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PHP XML parsing bug – a workaround and a fix

by | Aug 5, 2009 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

One thing I didn’t find in my testing and change control was a PHP and XML parsing bug.

Documented in several places – libxml2 2.7.x and greater have a known issue.

One workaround is to force in libxml2 version 2.6.x

Not the most glamorous fix – but opensuse.org has the old libraries from openSUSE 11.0

The better (but more complex) fix is to upgrade PHP to 5.2.9 and libxml2 to 2.7.3

opensuse.org has the correct pieces from openSUSE 11.1

http://www.peteware.com/blog/2009/01/fixing-libxml2-php-wordpress-and-the-missing-angle-brackets/

http://www.peteware.com/blog/2008/12/wordpress-libxml2-bug/

http://josephscott.org/archives/2008/12/problems-with-libxml2-for-wordpress-xml-rpc-users/

http://josephscott.org/archives/2009/03/conclusion-of-libxml2-issues-use-php-529-libxml2-273/

WordPress filesystem abstraction – and automatic updates

by | Jun 11, 2009 | patching, Uncategorized, wordpress

Way back in the not-so-distant past the only way to update WordPress was to download (wget/ftp) updates, plugins and themes, unpack them and perform the update/install.

It is possible to pull the latest builds from subversion – but that’s really focused on the core hacker.

New in WP 2.7 was the ability to update automatically.

There were a few challenges with this – permissions, PHP modules, various host implementations – but I found it generally quite successful.

I found a great FAQ here – http://dd32.id.au/2009/02/20/wordpress-filesystem-abstraction-faq/

From the same author is a very cool plugin – core-control – it lets you enable and disable various transports – and shows the status of them.