I downloaded Serendipity 1.0beta2 over the weekend and started trying it out.

My initial thought after setting it up was: *wow*. It really is incredibly easy to set up. No hand-editing of config files. No weird menus or scattering things all about. The whole system speaks of elegance and good coding practices. Except the fact that it ships some files world-writable in the tarball.

As I looked at it some more, I noticed a few problems, though. I submitted bugs or feature requests to the project as appropriate, and am including links to them here:

• No option to display the number of reads for each story. SF 1459385
• No tracking of HTTP referers (or, at least, no integrated interface for viewing them). SF 1459389
• Spartacus, the tool to automatically download and install new plugins over the Web, was broken. The netmirror.org site was unresponsive and the s9y.org site gave a 404 to it. SF 1459370
• It doesn’t seem to offer an RSS feed for the comments on individual posts. SF 1459391
• There’s no RSS feed for individual categories. SF 1167982
• Captcha support is built-in, but seems broken out of the box. (It rejected every attempt to post). SF 1459374

Despite these problems, this looks like a very strong contender. And I was using a beta.

Next up for testing: WordPress.