Serendipity Weblog System

I see that the Serendipity team have released version 0.8 of their blogging system which is called the Serendipity Weblog System.  The feature list is impressive, has anyone tried this software out?  If so, any thoughts in how it rates compared to something like WordPress?  Here are some of the features:

• Simple. Designed for users of all technical levels.

• Robust Editing Interface. Featuring an
  (optional) WSYISWG editor, easily browsable image manager, extended
  entry support, entries statistics and a host of other features.

• Threaded comments, Nested categories and posting to multiple categories are supported.

• Anti-Spam / Comment moderation. Through use of
  a (bundled) plugin you can enable CAPTCHAs, SURBL-blacklisting,
  automatted comment moderation based on the content of a comment. Highly
  configurable.

• Support for XML-RPC Editing. Support for both the Movable Type? and Blogger XML-RPC APIs.

• Dynamic. You don’t need to constantly wait
  while your weblogging system regenerates pages. Caching is dynamically
  managed, so you don’t need to worry about it when publishing your
  weblog. Optional advanced URL rewriting rules are available.

• Trackback and Pingback. Serendipity can
  accept, send and autodiscover trackbacks and pingbacks. Of course you
  can also ping common weblog services like technorati, blo.gs, blogger,
  yahoo and blogg.de.

• Plugins. A robust plugin system allows you to
  modify Serendipity without digging through the core source code.
  Sidebar plugins allow easy customization of your blog with dozens of
  features. Event plugins are a powerful method of method callbacks,
  which can hook in into any place in s9y to make it one of the most
  flexible APIs available.

• Multiple Databases. Serendipity supports MySQL(i), PostgreSQL and SQLlite database backends.

• Multiple Users. Multiple users can edit and administrate the weblog.

• Internationalized. Serendipity is available in English, German, Danish, French and many more, and adding new translations is a snap.

• Skinable. Templates can easily be added by the
  magic of CSS. Several templates are included by default. Even visitors
  of your blog are able to change the layout on-the-fly if you use the
  template-dropdown plugin. Our Development Version (0.8) contains full
  SMARTY-Templating support for even more flexibility.

• Open Source. Serendipity is licensed under the BSD License.

• Standards Compliant. Serendipity supports
  XHTML 1.1, CSS 2.0, RSS 0.93, 1.0, and 2.0, Atom 0.3. Supports
  conditional GET for caching RSS feeds on the client-side.

• Shared library. You can use Serendipity as a
  single installation to serve multiple and independent weblogs, but only
  maintaining a single codebase.

• Easy Upgrading. An easy and automatic upgrader helps you in the process of upgrading between Serendipity versions (starting with version 0.5).

• Flexible Input/Output. Choose between HTML, Textile, Wiki and/or BBCode markup. For both users and your editors!

• PHP-powered to fulfill the needs of ever-growing PHP-enabled websites and easy integration with support of embedding Serendipity into your webpage.

I believe that free blogging systems like Serendipity and WordPress represent the future of blogging.  I don’t really see paid systems every being as popular as the free stuff.  That isn’t anything surprising, really.

(via The Blog Herald)