WordPress 2.9.1 Released

I’m sure many have opted to wait for this 2.9.1 release before updating to 2.9. Well, now should be the best time for you to update your WordPress site. My experience with WordPress has been great so far. I’ve always updated my sites to the latest version as they become public. Yes, I upgrade immediately, always. Alhamdulillah, thankfully, I have never faced any problems on any of my sites.

Related to the 2.9.1 update, WordPress MU 2.9.1 is also in the pipeline. It’s been a while since the MU has been updated. I think it’s at 2.8.1 right now. Anyway, I am now patiently waiting for the release of WordPress MU 2.9.1. Have a number of sites running on MU at the moment.

Not familiar with WordPress MU? MU allows you to run multiple WordPress sites on a single WordPress installation. Makes your life as administrator slightly easier especially in terms of plugins and themes updates. Do it once and all your sites are updated.

If  you are not familiar with MU, now would be a good time to try it out. The next major release  (WordPress 3.0) will merge  WordPress and WordPress MU, together into a single core version. Will the merge make WordPress more complex?

At the moment, many shared hosting sites do not support WordPress MU. How will the merge affect them in the future? Will they stop supporting WordPress? I sure hope not. I they do, it’ll cost them quite a bit. I’d say many sites today are built on WordPress even if it’s not a blog. WordPress is almost everywhere now. It’s not only running blogs either. You can run a company Intranet on WordPress (see video at the end of this post).

You might want to check with your hosting provider about this. You can probably ask them now. See if they allow you to run WordPress MU in your account. If they don’t, ask if they plan to allow it in the future.

Should you not be allowed to run MU, you might want to start looking around at new hosting providers. I use Bluehost. I’ve got some  WordPress MU installations running on them too. You can check them out here.

Have you updated your WordPress? How did the update go?

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!

 

Introducing WordPress 2.9 Carmen

Yes, you read that right. WordPress 2.9.1 update is coming out soon. Barely one week after the release of WordPress 2.9. Apparently the new version has some problems with PHP’s curl extension on certain hosts.

Last week, or should I say 6 days ago, WordPress 2.9 was made available for public download. A slew of new features are made available on the new version apart from some bug fixes. Overall, the 2.9 could be considered as a feature enhancement version for many. Among the most notable additional features include:

Undo / Trash: Users can now select to put items into a trash can. Posts, pages, categories and whatnots will now be sent to a trash can instead of being deleted. Just like the recycle bin in your Windows computer (if you use Windows), you can restore items in your trashcan if you’ve deleted them by mistake.

Image Editor: You can now perform some level of image editing within WordPress itself. Simple actions like cropping, editing, rotating, flipping, and scaling your images can be done outright from WordPress. No longer will you need an external photo editing software to do simple photo formatting. Of course, don’t expect it to replace Adobe Photoshop or even MS Paint for that matter.

Bulk Plugin Updates: I’m sure many of you are annoyed with having to click so many times when multiple plugins are upgraded at the same time. Well, for those of you who are running like tonnes and tonnes of plugins, this allows you to update all plugins with new updates with a single click.

Smart and easy video embeds: How many video related plugins have you got running on your website or blog? WordPress 2.9 is now smart enough to embed videos properly on your site. Just post the url link to the video and WP2.9 will automagically transform that link into its proper embeded code. View the following video about this new feature.

Have you upgraded to you WordPress to 2.9? I have, on all my two stand alone WordPress sites. Both of them upgraded smoothly. No problems what so ever. Even the plugins are working just fine. The rest of my other sites are on WPMu. Don’t really know when they will release a 2.9 for WPMu yet.

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!

 

What vulnerability? Well, the person who disclosed the vulnerability, Stefan Esser, calls it the SQL Column Truncation Vulnerabilities. What is it? In plain English, it allows them bad people to sort of modify passwords of other existing users in the system.

Them bad people will still not be able to get into the system as other users, though. The new password is still unknown to them as it was randomly generated. However, it is still breakable with a little more effort since there is also a weakness in how the random password was generated.

What this does is basically annoy your users as they will then have to reset their passwords since it’s been changed by the bad people. Thus, if you don’t want your registered users and customers to be annoyed silly by these bad people who go around changing user passwords, I recommend that you upgrade your WordPress installation to 2.6.2

Do note that the SQL Column Truncation Vulnerability affects all application using MySQL as the backend database. Verify with your app vendor about this.

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!