Serendipity Weblog 0.8

Garvin Hicking writes “The Serendipity team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the final release of Serendipity 0.8.

Serendipity is a PHP-powered weblog application which gives the user an easy way to maintain an online diary, weblog or personal homepage.

The development of Serendipity is intended to offer a flexible, expandible and easy-to-use framework. We use a sophisticated Plugin architecture, affecting both the appearance of your blog and its core features. It ships with a variety of useful plugins to enhance your blog, and several more are available in an additional CVS repository. Serendipity’s Frontend is based on Smarty Templating and can thus be easily modified and enhanced.

WordPress/Textpattern users might favor Serendipity because of its functional and flexible expandability without the hassle of editing the core application files. Moveable-Type users will appreciate the BSD-style licensing and the speed and functionality of dynamically generated pages.

Serendipity offers all of the following features and many more:

++ CORE FEATURES

* WYSIWYG-Editor
* Image and File-Asset-manager
* multiple users
* threaded comments, comment+trackback moderation
* nested categories, post to multiple categories
* XML-RPC interface to Blogger and MT-API
* powerful Plugin API to both affect custom sidebar items as well as ‘event hooks’ to trigger any kind of custom functionality nearly anywhere inside Serendipity
* dynamic page generation with ‘pretty URLs’
* track- and pingback autodiscovery,
* multiple database support (MySQL, MySQLi, PostgreSQL, SQLite)
* can be used as shared library to host multiple blogs
* effective anti-spam-measurements (automoderation, captchas,…)
* Skinable via structured CSS-elements
* Standards compliant: XHTML, CSS2, RSS 0.93/1.0/2.0, Atom 0.3, Conditional get support for XML-Feeds
* Flexible input: Choose between entering HTML, Textile, Wiki and/or BBCode markup, even for user-made comments
* Flexible output using Smarty templating
* Can import RSS-feeds to ease up migration
* Easy upgrading and updating without having to mangle with SQL-files
* Internationalization (German, English, Danish, Czech, partially: French, Dutch, Portuguese…) – easy language addition/translation
* Open Source license: BSD-style

To wrap it up: Serendipity can do anything you want to get done with a blog, as easy as that. If you want more information, visit our Wiki on http://www.s9y.org/.

++ NEW FEATURES

The latest 0.8 release vastly improves the featurebase of Serendipity.

A complete list of changes for this release can be found in our NEWS file, located in our CVS Repository. Here are the most important changes since 0.7:

* Support for Smarty Templating
* Improved installer with new “Simple Installation” mode (reduced configuration options)
* Redesigned Administration Panel, Authoring Suite and Administration suite have been merged into one, new Item “Personal Configuration” has been created
* Amount of articles per page can now be changed in Configuration
* Syndication plugin offers to make RSS full content feeds (including extended entry)
* Added native import tool for Nucleus, WordPress, b2evo, bblog, bmachine, pmachine, geeklog, sunlog, Textpattern, phpBB and MoveableType installations, preserving entries, categories, users and comments. Improved import tool for handling charsets and HTML entities.
* New “View all entries by specific author” display
* New “View by Week” archives display
* Improved “Pretty URLs”
* Media Manager allows to upload files and insert the immediately in entry creation, support for hotlinking and searching for filenames. Also the media manager remembers the last selected options via Cookie.
* Support for Server-timezone offset
* Improved directory/file structure
* Serendipity can now be used with JustBlogIt Extension
* Allow trackbacking https files (if PHP’s https support is enabled)
* Use iframe technique to save an entry. This will make sending trackbacks visually more appealing and faster create a visual feedback for the author. This may introduce problems with old generation browsers, in which case this technique can be disabled. If you face any issues, please report them to the Serendipity team.
* Added option to send gzip’ed pages
* Allow persistent db connections
* Results of a search are now paginated
* Support for realnames of authors instead of login-name only
* Allow optional visitor-browser content-language negotiation
* RSS feeds can now hide all email adresse by configuration

++ SECURITY

* Fix bug with exit.php tracking (possible SQL injection)
* Fix XSS injection attacks to BBCode plugin
* serendipity_config_local.inc.php can now contain user-defined PHP code for individual purposes
* fixed flaw in the function used to validate path-names for uploading media
* Do not allow uploading.php/.shtml files to the media manager
* Chief users are no longer allowed to hide plugins installed by other users

++ FIXED BUGS

* The RSS feed “guid” element has been marked as ‘isPermalink=no’ to not use that element as a link.
* Trackbacks to a link will not be sent more than once
* Entries published in the future can now only be seen by visitors if the author chose to do so (configuration directive added)
* Fixed problem in imageMagick detection
* Upgraded htmlarea WYSIWYG component to latest version, fixes copy+paste errors with Mozilla
* Added missing SQL index keys
* Fixed bugs with media library on windows filesystems
* Fixed installer bugs caused by register_globals, correctly detect most 500 Internal Server Errors when installing and emit an error when magic_quotes_runtime is set to on.
* Fixed possible SQL-injection bug in pingbacks
* Hopefully fixed the MS IE problem which spontaneously did not load CSS stylesheets
* Fixed issues with referer tracking on MySQL
* Fixed XML-RPC Posting API problems

++ NEW LANGUAGES

* Traditional Chinese
* Simplified Chinese
* Icelandic
* Japanese
* Finnish
* Russian
* Korean (only partial)
* Persian (plus RTL-template)

++ TEMPLATES / CSS

* Smarty Templating! (See http://www.s9y.org/40.html)
* New CSS classes for distinction of authors within entries/comments:.serendipity_entry_(author|comment)_USERNAME, applied to each entry container, where USERNAME is replaced with the name of the author.serendipity_entry_author_self, applied to the entry container if the currently logged in user is the author of an entry.serendipity_comment_author_self, applied if the commenting username matches the owner of the entry.
* New CSS “div.container_X” CSS class for sidebar plugin items, where X is substituted with the plugin classname.
* New bundled template, “Kubrick port”

++ THE FUTURE

In the future, Serendipity will offer a centralized repository for Plugins, Themes and other Customications (codename SPARTACUS). It will be much like PEAR and allows to easily install and upgrade plugins and themes.

Other plans include to further improve the Translation System and modularize more parts of Serendipity. As well, take a look at our (http://www.s9y.org/32.html) for more of our plans.

++ MIGRATE

If you want to upgrade from a different blog application like Word Press or Moveable Type, you can use the RSS import facility to preserve your entries. Look at our Wiki on (http://www.s9y.org/53.html) to see instructions.

New in this version is *native import* for many popular blog (and forum) applications. You will see this functionality in the ‘Import Entries’ section of the Serendipity Administration panel.

++ DOWNLOAD

Now what are you waiting for? Read more about the release and download Serendipity here:

http://www.s9y.org/63.html

The Serendipity Team”