Mallow Camera Club are holding an exhibition of photographs in Mallow Town Library for charity for the next three weeks and fellow blogger, photo blogger and WordPress lead developer, Donncha O’Caoimh will have one of his photos in the exhibition for sale – well done Donncha.
Head along if you get a chance, it is for a good cause.
WordPress was updated to 2.1.2 overnight after it was found that one of their download servers was compromised and malicious code introduced into version 2.1.1 to include code that would allow for remote PHP execution!
From the WordPress site:
What You Can Do to Help
If your blog is running 2.1.1, please upgrade immediately and do a full overwrite of your old files, especially those in wp-includes. Check out your friends blogs and if any of them are running 2.1.1 drop them a note and, if you can, pitch in and help them with the upgrade.
If you are a web host or network administrator, block access to “theme.php†and “feed.phpâ€, and any query string with “ix=†or “iz=†in it. If you’re a customer at a web host, you may want to send them a note to let them know about this release and the above information.
This only affects you if you are hosting your own copy of WordPress and it is version 2.1.1. If you are on any other version or are on WordPress.com then you can safely ignore this.
WordPress 2.1 has be updated to 2.1.1
The update is a low to medium priority update and:
includes about 30 bug fixes, mostly minor things around encoding, XML-RPC, the object cache, and HTML code.
This is a list of the files changed from 2.1 to 2.1.1:
* wp-includes/post-template.php
* wp-includes/cache.php
* wp-includes/formatting.php
* wp-includes/category.php
* wp-includes/post.php
* wp-includes/version.php
* wp-includes/js/scriptaculous/wp-scriptaculous.js
* wp-includes/js/tinymce/tiny_mce_config.php
* wp-includes/js/tinymce/wp-mce-help.php
* wp-includes/js/tinymce/tiny_mce_gzip.php
* wp-includes/capabilities.php
* wp-includes/cron.php
* wp-includes/functions.php
* wp-includes/bookmark-template.php
* xmlrpc.php
* wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
* wp-admin/admin-functions.php
* wp-admin/custom-header.php
* wp-admin/options-general.php
* wp-admin/edit.php
* wp-admin/index-extra.php
* wp-admin/options-reading.php
It would be irresponsible of me to recommend that you simply update those files. Instead I’ll recommend that you read the upgrade instructions.
Looks like Twenty Major has moved over to WordPress as his blogging platform.
Good move Twenty! Wonder what Donncha thinks?
One thing though – on Blogspot (Twenty’s old blog host) wouldn’t it be easier for Twenty to maintain his anonymity?
Although I see the crafty old bugger has gone through Domains by Proxy!
Akismet is the default anti-spam plugin which comes with WordPress and it has saved me from literally hundreds of thousnads of comment spam messages (124,200 last time I looked).
A new version (Akismet 2.0) was released the same time as WordPress 2.1’s release so it’s release was kind of drowned out in the hoopla.
To my mind, the most significant change in Akismet 2.0 is the ability to tell Akismet to automatically delete any comments on posts over a month old.
As Matt himself said:
When I was doing some research into false positives I found an interesting statistic: the overwhelming majority (more that 99.99%) of false positives (which is when Akismet marks someone as spam wrongly) occur on new posts. Which makes sense because most real comments happen on new entries.
Typically I used to get >500 comments per day flagged by Akismet. There was no way i could go through those looking for genuine comments accidentally flagged as spam by Akismet.
Today though, having configured Akismet to dump all suspected spam comments on posts over a month old, I now only have to check 20-30 comments per day.
And just this morning, I rescued two comments which had accidentally been marked as spam by Akismet.
Well done to the guys in Automattic again. I love Akismet.
I upgraded to WordPress 2.1 this morning and the whole process was remarkably painless.
The entire process took about ten minutes – the majority of that time was spent on backing up the previous version and FTP’ing the new files into place.
Of course, if you are a client of mine and I maintain your blogs, it actually took waaaaaaaaaaaay longer. Hours of research, planning, etc. were involved and if you need me to upgrade your blog, my invoices would obviously reflect that 😉
The only glitch I found so far was that when I was double-clicking a word to select it in the Visual mode, the paragraph I had just been writing disappeared. And that disappearance was then auto-saved!
Clicking into the Code tab revealed that I had somehow inadvertently switched the paragraph style to hidden. Deleting the style info revealed the text once more.
I like the auto-save feature (see in the image above, the post is being saved) and the ability to quickly move between the Code and Visual (wysiwyg) views.
The builtin spell checker will prove handy too when I’m not using Firefox (Firefox 2 also has a spell checker which is fabulous for illiterates like me) or the Visual editor.
The other very nifty improvement I noticed was the ability to set any page as the front page of your site. This will allow many more people to use WordPress as a simple CMS for their entire website.
WordPress just gets better and better, great job guys.
WordPress 2.1 has been released.
The major features according to the WordPress.org site are:
* Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again.
* Our new tabbed editor allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post.
* The lossless XML import and export makes it easy for you to move your content between WordPress blogs.
* Our completely redone visual editor also now includes spell checking.
* New search engine privacy option allows you take you to indicate your blog shouldn’t ping or be indexed by search engines like Google.
* You can set any “page� to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system.
* Much more efficient database code, faster than previous versions. Domas Mituzas from MySQL went over all our queries with a fine-toothed comb.
* Links in your blogroll now support sub-categories and you can add categories on the fly.
* Redesigned login screen from the Shuttle project.
* More AJAX to make custom fields, moderation, deletions, and more all faster. My favorite is the comments page, which new lets you approve or unapprove things instantly.
* Pages can now be drafts, or private.
* Our admin has been refreshed to load faster and be more visually consistent.
* The dashboard now instantly and brings RSS feeds asynchronously in the background.
* Comment feeds now include all the comments, not just the last 10.
* Better internationalization and support for right-to-left languages.
* The upload manager lets you easily manage all your uploads pictures, video, and audio.
* A new version of the Akismet plugin is bundled.2.1 also includes over 550 bug fixes.
Installation and upgrading instructions are provided. Follow them closely.
You can download it here .
The next version of WordPress – version 2.1 is to be released later today and Aaron Brazell has a good post outlining 10 features of WordPress 2.1 you should be aware of.
One that I love is the AutoSave feature. I have lost several posts during writing which I wouldn’t have lost if I had this feature. Another is the upgrade tool – that’s right, WordPress 2.1 on installation will automatically upgrade your previous installation making the whole installation process that much easier, it seems.
Looking forward to giving 2.1 a whirl!
A couple of people mentioned to me that they were having issues leaving comments once more on this site.
On the advice of Donncha (lead developer for WordPress.com), I installed wp-cache 2.0 on this blog along with Donncha’s own patch for it.
It certainly seems to have speeded up the blog – is anyone still having problems leaving comments?
The presentations I gave to Microsoft Belgium this morning went really well and I received tremendously positive feedback. I have been asked not to talk about the content of the talks so I can’t say anymore about those.
I met some cool people there. Dave and Tom organised the event, and ran it really smoothly, despite Aer Lingus’ attempts to sabotage it by getting me there late!
I also caught up with Dirk (thanks for the ride from the airport) and Hans, both of whom I met originally in Burgenstock in September. And I met and had a great chat with Chris today at lunchtime. Chris uses WordPress.com so he can’t be all bad!!!