Serendipity Forums

Hello,

I am coder / webmaster / professional printer from Finland.

Just installed newest (downloaded) beta and everything went smoothly, I even tested Hemmingway template and it was breeze to set up (hey, been coding my own php / perl / c / pascal / MySQL etc. for years), especially compared to another blogs/cms I've used (phpnuke, postnuke, Blog:CMS, Nucleus, Wordpress, Jaws, Geeklog).

Also plugin selection is nice, infact I was prepared to code my own rating system (no need), conversion utility (no need, or perhaps I make one from Blog:CMS with reviews and comments, done that previously), mobilephone / pop3 posting utility (no need, but done one for Blog:CMS with mms support but those UTF-16 with base64 packings are nasty), cronjob manager (even that was in pluins, wow!).

Now some ajax enchantments (beside the lightbox) are needed but whatever, they are done in breeze

Current blog that would be converted to serendipity (hopefully before christmas):
http://www.nominaali.com
And some sample that could be final look-a-like:
http://www.nominaali.com/~ihra/rico/nomisko.html
(and yeah, it is me in pics)

Thanks for the great product.

Best parts: template system, object-based plugins, no overhead (have you seen what wordpress does? Or phpnuke?), good support.

Welcome to the Serendipity community!

I like the look of both those blogs. Well-differentiated, smooth, round corners. Very nice.

Now some ajax enchantments (beside the lightbox) are needed but whatever, they are done in breeze :)

Oh, could we ever use your help.

Thanks for the kind words!

Some more info after two days of s9y usage:

- basic installation: few minutes and it was online with "everything". Really smooth and fast. Perhaps MySQL database could be created "on the fly" with install script but then again, I am against it (but some users might like it).
- Spartacus is perhaps THE nicest feature of the s9y Along with the good selection of plugins (although some are in "not so obvious" places). Perhaps Spartacus should be installed by default too, it took me 5 minutes to put it on, after I found what I was looking for at s9y.org
- pop3fetcher worked just the way I coded another plugin like p3f Now that gmail works with n70 I can restrict posting to one client / address (no need to mess with mms (which can contain operator messages and UTF-16 with base64 etc)).
- I did like bex01 skin so much I used it "straight out of the box". Some elements will be modified of course but really impressive!
- tag clouds WITH categories is a bless, because I can use either or both, there is no restrictions (and I have few thousand articles which could be pain to update at once to contain tags). Worked also really good and managing the "leafs" is a blessing
- converting from nucleus to s9y went fine, I just have to put images that were popupped to lighbox/greybox compatible and also see if rounded corners javascript will be working.

There is no bugs that I can see and another thing is pretty good security (even that I myself don't like RPC-services, they are so easy to hack). Nucleus required about 10-20 hours worth of coding to fill out the security holes (mostly rpc holes and also php5 compatibility problems).

So currently not many problems and test site is already running (even that I was drunk during the installation )

Hi ihra!

Great to read your report, that was exactly what we hoped for, when others inspect Serendipity: That they find something inspiring and something they are able to work with.

- Spartacus is perhaps THE nicest feature of the s9y Along with the good selection of plugins (although some are in "not so obvious" places). Perhaps Spartacus should be installed by default too, it took me 5 minutes to put it on, after I found what I was looking for at s9y.org

Sadly we still have some issues with Spartacus, mainly on hosts that are firewalled, or when our mirrors have connection problems. We use the PEAR_HTTP Request class, which sometimes spews weird connection messages at us, and we haven't yet figured out how to deal with them properly.

Once Spartacus is perfectly firewall aware, we will definitely make it a standard plugin. Until then, we try to make the users install it by themselves, so that they first might be able to check if their hosts are restricted.

There is no bugs that I can see and another thing is pretty good security (even that I myself don't like RPC-services, they are so easy to hack). Nucleus required about 10-20 hours worth of coding to fill out the security holes (mostly rpc holes and also php5 compatibility problems).

Yes, we constantly try to make our security top notch; you'll also find session tokens in there which aid against XSRF, that many blog applications like WP don't do yet.

So currently not many problems and test site is already running (even that I was drunk during the installation )

Like Judebert already indicated - we would feel very glad if you will have some time in the future to check into the serendipity development, maybe want to contribute plugins or themes. We are a very open community, as you might also see from our discussion forums here. All voices will be heard.

Have fun using Serendipity and best regards,
Garvin