Yesterday I read that the 2.5 version of Wordpress was officially released. The cautious part of me wanted to wait to upgrade, but the totally paranoid and non-lazy part wanted to just get it over with. I had read a few mentions of incompatibility, but I decided to just bite the bullet and upgrade.

I hunkered down at my desk, did database and filesystem backups, downloaded the 2.5 release and untarred to my blog directory. Typed in the URL and — poof — there was the blog. Did smoke testing of all the plugins and they worked - every one of them. I was literally done in about 5 minutes.

I don’t think I’ve had an upgrade that wasn’t painful in some way in a long time. This one was nothing. It just worked.

So anyway, long way to say I’m on Wordpress 2.5 now. I was shocked at the ease of the upgrade. Later in the day, I saw all kinds of tweets around other people upgrading and having the same fulfilling sense of surprise when they realized they were done.

Thanks to the Wordpress team for another great (and uneventful) release.

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I found this plugin that corrects a pet peeve of mine that I’ve had for a while. The Flickr Blog This To Draft Plugin by Donncha O Caoimh ensures that all of your blogged photos from Flickr come in as drafts, so that you can go in and massage the HTML before publishing.

If you blog photos from Flickr much, and spend time rushing to edit your published picture (to fix HTML, add CSS attributes, etc), grab this plugin to remove the unneeded stress from your life.

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Version 2.1.3 of the Wordpress blogging platform has been released and is available for download. According to the Wordpress blog, this is a security release that “includes fixes for several publicly known minor XSS issues, one major XML-RPC issue, and a proactive full sweep of the WordPress codebase to protect against future problems”.

I’ve upgraded, and so should you. Take a couple of minutes to do this upgrade, as the possible consequences aren’t worth the humiliation.

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The Wordpress team has announced the release of version 2.1 of their Wordpress blogging software on Monday. A list of the changes can be found in the release announcement.

Sure, this is old news (by internet time standards) but I just got around to getting caught up. I’ve upgraded the site and the process was absolutely painless. All of my current plugins worked as far as I can tell.

For those who have a bit of trepidation over upgrades and the compatibility of plugins, I can tell you that my installation, with over 17 plugins active, seems to be working fine after the upgrade this morning after a total upgrade time of around 15 minutes including backups of my installation directory and database. As usual, the upgrade instructions are available on the Wordpress site.

The Wordpress team is planning its next release, Version 2.2, around the April 23 timeframe.

I haven’t had a great deal of time this morning to play around, but it does seem that the site runs just a tad bit faster then it did under the previous version.

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I’ve been having a real problem with the site being hit hard by spammers lately. Consequently, I have turned comments off on most of the articles on the site at this point.

Due to the implementation of SPAM Karma 2 and Akismet, none of the comment spam actually made it to the blog. I was pretty amazed at how thoroughly these two pieces of software have filtered the incoming comments.

However, the comments not making it to the blog doesn’t mean that the spammers haven’t done any real damage. Twice now I’ve come home to find my comments disabled by my provider, due to basically a Denial of Service attack being executed on the site by these morons.

I found a great page at the Wordpress Codex on Combatting Comment Spam. I would encourage anyone currently dealing with this problem to check out this page. I will be implementing some of these ideas one by one over the coming weeks to see how much they help.

I’ll let you know of the success I have. In the meantime, if you aren’t running Spam Karma, I would encourage you to go take a look at it and its corresponding Akismet plugin. The combination of both has been highly effective in this corner of the web.

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The folks on the Wordpress team have released version 2.0.5 of the Wordpress Blogging Application. This release includes around 50 bug fixes one of which was a missing index on the posts table. I just upgraded and the site performs much better now. I had always thought that the site ran a tad bit slower after the 2.0 upgrade, but for some reason I just figured 2.0 was doing so much more than the 1.x versions. Didn’t even think of looking at table indexes.

Mark Jaquith has also put together his list of change files and corresponding archives containing only the changes from 2.0.4 to 2.0.5, along with a patch file to upgrade your stuff directly. I opted to download from the Wordpress site.

In any event, according to the release announcement, there are some security fixes in this release as well. As I do with every release of Wordpress that contains security release, I am reminding you not to be lazy and get your site upgraded as soon as you can. The performance improvements alone are worth it.

Now … off to see if they fixed that “posting from Flickr mangling CSS thing” …

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The Wordpress team has released version 2.0.4 of the Wordpress blogging software. From the release notes:

This release contains several important security fixes, so it’s highly recommended for all users. We’ve also rolled in a number of bug fixes (over 50!), so it’s a pretty solid release across the board.

This release contains security fixes. As I continuously remind everyone since being hacked, don’t be lazy on these upgrades!

Needless to say, I’m done.

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The Wordpress team has released version 2.0.2 to address some security issues with 2.0.1. You can get the full story over at the Wordpress blog, or go directly to the download area and grab it. Remember, don’t be lazy.

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I am continuing to work on the site and its migration to Wordpress 2.0. Along with the upgrade of the main site, I’ve had to upgrade the following items:

1. Ultimate Tag Warrior - I have upgraded this to version 2.8.9 to remove an error in the admin screens
2. FAlbum (Integrated Wordpress / Flickr Photo Album) - I have upgraded this to version 0.5.6. Along with getting everything to work properly, this version also gets rid of those missing images you saw in the photo album due to Flickr changing its URL scheme. With this work completed, the integrated photo album is now back up and running.

Right now, I think everything is working properly except for the comment issue when “wordpress” is in the permalink. If you find anything else broken, please let me know. I will continue to test over the next week or so.

Incidentally, the Wordpress team is planning to release the official 2.0 release on December 26. Once that happens, I’ll go through the excercise again to ensure that I am on the most current version.

Overall, I think the Wordpress team did a great job with this version of the software. For some additional information on Wordpress 2.0, you might want to hit the following articles written by Owen Winkler:

• Whats New In Wordpress 2.0?
• Whats Not Gonna Work in Wordpress 2.0?

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I found that if permalinks are on and the post-slug contains the word ‘Wordpress’, the comments section would not appear on the post. I have submitted an issue to the Wordpress team.

If you notice, I have changed the word ‘Wordpress’ in each of the slugs to ‘wp’ and they work fine. An old post with Wordpress in the slug can be found here. Notice - no comments section.

Obscure issues like this is why I don’t mind installing beta software in my production environment. Chances are, if you don’t run it for real, you won’t find this stuff.

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I decided to upgrade the site to Wordpress 2.0 to see what the new version looks like. Currently, I’m having some problems with permalinks and some plugins may not work. I will continue debugging later on in the next two weeks. One thing I will say is the new version looks great. The admin section has been majorly overhauled, complete with AJAX enablement, drag and drop placement of sections within the admin screen, and live preview of your post so that you can see what you’ve written in context with your theme - something I’ve been waiting for for quite some time.

The main problem (that I know about right now) is that it seems as if the comments do not work on posts since the upgrade. For some reason, on newer posts you just cannot get to the comment template. I’m currently tracing through that to figure out what the deal is.

As I get the bugs worked out, I’ll post up the details of what I’ve found.

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I was finally able to integrate the photo album on Flickr into the actual site, thanks to the FAlbum Wordpress Plugin released at version .5 by Elijah Cornell. Once again, no brainer to install. All I had to do was modify the falbum-wp.php file to close the extra divs in my theme.

The plugin supports permalinks, tags, and all of the goodies you would expect from a Flickr based photo album.

To see the new photo album, go to http://www.bieberlabs.com/wordpress/photos, or click the photo album item in the menu at the top of the site.

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I’ve installed the UltimateTagWarrior plugin for Wordpress in order to experiment with tagging on the site.

Installation was almost a no-brainer and consisted of unarchiving the downloaded zip file into my plugins directory and activating the plugin. I then messed around with different tag cloud types for the sidebar and wound up settling on the sized cloud. The code in the sidebar looks like this:

<h2 class="sidebar-title">Tags</h2>
<?php UTW_ShowWeightedTagSetAlphabetical("sizedtagcloud"); ?>


That got the tag cloud to display in the sidebar. Rather than go with the default tag editing that comes per post when you have local and technorati tags on in the Admin Manage/Tags screen, I turned them off and added the following code to enable Ajax based tag editing to the blog entries:

<?php UTW_ShowTagsForCurrentPost("superajax"); ?>


And thats it. Tagging is enabled!

Just to be clear, the almost no brainer has nothing to do with the quality of the plugin, but because I was picky as to how I wanted things to work. If you want plain vanilla tagging without Ajax, the default install and adding the code to the sidebar should suffice.

Happy tagging!

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