Personal – Serendipity

As every year since 2015, we'd already booked our rooms at the Linux-Hotel located in Essen (Germany) for our community meeting and developer retreat Serendipity Camp (or sy9camp for short).

We were looking forward to this great event very much, but unfortunately we had to cancel our plans to #flattenthecurve.

So we decided to have a virtual meeting instead. It's not the same, especially as we were limited to audio only due to bandwith constraints, and we missed the chatter at breakfast and some deep thoughts over a glas (or two) of wine in the evenings, but we got something done nevertheless.

• Serendipity 2.3.3 has been released (after fixing some last bugs).

• We moved this blog and some of our infrastructure to a new host, getting the Spartacus build process unstuck and moving to PHP 7.2 and a current version of s9y here.

• And we made some progress on our plans for Serendipity 2.4, our next feature release!

Stay tuned - and if you want to drop by for our next camp, please see the forums and the camp info page (currently German only).

Our group of developers says "Hi!" from the Linux-Hotel in Essen. We met up for the third time (thanks for hosting us!), and it was entertaining and productive as ever - great to have such a nice community and same-spirited people.

We mainly worked on releasing Serendipity 2.1, addressing some last-minute PHP7 things and went through our open issues.

We also talked a lot about coming features for the next Serendipity version, how we want to implement responsive images, improve on our login/hashing framework and went through all of our plugins to see how we can consolidate some of them and remove deprecated ones.

On March 29th in 2003, Jannis Hermanns officially renamed his jBlog to Serendipity. Now, 13 years later, we are still actively working on improving what was meant to be a simple and expansive blogging infrastructure.

In April, we will have our second user/developer meetup in Germany (Essen) and hopefully decide on a couple of remaining issues for releasing version 2.1 of Serendipity and launching the currently "work in progress" version of docs.s9y.org. This new page will better present Serendipity and offer new and more streamlined documentation.

A few years ago, a Serendipity Book was published in german language by Garvin Hicking, which was later open-sourced and put into our documentation repository. Out of this, our fellow core developer Ian (Timbalu) has put an awesome amount of time and effort into updating this german documentation for recent Serendipity versions.

You can find this on docs.s9y.org/Book/ and you will see that it is still marked as "Draft" - which means, we would appreciate your feedback and input. We do hope to get this book translated to english at some point, any help on this is appreciated.

On behalf of the team, many thanks to Ian (Timbalu) and we're excited to keep making Serendipity be a great blogging tool for your needs.

This weekend marked the first time a couple of developers and users finally shared a room and their faces with each other. We hope this was only be the first time, and will be repeated at least annually.

Our goal for this weekend was to connect names to faces, get to know each other and discuss the past and future of Serendipity. Seen from both viewpoints, users and developers.

Luckily, the kind people of the Linuxhotel in Essen (Germany) have a great offer for OpenSource projects like us: comfortable rooms, food, wifi and a special ambience for a price that is hard to beat. Thanks so much for having us!

Also, the city of Essen was a good middle ground for most of our people to meetup (from left to right):

• @supergarv (Developer)
• @ddeimeke (User and Supporter)
• BEA (User)
• @yellowled (Developer)
• @mattsches (Developer)
• @onliandone (Developer)
• @DerMario (User and Supporter)
• @Szlauszaf (User and Supporter/Developer)

Hey!

Finally I've been to a small West-Coast-Trip to the USA. I also visited Las Vegas, and guess what I found...

So there we have the place for our meetup; there's one in New York as well... ;-)

Best regards, Garvin

Das deutsche "Serendipity Handbuch" OpenSourcePress wurde vor einiger Zeit veröffentlicht, und der Verlag war so nett, die Rechte an den Buchinhalten zurückzuerhalten (auch dank des tatkräftigen Engagements von Dirk Deimeke und natürlich unserer tollen Community).

Das bedeutet, die Inhalte wurden nun unter einer CC-BY-NC-SA Lizenz veröffentlicht und können von der Community (also: EUCH!) frei gelesen, erweitert und möglicherweise auch übersetzt werden. Die meisten Dinge des Handbuchs finden auch heute noch Anwendung, aber es gibt genügend Spielraum für Verbesserungen.

Schaut euch das ganze hier an: Das Serendipity Handbuch. Die Dateien liegen im LaTeX format vor, ihr benötigt daher eine funktionierende LaTeX-Umgebung, um die Dateien kompilieren zu können. Die .tex-Dateien sind jedoch im Klartextformat, also keine fremde Scheu. :-)

Derzeit überlegen wir, in welchem Format das ganze endgültig und sinnvoll für die Benutzer und Mithelfer hinterlegt werden wird. Gerne diskutieren wir hierüber mit euch im Forum.

The german "Serendipity Manual" was published by OpenSourcePress some time ago. They were so kind to revert the publishing license back to our project (thanks to the great work of Dirk Deimeke and kind people like you), so that we can now publish it under a CC-BY-NC-SA license, and let the community (read: YOU!) be able to read the documentation for free, contribute to it, and hopefully even translate it to other languages. Many aspects of the book are still up to date, but surely many improvements can now be made.

Check it out here: The Serendipity Book. The files are written in LaTeX format, so you need a working LaTeX environment to compile it as PDF or other variants, if you like. We are currently working out the best format to use in the future; if you want, you can help us discuss this on the forums.