A Deeper Look into Serendipity Blogging Platform

Dec 11, 2007 16:59 GMT  ·  By

Can you imagine that a full featured website can be deployed and managed directly from the web server almost visually, without using codes at all? The free blog platform and application developement framework, Serendipity, makes possible the visual web site development, being intended both for beginners and advanced webmasters. It provides unique features that cannot be found in another actual blogging platform distribution.

From the installation point of view, the Serendipity application is compatible with many web servers PHP enabled, such as IIS, Apache and Lighttpd. It can be deployed on various database types (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite) and support a custom installation mode. The application comes packed with customizable templates and plugins.

The extensions or templates can be installed or customized with a few mouse clicks from a very friendly and intuitive user interface in administration panel. For non-technical users, the automatic management system of plugins has many advantages, because the risk of code corruption does not exist, as compared to other blog platforms, when the extensions must be integrated manually. Previous users' experience shows that the Serendipity blog platform is compatible with any type of PHP installation, like the situation when PHP is installed as CGI.

Templates customization can be easily performed from the Theme/Style options section. You do not have to write a code in order to define the relative position, type and individual properties of various elements in the template, such as colors, posts position, date formatting and more. Practically, this blogging platform system is really constructed in the WEB 2.0 spirit. Besides search engine friendly URLs and multiple accesibility options provided, it leaves the blogger or content developer to concentrate on its publishing job, without being concerned about site structure (layout).

The updating process is automatical and if you want to import the content from other blog platforms, such as WordPress, Movable Type, Textpattern and more, this can be done in a few seconds. In conclusion, this blogging platform, even not so shinning from the template resource point of view, seems to be a new point of reference for blogging website structure organizing methods, as well as web standard compliance.