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

Protecting WordPress from SQL Injection Attacks

David Kierznowski at BlogSecurity suggests that WordPress is “insecure by design.” What he means is that in general WordPress does not sanitize MySQL queries. He recommends that WordPress provide “a proper set of SQL safe functions (i.e. $wpdb->escape_int and $wpdb->escape_str” and “use mysql_real_escape_string(), and have clearly defined coding standards and security policies” like [...]

New York Times Invests a Little Bit in Automattic Without Seeming to Know Why

The big news today is that Automattic, the company founded by Matt Mullenweg, lead developer of WordPress, has landed a whopping $29.5 million investment from several venture capital companies and the New York Times. In announcing the move today, the Times emphasized that its investment was “small” and the “smallest.” It also seemed [...]

Crunchies: Did WordPress.org or Automattic Win?

The “Crunchies,” which describes itself as an “award ceremony to recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year,” had its award ceremony last night. WordPress of some sort won an award, but it’s not clear which.
WordPress is the open-source blogging software hosted on WordPress.org. It’s sometimes referred to [...]

WordPress Publisher Blog Launches

Automattic, the company founded by WordPress lead developer Matt Mullenweg, has launched the “WordPress Publisher” blog.
We’ll cover features that are often overlooked, we’ll highlight plugins that extend WordPress functionality, and we’ll showcase interesting sites being built with WordPress.
From the description, it sounds like the WordPress Publisher Blog aims to be Automattic’s in-house version of Weblog [...]

How I’ve Cut WordPress Comment Spam by 45%

For the last couple of months I’ve been keeping the database entries for comment spam caught by Akismet at my personal blog. I have an ongoing search for patterns that I hope to use in a future project.
WordPress accepts three types of comments: “regular” comments made by submitting the comment form on-site, [...]

User Interface Guide Coming to WordPress

Matt Mullenweg, lead developer of WordPress, recently announced plans for “a set of interface guidelines similar to Apple’s or Yahoo’s detailing what was found in the research, so core WP devs, plugin authors, and other web devs can make better decisions about interactions in the future.” (The research he’s referring to—commissioned by Automattic—was done [...]

WordPress a Necessity?

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch lists WordPress among his favorite “Web 2.0″ companies. Considering how many well-known bloggers use WordPress and that 3.81 million people downloaded WordPress in 2007, I think he’s not alone.

WordPress 2.3.2: What’s New

Bug fix
Yesterday WordPress version 2.3.2 was released, chiefly to fix a bug that allowed any visitor to your site to view any posts set to be published in the future (a request like http://pressedwords.com/?x=wp-admin/&paged=1 would do it).
Suppress Error Messages
More generally, WordPress now suppresses most database error messages. That’s great for a production site, where [...]

6 Tips for Localizing Your WordPress Plugin

Localizing (or internationalizing) your WordPress plugin means making its text capable of being translated into other languages, without having to change the plugin itself. That’s something any plugin author should want to do, considering the huge communities of non-English-speaking WordPress users and the relative ease with which internationalization can be done.
Here is a list [...]

Hello world!

Welcome to the inaugural post of Pressed Words.