I’ve written a new plugin for WordPress called Paul’s Latest Posts. This sidebar widget pulls your latest posts and displays them with an excerpt. I’ve just gotten confirmation from WordPress Plugins that it’s been approved for hosting on the official WordPress Plugins page. It’s not showing yet, but when it is I’ll provide the link and you can tell me what you think.
Posts Tagged ‘plugins’
New WordPress Plugin – Paul’s Latest Posts
Tuesday, January 20th, 2009Initial Reaction To WordPress 2.7
Monday, December 15th, 2008I installed WP 2.7 on my home MAMP Server last night to see what all the fuss was about, and I have to say I am impressed. I like the new AJAXified Admin Page, and the new layout. I like the way that plugins can be updated either from the ZIP file or directly from the WordPress.org Extend page. I like the new threaded and paged comments loop. I like the new customisable Dashboard. In fact there are a whole host of new features that make me want to upgrade immediately to 2.7, but I won’t be – at least not for the time being.
My issue is that there a quite a few plugins that I use that are not compatible with 2.7. I’ve spent a lot of time finding and incorporating these plugins. They help define what my site is. They make my site work the way I want it to work. Until plugin authors have a chance to upgrade their work to refelct the changes in 2.7, I’ll be sticking to my current WordPress installation.
WordPress Plugins Redux
Friday, December 14th, 2007I was playing around with updating the way the date and time are displayed on this blog, (more about this later), and as part of the testing I was going through some old blog posts when I came across this old post: WordPress Plugins. Seeing as it’s been nearly a year, I thought it was about time that I posted an updated list. So here are my current plugins:
- Akismet
- Autometa
- Bad Behaviour
- Block-lists Anti-Spam Measures
- Category Cloud Widget
- Category Tagging
- Contact Form 7
- DoFollow
- FeedBurner FeedSmith
- FireStats
- Google XML Sitemap Generator
- JPF Quotes
- MyDashboard
- Tag Cloud
- RunPHP
- Sociable
- StatPress
- WordPress Mobile Edition
- WordPress Reports
- WP-chgFontSize
Commenting Problems
Monday, December 3rd, 2007Over the last while I’ve noticed a quirk in how the comments on this site were being displayed. If the comment contained a URL, part of the URL would appear at the very start of the comment, like this:
domain.tldSome random comment stuff
It’s been going on a while, so today I decided to see if I could figure out what was causing it. I started by disabling all the plugins on the site, creating a test comment and then editing it to see if I could replicate the problem. My test comment displayed correctly, so it was just a matter of enabling each plugin one by one, editing the comment and checking if the problem recurred.
Using this method I narrowed it down to the an anti-spam plugin that I use: Block-lists Anti-Spam Measures by John Sinteur.
I emailed John, and within literally two minutes he had replied with an updated version of the plugin that fixed my problem. So a big thank you to John, both for a great plugin and his fantastic support.
BackUpWordPress Plugin Security Issue
Sunday, November 11th, 2007Over the last few days I’ve been noticing quite a few hits on my blog for various, non-existant pages. Each of these hits takes the form of:
bkpwp_plugin_path=URL of a text file on an another website
Checking the URL in the page request returns a text file containing PHP code that attempts to launch a remote shell.
The first part of the page request is a reference to a plugin for WordPress called BackUpWordPress This plugin automatically backs up your WordPress database and files. According to Security Focus, the plugin does not properly check user provided input, thereby allowing remote users to possibly access your hosting providers server.
At this point in time there is no update available to resolve this issue. If you’re using this plugin, then until a fix is made available, the safest option is to deactivate and remove the plugin.
Update: Since I wrote this piece, the BackUpWordPress plugin has been updated to fix this issue. Kudos to the developer for releasing a fix so quickly. More details in this comment.
New WMP Plugin for Firefox
Tuesday, April 17th, 2007Microsoft have just released a new Windows Media Player plugin for their greatest competitor in the new browser wars – FireFox. The new plugin resolves several problems with the older plugin that would crash Firefox.
The plugin is available for Windows XP and Vista only, though it would be nice if they released it for other platforms, but I don’t see that happening any time soon.
The plugin can be downloaded from the Microsoft Port 25 website.