Serendipity Forums

I've been using open source cms's for a while. And I've looked at a lot. "Tried them all, " or just about have. But serendipity seems to be one of those systems that's slips just under the radar.

And I don't know why.

So tonight I downloaded the latest version and uploaded it to a test site and did a little write up http://landofmidnight.com/serendipity_blogging_system. It does seem to be a good, solid system. Just one that isn't used or talked about much.

What I'm asking is, how is Serendipity being promoted or represented outside the s9y.org domain? Anyone here visit opensourcecms.com? Any other board that discusses blogs? Anyone use Blog Explosion? (If they have the time for that...) (I can't recall seeing a serendipity site there yet.)

silverwing ~
no, I don't use serendipity. but I do support open source cms projects. And yes, it's late as I type this, and am very tired...

Well, wordpress has the edge that it's a fork of an already popular blog software, and wordpress came at a time that movabletype went commercial and so wordpress was announced as movabletype's successor by slashdot and the rest of the world. Since then wordpress has gained a nice and large community -- which has carried it since.

It's just hard competition, since wordpress seems like the obvious choice for many.

Serendipity is just now really maturing, 0.8 is going to be great, but still lacks some stuff that wordpress has (like custom permalinks).

To answer your question, I personally don't do much PR for Serendipity. Not because I don't like it (hehe), but because I don't have time and I feel my effort might be wasted against the mighty Wordpress.

BTW. I signed up at Blog Explosion (never heard of it before) with you as ref.

About the installation: You really only need to chmod two directories, wordpress requires the same (IIRC)

You can even do "chmod -R 0777 *" if you don't like security

I really don't like Wordpress' installer though

Hi silverwing!

First off, thanks for your support in this area. By the release of our 0.7 version we posted announcement to quite a few sites (see http://www.s9y.org/54.html for a list of URLs). However response from those sites was very low, and I honestly don't know why.

Serendipity seems to be kown inside a closer circle of PHP developers, but is not very well kown to the 'common user'. I do feel that we're up to par with all other blogging engines. Of course there are areas were we're lacking (templates and users, mainly) but also other where we're supperior (plugin API, smarty templating, i18n, shared installation, ...).

We are also very few active developers, and that's what keeps us from doing more promotion work. I am already quite active on the forums and mailinglist, and my limited time doesn't allow me to do much more work. I would love to see Serendipity promoted, and will try to help as good as possible.

If you happen to have any more specific suggestions, we will gladly take them. If you have questions about Serendipity, also just go ahead and ask them.

Regards,
Garvin

Hi Tom and Garvin. Thanks for your replies.

(I've got some sleep so I'm probably a little more coherant now!)

In my highly opinionated... er, opinion, you all are doing everything right regarding promoting Serendipity on s9y.org. (I can find what I need when I need it.)

I do believe that someone (regular user) should visit opensourcecms.com and respond when someone request something that serendipity could be used. (But not harp on it. There are some people there that when I see thier name, I know what they're going to say, what system they'll recommend - for everyone, everything - and it drives me batty.)

I went to see if anyone was saying anything about serendipity on http://www.cmsmatrix.org/ and noticed that it wasn't listed. Might be a good idea (Wordpress, Nucleus/BlogCMS are listed.)

If I can think of anything else, I'll let you know.

silverwing

I've just added s9y to cmsmatrix.org