While working on supersized.org, I figured I would need a special default template for supersized s9y installations. Then I noticed that most of s9y's templates are using table based layouts... Ugh!!!

So I sat down and created a CSS only smarty template (with no tables or images in the HTML), nice and easy, until I saw results I liked. It looked a little boring though: There were no icons. The icons you see in the screenshot are my first self-made icons. I created them pixel by pixel with the zoom at 1600%. Ha!

How do you like this template? Does it look cool or does it suck? What would you change?

The Serendipity team is happy to announce the immediate availability of Serendipity 0.7.

Serendipity is a PHP-powered weblog application, aiming at giving you an easy way to maintain your own individual diary or personal homepage.

The development of Serendipity is based upon offering a flexible, expandible and easy-to-use framework. We use a sophisticated Plugin architecture, affecting both the appearance of your blog and its core features. It ships with a variety of plugins (31 bundled with the distribution) to plug-and-play with your blog.

Wordpress/Textpattern users might favor Serendipity because of its vast functionality and flexible expandability without the hassle to edit core files. Moveable-Type users might appreciate the fact of our BSD-style licensing and the speed and functionality of dynamically generated pages.

Serendipity offers all of the following features and many more:

Want to put stuff into the HTML head of your s9y installation? I patched HTML nugget plugin, to make it a head nugget. I think it's still named html nugget, but I don't know exactly. It's here.

Butt-ugly, eh? :)

Garvin has bundled beta4 of the upcoming 0.7 release that is waiting for you to download. Here's what changed:

Bugfixes:

• Fixed two mod_rewrite rules to properly redirect to categories/archives pages without falling back to apache's Errorhandling
  
• Some SQL fixes for postgreSQL and SQLite for the entries pagination footer, index key creation and statistics plugin
  

New features:

• RSS Import: New option 'full body only', so that imported RSS contents can be forced to only show up in the full body.
• Extend filter in commment moderation to allow the user to select which types of comments he wants displayed "All", "Only approved", "Need approval".
• Upgraded Spam Protector event plugin. Optionally:
  • Use Captchas - images with string sequences which a user has to enter before his comment is accepted.
  • Restrict captchas to entries older than X days.
  • Auto-moderate comments to entries older than X days.
  • Auto-moderate comments depending on their amount of contained links.
  • Reject comments depending on their amount of contained links.
  • Able to log rejected/moderated comments to a plaintext file.
  • Fallback method for non-gdlib-enabled hosts.

Feel like being fresh? Grab a copy!

Evan Nemerson has created a wordpress import patch for s9y that lets you drop wordpress and move to s9y without a hazzle. He's saying that it "allows importation of WordPress users, categories, entries, and comments". Now isn't that tight?

Thanks, Evan!