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Fixing WeatherIcon plugin for WordPress 2.9-rare (alpha nightlies)

by | Oct 21, 2009 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

Couple of changes to WordPress 2.9 coming along – including deprecating streams.php and gettext.php in the includes.

There’s a ticket on it here – http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/10890

The easy fix is to comment out the lines where the modules are loaded:

WeatherIcon.php
55 # Fixes a bug in l10n.php where some guy decided there was no reason
56 # to load files which are required for their l10n functions if no
57 # language is defined in WordPress.
58 #require_once(ABSPATH . 'wp-includes/streams.php');
59 #require_once(ABSPATH . 'wp-includes/gettext.php');

WordPress 2.8.5 – beta and drop

by | Oct 20, 2009 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

There’s an annoying DOS for WordPress doing the rounds – it’s blockable at the edge, using .htaccess, using a plugin, hand patching or by upgrading to 2.8.5

Kudos to the team for getting on top of this.

Here’s the scoop off wp-hackers:

http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.8.5-beta1.zip
2.8.5 will probably release sometime in the next 24 hours.  Changes since 2.8.4:
http://core.trac.wordpress.org/log/branches/2.8?action=stop_on_copy&mode=stop_on_copy&rev=12075&stop_rev=11811&limit=999
Summary:
* Fix for trackback DOS
* Removal of permalink_structure eval
* Remove some create_function() calls
* Disallow unfiltered uploads by default, even for admins. Enable it
again with define(‘ALLOW_UNFILTERED_UPLOADS’, true); in wp-config.php
* Add extra escapes here and there for some backside coverage
* Retire two old importers
* A few small bug fixes
This is mostly a security hardening release.  There’s nothing exciting
unless you are concerned about the trackback DOS bug. Anyone who wants
to DOS your blog can do it regardless, but the trackback DOS bug makes
it easier for people to be annoying.

Future updates – watching, waiting – and thinking about change

by | Oct 14, 2009 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

Gallery is undergoing a major revision.

Gallery v3 is in beta right now – I expect it will be RC then released by the end of the year.

Couple of things to look at here on the migration from Gallery 2:

  • migration of hundreds of thousands of photos from G2 to G3
  • permissions
  • post-migration clean-up
  • storage and CPU churn
  • big one – there is no plugin for WordPress right now – and the WPG2 plugin is no longer maintained with no plans for upgrade.

    • The other set of updates is around WordPress itself.

    Three interesting updates – first WordPress 2.9 is going to go beta soon; release in maybe December. That’s going to need some poking and investigating. I’ve already found a couple of changes in alpha that break some plugins.

    The other WordPress change that I’m going to look at is the merge of WordPress MU into WordPress core; also the new features of BuddyPress on top of WordPress (MU or core).

    The BuddyPress/WPMU will let me offer multiple blogs to Rachael’s cubs and other leaders. 

    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.