Articles written by Austin Matzko for Pressed Words

Austin Matzko is a web developer living in Boston, Massachusetts. He blogs and helps out with WordPress development as “filosofo.”

You can contact him at austin@pressedwords.com

Define “Imitation”

I couldn’t help noticing the similarity between the upcoming re-design of the WordPress admin interface and Dictionary.com, and sure enough, Happy Cog has designed both.

Venture Capital and Automattic

Xconomy has an article about the birth of Automattic, the company started by WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg. The author has interviewed Mike Hirshland, a partner at Polaris Venture, Automattic’s main investor.

Adding Advanced Options Boxes in WordPress 2.5

The upcoming WordPress 2.5 has a completely-redesigned admin backend. Plugin authors who add custom fields to the “Write Post” and “Write Page” pages will need to change their methods to work with the new design. Ozh explains how to use add_meta_box() with the new design to add those custom fields. He has [...]

Readying Plugins for the New WordPress Admin Theme

The WordPress admin theme has been overhauled for the next version (scheduled to be released mid-March), which means that a lot of plugins’ admin pages could end up looking out of place.
Joost de Valk gives some brief tips on how to mark up plugin admin pages to take advantage of the new styling.
Unfortunately, as he [...]

CSRF Attack on WordPress

Someone named Ferruh has a proof-of-concept cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attack against WordPress (HT: DK at BlogSecurity). I’ve tried it out successfully on my own version of WordPress 2.3.3.
The scenario is like this: you go to leave a comment on someone’s site, and surreptitiously that (evil) site tricks you into changing your WordPress admin password [...]

What You Won’t See in WordPress 2.5

One of the WordPress lead developers, Ryan Boren, announced today that WordPress 2.5 was going into “feature-freeze.” That means that the remaining month until 2.5’s March 10 release will be spent fixing the bugs in existing 2.5 features, not adding more.
And that’s a lot of bugs, as much of the admin redesign hasn’t yet [...]

Serious Security Flaw: Upgrade Immediately

Today a serious security flaw in the current version of WordPress surfaced in the support forums. Basically, a user with login rights but not editing capabilities can edit any post using XML-RPC. A quick fix is to delete the xmlrpc.php file, although you should be aware that this will also keep your site [...]

WordPress 2.5 Dashboard Preview

On a WordPress IRC channel, Michael Adams of Automattic posted this this screenshot of the new design for the new WordPress Dashboard. The Dashboard is the first page you see when you log in to the WordPress administrative area.
As you can see, the Dashboard will be divided into blocks, and those blocks [...]

How Many Bloggers Use Each Version of WordPress

Yesterday I mentioned that WordPress was the most-used content management system among Technorati’s top 100 bloggers, and I wondered what versions of WordPress they were using.
As it happens, discovering the WordPress version is fairly simple most of the time, so I wrote a Perl robot to gather that information from the top 100 Technorati bloggers. [...]

WordPress: Most-Used Blogging Application For the Most Popular Blogs

According to Technorati, more of the top one hundred linked-to blogs use WordPress than any other CMS. Specifically, 34% of those most popular blogs use WordPress, compared to Movable Type’s 16%.
Most WordPress themes announce their version number in the page’s meta tags. Since I’m sure Technorati has the data, it would be really [...]