Infrastructure - 4 – Serendipity

UPDATE: Spartacus works again

Yesterday, my private linux development box passed away. My small EPIA ME-6000 Mini-ITX PC served me and the serendipity development several gracious coding hours. Even though its 256MB of RAM and the performance of a P2-400 was sometimes driving me insane, it had one big bonus: It was nearly fanless, and thus silent enough to fit into my combined living/work area.

And now it is no more.

Which temporarily means, as long as I get a new silent PC I cannot boot my linux system, which (apart from fetching my mail and beign my file storage) also took care of updating the Spartacus XML files every 24 hours. This means that until then, the new plugin versions are not available via Spartacus, and you must either wait or fetch them via CVS.

Since a new silent PC cuts a larger hole into the budget that I had planned for my turkey-holidays, I can't tell how long I need to gather up that new PC. If anyone here has a small project (2-3 weekends?) in his backhand, that would require a skilled PHP-developer with solid Serendipity-knowledge like myself - please raise your voice. :-)

Some time ago, the publisher of the ezine called ITS ART Magazin approached me and asked to do an interview with me about programming Serendipity.

Since I generally enjoy this kind of being able to tell about Serendipity, I couldn't refuse this question of course. :-)

Thus, you can now find this interview in the latest issue #05. The interview culminated into a nice conclusion, so everyone who's interested, have a go at it.

I generally suggest you to check out this ezine, its contained images and featured artists alone are a great source of information and inspiration, and the generall layout is a pleasure to look at. Spread the word about this magazine, it's better than most printed editions you can find at you newsstands!

Also have a look at their blog!

Jay took some time to create a Serendipity Debian Release Package! Go and try it out. :-)

Thanks a lot, Jay! We are also still on the lookout for volunteers helping us create a PEAR channel and PEAR packages. *g*

The Serendipity Team is proud to announce the final release version of Serendipity 1.0, an advanced and flexible blogging/cms web application. With its comprehensive feature set, including multiple authors, internationalization, templated output, and an open plugin architecture, Serendipity's stable 1.0 release is ready to become the most popular Web application in the world!

INTRODUCTION

Serendipity is a PHP-powered weblog application which gives the user an easy way to maintain an online diary, weblog or even a complete homepage. While the default package is designed for the casual blogger, Serendipity offers a flexible, expandable and easy-to-use framework with the power for professional applications.

Casual users appreciate the way Serendipity's sophisticated plugin architecture allows you to easily modify both the appearance of your blog and its features. A single click installs any of more than 120 plugins, instantly enhancing your blog's functionality. No need to edit code! Likewise, one click installs any of more than 40 official templates, so your blog looks the way you like it. And Serendipity's SPARTACUS plugin automatically checks the central repository for upgrades and new functionality whenever you check the list.

Advanced users value Serendipity's Smarty templates for combining simplicity with well-documented web standards. It makes minor modifications trivial, but provides the power to unleash your creativity and completely customize your site! Serendipity's outstanding support gives you the confidence to be adventurous, too.

Programmers and other technical users commend Serendipity for its fast, stable, clean PHP code. While beginners can learn from Serendipity, advanced programmers can easily make complex modifications. Serendipity is programmed in PHP, long recognized for its ideal blend of power, simplicity, and speed. Serendipity's BSD licensing ensures that programmers around the world can learn from it and improve it.

Users of other blogging/CMS applications are already switching to Serendipity, thanks to its easy customization and outstanding support. Corporate users are taking advantage of Serendipity's unparalleled flexibility to set up fast, simple CMS sites.

Serendipity's basic features include something for everybody, from the personal blogger to the professional corporate web designer:

• WYSIWYG and HTML editing
• Built-in, powerful media database
• Multiple authors, configurable permission/usergroup system
• Threaded comments, nested categories, post to multiple categories
• Multiple languages (internationalization)
• Online plugin and template repository for easy plug-and-play installation
• Cool plugins: category-based sub-blogs, podcasting, RSS planet/aggregator, static pages
• Robust spam blocking
• One-click upgrading from any version
• Can be embedded into your existing web pages
• Standards-compliant templating through Smarty, remote blogging via XML-RPC
• BSD-style licensing
• Multiple Database support (SQLite, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MySQLi)
• Shared installations can power multiple blogs from just one codebase
• Native import from earlier blog applications (WordPress, Textpattern, MoveableType, bblog, ...)

Of course, Serendipity has far too many other features to list!

NEW FEATURES / FIXES

The Serendipity team has been working hard to produce what we think is the best blog in the world. Since our most recent prerelease, we've updated the installation screens, added new languages (Polish, Turkish, and Tamil), made our RSS feeds templatized, improved the spam filters with Akismet support, and fixed every known bug.

But there's even more to like about Serendipity! Here are a few other recent improvements:

• Completely new, fresh default template from the contest winner, Carl Galloway!
• Fixed all known bugs, making the 1.0 release of Serendipity the most stable version ever
• MORE Spamblock improvements (Blacklists, stronger Captchas, Akismet, improved ruleset filtering, bypass captchas for registered users)
• Improved language handling facilities for better co-operation with multilingual entries
• Enhanced templating (hiding sidebars, including extra entries anywhere in template)
• One-click editing of static sidebar HTML
• Full phpDoc code documentation for all Serendipity functions
• New Pivot Blog importer
• Bugfix: UTF-8 in permalink and markup
• Bugfix: Correct comment counts
• Bugfix: Recode UTF-8 trackbacks to mismatching blogs
• Bugfix: Better XHTML and CSS output for internal plugins

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

UPGRADING

Upgrading from any version (even previous beta or alpha versions) to Serendipity 1.0 is startlingly easy: just unpack the release files to your existing Serendipity directory, go to your admin panel, and confirm the upgrade process. Serendipity automatically upgrades your database and informs 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

THE FUTURE

Just because we've completed the stable 1.0 release version, don't think we're out of ideas! The Serendipity Team has already been working hard on version 1.1. This huge effort has already provided a vastly improved media database, supporting ID3/EXIF evaluation, on-the-fly synchronization with the filesystem, annotations (all customizable through templates) and a new explorer-like interface to the media files. Also, all media directories can now have individual permissions.

We've also enhanced usability, so you can temporarily disable event plugins, customize theme options, like colorsets and menus, and enable or disable specific markup plugins for each entry! As well as constantly improving the user interface and adding drag'n'drop support for arranging plugin items easily.

To participate in the future of Serendipity, try out the latest Serendipity 1.1 snapshots, and visit us on the forums.

THANKS

Serendipity 1.0 marks the end of a very long development cycle that started in 2002. Many beta-releases have been issued since, keeping us closely in touch with the community, fixing bugs and offering features our users really wanted.

The team would like to thank everyone for reporting the issues they found and telling us developers what you really want form your blog. Visitors to the forums will see how much of their feedback was implemented into Serendipity 1.0!

Refining Serendipity's documentation and appearance was critical to the release of Serendipity 1.0. Thanks to the great help of Carl Galloway, David Cummins, Judebert, ceejay and Martin Jacobsen, Serendipity not only has a new default theme, but a new logo and website. We couldn't have done it without their help, or the help of the community that participated in that public process. In recognition of that outstanding community, the new logo includes multiple individual circles, grouped as a platform. From that platform, you can create anything.

Our small "1.0 Release Team" is proud with what we have achieved in our little spare time, and even though it was difficult at times, we believe that with this new logo, look, and functionality, Serendipity will continue to be the best blog engine, and grow into the most popular.

RESOURCES

The Serendipity home page: http://www.s9y.org/

The Serendipity forums: http://www.s9y.org/forums

Serendipity news from the Serendipity Blog: http://blog.s9y.org/

Serendipity plugins: http://spartacus.s9y.org/

Serendipity themes: http://themes.s9y.org/

Try Serendipity online: http://supersized.org/

DOWNLOAD

Now what are you waiting for? Download the Serendipity 1.0 release! http://www.s9y.org/12.html

On behalf of the s9y-Team,
Garvin

The last month has been a hard time for developers on SourceForge.net, because their CVS service went down for good also for developers, and anonymous access was not updated for the time being.

The Serendipity Spartacus plugin by default uses the SourceForge Servers for downloading plugins and files, and thus this had not worked properly the past month. The first way to fix that problem was to use the "Netmirror.org" file mirror.

Because of the changes made by the SourceForge team to CVS, their new infrastructure will no longer work with the Spartacus plugin, because they changed Domain and URL locations. Users should either use the Netmirror.org file mirror, or use the latest version of the Spartacus plugin with the new path location: serendipity_event_spartacus.php + lang_en.inc.php. The patch is fairly easy and just replaces the URL of the server.

Attention for Plugin Developers using CVS access: SourceForge.net has changed the CVS server from "cvs.sourceforge.net" to "php-blog.cvs.sourceforge.net". You will either need to check out that new repository, or else use this bash command to search+replace all the old paths to the new paths:

find -name "Root" -exec sed -e "s:@cvs:@php-blog.cvs:g" -i {} \;

(Many thanks to lars for pointing this out to me)

Read the Sf.Net docs for details on the new CVS project service. Other good news is that anonymous CVS access will no only lag 2 hours, not 24 hours.

Let's see how this will work out, and my thanks to the SourceForge.Net team who has surely not an easy job providing free access for thousands of projects.

Reports of the past improvements to the spamblock plugin have been very positive. On top of that, I got aware that the WordPress Akismet.com Antispam Service is available for other systems of that. So I sat down and implemented their pretty easy API into Serendipity's Spamblock plugin.

For Akismet to work, you need a Wordpress.com user account, with which you get a "API Key". You must enter this API key into the s9y spamblock plugin configuration screen, and then also set the option on how to treat Akismet marked spam (either reject or moderate).

Please try out this plugin and give us feedback. You can download the updated version here:

serendipity_event_spamblock.php and lang_en.inc.php. Put those two files into your plugins/serendipity_event_spamblock/ directory. The plugin should be compatible with Serendipity 0.9.1, 1.0-beta and 1.1-alpha.

Thanks to the guys from Akismet for offering a freely available API to check Spam against! Letting the development community fight spam with bundled efforts is the only way we might get rid of the annoying destroyers of the Web.