What irritates me about this is that this password reset issue has been known for weeks now, and there’s been virtually no word from the developers on it.  Several guys have mentioned the manual reset fix, which, yes, I’ve already done to shore up the security holes.  But when my users want to change their passwords, they have to contact me, which ends up being a hassle for all involved.  It just would have been nice to have a patch released for this issue a long time ago, instead of having to wait for WP 2.6 to be released with, hopefully, a fix for the bug.

John Bintz has added another great tool to ComicPress 2.5 that makes it even more efficient to post up new comics.  It’s a plugin for WordPress called ComicPress Manager that goes hand-in-hand with the ComicPress theme.  Before, I had to make the comic, use Filezilla to upload the file to the comics directory, then go into the WordPress dashboard and create the new post, write the title, write a little blurb about the comic, add tags, set the category, and set the date and time so that the comic publishes only when I want it to.  With ComicPress Manager, all I have to do is create the comic, make sure the file name contains the date and name, and use ComicPress Manager to upload the file.  From there, the plugin automatically sets the date and time for me, pulls the post title from the tile of the comic file name, and even creates thumbnails for the comic archive and the RSS feed.  I can set my tags and blurb right there.  What took me about five minutes before now takes literally 30 seconds and adds more features than were previously available.  It’s a powerful little plugin that makes it even more fun to produce a comic by taking away a lot of the ‘pain’ in posting.

Again, my thanks to these two gentlemen for producing these great tools and volunteering their efforts to the webcomic community.

cforms has become my contact form plugin of choice.  It is a very powerful and robust plugin that allows user customizability right down to the last detail.  As such, the admin interface is a little daunting, but the power that cforms provides makes it well worth the effort to learn it.  At this point, I think it’s fairly safe to say that there isn’t a better contact form plugin out there.

Extra Sentence Space is exactly what the typing Nazi ordered.  High school typing class taught us that it’s proper form to place two spaces between sentences.  HTML documents only display a single space, no matter how many you type.  This plugin brings back the ability to add the second space back in and clean up your document formatting. 

I’ve been using Flexible Upload almost since it was first developed.  What’s attractive about this plugin is that it allows you to resize images on the fly and, if so desired, add a personal watermark to your own images.  Now, with all the problems surrounding the Media Uploader in WordPress 2.5¹, Flexible Upload provides the means to bypass most of the buggy AJAX code and get your images uploaded to your blog quickly and reliably.

Ozh has fast become one of my favorite plugin developers.  He consistently creates plugins that are practical and high quality.  I’m running three of his plugins on all my installations that make the WP 2.5 dashboard experience a lot more fun.

Ozh’ Admin Dropdown Menu reorganizes the WP 2.5 dashboard, putting all the links in a single row at the top of the dash.  What’s more, a simple mouseover for any menu tab will display a dropdown menu that will give one-click access to any submenu in the dash.  This plugin effectively cuts dashboard navigation times in half.

Ozh’ Absolute Comments makes it fun and easy to reply to reader comments by reorganizing the Comments menu and allowing for instant comment reply right in the dashboard.  It’s fast and powerful, and every WordPress user should be running this plugin.

Ozh’ Better Plugins Page cleans up and reformats the plugin page, making it a little easier to look at and use.  It also provides a set of filters that can be used to display only a particular subset of plugins.

The WP 2.5 dashboard comes with a fixed width, which is rather ugly for those of us who use a large monitor resolution.  Remove Max Width undoes this limitation and allows the dashboard to stretch completely from side to side.

ShareThis has been around for awhile now, but it compacts social bookmarking down into a single button.  Using this plugin gives your readers the ability to share the wealth and send additional readership your way.

I’ve been using Textile as my text markup option almost since I started using WordPress several years back.  Textile and and its plugins have undergone various iterations since that time, but TextileWrapper is the one I’ve been using for the last year or so.  The thing that I like about Textile in particular as a markup tool is because it uses common characters for the markup, making it extremely fast to add formatting to my writing as I go.  I use TextileWrapper on all my WordPress installations and won’t set one up without it.  Everyone has their markup tool of choice, but this is the one that I think is easiest to use.

Anyone who’s ever had a catastrophic blog failure resulting in lost data knows the value of backing up your database².  WP DB-Backup should be required for every WordPress installation³.  It makes it easy to keep a backup copy of your DB on file, y’know, just in case.

Shift This Order Pages is a little clunky to use⁴, but it beats hands-down having to go into every page on your blog manually to change the menu ID.  If I have an installation of WordPress that contains more than a couple of pages, I make sure I include this plugin to move pages around more easily.

I know I, for one, like to have the option of subscribing to comments on particular blog postings, and I don’t generally like to add individual RSS feeds to my Google Reader.  Subscribe to Comments gives readers the option of getting follow-up comments in their email.

Web servers don’t provide a means of automatically adjusting for daylight savings time.  Timezone fixes this by automatically applying this adjustment twice a year.  Just tell it what time zone you live in and whether you make the adjustment, and it does the rest.

These are my favorite plugins, and I firmly believe they are well-worth your time to investigate, as well.  Feel free to tell me about any other essential plugins you use by commenting below.

¹ A problem which, at this point, still has no real solutions, despite many reports of bugs on the WordPress support forums.

² And the rest of you ought to know the value of backing up regularly.

³ Frankly, it ought to be included into the WordPress core, in my opinion.

⁴ It took me a little while to figure out just exactly how to make it work.

My next step, then, was to log in to phpMyAdmin and double-check the database for my blog.  All the tables were present and accounted for, and the sizes looked about like they should for 4.5 years of blogging.  So, I backed up the database real quick and then repaired all tables (since I’ve had problems with a table breaking in the past and messing up my blog).  After that, everything came back to working order again, which is a huge relief.

My theory is that someone tried to access the install.php file, probably by a roundabout means, in an attempt to either access my site or corrupt it irreparably.  The attempt clearly failed, but it did nearly cause me a minor heart attack.  I’ve since deleted both the install.php and upgrade.php files, just to prevent this sort of thing from happening again.  In theory, not deleting them shouldn’t cause any harm, since accessing them after an install or an upgrade generally only returns a message saying you’ve already done that, but I also wouldn’t be at all surprised if hackers have found ways to exploit those files for their own amusement.  I’ll likely make a point of backing up all my DBs on a more regular basis now (especially since SSH makes it so darn fast and easy to do), just to make sure that if I do get hacked at some point in the future, it will be an easy task to return things to a general state of order again.

So, what do you think?

Go to wp-includes/pluggable.php and find and remove line 228:

$phpmailer->Sender = apply_filters( ‘wp_mail_from’, $from_email );

Save and re-upload the file, and you should be back in business.  I’ve submitted a new ticket for the issue, so hopefully the problem will be fixed in the next revision.

Everything with WP-Stats works as it should except for the traffic tracked to individual entries.  As you can see from the screencapture, the traffic is no longer being logged correctly.  Instead of seeing the title of the post in question, what generally shows up is the post ID, though I usually have one entry that shows the title for some reason.  This wouldn’t even be so bad, since ordinarily you’d at least be able to click through to the post and check the title that way.  Tedious, I know, but at least it’d be something.  Instead when I mouse-over the link, here’s what I see:

A useless link that doesn’t actually take me where I want to go.  Now, obviously something doesn’t work right, and I haven’t had a chance to jump into the code to see what’s happening.  The WordPress support forums have seen a fair bit of traffic about the WP-Stats plugin being broken, though I don’t think I’ve seen my own specific problem appear yet (something which I’m about to remedy).  Hopefully a new version will be released soon with a patch to address the various problems users have been reporting.

What I like about T1 is the custom styling for each category, giving each type of entry its own special look.  I intend to take full advantage of this as this tumblelog will give me a good place to share any all neat videos, photos, links, etc. that I run across in the course of the typical day.  Comments are open and welcome – just mouseover any entry for the comment link to appear on the right-hand side.  Also feel free to subscribe to my feed, particularly if randomness is your cuppajoe.

I’ve also just spent the last 45 minutes upgrading plugins, thanks to the nifty little plugin update notifier that’s now built into WordPress, and I’ve also coded this theme to be compliant with WordPress 2.3 tags.  I’ll rebundle it tomorrow and distribute it on the download page.  All in all, I’m very happy with what I’m seeing.

This is the only one of my WordPress installations that I’ve run tags on, since UTW was, quite frankly, such a pain in the neck to implement.  I’ll be converting a couple of my other installations over to tags soon, as well, and I’ve been toying with the idea of setting up a Tumblelog but was waiting for 2.3 to come out before doing so.  I think I’ll be setting that up in the near future now, as well.

Unfortunately, apparently Bad Behavior has failed before, prompting an upgrade from 2.0.7 to the current version of 2.0.10.  Trouble is, now 2.0.10 is malfunctioning and it blocking all scripts that had anything to do with communicating with the database.  My guess is that something has gone wrong with Bad Behavior servers, potentially causing some sort of “feedback” loop.  I – and a couple of others – have left comments notifying the author of the problem, so hopefully we’ll see a new version released in the near future.  In the meantime, problem solved and everything seems to be functioning properly again.

• openID. I’ve wanted to set up an openID server for my blog for quite awhile now.  The idea of being able to use my domain to securely log into other websites that use openID, rather than having to hassle with different usernames and passwords, was very appealing to me.  However, the technology was initially so new that it was difficult to incorporate openID into WordPress without some hefty file hacking to make it work.  Then plugins started coming out, some of which worked better than others.  Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to get openID to work here, despite a nice little WordPress plugin that’s supposed to take all the hardship right out of installing it.  I suspect that problem lies with inadequate support from my webhost, and all my attempts to contact the plugin’s author have been met with the silent treatment.  The plugin itself hasn’t even undergone any changes, additions, or revisions since it was first published, so I suspect that it’s probably no longer being supported.  This, then, continues to leave me in an openID black hole until something changes either with my webhost or with a plugin developer that can produce an openID plugin that works so well that almost anyone can use it on any hosting package.
• dp.SyntaxHighlighter. I work enough with CSS in the occasional WordPress or bbPress theming project that I do like to share snippets of code when the situation demands it.  There’s a host of good code sharing plugins out there for WordPress, but the WordPress.com developers have incorporated a syntax highlighting package into the .com blogs that’s really slick.  The thing that I like so much about it is that it has a little button that will automatically copy all the code to your clipboard for easy pasting into a text editor.  Gone is the need to highlight and copy and then have to manually remove the numbers from the beginning of each line.  Unfortunately, dp.SyntaxHighlighter has not yet been bundled as a WordPress plugin, and not being terribly adept yet at coding in PHP, I’m not sure where I’d even start to create a plugin to incorporate it into hosted versions of WordPress.  I may try tackling the project here at some point and learn much more, I’m sure, about PHP in the process, but that will have to wait for another time when I don’t have quite so much on my plate. I suspect, though, it’s only a matter of time before else beats me to it.

• LaTeX. The WordPress.com blogs also have LaTeX installed on them for the uber math geeks.  I had a brief introduction to LaTeX when I took Calculus from my father-in-law during my undergraduate education (though I hadn’t yet then met his daughter).  I’ve always been somewhat intrigued by coding and markup languages, and LaTeX seemed similar in many ways to HTML and C.  The beauty of LaTeX, though, lies in its ability to allow you to easily and attractively put complex mathematical formulas and diagrams on a page.  The downside to LaTeX, though, is that the software necessary to make it work is rather complicated to install and somewhat less complicated to use.  It’s gotten better in recent iterations, of course, but it’s still somewhat cumbersome to set up.  The brains over at WordPress.com actually took the time and effort to make LaTeX work with their blogs and to allow anyone who wants to do so to render LaTeX formulas on their WP.com blogs.  There are a couple of plugins that allow you to use LaTeX on hosted versions of WordPress, as well, but they depend heavily on all the LaTeX software being installed on your server.  Most webhosts do not have these software packages installed, and it is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to install these packages yourself or to get tech support to install them for you.  So, unfortunately, I have yet to get LaTeX installed on this blog.  This does, however, providing a major driving motivation for me to use my WordPress.com blog a bit more, especially since I intend to spend some time working my way through my old Calculus textbook (yes, I did keep it) in an attempt to learn Calculus again and learn it better this time.  So, I may end up referring you back and forth between the two blogs, at least until I can find a way to get LaTeX installed here.

The documentation on <?php wp_tag_cloud(); ?> is currently incomplete, so I had to do some digging into the core code to find out how to adjust the parameters.  <?php wp_tag_cloud(); ?> takes a string of parameters that adjust how your tag cloud displays.  For example, <?php wp_tag_cloud('number=20&order=desc'); ?> will display a tag cloud of your top 20 tags and sort them in descending order.

Here are the various settings:

• smallest – Adjusts the size of the smallest tags in the cloud.  Default is ‘8’.
• largest – Adjusts the size of the biggest tags in the cloud.  Default is ‘22’.
• unit – Sets the unit type for font size (i.e. point or em).  Default is ‘pt’.
• number – How many tags will display in the cloud.  Default is ‘45’.
• format – ‘Flat’ displays an inline cloud with each term separated by whitespace. ‘List’ generates an unordered list.  ‘Array’ lets you define an array of tags.  Default is ‘flat’.
• orderby – Sort the cloud by ‘name’ or ‘count’.  Default is ‘name’.

• order – Sort the cloud in ascending or descending order.  Default is ‘ASC’.

  The new native taxonomy isn’t as powerful as UTW was, but I’m sure it won’t be too long before there will be a host of new plugins to change that.

  WordPress 2.3 Beta 2 releases on Monday.  I’ll write about any new changes somewhere around then.

  ]]> http://shamuswrites.com/2007/08/30/wp_tag_cloud-wordpress-23/feed/ 0 http://shamuswrites.com/2007/08/30/wordpress-23-beta-1-test/ http://shamuswrites.com/2007/08/30/wordpress-23-beta-1-test/#comments Thu, 30 Aug 2007 19:39:31 +0000 Jim http://shamuswrites.com/2007/08/30/wordpress-23-beta-1-test/ I’ve been toying around with the WordPress 2.3 Beta 1 most of the day today.  I basically copied this site’s files and database to another location, uploaded the 2.3 files, and ran the upgrade script.  Then I spent the next several hours mucking about with the new system.  Here’s what I’ve discovered so far:
  • The only plugin that ‘broke’ upon re-activation was the Custom Write Panel.  And even then, I’m not sure it actually broke.  It generates a ‘Plugin could not be activated’ fatal error, yet it clearly showed as active in the list and seems to function just fine when I go to it to write up a new entry.  I have a feeling it has to do with the new tag field in the write screen that the Custom Write Panel plugin will obviously not be able to account for properly.
  • The UTW tagging conversion process works pretty well.  I have a massive database, though, and the tag importer counted just shy of 1200 tags that I’ve used in the past and nearly 4000 tag-to-post relationships.  Writing the UTW tags to the new WordPress taxonomy system took awhile, I think in part due to the size of the database as well as to the somewhat sluggish nature of my computer.  The conversion appears to have gone off without a hitch, though, and I’ve retired the UTW plugin on the beta test site in favor of the native taxonomy system.
  • The categories-to-tags conversion process failed tragically, however.  It’s been generating duplicate entry database errors, thus failing to convert category names to tags.  Of course, it did, for some reason, single out my Commentary category to convert properly, thus removing every entry from that category (and every other category), effectively removing them from my blog – unless they happened to also be filed under another category, in which case they got to stay.  I had similar problems with converting categories to tags with UTW, as well, so it could be something problematic with the whole system.  It matters little to me, in the long-run, since I prefer to keep my categories separate from my tags, but since I’m helping to beta-test the software, I wanted to see how badly I could break things.
  • The new tagging system has two new functions – <?php the_tags(); ?> and <?php wp_tag_cloud(); ?>.  The first takes three parameters and is most useful for displaying your tags at the end of entries.  The latter takes a string of options and is most useful for displaying a tag cloud of your specifications in the sidebar, on a page (say, as a site index), or in a post, if you prefer.  I’ll talk more about the tag cloud function in the following entry.
  • The plugins page in the dashboard also now displays when plugins have new versions (according to the wordpress.org plugins database).  It’s a slick little addition that I’m very pleased to see.

    By and large I’m happy with the new changes to the WordPress core.  I’m eager now to see what sort of new plugins will come out of the new tagging taxonomy. 

    ]]> http://shamuswrites.com/2007/08/30/wordpress-23-beta-1-test/feed/ 1 http://shamuswrites.com/2007/08/28/a-look-at-wordpress-23/ http://shamuswrites.com/2007/08/28/a-look-at-wordpress-23/#comments Wed, 29 Aug 2007 02:14:42 +0000 Jim http://shamuswrites.com/2007/08/28/a-look-at-wordpress-23/ Small Potato has written up a preliminary review of WordPress 2.3 Beta 1, and I must say that the new features being introduced into this version are positively yummy.  I think I’m going to really like having tags native to the WordPress core.  I was worried about the need for a tag importer for those of us who use tagging plugins, so I’m pleased to see that the WordPress development team will be including an importer for UTW and are currently testing importers for a couple of other popular tagging plugins, as well.  It was also nice to get a closer look at the new template tag for tags – <?php the_tags('', '', ''); ?>.

    The default blogroll has also been the source of much contention lately, in light of the debate over what constitutes sponsored links and what doesn’t.  Matt’s integrity has also been called into question over a number of issues lately, so it’s nice to see the development team taking the suggestions of the WordPress community seriously by replacing the legacy default blogroll links with others that point at WordPress development and documentation links.

    I haven’t had a chance to install and test out the WordPress 2.3 Beta 1 yet, but I’m already liking what I’m hearing from those who have.  I can’t wait to take a look at a full feature list for the next version of WordPress.  I expect that some of my current plugins may break with 2.3, but I think the trade-off for new native features will be well worth the extra trouble.

    ]]> http://shamuswrites.com/2007/08/28/a-look-at-wordpress-23/feed/ 0