Episode 27: WordPress 2.2.1 and WordCamp Schedule

News: WordPress 2.2.1 is a security fix

WordPress 2.2.1 is a bug fix release for the 2.2 series. Since 2.2 was released a month ago, the WordPress community has been improving fit-and-finish by identifying and fixing those little bugs that can be so annoying and by fine-tuning some small details. The result is a nicely polished 2.2.1 release. Here are some highlights.

• Atom feed validation fixes
• XML-RPC fixes
• Widget backward compatibility fixes
• Widget layout fixes for IE7
• Page and Text Widget improvements

Unfortunately, 2.2.1 is not just a bug fix release. Some security issues came to light during 2.2.1 development, making 2.2.1 a required upgrade. 2.2.1 addresses the following vulnerabilities:

• Remote shell injection in PHPMailer
• Remote SQL injection in XML-RPC
• Unescaped attribute in default theme

Matt Mullenweg answered some criticism about the security fixes and the version updates.

News: WordCamp Registration Opened and Speakers Announced

Registration for WordCamp 2007 San Francisco was opened up and it’ll cost you $25 this year, but that’ll get you a WordCamp t-shirt and lunch both days. Registration closes Monday, July 9th, so you’d better sign up now if you’re going.The program is divided into two parts this year. Saturday is focused on general WordPress usage while Sunday is focused on more advanced topics.

News: In San Francisco Friday? Want to come to a WordPress Podcast Meetup?

Aaron and I are kicking around the idea of hosting a meetup in the San Francisco area Friday afternoon prior to WordCamp. If you’re in town then, would you be interested in meeting up?

Plug-in: Spell WordPress is for those who are fastidious about making sure the trademark name is always spelled correctly. (This plugin is based on a rant from my personal blog.

Plug-in: SEO WordPress reduces duplicate content on your blog. The plugin essentially ‘herds’ googlebot and other spiders to the content you want indexed. The result? A much more search engine friendly blog and better indexing.

Plug-in: AJAX Edit Comments 1.1 allows admin and users to edit comments from a post. Users see a countdown timer when editing a comment. Admin can now also edit, delete, and mark as spam from a post without having to go to the admin panel. In other words, any user that leaves a comment on your blog can edit their comments.

Plug-in: Feed Count provides an alternative to FeedBurner‘s subscribers count chicklet. Users can customize the CSS style, refresh time, and link. Feed Count also uses before and after tags and integrates with the WordPress admin panel.

Plug-in: Feed Master is a beta-release plugin that allows blog owners to count the number of subscribers to their blog’s feed. Feed Master offers greater personalization of your feed, improved plugin interface, more specific statistics, ability to create feed networks, information about subscribers, and automatically creates a robot.txt file.