Serendipity Forums

Hi guys. I'm new here XD.

So, I'm planning to change my CMS to Serendipity, but first, I need a few questions answered regarding its capabilities. You see, I have been using Fusion News for around 2 years now, but development has been excruciatingly slow with only one person developing it. I had to ask that one person for so many custom code modifications before I could get it looking like this.

I searched around and found Serendipity to be actively in development, looking easy enough to use and with a big community, so I thought this one was a good option.

Before I dive in though, I was wondering if it could do the following?

- This is a long shot, but not necessarily important to me, but do you guys think there may be someway to import my Fusion News entries and comments to Serendipity? Currently, FN just stores the news entries with their comments in a .php file (there's this directory full of news.newsnumber.php files, i.e. news.101.php).
- ^If it can't do the above, will Serendipity allow having the FN entries still online in my site, and just have Serendipity above it? (i.e. Serendipity will start posting above the last FN post, and pretty much just... bury it, or something). Again, not that important since I can just put this in an archive of sorts.
- So I checked and there's an avatar plugin for comments that supports a bunch of avatars, but does it allow Avatar URLs? What I mean is, can there be an additional field in the comments forms wherein the user can just post a URL of the icon he/she wants to use? i.e. tinypic.com/dfghj.jpg
- Can news be integrated (by tags) in a page other than the homepage? You see, my site is a gaming site, so I was planning to have news related to it showing up in that particular game's subpage.
- You see, I used to design and write the other parts of my site with nothing but just Notepad and Photoshop. Is Serendipity like Wordpress where you have to place parts of the layout in files/pieces, or can it just be integrated? Or specifically, would it be hard to integrate my layout into Serendipity? Will it require a lot of code? Thanks.
- Can Trackbacks be disabled?

I guess that's pretty much it for now. I'm sorry if I didn't just consult the search option of the forum. In fact, I actually did, but somehow I think I was putting the wrong words in :/.

Hi!

Welcome!

Let's see if I can answer a few things:

- This is a long shot, but not necessarily important to me, but do you guys think there may be someway to import my Fusion News entries and comments to Serendipity? Currently, FN just stores the news entries with their comments in a .php file (there's this directory full of news.newsnumber.php files, i.e. news.101.php).

S9y has a lot of importers, but they all stem from database operations. Parsing, loading and converting entries from a foreign system would need quite a different approach, so we can't just adapt some database table names and all would be fine.

There are not many users importing from Fusion News, so I personally don't have the time to spend on an importer. If you know some PHP, you could though write an importer basing on the current ones?

- ^If it can't do the above, will Serendipity allow having the FN entries still online in my site, and just have Serendipity above it? (i.e. Serendipity will start posting above the last FN post, and pretty much just... bury it, or something). Again, not that important since I can just put this in an archive of sorts.

That wouldn't really be feasible, because the index.php and other files would then be inside the same directory, and that wouldn't really work. So you'd really need to use another URL/directory for your old blog, and put s9y somewhere else.

- So I checked and there's an avatar plugin for comments that supports a bunch of avatars, but does it allow Avatar URLs? What I mean is, can there be an additional field in the comments forms wherein the user can just post a URL of the icon he/she wants to use? i.e. tinypic.com/dfghj.jpg

that's not really how the avatar systems work, since it would also easily allow for exploiting a blog with foreign images. The avatar plugin actually works by fetching favicons from user's email adresses or homepage urls, with service integrated like gravatar.com. That's the better route to take.

- Can news be integrated (by tags) in a page other than the homepage? You see, my site is a gaming site, so I was planning to have news related to it showing up in that particular game's subpage.

Short answer: Yes
Long answer: You'd have to do some "inclusion" coding, either by using the javascript inclusion (serendipity_event_backend from spartacus) or by including the s9y API on a PHP page and then accessing serendipity_fetchPrintEntries().

Another (maybe the best) way is to base it on the RSS-Feeds. There are per-Tag RSS-Feeds, so you could implement those in foreign pages.

- You see, I used to design and write the other parts of my site with nothing but just Notepad and Photoshop. Is Serendipity like Wordpress where you have to place parts of the layout in files/pieces, or can it just be integrated? Or specifically, would it be hard to integrate my layout into Serendipity? Will it require a lot of code? Thanks.

Yes, s9y is like wordpress in that regard - we have (Smarty) template files, that are really just HTML with some basic Smarty Syntax, so that it is easier to understand than PHP code, but still as powerful.

so if you're good with HTML/CSS/JS, you should have no problem adapting your layout into the serendipity template files (usually only index.tpl, style.css and entries.tpl)

- Can Trackbacks be disabled?

Yes, we have a FAQ on this on s9y.org

HTH,
Garvin

S9y has a lot of importers, but they all stem from database operations. Parsing, loading and converting entries from a foreign system would need quite a different approach, so we can't just adapt some database table names and all would be fine.

There are not many users importing from Fusion News, so I personally don't have the time to spend on an importer. If you know some PHP, you could though write an importer basing on the current ones?

I don't really know much PHP, so I guess that's out of the question XD;;; And now that I think about it, I sort of can't change the URLs for those entries since they're linked to my site's FB/Twitter/Google Plus, as well as some other gaming sites...

That wouldn't really be feasible, because the index.php and other files would then be inside the same directory, and that wouldn't really work. So you'd really need to use another URL/directory for your old blog, and put s9y somewhere else.

Yes, s9y is like wordpress in that regard - we have (Smarty) template files, that are really just HTML with some basic Smarty Syntax, so that it is easier to understand than PHP code, but still as powerful.

so if you're good with HTML/CSS/JS, you should have no problem adapting your layout into the serendipity template files (usually only index.tpl, style.css and entries.tpl)

Hrmm, about this. You see, Fusion News just works by having a PHP include code in the index.php (or any .php page, for that matter). The site I linked to earlier was basically a site I coded and designed myself using Notepad and Photoshop, and I just put the include code in there somewhere. Can't I just put the include code of FN in one of the Smarty template files, and sort of make Serendipity eventually bury it...?

Short answer: Yes
Long answer: You'd have to do some "inclusion" coding, either by using the javascript inclusion (serendipity_event_backend from spartacus) or by including the s9y API on a PHP page and then accessing serendipity_fetchPrintEntries().

Another (maybe the best) way is to base it on the RSS-Feeds. There are per-Tag RSS-Feeds, so you could implement those in foreign pages.

Ah, I can use the RSS then.

that's not really how the avatar systems work, since it would also easily allow for exploiting a blog with foreign images. The avatar plugin actually works by fetching favicons from user's email adresses or homepage urls, with service integrated like gravatar.com. That's the better route to take.

Oh, I see. Can there be a way to implement this, though? It was a request of my site visitors, you see (we're implementing something like this using our shoutbox/chatbox). What they almost always have is just a tinypic/photobucket URL to their avatar.

Thank you very much