Serendipity

Serendipity is a PHP-based weblog engine that provides a lightweight, extensible platform for running blogs and small CMS-style sites. It offers a plugin-driven architecture and theme system to extend functionality and customize presentation while supporting multiple database backends.

Key Features

• Plugin architecture with a backend plugin manager for installing and configuring extensions
• Theme system with support for custom themes and template-driven layouts
• Media library for uploading and embedding images, videos, and other files
• Built-in editor for creating posts plus support for markup plugins (Markdown, Textile)
• Integrated anti-spam measures and comment handling (trackbacks/pingbacks supported)
• Supports MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL and SQLite as storage backends
• Server-side PHP stack designed to run on typical LAMP-style hosting (PHP 8+ recommended)

Use Cases

• Personal or hobbyist blogs that need a simple, extensible publishing platform
• Small business or project sites that require blog/news functionality with custom themes
• Multi-author blogs or lightweight CMS workflows using plugins for pages and content types

Limitations and Considerations

• Primarily designed as a traditional PHP-rendered blog engine, not a headless CMS or modern SPA framework
• Plugin ecosystem and community are smaller than larger projects, so some integrations may be limited or require manual maintenance
• Requires a PHP hosting environment and typical LAMP-style components; advanced hosting stacks may need extra configuration

Serendipity is suited for users who want a dependable, PHP-native blogging engine with extensibility through plugins and themes. It balances simplicity for casual bloggers with enough flexibility for professional and multi-author sites.