Serendipity Forums

Hi

After a long search Serendipity is top of my shortlist for my personal website.

Main features:
Blog with categories (nestable).
Image Gallery with sub galleries (I dont need fancy features, just ability to organise them properly)
and basic static pages.

Without have to resort to code hacking.
Not because I dislike coding, but it shows weak system design.

Shockingly its so hard to find a CMS or Blog system that can do these 3 features intergated and neatly, for most blogs either the static pages or image gallerys are hacked into templates or bolted on, or the CMSes have either weak blog features or no integrated gallery. (And thats after weeding out the blogs and CMSes that have either dire templating, modularity or just plain hard to use).

Anyways so far Serendipity is closest to what I need (even has a nice experimental cache to offload my poor memory starved mysql db). From my initial play with it the only things lacking that I would like (but not need) are searching of user galleries (just titles would be fine) and ability to comment user galleries (gallery as a whole or individual pictures).

Not the end of the world if these feature ideas are totally impossible, but I thought I would ask.

Would be happy to put the coding time into writting these features if possible and I do end up choosing Serendipity.

Cheers, Nick.

Glad to hear you like Serendipity!

And on to your questions...
Usergallery searching: Hmm... I've never thought of this, mainly because there has never been enough data to really search. I will take a look at it.

Would a section at the end of the search containing possible image hits work (the way static pages return now)?

Usergallery comments: Ok, which style of comments do you mean? If you mean you want the ability for users to leave comments about pictures, that is a little tricky to do with the plugin. If you mean being able to title and comment a picture when it is uploaded, then you are in luck! Serendipity 1.1 supports this with a brand new shiny media library.

Unfortunately, I haven't gotten around to working on the usergallery plugin yet, so I'm not sure when I will get an updated plugin out. I really had not planned on releasing an updated plugin until 1.1 hits a beta point.

But if anyone out there has the time to go at it, they are welcome to go for it. (Otherwise I might be able to start working on it in a week or two, especially since Harald pointed out some new things I need to work on over here: http://www.s9y.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=6401)

Searching, the way you mentioned would be fine, Im not too bothered about individual image hits, titles of gallerys and sub gallerys would be fine.

I forgot to mention, I love tagging, would be great to tag static pages and galleries images - will the new media manager do this (and set default tag for each directory to be added to each image) ?

Comments. Yes I mean for user to leave comments, but its not a big problem, as I can simple create an entry annoucing each gallery I create which people can in turn comment on.

Hi Nick!

Just dropping in to reply to:

I forgot to mention, I love tagging, would be great to tag static pages and galleries images - will the new media manager do this (and set default tag for each directory to be added to each image) ?

The 1.1 media manager supports keywords as well as any other "custom fields", where you can also search by. This is implemented into the internal media manager, so plugins yet have to make use of it.

Hope you enjoy Serendipity

Best regards,
Garvin