Archive For October, 2008

I’ll be at the WordPress meetup at Latinoware tomorrow (Saturday) at 18:00. I’m speaking earlier in the day ta 13:00. Been around the conference today and been really impressed with the breadth of subjects covered and the number of attendees. Confused about the logo though. (Is South America tucked into Africa?) Se você fala Português passar esta sobre a sua audiência.

Happy Halloween to everyone! At this All Hallows Eve, I would like to talk about Scary WordPress Moments. Since I have been working with WordPress for some time, I have had quite a few scary moments with WordPress. One stands out in recent memory.

WordPress Pumpkin by Eric Martin Displayed with permission

Let me start by saying that I am a huge proponent of backing up my blog. I put together the original WP-DB-Backup which has been enhanced and fixed through the years and is a fantastic plugin. I use it religiously combined with a couple of tricks I picked up from readers along the way. I have the plugin backup my databases everyday and email them to a “backup” gmail account. I also have filters setup in the gmail account to delete daily backups as they come in, thus managing space (gmail keeps deleted emails for 30 days). So I have a rolling 30 day backup of all my blog and all of it is automattic.

That being said, about two WordPress point releases ago, I had sat down to backup, upgrade and fix Weblog Tools Collection after the release of the major upgrade. This blog is not that big or popular but it is my baby. It has taken on a life of its own and I have mangled and modified the code in many places to do things my way. Even though the code is fun to play with, the modifications cause me huge headaches when upgrading (my own fault). So my obsession for the blog and the custom modifications combined with a large database and a complex theme structure makes upgrades harrowing to say the least. Heck Matt has goaded me to upgrade this blog many times in the past after I had failed to do so for many weeks after a release. So I have an established and documented procedure to upgrade this blog which I keep up to date with all the changes required to counter and/or fix the modified code. However, during this one upgrade, I somehow missed a crucial step. You see this blog uses a table prefix from the Cafelog days and I had forgotten to change it in the config file before uploading it. Some reader managed to run the “new” setup for the blog between me uploading the files and then going over to the admin panel to upgrade it.

I thought I had somehow lost my blog and that the original tables with my precious data in it had been replaced with fresh new ones. I remember my blood running cold and panic starting to set in. I know WordPress quite well and I know how it works. I had made a backup before I started upgrading and I had followed all the steps for the upgrade. But for a brief few minutes that Saturday morning, I was truly sweating bullets. What bothers me now is that I did not recognize the problem soon enough. It took me almost five minutes to realize what had happened and take steps to fix it. As a reminder of that day, i never deleted that set of tables and have left them intact.

What Scary Moments have you had with WordPress? What did you learn from them?

(cross-posted to the Carrington web site)

Version 1.2 of Carrington Blog is now available for download.

It’s been great seeing developers picking up the Carrington theme framework and using it. We wanted to get these fixes and features out ASAP as a result.

This version has a couple of changes - both bug fixes and new features:

• Added support for meta-{key}.php content templates (previously supported only meta-{key}-{value}.php templates) as requested.
• Added a field for entering the About text that is shown in the sidebar. If this is present, the /about page content is not used. The content of this field is passed through regular WordPress filters for formatting, etc.
• Fixed a layout bug with comment links.
• Adjusted some header tag spacing.
• Abstracted all general templates (header, sidebar, etc.) - this was not working completely in 1.1.
• Updated documentation.

Enjoy! Let us know in the forums if you run into trouble.

ShareThis

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Eric Martin carved a WordPress pumpkin. Happy Halloween everybody.

New Plugins

MagpieRSS Hotfix for Enclosures

This hotfix adds support for RSS enclosures to MagpieRSS, the RSS feed parser behind the fetch_rss() function in WordPress.

Tylr Slidr

This is a WordPress plugin that makes the process of adding a Flickr slideshow to your site much easier.

Upload RapidShare

Upload your file to Rapidshare

IE Warning

Shows nice and simple splash to your visitors with Internet Explorer

WP Unique Article Header Image

Allows you to add/associate unique header image with each single post/page.So you can spice your blog to have a unique header image per post/page.

LinkShare Link Locator (L3) Description

LinkShare Link Lookup (L3) is designed to make it easy for you to integrate LinkShare links in your posts, right from the actual write post page! Simply click the red arrows on the top right of the posting page and start earning today.

New User Approve

New User Approve is a Wordpress plugin that allows a blog administrator to approve a user before they are able to access and login to the blog.

Simple Post Template

Allows you to define a post template for all new posts.

Random Tags Cloud Widget

Random Tags Cloud displays your tags by selecting randomly. Of course, you can customize other tag cloud’s settings.

iPhone Control Panel

Configure how iPhones and iPod touches see your site. Add custom css, a home screen bookmark icon, change the viewport, or redirect to another url.

Updated Plugins

All in One Video Pack

Easily add full video capabilities to your blog.

My TrustedOnes Recommendations

The plugin shows your TrustedOnes recommendations, according to topics and wisdom of your choice.

Shantz Wordpress Prefix Suffix

Shantz WP Prefix Suffix is a light plugin to quickly add text/htm/css before and/or after your posts and/or pages.

eShop

An accessible Paypal Shopping Cart plugin.

YouTube with Style

The YouTube with style plugin allows WordPress users to easily embed a YouTube video without the default YouTube player.

Paginated Comments

Breaks down comments into a number of search engine optimized pages.

WP-Cumulus

WP-Cumulus displays your tags and/or categories in 3D by placing them on a rotating sphere.

Scissors

This plugin adds cropping and resizing functionality to Wordpress’ image upload and management dialogs.

Nicecoder has released a plugin for IndexU Deluxe v1.1 to integrate the vBulletin user database.

By using this plugin users of vBulletin can log into IndexU with their vBulletin login.

The…

This past week we have adopted three new management positions within the phpBB Teams that we hope will better prepare us for the future. These management positions will run the project along side the Team Leaders with equal power. The Team Leader’s group has been renamed to the Management Team to better describe these people since the new positions won’t lead any teams. These positions are Business Manager, Operations Manager and Website Manager.

The Business Manager will oversee all business related aspects of phpBB. His first task will be to found a non-profit organization for phpBB to give us more power and protection of copyrights and other assets. He will ensure that all rules and regulations corporations have are being followed. This position will be filled by ChrisRLG.

Do not worry. PHPBB HAS BEEN AND ALWAYS WILL BE FREE! We will never charge any amount of money to use phpBB. We are creating a company to ensure that phpBB will always remain free and will be better able to serve the community by having sufficient funds for events, server hardware, and in the future possibly employing people. More information on the company will be provided at a later date.

The Operations Manager will work primarily within the existing teams. If a task doesn’t fall within the jurisdiction of a Team Leader then the Operations Manager will be in charge of the task. Most of the time Team Leaders need to focus on their teams and don’t have time to deal with other issues. This is where the Operations Manager will step in. He will be the liaison between teams and ensure information is flowing properly. He will organize meetings of the Management Team. Team Leaders will still be in charge of their teams. This position will be filled by wGEric.

The Website Manager is not a new position. We used to have a Website Team. Since each team has been taking care of their respective sections of the site the Website Team has never had any members. We decided to remove the Website Team and change the title of the Website Team Leader to Website Manager. He will continue to coordinate between all of the teams to ensure the website is working smoothly and following the style guide correctly. dhn will continue to serve in this position.

We will add more management positions as we grow and find we need them. We hope that this structure will allow us to grow even more with as few growing pains as possible and ensure that we continue to operate in a productive manner.

You may discuss this announcement here: viewtopic.php?f=64&t=1269405

*Trick-or-treat!*

In celebration of Halloween…*
Buy 2 skins and get 2 Free!*

Offer is valid until the end of Sunday.

How to redeem your 2 free skins?
After you purchase two skins simply open a support ticket and request your 2 free skins

First thanks to zoints for having meebo as one of there blocks and thanks to stangger5 for making the profile blocks for the mp3 player and for youtube. I did use his as a guide but the rest is all…

I finally got around to setting up the blog feed. I just tested it and it works!!

you can now add your rss blog feed in every post. Just edit your…

This adds a new box on FORUMHOME which shows user’s anniversary (registration on forum)

So if any user has registered at least 1 year ago on the actual date, he will show up in that list
…

Contender

Contender is a three column, fixed width, adsense ready theme.

NeeWee

Fixed width, three column, gravatar and widget ready theme.

Pink Orchid

A clean simple SEO optimized three column template in soft pink colors. The theme has two widget ready sidebars, gravatar support and is ad ready. The theme features a bio box that can be edited independently of the side bars and is unaffected by the use of widgets.

Grey Matter

Grey Matter is an two column, gravatar & widget ready, free and easy to use WordPress theme.

WordPress for LinkedIn.: The WordPress Publisher Blog reports that the WordPress application is available for LinkedIn. Once this app is added and setup, your LinkedIn network will be alerted when you post something to your WordPress.com or self hosted WordPress.org blogs. To add the WordPress App to your LinkedIn account, visit the LinkedIn Application Directory. Select the WordPress App, enter your blog’s URL, and choose to display either all of your blog posts or just those tagged with “LinkedIn.” Save, and you’re all set. Wired, ZDNet and others have writeups on the new Application platform from LinkedIn.

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