Blogging

A new version of the blogging application Serendipity is now at the beta stage, Serendipity 1.2 Beta 1.  The most significant changes in this new version of Serendipity is the authentication and session scheme for easier plug-in interaction.  Also support for theming/template authoring has been improved using Smartyfield.

The following is a list of some of the new enhancements according to the Serendipity 1.2-beta1 announcement since Serendipity 1.1:

• Templates for Backend (Entry Editor, Master Template) via Smarty
• New session/login system
• Improved database support for SQLite3 and PDO::Postgresql
• IPv6 support

So you want to write a successful blog?  Or perhaps just have a successful Website that people actually visit?  Lorelle reminds us just how to make your blog of interest to others.

I have many friends raised within countries which still play by these rules, where you are and do what your father or mother did, and maybe your grandparents before you, not what you want to do. Where apprenticeship programs are the only way into a trade. Where you are tested and found competent for a specific job, not because your heart leads the way.

"If you think you need filtering technologies to be sure your employees aren't damaging your reputation, that's a management problem, not a technology one.  If employees can't be trusted, technology is the least of your problems."

- Tim Bray, Director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems Inc., "Keeping Secrets in a WikiBlogTubeSpace World", ComputerWorld, March 19, 2007

At first I was skeptical that this article was without bias regarding Wordpress.com since it was Matt Mullenweg's own blog that referred me to the story.  I was pleased to discover that the author, Jonathan Bailey, helped erased my skepticism in his well written article, Wordpress.com is Virtually Spam Free.  The first two paragraphs should get you interested in reading more.

This excerpt reminds me of long debates I had in my meteorology days over which is sunnier, "partly cloudy" or "partly sunny"?  I like Movable Type's answer to the long standing IT question...can just a blog be a full CMS?

There are often debates about this sort of thing — if you’re using a tool like Movable Type, which is platform designed for blogging, but it’s being used as a general content management system, is the output still a blog? Our answer: Who cares?

Last week, Linux.com posted an article titled, Drupal vs. WordPress - Which is better for blogging?

Serendipity 1.1.1 was released to fix a few bugs. This is the first update to Serendipity 1.1 since it was first released at the end of 2006. The 1.1.1 update does not include any security fixes so you may not even need to update unless you've experienced one of these bugs:

• Windows IIS server cookie/session authentication problem when not running via HTTPS
• Change execution order of trackbacks to properly send them when a failure occurs
• Display proper plugin permissionship restrictions when the admin user is not part of the group that is restricted
• Fixed a bug that some plugins were not able to properly execute in the entry detail view

In a blog post at the Serendipity site, Garvin also commented on the feature improvements that can be expected for Serendipity 1.2. Users of the weblog application can expect the following in Serendipity 1.2 once it is released :

• Improvements on the authentication/plugin API sequence to better support future plugins like OpenID.

Are you tired of all the Drupal and WordPress posts we've been doing lately here at CMS Report? Not my fault...I only report the CMS news! The fact is that among the open source CMS that I post about...both Drupal and WordPress have been churning out a lot since the New Year started. The release of Wordpress 2.0.7 is just a good example as any.

"Blogging isn't a publishing strategy; it is a community strategy."

-Kevin Anderson, "Blogging isn't a publishing strategy", Corante, Nov 12, 2006

Nucleus version 3.24 has been released:

This release fixes a recently discovered cross site scripting issue. While there are no new features in this release, upgrading is recommended when your Nucleus installation has the "Allow Visitors to Create a Member Account" option enabled.

Click here for the original post at nucleuscms.org as well as download links.