Serendipity Forums

HI,
I hacked a trivial blog for http://www.spacezone.de/blog/ and I'm thinking about replacing it by something better if I could just find a blogging system that can do what my blog does:

news style I tend to write long articles, In future I want to integrate images, movies, etc. I don't want all this on the homepage (I think scrolling is pretty anoying). Therefore, whenever a list of entries is displayed, I want to show only a list of titles. This has several advantages: looks less bloggish, readers get to read what interests them most instead of most recent entries, search engines get it right without any magic

Ultrafast lightweight solution (or fast cache). Features are great, whatever feature you offer I'd like to try it, but first of all I want my writing available, reliably under any condition. If it doesn't serve as fast as apache serves static files, it simply won't do[/list]

simple interface ATM I publish by sftp uploading txt files. I certainly cannot be bothered with anything more sophisticated

I skim read the documentation and browsed the spartacus database without any solutions to my idea of a blog. (I admit this differs from what most people want.) I'm sure "news style" could be done by a template hiding entry bodies, but can it be done efficiently or would the server spend expensive CPU seconds to proccess things never to be displayed?

Certainly, a powerful system is never lightweight. The question is, will the "dynamic" caching compensate for this? Or would I need the new/experimental "simple cache" module?

From screenshots it seems you implemented a Web UI with WYSIWYG editing, which is not what I want. (Nice to have, though, in case my grandma wants to strat blogging *evil_grin*). There is also an API and a POP3 interface. Would it be hard to have a simple Web UI (text only, no scripts) or file upload editing. What kind of markup is used? Wiki-like?

I don't mean to critisize your work and I haven't looked at the code yet. I'm trying to find out, whether to joinig the s9y community or not. I have programming skills, though I don't like PHP very much.

Jan

Serendipity is almost infinitely powerful if you have the patience or the skill to make it do what you want it to do. May I suggest you download the v1.1 beta, and the Hemingway template, and use the default text editor (not wysiwyg, its plain text). Doing this will answer the bulk of your questions about Serendipity.

Sorry, I don't know much about the method of updating posts you describe, but check out the plugins, I believe it might be possible to update your blog via email.

Cheers

Carl

carl_galloway wrote: Sorry, I don't know much about the method of updating posts you describe, but check out the plugins, I believe it might be possible to update your blog via email.

ey carl do you mean sometyhing like this http://www.s9y.org/forums/viewtopic.php ... ight=email

Greetings
Arnold Nijboer

jk, I hope you find something that does everything you need. From what I see here, Serendipity is likely to be the closest thing you can find.

jk wrote:news style <snip> whenever a list of entries is displayed, I want to show only a list of titles.

Serendipity gives you three text fields for each entry: a title, a body, and an extended body. You could easily use the title as a title, the body as a byline, and the extended body as the click-to article.

If you want even more flexibility, keep in mind that Serendipity uses Smarty templating. Making the article lists display only titles is relatively trivial: just delete everything you don't want from the template that most closely matches your needs.

jk wrote:Ultrafast lightweight solution (or fast cache). Features are great, whatever feature you offer I'd like to try it, but first of all I want my writing available, reliably under any condition. If it doesn't serve as fast as apache serves static files, it simply won't do

Serendipity was built for one thing: speed. And security. Two things! Serendipity was built for two things: speed, security and flexibility. Three! Three things!

Seriously, Serendipity was built with speed in mind. The default installation comes with only the features required to run a blog as an online diary. Extra functionality is added with plugins or template changes.

Unfortunately, nothing serves as fast as static files. Serendipity does use a database to store its data, and that connection is probably the biggest limit to its speed. That, and the number of plugins you install. Two! Two biggest speed limits!

jk wrote:simple interface ATM I publish by sftp uploading txt files. I certainly cannot be bothered with anything more sophisticated

No need to bother with sftp. Serendipity gives you an entry screen where you just type the text you want. If you know HTML, you can enter it directly. If not, you can enable the WYSIWYG editor. And if you don't want any fancy HTML stuff, just type text. With the nl2br plugin installed (comes that way by default), text will be rendered in the blog almost exactly the same way it's displayed in the entry screen.

jk wrote:I skim read the documentation and browsed the spartacus database without any solutions to my idea of a blog. (I admit this differs from what most people want.) I'm sure "news style" could be done by a template hiding entry bodies, but can it be done efficiently or would the server spend expensive CPU seconds to proccess things never to be displayed?

On the contrary, removing instructions from the template will cause it to execute faster. Of course, you still have to hit the database, so it'll never reach static file speed. But you'll be hard pressed to find a faster solution to serving up dynamic content.

jk wrote:Certainly, a powerful system is never lightweight. The question is, will the "dynamic" caching compensate for this? Or would I need the new/experimental "simple cache" module?

Our caching will help. The power of Serendipity is implemented in a surprisingly light framework. You can weigh it down with loads of features, but by default it's as close to the minimum as possible while still allowing extendability and dynamic content.

jk wrote:From screenshots it seems you implemented a Web UI with WYSIWYG editing, which is not what I want. <snip> Would it be hard to have a simple Web UI (text only, no scripts) or file upload editing.

While a WYSIWYG editor is available, we encourage the use of the plain text editor. The GUI is simple web text entry boxes. (There might be a script there to handle multiple category choices; I can't really remember.) File upload editing could be implemented in a plugin, but isn't currently supported. (Then again, there are so many plugins now. I could've missed it.)

jk wrote:What kind of markup is used? Wiki-like?

HTML is the default markup, but we also support multiple markup plugins: the Serendipity Markup is the simplest (uses *bold*, _underline_, ^superscript^, @subscript@, #special characters#, and |colored|text|), but we also support bbCode, Wiki markup, and a few others. You've already found the SPARTACUS repository; look there for "markup" and you should find them.

jk wrote:I don't mean to critisize your work and I haven't looked at the code yet. I'm trying to find out, whether to joinig the s9y community or not. I have programming skills, though I don't like PHP very much.

We don't take it as criticism. We want to make Serendipity work as a blog for anybody. It's part of our job to help potential users understand what can and can't be done.

We'd love to have you as part of our community. (Shame about the PHP thing, but we'd also love to have contributions in JavaScript, templating, and translation. Even UI analysis is welcome.) We hope Serendipity can do your job, and if not, we hope you find something that can.

If you'd like to try out Serendipity (and other blogs) without even having to install, check out OpenSourceCMS. Here's a link to the Serendipity demo: http://www.opensourcecms.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=205