Good advise from Matt Mullenweg on how to keep WordPress secure, especially in light of all the news regarding a new worm making its way around.
If you’re hosting your own version of WordPress, one-click upgrading, via the dashboard interface is really easy. For everyone else, ask your hosting provider to provide the latest version so you can run the updates accordingly.
Earlier this week I installed the Redirection Plugin for Wordpress to handle some broken permalinks caused as a result of changing the URL structure for my domain.
There’s some great information about customizing the plugin at Redirection Plugin and Regexes. For my purposes, I was trying to redirect posts like:
http://www.leonelson.com/blog/2009/02/title-of-this-page.html
to:
http://www.leonelson.com/blog/2009/02/title-of-this-page/
Here are the settings that worked for me:
Source URL: /(\d*)?/(\d*)?/([A-Za-z0-9-]*).html
Target URL: /$1/$2/$3/
I normally upgrade to the latest version of WordPress hours after it’s officially announced on the WordPress Blog. WordPress upgrades are generally seamless – Deactivate your Plugins, Upload Your Files, Run the Upgrade Script, Activate your Plugins and you’re good to go. However, with the recent 2.2 release, I encountered various problems that seem to stem from plugins that need to be updated to work with the 2.2 code (e.g. Ultimate Tag Warrior 3 and K2). So until the plugins are updated I won’t attempt an update anytime soon. Time to restore my earlier backup of WordPress 2.1
Time to update your WordPress blogs. 2.0.5 is out.
WordPress 2.0.4 was released 5 days ago. I’ve been staying away from my blog for the past week and totally missed the dashboard message. Either way time to update all your WordPress blogs as 2.0.4 is a security release.
I’ve been so busy that I missed the whole WordPress 2.03 release. Normally, once an update is posted I try and get it within minutes. However, I’m now trying to manage 3 active WordPress sites and so every time there’s a new release or update I need to allocate sufficient time to backup, deactivate plugins and then update the appropriate files. Nevertheless, after spending the last hour taking precautions and then running the required update scripts, the sites appear to be running without a hitch.
Ben Tray’s Unsleepable theme currently hard codes a number of social tagging sites directly in the sidebar. Since I had already been using the Sociable plugin I wanted to try and integrate the plugin directly within the Sidebar so that I could add/ remove other social tagging sites using the Sociable administration screen. To do this, all I had to do was:
[code lang="php"]
[/code]
with:
[code lang="php"]
[/code]
In the last month I’ve decided to focus a bit more on making my blog more pleasing to the eye. This was partly because of some of the statistics I was starting to receive from Google Analytics and also because looking at the default WordPress K2 Theme was becoming quite boring.
I started off by using MIna scheme and had some trouble with the fixed width of my blog. Thankfully, I didn’t spend much time trying to tweak the style sheets as earlier this week Ben Gray released his Unsleepable theme. The Unsleepable theme is one of the best themes that I’ve seen for WordPress and it resolved some of the fixed width issues I had been having with the previous theme. However, deciding to use a new theme can sometimes be a bad idea. For example, shortly after deploying the Unsleepable theme I had to design a new logo. It also led me to try out some new plugins that I had been holding off from using. The current site now uses some new plugins such as Brian’s Latest Comments, Sociable, Ultimate Tag Warrior, Extended Live Archive and Word Press Contact Form.
Now the fun of customizing and integrating begins.
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