I started this site using WordPress as it was the easiest tool to start with that I knew of. Yesterday I found a new script Serendipity that is about 100% better than WP and came from the recommendation of the creator of PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf who uses it on his toys page. After about an hour of playing with the program I was convinced that I had to use it.
I’ve spent the last 24 hours or so working with Serendipity, s9y for
short and I am always finding new features that amaze me. One of the
neatest features is how its plug-in database works, its online. Unlike
many plug-in and template systems this allows you to single click
download and install items. This is so simple it is just neat.
The template system is built on Smarty
which allows for very simple templates that can do advanced stuff. I
was able to take the default layout and turn it into this one in just a
little bit of time. It is the neatest and easiest template systems I have seen to date, especially in an open source project.
Like many systems of this sort it has plug-ins that allow to further
customize the site. They have a decent size database full of scripts
and also have decent documentation for creating your own ones. I have
yet to sit down a write my own plug-in, but I have looked at the code
in many of them and it is very clean and easy to read. I will be
writing my own plug-ins in the future and will probably write more
about this in the future.
The conversion from WP to S7Y was fairly simple. The only issue I had
was that the user you use to do the conversion needs to have
permissions on both of the databases. After giving the user full access
to both databases the conversion was very simple. There is also an
issue with images just linking from their old positions rather than
importing into the new script. I really did not expect this to be
automated though. I am still working on getting all of the images going
in this new version.
I am currently very happy with Serendipity and I believe that I will be
using it for a long time. If any of the developers read this I would
like to say thank you and keep up the great work.
