the files after the upgrade, but it might be that you receive certain PHP error notices.
The current release can be easily installed on any previous Serendipity installation. Just unpack, upload and visit your admin panel to perform possible database upgrades. Please be sure to make a backup of your Database prior to upgrading, and read the upgrade pointers on Upgrading Serendipity. Also make sure that your server is running at least PHP 5.2, otherwise Serendipity would no longer run after the upgrade.

A note for developers: If you have created your own, custom event plugins you might see PHP notices when your method variable signature of i.e. the "event_hook" or "introspect_config_item" methods mismatches the one that is defined in the Serendipity Plugin API. Make sure that the list of parameters for i.e. the event_hook() method matches:
function event_hook($event, &$bag, &$eventData, $addData = null) {

Have fun using Serendipity, and let us know on the Forums if you have any issues!

Download here!

A Release Candidate 3 has just been released (see s9y.org - Downloads, that fixes a couple of reported PHP error notices (in Spartacus, for template configurations). Also the error reporting itself has been reworked a bit to be less verbose. This version also addresses enhanced escaping for stored cookie values of the media database, which we have received a (not very clear) report of. This only affected logged-in users of the backend, so the impact should be minimal.

Please report any issues you find with RC3 as usual on the s9y forums; if you want to address any security issues, please contact security (at) s9y . org. We take all reports seriously, and are very thankful for anyone reporting issues to us. We are a small team, so any help from the outside is really appreciated (and needed) by us. Thanks!

The Serendipity Team is happy to announce the second Release Candidate for Serendipity 1.7.

The first RC1 that was online for only a couple of hours had two issues that made us pull this release candidate. One bug affected people with older plugin versions, that could throw PHP notices and prevent Serendipity from executing properly. The other bug affected that certain variables for Smarty templates were not existing due to missing variable transporting. Both issues have been fixed in this second release candidate.

While we are still working hard to rebuilding the backend (for future HTML5 possibilities, better maintenance and in the end, a better design/UI) we have tried to make Serendipity 1.7 to be the final "pre 2.0" release that deals with a couple of problems with older Serendipity versions.

First and foremost, this release addresses several PHP 5.4 compatibility issues. Serendipity 1.7 now at least requires PHP 5.2 to operate (due to Smarty3). If you have a lower PHP version than 5.2, you can run Serendipity 1.6.x properly, but of course should better ensure that your webserver will be upgraded to a more recent PHP release version.

Serendipity 1.7 comes with Smarty3, a larger rewrite of the Smarty Templating Engine. To make proper use of Smarty3, several core mechanisms have been updated. Other features include better nl2br/nobr plugin handling, Updated 2k11 theme, RSS sidebarplugin can now handle Atom feeds, entryproperties plugin can now define defaults for custom fields. See the contained NEWS release file on github for a list of all changes.

In our alpha development process, many kinks should have been ironed out, so that at this point we feel confident to let YOU try out this new version without facing issues. Now we need you to make sure that there are no quirky webservers or installations out there, that would report any PHP5 notices/errors. Testing the release is quite easy; first you should backup your current installation (download all files via FTP/SSH/RSYNC/whatever, make a database dump) and then simply upload all new files to your webserver; then you're ready to go.

Please report all issues and bugs on the Serendipity Forums (specifically, this thread). If all goes well, we can then soon release the 1.7 final version, so that our developers can fully concentrate on finishing our 2.0 development. On this matter: A huge thanks to developers who made the recent new features, (re)built templates and fixed plugins. This specifically applies to ophian, yellowled, onli, mattsches, Don - your continued work and help is invaluable to me (=Garvin).

Now, go, grab that release: s9y.org Download section

On behalf of the team,
Garvin

The problematic 1.7-rc1 has now been superseded with a new 1.7-rc2 release candidate. The original announcement has been updated to reflect the changes.

The 1.7-rc1 that has been published today has an issue with older Serendipity plugins existing on prior installations, preventing Serendipity 1.7 to operate properly. While we fix this issue for an upcoming rc2, this problematic rc1 has been removed at this point.