Blogging and being a Serendipity webmaster

At its most basic, s9y allows bloggers to write their posts, select a category for the post and click save which publishes the entry to their blog. Bloggers can select how many entries are displayed on the start page, from one to any number.


The image above demonstrates my favourite reason to use Serendipity, the plugin management screen - watch my video, managing Serendipity plugins to find out more. Check it out, one click tells you if any of your plugins need to be updated, and clicking install makes it happen. Not happy with a plugin on one side of your content? No problem, just move it to the other side, or hide it if it isn't needed. Want to add a plugin, simply click the install link and voila, a list of all plugins ready to download and use.

Categories are easily setup, and can be grouped to make it easy to find posts. When readers subscribe to the RSS feed of the blog, they can choose to subscribe to the complete feed or individual feeds for categories.

A major benefit of Serendipity when writing posts is the split nature of entries. In the administration screen two text boxes are available, the main entry, and then an extended entry that only gets displayed when the entry link is clicked.

Multiple authors are supported without installing any mods or plugins, meaning families, groups of friends, or projects are able to start a blog and everyone can be given their own login. Administrators can choose to give authors restricted rights or any rights considered necessary.

Bloggers whose language isn't English will also find that all core functions have been translated into many languages such as German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Dutch, Greek, Chinese, Bulgarian, Russian, Farsi, Finnish, Hungarian, Czech, Danish, Icelandic, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Arabic, and others.

Most users simply use Serendipity as their personal blog, however it is also possible to use it for business purposes, photoblog, or complete CMS.

By adding extra plugins, a basic muti-user blog is turned into a full featured website.

Business Use
Most users who want to use Serendipity for business use create a customised template, then add the static pages and contact form plugins. Tweaked properly these give the appearance of a standard HTML website but using the power of the Serendipity engine to make editing page a snap. Finca Retama is an example of this.

A publicly listed corporation, Vindon Healthcare PLC also use the Serendipity engine to manage their website, but in this instance they make extensive use of more than just static pages, they also use the blog part for news about their company, and interestingly, they use a sidebar widget to showcase their stock market listing.

Group Blog
A great looking theme for a social site located in Feudenheim, part of Mannheim in Germany. In addition to the blog, this site also sells merchandise and operates a forum for residents of Feudenheim to share gossip and info about sport, entertainment and parties.