Category Archives: Asides

Frequently-Used WordPress Filters and Actions

Edward Dale has grepped through the WordPress plugins repository to find the most frequently-used filters and action hooks. In case you didn’t know, the filters and action hooks API is the glory of WordPress: it’s what makes WordPress so easily modified and extended. Seeing which are the most often used should say something about what […]

WordPress Use Declines Among Top 100 Bloggers

…but just barely. Last year, 34 of the top 100 bloggers used some version of WordPress. This year it’s 32. Movable Type / TypePad use has increased—again, barely—from 23 to 28 of the top blogs. Most of the changes seem to be a result of blogs coming and going from the ranks of the top […]

Beware Upgrading to a Fake WordPress 2.6.4

The Register mentions an attack on WordPress blogs that tells users to upgrade to a bogus 2.6.4 version of WordPress. This attack seems to be taking advantage of the security vulnerability that necessitated WordPress 2.6.3, whereby if an attacker could get control of an RSS feed that you publish on your blog (for example using […]

WordPress 2.7 Theme Comments How-To

Otto has a good tutorial on adjusting a WordPress theme to take advantage of the upcoming comment features in WordPress 2.7, including comment threading and paging. Keep in mind that WordPress 2.7 is still under development, and these features could change somewhat before 2.7 is released.

WordPress 2.6.1 Released

Bug-fix version 2.6.1 of WordPress has been released. it’s been a while since I’ve seen a release announcement say “You need not upgrade to 2.6.1 if 2.6 is getting the job done.”

Previews of the Default BuddyPress Theme

Andy Peatling, who works on BuddyPress for Automattic, has posted screenshots of the new default theme that will part of BuddyPress. In case you didn’t know, BuddyPress is a “WordPress MU Based Social Network Platform,” which in other words means that it’s similar to Facebook, except open source.

WordPress Admin Bar Updated

Viper007Bond has released version 3.0.0 of his WordPress admin bar, which puts a navigation menu for admin pages at the top of each external WordPress page, for logged-in users. By default, this admin bar looks a lot like the one at WordPress.com, but it (optionally) includes all available admin menu items, and there are a […]

Remove Microsoft Word Garbage from WordPress Posts, by Default

Dave Addey has released a compact WordPress plugin (about 10 lines long) that enables by default the TinyMCE feature that “cleans up” Microsoft Word markup. Typically, if you paste content from Word into WordPress’s WYSIWYG, TinyMCE, you get a ton of unsightly markup, such as font and alignment tags, which can wreak havoc on your […]

TechCrunch: Do as We Say, Not as We Do with WordPress Upgrades

A recent TechCrunch post makes it sound as if WordPress security releases are desperately following close on the heels of widespread attacks. The author, Nik Cubrilovic, then seems to suggest that open source applications are particularly at risk: Hackers are taking advantage of the open-source nature of the software to analyze the source code and […]

Zero-Day WordPress Exploit? Probably Not

The blogosphere has been all a-Twitter about a WordPress security vulnerability. Known as the “AnyResults.net” hack, it redirects blog hits with Google as the referrer to one of several spam sites. According to Donncha O Caoimh of Automattic, this exploit took advantage of a vulnerability that has been fixed in the latest stable version of […]