The WordPress Podcast

WordPress news for this week:

1. WordPress 2.5 is now in feature freeze. No more new features will be added. Concentration will be on fixing bugs, polishing up the new admin design, and finishing off the new features that are already in. March 10th as the release date.
2. There’s a new WordPress Development Blog, a bit different from the “official” WordPress Development Blog. This new Prologue theme-based blog is more about helping developers find and fix bugs, and less about official announcements of security issues, etc.
3. Chris Johnston was nice enough to put up a WordPress 2.5 demonstration blog so people could see what version 2.5 looked like and how it behaved, except it was hacked and now points to some foreign language domain having something to do with casinos. No, I’m not linking to it.
4. In the sidebar you’ll find this last week’s poll question, “Is WordPress Insecure by Design?”
5. In WordPress.com news, Lorelle explains how a battery failure caused all of the posts meant to be published in the future were mistakenly published last week, and puts her own layman’s spin on WordPress.com’s Terms of Service.
6. Our interview with Lisa Sabin-Wilson, author of WordPress for Dummies and owner, founder and creative director of E.Webscapes Blog Design service.

Guest co-host: Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today

 

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Okay, so I’m a few days late getting this episode out, but at least it’s not 2 months late!

Covered in this episode:

1. WordPress 2.3.3 released: This urgent security release fixes one security bug and several other minor bugs. The security bug affects only blogs that allow users to register: A flaw was found in the XML-RPC implementation a hacker could use to gain access to and edit posts of other users.
2. Several plugins have recently been found to have security vulnerabilities, such as WP-Footnotes v2.2 has cross-site scripting problems. register_globals must be turned on before array elements could execute unsanitized HTML to exploit the plugin. Other plugins with problems: WordsPew v3.x reported an “id” based SQL injection vulnerability, dmsguestbook 1.7.0, st_newsletter 2.x, WP-Cal, Adserve Plugin version 0.2, and WP-Forum 1.7.4
3. Is WordPress Insecure by Design?
4. Prologue is a Twitter-like theme released by Automattic, great for inter-organizational microblogging.
5. Design Canopy has released a theme along with a set of instructions that allows you to use WordPress install as a taggable, searchable contact manager that can be made into a Members Only system and display related contacts.
6. The addition of WordPress in the Kazakh language brings to 58 the number of languages WordPress covers.
7. Calais is offering a $5,000.00 bounty to anyone who can develop a plugin that does specific things involving tags.
8. WordCamp Hamburg (Germany) was a success. “It was a very lively camp with excellent sessions, intense socializing and networking.”
9. WordPress.com adds more statistics features for tracking your blog stats. You can now see summarized stats for referrers, search terms, and clicks in addition to blog posts.
10. Content Theft and WordPress explains the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress and reporting copyright violations.
11. Automattic introduces the Prologue WordPress Theme on WordPress.com.
12. There are now 3 gigabytes of free storage on WordPress.com blogs.
13. More WordPress and WordPress.com news on the Blog Herald

 

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Saturday, March 29th and Sunday, March 30th a lot of WordPress users and coders will be gathering at the George A. Purefoy Municipal Center at 6101 Frisco Square Boulevard in Frisco, Texas, North of Dallas along the Dallas North Tollway to participate in that area’s first WordCamp.

We have a great lineup of speakers, with several being from the DFW area. For only $20 attendees can come both days, get fed lunch, have a great time, learn from some of the best minds in new media and walk away with a WordCamp t-shirt.

For more information and registration, visit the official blog at dallas.wordcamp.org.

Discussed in this long-overdue and extremely lengthy episode are such subjects as:

1. Changes coming for the podcast
2. WordPress 2.3.2 released and is considered an urgent security release.
3. WordPress 2.4 is a missed release, WordPress 2.5 in the works: Westi on WordPress, David Peralty’s Admin Overview and Liz Danzico’s WordCamp session on the admin overhaul (including her slides).
4. WordPress Developers Considering Change to Release Schedule
5. Automattic Receives $29.5M in Series B Funding
6. WordPress wins Crunchie for “Most Likely to Succeed”, Toni Schneider “Best Startup CEO”
7. Blog security gains attention: David Airey hacked using a GMail exploit, Blogging Pro wonders how secure WordPress is, Simple Thoughts details ways to harden your WordPress blog from attack, Ryan Boren discusses ways WordPress 2.5 will have a new format for authentication cookies and a new password hashing algorithm, there’s a plugin to secure your admin pages, Donncha O Caoimh details other ways to secure your blog, and Blog Security’s Whitepaper on securing your blog is indispensible.
8. Turk Hit Box is offering free custom-designed WordPress themes provided your blog has a Pagerank of 4 or higher, it’s at least 8 months old, your rss subscriber count is more than 50 and you leave the footer link intact.
9. Akismet Updated to 2.1.2
10. WordCamp Dallas is scheduled for Saturday and Sunday, March 29th and 30th and includes notable bloggers and podcasters such as Matt Mullenweg, Cali Lewis, Lorelle VanFossen, Aaron Brazell, Mark Ghosh, Liz Strauss, Jonathan Bailey, John Pozadzides, Chris Smith, Jacob Santos and moi.
11. Two new WordPress-related podcasts you might also enjoy listening to are Talking WordPress with Steve Sande and Chuck Joiner and WordPress Weekly with Jeffro
12. Lorelle’s WordPress.com news: 2 million blogs!; Avatars in your Dashboard; Enhanced stats; Enhanced feeds liven up your blog
13. Plugin: Blog Voyeur 0.2 by Donncha O Caoimh uses the cookie left by WordPress when a person leaves a comment on a blog to track when they come back and what they look at when they do
14. Plugin: WordPress Dual Feeds by Stephen Cronin allows you to offer readers both full post and summary feeds for all your blog feeds.
15. Plugin: ShareThis updated to 2.1b1, adds features

 

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