Serendipity 1.1.2 review

Posted by admin
in Blogging Platforms

Although Serendipity was first released about 2 years ago I didn’t really take notice of it until recently. And that’s too bad because I found it to be a very good blogging platform.

Serendipity requirements:

Serendipity learning curve and usability:

First things first: make it easy for yourself the first time you install Serendipity and choose the simple install method. If you don’t you’ll have a thousand and one options to configure and it can get really annoying. Other than that, Serendipity is pretty much a straight shooter.

It’s very easy to create entries and for writers that don’t like code there is a built in WYSIWYG editor. There are 2 text areas for each post: “Entry body” for the teaser and “Extended body” for the rest of the page; if you want to publish the whole post in the category view (e.g. main page) just put everything in the “Entry body” text area.

Creating categories is also easy, but it also gives you a peculiar option: you can select the read and write permissions by selecting the appropriate groups which have access. We’ll take a look at this again a bit later.

Although it seems to be a very good blogging platform it isn’t as refined as Wordpress: you can’t create static pages without installing a plugin first, you can’t upload files directly from the “New Entry” page, you can’t change the URL of the post and other little things like that.

Also, Serendipity themes are harder to create than those for Wordpress because there are more calls and possibly more template files to edit if you want to create a significantly different theme. The good thing is that there are a lot of very nice themes to download, so there shouldn’t be a problem in finding a suitable design for your blog.

Serendipity security:

It was a nice surprise to actually find a developed access control system in a blogging platform - it seems to be a lot like Drupal’s with the distinction that you can’t impose restrictions on activated plugins.

Note: at the bottom of group access configuration there is a line saying “If the option “Plugin ACL for usergroups” is enabled in the configuration, you can specify which usergroups are allowed to execute certain plugins/events.” The problem is that I couldn’t find that option or even an event or sidebar plugin that would enable it.

When creating categories you can assign read and write permissions to certain or all groups; a user can be assigned to one or more groups, thus making access control even more configurable - pretty good for a blogging system.

Serendipity plugins and applications:

Serendipity plugins are of 2 types: sidebar and event plugins.

Sidebar plugins are used to display in formation such as calendars and blog categories in, you guessed it, the sidebars. Some interesting sidebar plugins:

Event plugins are used to manipulate data in the backend by using the hooks that the system provides.

Serendipity documentation and support:

Although the documentation is well written there are some downsides: there isn’t enough of it and it isn’t categorized too well either. The documentation is distributed in 3 categories: installation, user and technical documentation and although this is enough for a blogging platform the docs are arranged erratically (at least from my point of view).

Anyway, if the documentation is not enough most likely the forums will. The Serendipity community is very active and helpful - just don’t be annoying and search the forums for the problems you might be having before you open a thread.

Serendipity sites: