The Four-eyed Journal » Upgrades

Pre-New Year surprise: WordPress 2.3.2 is out!

jhay — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 00:29:01 +0000

Just an hour ago, a new upgrade to WordPress has been released, WordPress 2.3.2 is now out. As posted on the WP Development Blog:

WordPress 2.3.2 is an urgent security release that fixes a bug that can be used to expose your draft posts. 2.3.2 also suppresses some error messages that can give away information about your database table structure and limits and stops some information leaks in the XML-RPC and APP implementations. Get 2.3.2 now to protect your blog from these disclosures.

As a little bonus, 2.3.2 allows you to define a custom DB error page. Place your custom template at wp-content/db-error.php. If WP has a problem connecting to your database, this page will displayed rather than the default error message.

Wow, I’ve never heard of these bugs before and they sound quite scary. Your draft posts being leaked to the public right underneath your nose! It’s like being caught with your pants down and butt-naked in mall during a sale or Santa spoiling his surprise gifts because of a sneeze!

On the brighter side, the ability to customize the DB error page is a welcomed treat. Finally, we could do away with that dreadful DB error page, I believe it has the same effect on WP bloggers as the Blue Screen of Death has on poor Window$ users.

You can grab a copy of the latest WP 2.3.2 here.

Plugin Compatibilities with WordPress 2.3 Release Candidate 1

jhay — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 15:24:03 +0000

One of the great advantages of blogging on your own webhost is the ability to create multiple blogs and use one of those to play and mess around with WordPress. This compes particularly handy if you’re either a plugin developer, a theme designer or your average WP hacker.

Of course power bloggers are a combination of all three, for us ordinary WordPress bloggers who’s only become accustomed to installing plugins and widgets, tweaking themes and doing a few hacks here and there, the most useful and common usage of this practice is to test our new versions or updates of WordPress and to test if the plugins they currently use are compatible with it.

That’s exactly what I did and so the Four-eyed Demo Lab was born. A test-blog in the purest meaning of the term. I use it to test the new themes that I fancy, plugins that I’m keen on using and tasting the waters with new versions of WordPress.

Now that the next major upgrade to WordPress which is WordPress 2.3, less than 5 days away, preparing for the upgrade has never been easier. Of course one could always setup a local installation of WordPress on your PC but putting up a demo or test blog in a subdomain is far easier and more convenient.

My aim with this project is to identify early on which plugins will break once I make the upgrade to WP 2.3. Sure there’s that plugin compatibility list, but there would be times that the plugin you’re using is still not in the list, waiting time for someone or the plugin author himself to post updates or fixes for that particular plugin that finds itself at odds with the newest version of WordPress.

So last night, I downloaded WordPress 2.3 Beta 3 for my initial plugin compatibility tests and just a few minutes of writing this post, I downloaded WordPress 2.3 Releace Candidate 1 and upgraded my demo blog and pseudo-personal, punditry blog Sumilang to start the second phase of the test.

I setup the demo blog to use the same set of plugins I’m currently using with The Four-eyed Journal to see which ones would be broken by WP 2.3. So far only the WP-Polls plugin by GaMeRz didn’t work well with the new version. Luckily, an upgrade to the plugin will be made available soon to fix this.

As for the rest of the plugins that are working well with WP 2.3 RC 1 as of now are:

See any plugins you use as well? You’re in luck because these plugins are working with WP 2.3 RC 1 well, as of now. Note that these are the latest available versions of the plugins because one of neat new features of WP 2.3 is the plugin compatibility warning. If a plugin is not the latest version and a new one is available, WordPress 2.3 reminds you that it is outdated and the best of all, a link to where you could download the latest version of that plugin.

Now remember to backup your blog; it’s theme files, configuration files and database before making any changes and you’ll live on to blog for another day.

WordPress 2.3 RC1 is just great, and I’m sure the most stable release would even be the best version of our beloved blogging software, WordPress.

Big question now is, will WordPress 2.3 with it’s built-in tagging system would kill the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin?

Upgraded to WordPress 2.2.2

jhay — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 22:36:54 +0000

What a way to start the new week right? The wonderful guys WordPress has just released the latest version of our beloved blogging software, WordPress 2.2.2 as security fix and minor bug fixes. We’ve been told that plugin incompatibilities will be very minimal if none at all.

The files that have been updated in this particular release are the following:

Â» /wp-admin/import/wordpress.php

Â» /wp-admin/admin-db.php
Â» /wp-admin/admin-functions.php
Â» /wp-admin/edit-comments.php
Â» /wp-admin/link-import.php
Â» /wp-admin/options.php
Â» /wp-admin/upload-functions.php

Â» /wp-includes/formatting.php
Â» /wp-includes/functions.php
Â» /wp-includes/general-template.php
Â» /wp-includes/theme.php
Â» /wp-includes/widgets.php
Â» /wp-includes/version.php

Â» /wp-app.php
Â» /wp-settings.php
Â» /xmlrpc.php

Now remember, backup your WP files and database before doing the upgrade. You’ll never know when something is going to get screwed or not during the actual upgrade process. And be sure to check that your backups do work.

Now off you go to grab a copy of WordPress 2.2.2

How to monitor plugin updates

jhay — Thu, 17 May 2007 00:49:54 +0000

Yesterday’s release of WordPress 2.2 has prompted a wave of upgrades again not just in WordPress-powered blogs but it includes the hundreds if not thousands of WordPress plugins that make the blogging software one, if not the best blogging platform out there.

Also, yesterday’s successful upgrade of this blog to WordPress 2.2 was smooth and painless all thanks to miracle that all of the plugins that power The Four-eyed Journal were compatible with the version of WordPress. This has eliminated the need to visit each plugin’s site for updates or fixes in case it has some incompatibility issues with the new version. So I’m a lucky blogger, and so as Jaypee, but what about the others who weren’t and had to hold out on upgrading to the latest version of WordPress because a plugin or two doesn’t jive well with ‘Getz’?

All of this could’ve been avoided if we bloggers were to keep up to date on the plugins we use. Sure plugin authors and developers offer support for their plugins, some who still continue developing their plugins offer updates and even dedicated sections of their blogs for this purpose.

Question now is, do we regularly visit them? Do we check up on them from time to time? A common observation among us bloggers is once we successfully installed a plugin, integrated it into our theme and even made some custom hacks, we completely forget about them in terms of maintenance and updates.

We only remember and bother to check up on the plugin’s home page or author site if it gets broken or it gets in the way of some upgrades to our WordPress blogs or other plugins. In this light, some plugin authors are in a way being under appreciated. This is because we only got to know these authors because we decided to use their plugins, we neglect the fact that most of these authors are bloggers as well, and it turns out, they are good bloggers too.

So to bridge this gap, help us prevent blogs being broken by outdated plugins and to give something back to the plugin authors aside from piles of support tickets or e-mails, here’s a simple tip on how to keep updated about the plugins we use for our WordPress blogs.

Bookmark all of them in one folder

You go to Plugins management page in the WordPress admin area, right-click on every active plugin and choose “Bookmark This Link…”

Then create a bookmark folder solely for the homepages of the plugins you use.

Give it a custom name, something to help you remember what’s the folder for and what’s in it.

Do the same thing to the rest of the plugins you actively use.

Once you’ve added all the links, go to Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks menu in Firefox. Then simply drag the folder to your Bookmarks Toolbar and presto! Updates and fixes for your plugins are now a click-away.

This neat tip could be extended into your feed reader because hey, these authors are bloggers as well, so why don’t we give them a boost in their subscription stats and add their feeds to our reader. I’m sure they offer good posts as well as good plugins.

Smooth upgrade to WordPress 2.2

jhay — Wed, 16 May 2007 13:36:04 +0000

Against my early pronouncements about a month ago, I gave in to my obsessive-compulsiveness and upgraded this blog to the latest major release of WordPress which is version 2.2 which was named after renowned saxophonist Stan Getz.

The reasons why one should hold out on upgrading immediately once version 2.2 comes out is that plugins you currently use could be incompatible with the latest version and would result to anything from a messed up theme or the tragedy of a broken WP database. Numerous blog disasters were born this way and the only remedies would be reverting back to the previous version or completely restarting from scratch. Even the great John Chow of John Chow dot com succumbed to this problem when he attempted to upgrade his blog earlier today. Both tasks could be as ugly as the broken upgrade if one is fully prepared.

So again, we emphasize and remind all WordPress users to backup your blog files and database before attempting an upgrade.

Fortunately for this blogger, the upgrade to version 2.2 went on smoothly and without a single glitch. Of course I backed up my database, wp-config.php and the .htaccess files, downloaded a copy of WordPress 2.2, unzipped the package, fired up my FTP client and uploaded the new WP files.

Again, of course I deactivated all the plugins I currently use before actually uploading the files to the server. It was a nerve-wracking moment because I didn’t bother to check each plugin’s homepage to see if any had issues with WordPress 2.2 and if fixes or upgrades have been made to it.

It was leap of faith as I went on with the upgrade. To my relief and delight, all the plugins I use are compatible with WordPress 2.2 To help out the other anxious bloggers in identifying which plugins are compatible with WordPress 2.2 or not, I’ve listed all the active plugins running in this blog that, has so far, been running well with WP 2.2

This is quite an extensive list of plugins

Adsense-Deluxe ver 0.8 by Acme Technologies

Adsense Injection ver 2.0 by Dax “The Hammer” Herrera

Akismet ver 2.0.2 by Matt Mullenweg

DoFollow ver 2.2 by Kimo Souminen

Google Sitemaps ver 2.7.1 by Arne Brachold

Most Commented ver 1.02 by Nick Momrik

Optimal Title ver 1.0 by Aaron Schaefer

podPress ver 7.0 Dan Kuykendall

Popularity Contest ver 1.2.1 by Alex King

Recent Comments ver 1.18 by Nick Momrik

Recent Posts ver 1.07 by Nick Momrik

Related Posts ver 2.02 by Alexander Malov & Mike Lu

Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form ver 2.0 by Mike Cherim and Mike Jolley

Share This ver 1.4 by Alex King

Show Top Commentators ver 1.03 by Nate Sanden

Smart Archives ver 1.9 by Justin Blanton

Subscribe Remind ver 1.0 by Trevor Fitzgerald

Subscribe To Comments ver 2.1 by Mark Jaquith

the_excerpt Reloaded ver R1 by Kaf Oseo

Twitter Tools ver 1.0 by Alex King

Ultimate Tag Warrior ver 3.14 by Christine Davis

Ultimate Tag Warrior: Tag Archive ver 1.0 by Christine Davis

WordPress Database Backup ver 1.8 by Scott Merrill

WordPress Mobile ver 1.2 by Andy Moore

WP-PostViews ver 1.10 by GaMerZ

WP Grins ver 1.5 by Alex King

Imagine the chaos if more than one of these plugins were not compatible with WordPress 2.2, luckily for all of us who use them they work perfectly with the new version. For those who use a hacked or customized version of any of this plugins, visit their homepages and get in touch with their makers, I’m sure a fix or an update to the plugin will be available.

Again, if all your plugins are fully compatible with WordPress 2.2, I encourage that your set aside ample time to make the upgrade, it is definitely worth it. Especially since the following features are now included:

WordPress Widgets allow you to easily rearrange and customize areas of your weblog (usually sidebars) with drag-and-drop simplicity. This functionality was originally available as a plugin Widgets are now included by default in the core code, significantly cleaned up, and enabled for the default themes.

Full Atom support, including updating our Atom feeds to use the 1.0 standard spec and including an implementation of the Atom Publishing API to complement our XML-RPC interface.

A new Blogger importer that is able to handle the latest version of Googleâ€™s Blogger product and seamlessly import posts and comments without any user interaction beyond entering your login.

Infinite comment stream, meaning that on your Edit Comments page when you delete or spam a comment using the AJAX links under each comment it will bring in another comment in the background so you always have 20 items on the page. (I know it sounds geeky, but try it!)

We now protect you from activating a plugin or editing a file that will break your blog.

Core plugin and filter speed optimizations should make everything feel a bit more snappy and lighter on your server.

Weâ€™ve added a hook for WYSIWYG support in a future version of Safari.

Over all, this a good major upgrade to the blogging software we bloggers have come to love. Again, give it a download and upgrade your blog as soon as possible.

Now, we just have to wait for all the bugs to come out.