Serendipity Forums

Hi,

Just wondering (as I try to pick a PHP weblog tool to use instead of MT) whether anyone's done comparisons between Serendipity and WordPress (http://www.wordpress.org/)? Both look good, so I'd be interested in any feedback...

Thanks,
Peter

Yeah, I would be interested in that, too.

I am a complete newbie to PHP weblogs, so I have been checking out a few of the opensource systems available. I want to include weblogs as part of my own website, offering a blog service to selected individuals.

PHPWeblog: Couldn't get this to install.

Serendipity: Simplest installation yet. Nice interface. Allows you to "embed" the weblog content within your own webpages - which is exactly what I want. Lacks an "admin" user option - all "authors" seem to be able to mess with database configuration options etc: NOT good!

Wordpress: Slightly buggy installation. Default interface not as clean as Serendipity (but you can play around with these things in both systems). Best feature is that users can be given different levels of authority to edit/add entries. But this is not documented.

My conclusions:

My inclination is to go with Serendipity - but it would be VERY helpful if they could add the facility to nominate an "admin" user. This would allow one person to administer the site - configure database settings etc - while other users ("authors" in Serendipity) would just be able to add/edit categories and blog entries.

I prefer Serendipity.
I think it is more "power user" friendly (with regards to customizing via PHP) but the biggie for me is the lack of image support in WordPress. There are some hacks that revolve around gd but Serendipity's abilities with Imagemagick are far more impressive. I went through 5 or 6 different blog software packages before I settled on this one (although there is a unique one out there called Nanoblogger that is nothing more than a bash script that you run from the command line... not robust but still cool).

EDITED: I have to add that Wordpress now has rather good image support and that has me looking at it again. It has a large number of hacks and plugins and it has a very simple plugin setup coming as well (drop the plugin into a folder and you are done). If anyone has an opinion about the current Serendipity versus the current Wordpress (as of March 30) I would love to hear it.

I have both on my server now (among others). I find WordPress has photo uploader and makes thumbs, but that's it. Had to ftp to server to find thumb was there, and to include it in an article is a hassle, almost all manual.
Serendipity makes it easy, makes thumb and gives code etc. Only Movable Type has this that I know of, so Serendipity will take MT's place in my books. Just have to hack the large view to be a nicer window to fit photo.

Otherwise they seem a close match, but will know more after I play with Serendipity for a while, just installed it.