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Content Tagged with Serendipity + plugins

(Deutsche Übersetzung gibt es auf meinem privaten Blog)

A huge issue of Serendipity's Static Page-Plugin has always been its visual presentation of the editing screen:

Voices have been raised in the past to dust up this interface, which is why I worked on it at the beginning of this week, and committed my changes already to the official plugin repository (staticpage.zip).

Technically, the changes are quite minimalistic und quick to implement (2 hours of my life time). But the impact is huge:

Starting as of now, static pages can be created and edited using a customized smarty template, plus a static page can now have custom properties, similar to blog entries.

By default, a template file saved as backend_templates/default_staticpage_backend.tpl is shipped with the plugin, in which the distribution of the input fields is contained. There is a new smarty helper function ({staticpage_input}) that takes care of accessing the usual introspection methods for emitting the default list of data fields.

Own templates can override this template file by putting it in their template subdirectory, so that you can now have your own editing masks depending on the currently used template. This should be a blessing for magazine-like templates such as Mimbo or Hemmingway.

You can also store multiple template files inside this backend_templates directory, so that they all will be available from within the selection dropdown of the interface. For our veterans, the old list-style view is still available, of course.

An example for saving custom fields for static pages is also contained within the default template, but is commented out so that you must manually enable it. All custom fields need to be implemented through usual HTML form elements, and need to save their values inside a serendipity[plugin][custom][XXX][ fieldname. Once entered, the data will be automatically saved inside the serendipity_staticpage_custom database table, and will be available through {$staticpage_custom.XXX} when later being displayed in the frontend.

This way, you can easily add new custom fields for a staticpage which could decide, which CSS-Body-ID to use for rendering the page. Or you could specify, which sidebars you want to see when a certain staticpage is rendered. Or specify a custom header image for each staticpage. Sky's the limit!

This all vastly improves Serendipity's CMS-abilities and even more pushes it into a custom CMS-Framework, where you can manage any kind of customized content.

I hope you like it. :-)

The Serendipity Anti-Spam plugin allows to utilize the blogg.de IP blacklist service to block spam. Their service seems to have ceased existence, or at least is rejecting connections. This can lead to comments to your serendipity blog to be rejected. You can easily disable the blogg.de blacklist service in your Anti-Spam plugin configuration.

Note that this option is by default disabled in Serendipity since blogg.de announced that they are no longer actively maintaining the blacklist. A well fit alternative to this service is the Akismet API, which the spamblock plugin also supports.

Like announced earlier on the serendipity blog, fellow usability expert Joachim Harloff is currently trying to improve the listing of Serendipity Plugins so that they are more accessible to users.

He needs your help to fulfill them. Initially he planned to personally meet with serendipity users, but this proved more complex than initially hoped. Thus he has created a smaller, text-based version of it.

You can download the file at http://www.softuse.com/serendipity_sorting.zip. It contains detailed instructions. You can also feel free to personally contact Joachim about any questions you have.

Joachim estimates this questionnaire to take you about 1,5 hours of your time. You could greatly help to improve the serendipity usability, so please participate! Joachim wants to evaluate your responses starting on September the 8th.

I upgraded the staticpage plugin in CVS to version 3.50 yesterday (which should be available via Spartacus now already).

It now supports to use a custom smarty function to show static pages. This can be used in your custom template files (like the userprofile .tpls) to emit specific staticpages depending on variables.

Go ahead and play with it. The API is quite basic and described in the new 'smarty.inc.php' file. It basically works like this:

{staticpage_display template="$TEMPLATE" pagevar="$PAGEVAR" id="$ID" permalink="$PERMALINK" pagetitle="$PAGETITLE" authorid="$AUTHORID" query="$QUERY"}

The API is quite fundamanetal right now. If you want to access more properties/parameters, please let me know, and I'll implement them. Please discuss this feature on our forums in this thread.

This new Serendipity release addresses a local file inclusion security issue discovered yesterday. It was possible to give a special parameter to a serendipity file to include a file on your own web-tree (or other files the webserver has read access to). If used on clear-text files, this could be used to disclose information like the apache logfiles on your website.

This error can only happen in a scenario with two prerequisites: Register_Globals needs to be turned on in your PHP configuration AND your webserver must ignore the default Serendipity .htaccess file. This .htaccess file usually prevents to directly call Serendipity's include files via HTTP. Thus we feel that only a very low percentage of installations should be affected by this bug.

However, Serendipity 1.0.4 is a recommended upgrade for everyone taking security responsibly, like we do. We are thankful to the community for inspecting Serendipity, searching for bugs and security issues and reporting them to us. In this case, many thanks to Majestic from the forums for notifying us.

Most of the plugins (both bundled and available via spartacus) were upgraded to also circumvent that bug, so you should upgrade all of your active plugins to the recent versions as well.

The Serendipity 1.1 release tree was also modified with a patch for this issue. It will be contained in todays snapshot, and the 1.1-beta6 release file. The easy steps to perform an upgrade are documented in our FAQ on http://www.s9y.org/.

Google seems to have changed their URLs where pings to the sitemap webmaster helper tool are sent to.

Thus, the Serendipity Google Sitemap plugin requires you to either manually update to the right URL. The updated plugin in Spartacus has been committed today and should be available tomorrow.

The new URL to use is: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=%s (see this thread)

Despite my downtime, I was able to find the time to commit some changes I was having up my sleeve to the 1.1 beta version.

It involves, what many people have asked for: Specify, which user/usergroups are able to have access to certain plugins. My standpoint until now was, that plugins should implement the versatile permission management of Serendipity, available since version 0.9.

However, reality got me when I saw that no plugin was really ported yet to use that permission management setup to provide custom permission sets. But people wanted to have the ability to say "The staticpage plugin is only available to user XY".

Thus, I implemented a rather hackish way into the groupmanagement: You can now specify complete plugins, or specific event hooks which are forbidden for a usergroup. This way, you can say that group X is not allowed to execute a 'Staticpage' plugin.

This approach should work quite well for many usage scenarios - the upside is, that all old plugins are supported instantly. However, the neater approach of course is to modify plugins so that they provide their own permissions for more granulate control of what you want to achieve.

To enable this functionality you must first enable the option "Enable Plugin ACL for usergroups" in the serendipity configuration. The reason why you must explicitly enable this is, because those plugin checks decrease the performance of the plugin API. Every executed plugin hook must be checked against the blacklist, and those checks would hurt bloggers that do not intent to use this feature. To satisfy everyone, you have an option for this.

You can try the feature in the nightly builds created today, or using an SVN checkout. The feature is contained in 1.1-beta4.

Yesterday, Andyman77 from the forums brought the Thickbox project to my attention. Using his plugin, I intermingled that with the existing lightbox plugin so that you can now choose which JS library to use to format your links. Plus, lightbox2 got also added to the plugin.

What, you don't know what Lightbox is? It's a nifty javascript that will transform links to images into small "popup" links. When you thus link to a thumbnail images (<a href="large.jpg"><img src="thumb.jpg" />), lightbox will take on that image link, and once clicked on it, the large image will be shown on your page instead in a separate browser window. It sounds boring when explained, so just go to the lightbox pages and look at their installations.

The plugin installation is seamless, as all image links in serendipity will get automatically rewritten so that links from thumbnails will show up as lightbox links.

Thickbox brings fun into this thing by offering to also popup HTML links inside neat popups. Just add a 'class="thickbox"' attribute to your HTML links in your entries, and that's it.

The Serendipity 1.0 release progress is advancing - currently we have created new page layouts for the blog, wiki and spartacus pages that acommodate the new logo and our new default theme by contest winner Carl Galloway.

A major new documentation contribution, documenting all Smarty variables has been made by me: CSS classes / Variable Documentation on the Wiki. We are getting things together and finalizing the designs - the Serendipity 1.0 release version can hopefully be uploaded at the end of next week, if everything goes according to plan. Plus, the Serendipity Installation Documentation has been greatly improved and now contains screenshot-guided instructions.

Parallely, work on Serendipity 1.1 is evolving very well. Here are a few new key features:

• Completely overhauled Media Gallery. Serendipity has always been a major player in providing easy media database access, and is now enhancing it for even more usability and flexibility. You can now assign privileges for every media directory. You can now retrieve and store meta properties like descriptions, EXIF-Data, keywords - and filter/search for them easily. Plus, the media gallery is now Smarty Template-driven, so you can customize it to your needs. You can now move images/whole directories within the filestructure, and existing entries will be edited to suit that new location. The media database can now be synchronized on-the-fly with contents on the webspace - means you can upload files via FTP and they will automagically be imported. A explorer-like view on the directories completes the featureset.
  Watch this video:
  
• You can enable/disable certain markup plugins per-entry. Ever wanted to create a Full HTML posting, but were annoyed by automatic nl2br conversion? Now you can turn it off for specific entries.
• Support for Template Options. All Themes can now offer specific configuration options for using a theme, like specifying which colorset you want to use, which navigational items you'd like to see and even fine-control banner options. See Carl Galloways Page for some sneak previews on the functionality to come!
• Finally, you can now use Drag And Drop to re-order your sidebar/event plugins much more intuitively than in the past. It uses enhanced JavaScripts (from Cyberdummy.co.uk / tool-man - great script!), that works on all major browsers. For those browsers that don't offer support for that, or for users without JavaScript, the old method is still working seamlessly. This means, that Serendipity continually strifes to both deliver top-usability to our users, as well as satisfy people who are paying close attention to security issues.
  Watch this video:
  

So, if those features ring any bells inside your bellies, go to the Serendipity Site and try out 1.1 Snapshots. And stay close for the never-ending story of the Serendipity 1.0 release in the next days. :-)

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.

In the past few days, several people asked for the possibility to quicksearch not only serendipity entries but also static pages and multilingual entries.

I was overwhelmed to see how easy adding support for both was possibly, and did so within the past 30 minutes. I guess this once again proves how flexible the plugin architecture of Serendipity is... :-)

To get quicksearch possibilites in the Static pages, just fetch version 3.30 of the staticpage plugin via Spartacus. It will be online within the next 48 hours. As soon as you've upgraded, the quicksearch will show the results of found staticpages below the usual search results. You can customize the output of course, via the plugin_staticpage_searchresults.tpl template file.

Support for multilingual entries has one caveat: It requires an updated serendipity core file, which I just committed to our SVN 1.1-alpha1 and 1.0 release branch: Patch. This allows version 2.0 of the multilingual plugin (also available on Spartacus the next 48 hours) to fully interoperate with the search facility. It will search all entries in the language you are currently reading in and display the entries completely interface with the usual search results.

Please let me know, if it works out fine for you. Note that fulltext search requires MySQL 4.0 and above - SQLite and postgresql emulate the search with a LIKE search. Expect some performance decrease in that matter.