Pressed Words

Exporting Mephisto to WordPress

Austin Matzko — Fri, 09 May 2008 01:14:43 +0000

Jason Gill has published the amazingly concise script he used to export his Mephisto site to WordPress.

Using WordPress to Log System Changes

Austin Matzko — Thu, 08 May 2008 13:28:25 +0000

With a basic shell script and WordPress’s blog-by-email feature, Jon Buys is using WordPress to log user changes to his servers:

I decided to start tracking the email alerts with a centralized database. Now, at this point, I could have whipped up my own home-brew frankenstein creation, but since everything I wanted was already built into Wordpress, I really didn’t need to. Wordpress has the option of posting blogs via email. . . . Now, when management gets it in their mind to start asking questions, we can easily say “Let me reference my report.” They really like hearing things like that.

NPR Interns’ Blog Powered by WordPress

Austin Matzko — Thu, 08 May 2008 01:06:07 +0000

National Public Radio’s Spring 2008 intern blog is powered by WordPress, using a somewhat modified version of the default Kubrick theme.

Backporting WordPress Security Fixes

Austin Matzko — Wed, 07 May 2008 03:14:29 +0000

Alex Schleber so dislikes WordPress 2.5 that he’s worked out how to patch version 2.3.3 with 2.5’s security patches instead of upgrading. It’s an approach I would recommend against. For one thing, there’s a good chance that one won’t recognize all of the patches via changelogs, if for no other reason than that sometimes new features—not just fixes—have obviated bugs. Also, 2.5 introduced a number of features on the back-end that I would miss.

I am curious about his antipathy towards version 2.5, something he promises to blog about later. My guess is that it has to do with the design of the administrative back-end. That just confirms my opinion that the WordPress admin should be template-able. After all, no one ever decided not to upgrade WordPress because they didn’t like Kubrick.

Managing WordPress from the Command Line

Austin Matzko — Wed, 07 May 2008 02:47:00 +0000

Jon Smajda describes how he backs up and upgrades WordPress, and it’s the way I prefer to do it: using Subversion and mysqldump. I think the best part of his post is this sample backup cron script. With a little tweaking it could be used to back up remotely for best protection, in case, for example, your server walks out the data center door.

WordPress Vancouver

Austin Matzko — Tue, 06 May 2008 13:02:45 +0000

Phillip Jeffrey has some good photos and links to the presenters from the recent WordCamp Vancouver.

More WordCamps are coming up soon, including one in Milan this weekend.

WordPress Fantastico De Luxe Upgrade to 2.5.1

Austin Matzko — Tue, 06 May 2008 12:40:22 +0000

Jeffro2pt0 points out that Fantastico De Luxe, the fairly popular way of installing WordPress and other applications through your site’s control panel, now allows you to upgrade WordPress to 2.5.1.

Personally, I prefer to use Subversion to manage my WordPress sites, but that’s not always available on shared hosts.

WordPress Attacks Mapped

Austin Matzko — Tue, 06 May 2008 12:30:12 +0000

Franklin Veaux has diagrammed a network of compromised sites–including the Boston Public Library’s blog–that are geared towards installing viruses. He notes that there has been a surge of attacks recently against compromised WordPress sites, so the lesson is to be sure that you keep your WordPress version up-to-date.

Veaux does link to some of these sites in his post, so don’t follow those links unless you really know what you’re doing.

WordPressDirect.com

Austin Matzko — Tue, 06 May 2008 12:13:12 +0000

It looks like there’s a new WordPress install business that’s geared towards helping people set up business blogs using WordPress.

It claims you can set up WordPress for free using its service, so its business model seems to be based on affiliate sales and advertising. However, on signup the site does ask for a PayPal email with no obvious explanation why.

Of course, if you want to set up a personal (i.e. non-business) blog using WordPress, you can always take advantage of the official Install4Free site.

Restoring Your WordPress 2.5 Password in the Database

Austin Matzko — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 03:39:31 +0000

WordPress 2.5 introduced a much more thorough password-hashing algorithm with PHPass. That is great for security, but I was afraid that it would make restoring your WordPress password in the database almost impossible. You see, prior to 2.5, if you needed to reset your password, you could just hash it using md5 and put it directly in the wp_users table, as described here.

The good news—surprisingly—is that you can still do that in 2.5, as DD32 pointed out on the WordPress hackers mailing list. You can thank wp_check_password(), which checks to see if your stored password is still in md5 form, and if so, it lets you log in and then converts it.