I have been keeping an eye on the Serendipity weblog system and have very intrigued by some of it’s features. So I sent an email over to their main developers to find out what exactly they thought separates Serendipity from Wordpress. Here was the response that I got.
They first directed me to this page http://www.s9y.org/3.html which towards the bottom reads some information on the difference between the two. Here are the main points from that page:
- Easy plugin integration. No hacks, no problems during upgrades, good compatibility and a central plugin repository. Enhance flexibility without the need to touch any core files.
- BSD-licensed, Wordpress is only GPL. That means, you can use Serendipity to power your commercial sites without any issues. Of course, the Serendipity team still likes to get credited where credit is due.
- Supports a well-known and flexible templating system, the Smarty Framework. No PHP knowledge is required, and its a good established standard for templating.
- Cool plugins that behave well with the Core, like Multilingual Entries, an aggregator plugin and a flickr-like tagging infrastructure.
- Multiple DB support speaks for itself.
- Good PHP code style. Open and responsible release management, covering fast security updates.
Garvin Hicking of Serendipity was kind of enough to give me his own personal opinion on why someone might choose Serendipity over Wordpress:
- s9y easily supports shared installations to power multiple blogs from a central PEAR-like installation
- s9y supports a flexible but easy plugin API, no dirty PHP mockups required
- s9y uses Smarty templating, much easier to understand for easy modification than the somewhat spaghetti-like WP templates
- s9y has support for postgresql, sqlite and mysql and thus doesn’t restrict you on a single DB
- very important: s9y is BSD licensed. Use it commercially, no GPL bonds required
- the one-click spartacus plugin installation and plugin upgrade facility
- Plugins to allow “multi-blogs” on a single installation so that different categories can look like an own, independent blog - good for multi-user blogging.
- Official translations come with the distribution
- Very easy admin panel, not cluttered with dozens of sub-pages. Great ease-of-use and “keep it simple, stupid”. Many users confirm that s9y is very easy to handle, has good WYSIWYG support
- A great, skinnable and pluggable media database
- Not powered by people who once spammed google with invisible links on their homepage.
- Our backend and frontend is still usable with javascript-disabled browsers. Ajax is only optional and degrades flawlessly.
- Good security track record
- Development fit to the community: We are still flexible because we do not have as many diverging opinions like the massive WP community.
Wordpress is becoming more and more of a house hold name. And as more people use the Wordpress blogging system, more people will become bound by it’s limitations. That’s where knowing and understanding a blogging framework like Serendipity will be important! As you can see there are many things that Serendipity can do that Wordpress is not good at! I highly recommend you build your next blog using Serendipity so that you can start getting used to how it works and all of the things you can do with it. Don’t bind yourself to just Wordpress!
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