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ZENworks Configuration Management – System Updates

by ezs | Oct 15, 2007 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

As I wrote in a previous post – one of the most important new features of ZENworks 10 Configuration Management is the System Updates feature.

This allows administrators to automatically download, approve and deploy ZENworks patches and updates across their servers and workstations.

Written at: Winchester, England

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Securing a WordPress blog

by ezs | Oct 3, 2007 | evilzenscientist, Technology, Uncategorized, wordpress

I’ve been hosting a family blog and photo site for a good friend for over a year.

They decided recently to ‘lock down’ the site and restrict access to both the blog and the photos to family and friends only.

I spent some of yesterday doing this.

I’ve extensively use WPG2 to integrate WordPress and Gallery2 – and I use the permissions and roles within Gallery2 to successfully limit access to pictures. The most striking example of this is with my sisters Cub Scout web site; non members can read blog posts; but not view pictures.

Securing the WordPress side was a little more tricky. Drupal has a very strong permissions module -especially useful for the anonymous user. Nothing like that for WordPress.

In the end I used the post-levels plugin from Filipe Fortes – it needed some SQL mungling to work with WordPress 2.3 – but the end results were pretty good.

gtr.com

post-levels update for WordPress 2.3

by ezs | Oct 2, 2007 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

I made an update for the post-levels plugin so it works with WordPress 2.3

The plugin was throwing sql errors.

WordPress database error: [Column ‘post_id’ in field list is ambiguous]
SELECT post_id, meta_value FROM wp_postmeta, (wp_posts LEFT JOIN wp_postmeta as pl_wp_postmeta ON (wp_posts.ID = pl_wp_postmeta.post_id)) WHERE post_id = ID AND meta_key = ‘links_to’ AND (post_status = ‘static’ OR (wp_posts.post_status = ‘publish’ OR (wp_posts.post_status = ‘private’ AND (pl_wp_postmeta.meta_key = ‘post_level’ AND pl_wp_postmeta.meta_value <= 1 ))))

WordPress database error: [Column ‘post_id’ in field list is ambiguous]
SELECT post_id, meta_value FROM wp_postmeta, (wp_posts LEFT JOIN wp_postmeta as pl_wp_postmeta ON (wp_posts.ID = pl_wp_postmeta.post_id)) WHERE post_id = ID AND meta_key = ‘links_to_target’ AND (post_status = ‘static’ OR (wp_posts.post_status = ‘publish’ OR (wp_posts.post_status = ‘private’ AND (pl_wp_postmeta.meta_key = ‘post_level’ AND pl_wp_postmeta.meta_value <= 1 ))))

Here’s the fix:

function postlevels_query_cleanup($sql)
{
    global $wpdb;

// fix for WordPress 2.3
// evilzenscientist – 2 Oct 07

    $sql = preg_replace(“/post_id/”, “wp_postmeta.post_id”, $sql);
    $sql = preg_replace(“/, meta_value/”, “, wp_postmeta.meta_value”, $sql);
    $sql = preg_replace(“/meta_key/”, “wp_postmeta.meta_key”, $sql);

// end

Here’s the new plugin. It’s not really tested – except it works for me.