WordPress 2.8.4 – Update Now

Posted on August 12, 2009 by Mark Cahill

The folks at Automattic released a security update for WordPress today due to a very specific bug:

…a specially crafted URL could be requested that would allow an attacker to bypass a security check to verify a user requested a password reset. As a result, the first account without a key in the database (usually the admin account) would have its password reset and a new password would be emailed to the account owner.

While this isn’t an incredibly nasty bug, it does affect the admin user, which many folks use as their only point of access to the system, which is poor practice. On my customer sites, the admin user is never actually used by anyone (except for me, and only in an emergency). Everyone gets a user specific account and that account has the right privelidges for that user.

Click the upgrade button now, or have your web guy/gal/poodle take care of it for you.

A Grand Diaspora – The “Conversation” Disappears in the Ether

Posted on July 20, 2009 by Mark Cahill

One of the things that is most missed in the Social Media rush to “join the conversation” is that in many cases, by offering a plethora of places to get our content, we’ve turned the tables. Our readers who used to find us now expect us to find them. Even though I write on my blog, I’ll often get the comments for that post on my Facebook page, or via FriendFeed or Twitter, or on some other blog somewhere that quoted from my post. So instead of my comments coming to me, right alongside my post, I need to schlep out into the great wide web and find them.

Think about where your content appears. It may start on your blog, then it shows up on a myriad of social media platforms in which you participate, each with their own means of commenting or discussion and even, in some cases, yet another email function. Let’s face it, in many cases, those commenting functions are ratholes. You may not even see them for days or weeks, at which point, why would you even bother responding?

Look at the previous post here. I had a great comment that came in via my Facebook account, but I had to do a cut and paste to pull it into my blog. How 1998 that functionality is.

How about:

If social apps offered a “redirect comments to original publishing platform” option?
What if we had a function like a ping back that used xml-rpc to import a comment when it was made on your Facebook, or on another blog.
How about if readers thought to try to comment on the original article, instead of the summary?

I love comments, I love forum discussions. The problem I have is that when you start to spread them out acrross many separate and distinct platforms, their value decreases. The “conversation” is affectively split and disjointed, and we end up with a grand, yet failed, experiment.

WordPress 2.8.1 Released

Posted on July 10, 2009 by Mark Cahill

I really used to look forward to WordPress updates, probably because there were so many things that needed to be fixed. Now we’re at a point where it’s in very good shape, and, frankly, the interim releases are kind of boring.

Still, it’s good to see that I can finally click on automatic update, for either plugins, or the main software itself, and it actually does the update.

In other WordPress news, they have a new developers survey out for 2.9 image handling feature prioritization. My general sense as I filled it out was that there wasn’t anything earth shattering on the list. Again, a function of a fairly well featured system.

The only area I can think of that I think really needs further development right now is the workflow, but honestly, it’s not as though its not working for me. Simple workflow is good enough for my needs…but I know there are others for whom that simply doesn’t work.

So tell me, what do you think WordPress needs in the future?

WordPress Revision History to the Rescue

Posted on March 26, 2009 by Mark Cahill

(Uh, Jeff, Kelly, move on, nothing to read here. Nothing of interest to you at all…really…)

I had one of those moments today. Mistakes were made. Bad mistakes. The “oh crap, I’m editing on the production site, not the qa or dev server” type of mistakes that immediately have you picturing your career dissipation light suddenly burning bright.

So I noticed after working on this highly important site that I’d accidently overwritten something on the live site. Yech.

Luckily, as of version 2.6, WordPress now has Revision History. I’ve only used the feature a few times before, and then, only when I’d gotten to an unrecoverable point on a qa server. So in I went, and there it was…the content I’d overwritten, waiting for me, like a girlfriend I’d done wrong…

Saved. Career dissipation light dims to nothing.

Thank you WordPress…without that my next stop was going to be the Internet Archive…

Photo.net Live Blogging from the PMA Show

Posted on March 4, 2009 by Mark Cahill

Josh Root, Director of Community at Photo.net is live blogging and tweeting from the floor of the PMA (Photo Marketing Association) trade show in Las Vegas. The show runs through Thursday. You can catch the his blog posts at blog.photo.net (I did the blog setup, using WordPress) and his tweet stream at http://twitter.com/photonet.

In addition to new products and other show news, he’s running interviews with people like Photoshop Expert Kartin Eismann and Jodi Cobb, photographer from National Geographic. Be sure to check out the new blog!

Having Blog Trouble…

Posted on February 12, 2009 by Mark Cahill

After my upgrade to 2.7.1 I found I had no visual editor. After reuploading files, etc. I finally found that I’ve got an issue with one of my plugins. Not sure which one, but obviously it’s one that interacts with the admin console.

Steps to fix the problem if you have a tinymce editor in WordPress 2.7.1 that has stopped working.

Refresh the page using ctl-shift-refresh (this is a “hard refresh” which will force everything to reload from the server, not from browser cache).
Check if the browser has returned…
Start disabling your plugins one by one and testing each time you turn one off, then do a hard refresh.
If none of the plugins are causing the problem, delete wp-admin and wp-includes folders and re-upload freshly downloaded copies.
Hard refresh again.
Still have the problem? Off to WordPress.org with you (or contact whoever handles web support for you…)

(Update: the problem appears to be coming from Vipers Video Quick Tags – which is great, because I know he keeps up to date and will revise quickly.)

10 Killer WordPress Hacks

Posted on January 8, 2009 by Mark Cahill

Jean-Baptiste Jun has come up with a truly useful list for WordPress developers in his article for Smashing Magazine entitled “10 Killer WordPress Hacks“.

2008 was a very good year for the WordPress community. The software was updated numerous times, leading to the recent release of version 2.7, and many new blogs dedicated to WordPress were created. Of course, tons of new hacks were discovered, which helped lots of bloggers enhance their blogs.

In this article, we’ll show you 10 new useful killer WordPress hacks to unleash the power of your favorite blogging engine. Each hack has an accompanying explanation, so you’ll not only unleash the power of WordPress but also understand how it works.

Usually posts like this contain mostly low level stuff that everyone already knows. In this case, Jun has definitely added to the body of knowledge for the WP community. Don’t miss his link to the WordPress SQL and WordPress RSS hack list as well!

WordPress 2.7 Released

Posted on December 11, 2008 by Mark Cahill

It’s out and you can get it here.

Words to the wise:

There are some issues with Image Handling which have not been resolved. These issues appear to be related to server setup, and not the actual code, but sites where images handling worked on 2.6.5 may find that it is broken in 2.7 – like this site. (Update: yes, image thumbnailing is working for me now – it appears it’s finicky on large size images and doens’t like some formats. Not a bug.)
In order to take advantage of the new comments threading feature you’re going to need to make changes to you theme. You can either grab the comments.php bit out of a 2.7 compliant theme or follow the steps outlined here.
Many plugins have been found to cause problems. I suggest turning off everything you can and then turning your plugins on one by one to see if they break things, or if they cause general slowness. There is a good list here.
If you’ve customized your admin console be sure you test prior to upgrade. There have been substantial changes and the way they implement hooks in Admin has changed.

Otherwise, the system appears to be pretty solid, and once again has made moves towards becoming more of a Content Management System (CMS) than Blogging Software.

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