Many sites across the blogosphere are reporting a fake website that is distributing a backdoored version of WordPress. Though these are few and far between, it behooves all users to be careful when downloading any kind of code to run on their blog. The Register report contains an update from Peter Westwood (a WordPress lead dev) about the code being distributed and his suggestions on how to avoid being duped. Though the fake site is down now and If you believe that you might have been the victim of this site, please download a fresh copy of WordPress from WordPress.org and upgrade your blog to be safe. I personally follow a few simple rules to make sure that I never fall for a social engineering or covert code trap on my blogs. Always download core WordPress code from http://WordPress.org. Type the link into your browser address bar rather than following […]

New Plugins WP-CommentNavi Have nicer/advanced pagination for your comments in WordPress 2.7 Lolcats Widget Plugin This simple plugin retreives the latest lolcat and displays it on a widget. It caches it for two hours so it won’t slow up the process of loading each time. Popupper Allows a blogger to insert links that when the reader mouses over the links it shows a popup. WP-NoSpamUser “WP-NoSpamUser” is all about blocking potential spammers from registering on your blog. EasySMS EasySMS is a great way for WordPress administrators to txt message their registered users and broadcast a new post to user’s cell phones. Auto Post Images (API) This plugin will automatically put images into each post. The images are automatically added to posts and not to pages. Good for sites that host recipes. Alphabetical List Order your posts alphabetically for each selected categories. Comment Approved Notifier The plugin sends an e-mail to […]

While the U.S. Presidential election has come and gone, there are still plenty of things to vote for such as WordPress Ideas. WordPress Ideas is used as a central location where users of WordPress from all across the world share their ideas on how to improve the software, plugins to integrate, etc. At this time, the idea of Easy Updating Of WordPress leads the pack with 910 votes and a rating of five stars. As it turns out, this will be one of the features in WordPress 2.7 known as Core Upgrade. Next on the list is Open ID Integration. Although there are plenty of plugins that easily provide this functionality, considering the amount of steam the idea has, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it in a future version of WordPress. In order to participate in the WordPress idea center, you must have a WordPress.org user account. This will […]

Garden Garden consists of a fluid three column outfit with widgetized bars and columns, featuring an custom fields enabled news slider jQuery powered, built in are recent comments with gravatars, related posts, social bookmarking enabled. The frontpage shows the latest posts followed by footer action. Flickr, Delicio is enabled in the themes options panel. iEleg iEleg is a 2 column widget ready wordpress theme. Theme uses 2 small images for faster download. Feel free to get back if you face any problem. I would be very happy to help. Simple Brown Two column, widget ready and search engine optimized with a different style for the latest article. SpotOnSEO Two Column, fixed width, widget ready, SEO Friendly, AJAX tabbed theme

Making your theme’s comments compatible with WordPress 2.7 and earlier versions.: If you are a theme designer or author, you need to know that your legacy theme’s comments page will not be compatible with WordPress 2.7 Justin Tadlock has written up a simple (and clean) procedure to make the comments page compatible with WordPress 2.7 and still be backwards compatible with slightly older version of WordPress. While we are on the subject of comments and WordPress 2.7, Otto has also written a detailed post on the new comment enhancements in WordPress 2.7. Judging from the comments and reading through the article, it is a very well written peice and should answer most questions on the new features. [EDIT] As astutely pointed out in the comments, all themes should continue to work fine with original functionality. However to use the newly introduced commenting features of WordPress 2.7, older themes will have […]

New Plugins Custom Permalinks Custom Permalinks is a WordPress plugin that gives you ultimate control over your site structure. GD Star Rating GD Star Rating is post, page and comment rating plugin for WordPress. Plugin supports different image sets, rating moderation, vote rules, time restricted voting, templates, trend calculations, has a widget build in and shortcode support. Random Tags Cloud Random Tags Cloud displays your tags by selecting randomly. You can customize other tag cloud’s settings. It allows you to display your site’s tags on your sidebar. It works just like a regular tags cloud, but you can customize it. If you set, it gets your tags by selecting randomly. Comment Approved Notifier The plugin sends an e-mail to your commenters when you approve their comments. Results Count Remix Adds both the number of displayed posts as well as the total number of returned posts to search and archive pages. […]

WordPress 2.7 Keyboard Shortcuts in the WordPress Codex is a nice page to figure out the neat little tricks to make your job of administering a blog easier and more user friendly. WordPress 2.7 adds the ability to use keyboard shortcuts to browse and moderate comments. These keyboard shortcuts are designed to save time by allowing you to rapidly navigate and perform actions on comments. If your blog receives a lot of comments for moderation and/or spam, these shortcuts might come handy. Speaking of new features added to WordPress 2.7, Demetris has written a post on the Ten New Features in WordPress 2.7 that strikes him as the most useful. I really like his illustrated style of writing. It is worthy of note that some of the features he mentions are dependant on compatibility with your theme.

Normally, we usually keep a maximum of two posts a day that are published on WeblogTooolsCollection as a means of keeping your dashboard from being overcome by us. However, considering that the following security bulletin has been published concerning the plugin (WP Comment Remix) and it won the WeblogToolsCollection plugin competition, I felt it was important to pass along this security bulletin to you. According to the bulletin that was published by Chxsecurity.org version 1.4.3 contains the following vulnerabilities: SQL Injection: caused by unsanitized variable “p” in the ajax_comments.php file. Cross Site Scripting: This affects authenticated and unauthenticated users. Cross Site Request Forgery: the form generated through wpcr_do_options_page lacks the WordPress wp_nonce security function. These vulnerabilities are considered HIGH risks however, the latest version (1.4.4) apparently addresses these issues. If you are using this plugin on your blog, be sure to upgrade it to the latest version.