Serendipity Forums

Hi all. This is my first post here.

I'm new to the world of blogging and was referred to S9y for various reasons. It looks great, but before I get into it I had a few questions. I was about to sign up to the host I had my eye on, PowWeb. This looks to be a well featured host, but I've heard the uptime could be better; does anyone have any recommendations, with regards to S9y.

I use a Mac running Tiger. Basically, are there any compatibility issues I should be worried about (i.e. using Apple Safari).

Lastly, I know HTML back to front and have been working for a few days on a webpage design, should I throw this out the window or can I still use it alongside the workings of S9y? Obviously I will be choosing to edit my pages rather than use WYSWIG; are there any limitations at all when using this blogging tool as to how your page can look?

Thanks a lot for your time guys, I really appreciate it and look forward to being an active user here.

Hi WickEd, welcome,

I can't help you with hosting, but several of our active users (and template designers) are mac users so no compatibility issues apart from anything browser specific and this affects all webpages not just serendipity.

Can you use your existing template? I don't see why not, serendipity has special code that is used within the template files but most of the output can be manipulated quite a lot, in fact I would say Serendipity could be easier for html experts to work with because smarty is such an easy framework to learn, whereas other CMS/blog engines require knowledge of php, asp, ror etc. Also our community is pretty friendly, and if you get stuck we're always happy to help.

Cheers

Carl

And I'm a Linux user, so I can't say much about the Mac stuff; but I do use PowWeb and I've been writing HTML since Mosaic. (Heck, I compiled one of the first iterations of Mosaic for the IBM AIX machines at work. )

PowWeb has been an excellent provider for me. They had some early downtime problems, but these seem to have been resolved; my host has never been down -- that I know of -- during my entire four-year stay there. I think the SQL access is a little slow, but they're changing their hosting, so perhaps it will improve. They've even got their own Serendipity installer.

Your existing HTML design will be easy to integrate with Serendipity. It uses the Smarty template engine, as Carl pointed out; that's only one step removed from HTML anyway. Basically, you use special Smarty stuff to loop over entries and insert pieces of the page among your HTML. Very slick.

I use the non-WYWSWIG editor, too. While you can screw things up, you get complete control. In particular, be careful about the other markup plugins you install: NL2BR changes newlines to breaks, and therefore inserts <br/> tags all over your HTML. Other markup plugins apply their own transformations. Just make sure you disable them, or don't install them, and your HTML will appear exactly as you expect.