Templates - 2 – Serendipity

Carl Galloway has released his port of the Hemmingway Theme for Serendipity.

It's quite bleeding edge and supports various new features of Serendipity 1.1-beta, so check it out! Hooray for Carl. :-)

For ages, Serendipity has given users the flexibility to move around plugins in the left/right sidebar. Two sidebars were a usual concept for blogs in the days past, and for surely some more days to come.

But some themes, like the Hemingway theme give people a different approach to surrounding their blog content. The result of a porting discussion on the forums lead me to patch our plugin API.

Serendipity 1.1 already support custom theme options (like special navigation bars, colorsets etc.), and what came out of my recent patch is the functionality to define multiple custom sidebars.

With this, you can add a "top", "bottom", "middle" or whatever else sidebar locations to your themes, and put them in the smarty templates using the function {serendipity_printSidebar side="XXX"} wherever you like.

It's as easy as adding a config.inc.php file to your template, add a $template_config array value like this:

       
$template_config = array(
     array(
       'var'     => 'sidebars',
       'title'   => 'Sidebars',
       'type'    => 'string',
       'default' => 'left,hide,right,bot'
     )
);

There are two things to watchout: If you use locations other than 'left' and 'right', other templates may not output plugins that were put to a location like 'bot'. So if you switch templates, you must watch out on where you put your sidebar plugins into.
The other thing to pay attention: Only use "," to separate the sidebar item names (no spaces!) and never use more than 6 characters for your locations.

Please have a test with these new possibilities, tell us if you like it, and show us the results you made with it!

This functionality has been implemented into recent Serendipity 1.1 nightlies (currently 1.1-beta4)

Fellow serendipity-user Abdussamad wrote a nice Tutorial on how to add Hijri-dates (arabic) to the blog output. Thanks a lot for your contribution!

The past weekend, Davey asked me in an IRC chat that he's put off by Smarty and would like to use Serendipity without it for his next blog design. Mostly because of loosing some overhead.

I'm basically split oppinion on this: Smarty Templating is a great way to ease things up and unify a templating language that looks better and is more accessible to newbies. So this is basically an advantage that I, as a programmer, am willing to take. But to any one who's got his looks on grandma's performance pennies might think otherwise, and might think that PHP itself already is a templating language. Which I can understand. :-)

Smarty luckily has a pretty, pretty easy API facing towards the User. Basically all that Smarty needs are the assign and display methods. There are some more convenience functions, but let's disregard those for a moment.

With that in Mind, I was able to create a PHP AND an XML-Templating Engine for Serendipity, which completely bypasses Smarty by still using the same outward-facing API.

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.