Catch it if you can! WordPress mu 1.1.1 escaped!

Despite my best efforts to put off releasing WordPress mu 1.1.1 for another day it slipped through my fingers, tarred and zipped itself into neat bundles on the download page and screamed at all and sundry that it was free.

So, go on! Download and enjoy. As always, try it on your development servers before pushing it live, just to make sure it doesn’t conflict with anything else you’ve installed. We’re tracking the development version of WordPress itself so any new features that you see there will be in WordPress mu too. And if you haven’t looked before, the mu timeline will give you a good idea of what’s changed recently.

Some highlights:

  • PHPMailer is now used for email delivery. Once you configure it to use a local smtp server email literally flies out the door.
  • “No Options” are saved. Well, WPMU already had something like this for storing false option values but now it’s much better. Thanks Ryan for fixing that in MU.
  • Ryan’s In The Trunk post has a pretty good list of the new features you can expect in this release.

WP plugin: Flickr Blog This to draft post

Have you ever been annoyed when you blog a photo from Flickr and you wished the post had been saved as a draft instead of being published?

I’ve used Flickr to host the images on my photoblog from the first post there but this plugin should make it easier and less stressful to use. Every time I publish a photo through Flickr I have to rush to resave the post as a draft post before anyone notices all the extra line breaks or broken links. Add to that, I tag and categorise the post and it’s a frantic few minutes of editing.

The Flickr Blog This to Draft plugin for WordPress simply stops the publishing of blog posts from Flickr and saves them as draft posts.

Irish WordPress powered companies and a free iPod

Matt started the “company website run on WordPress” theme by posting that moo.com runs on WordPress, so here are two Irish companies that use WordPress to run their websites:

  1. Segala, a company involved in website accessability and trust. They have rather an interesting idea about content labeling. Paul Walsh, their CEO, “is Segala’s W3C advisory committee representative”. Keep an eye on them. You’ll be hearing more about them I’m sure! Oh, and if you leave a comment here, it may be entered into a link bait competition Paul’s running. He’s giving away an iPod on March 2nd. If he picks you, I’ll email you with Paul’s email address.
  2. The second website I will mention is one outside of the usual web 2.0 zone. It’s Harrington Estates, an estate agent in West Cork, Ireland. Houses are listed in posts, and interested buyers can leave a comment using the standard comment form. Thanks to the SEO friendly nature of WordPress, the site also appears on the front page of Google for related search terms! Thanks Frank for that info!

Are there any more Irish companies using WordPress that I can profile in a future post?

Update – the winner has been announced! Competition closed!

Is Flickr under attack by spam?

Has anyone else noticed an increase of spam comments on Flickr lately? I noticed my first spam comment there only last week, complained about it, and the comment and user were both deleted shortly afterwards. I thought nothing more of it.

This morning I got an unwelcome shock when I checked my Flickr comments through Bloglines. More spam comments. There’s a screenshot below. When I clicked through to the photos in question both comments had been deleted but later on another spam comment appeared and I now suspect any comment left by users with usernames starting with “a” with a mixture of upper and lower case characters and digits. Maybe it’s time they invested in an Akismet license for Flickr.com? Thanks Lloyd for the reminder!

Continue reading “Is Flickr under attack by spam?”

The new WordPress UTW gotcha

(Later – Scroll to the end of this post for a small patch to fix the problem with disappearing tags!)

As seen elsewhere and of course on the official blog, WordPress 2.1 was released to much fanfare yesterday.

It works great, I’ve been using the development version on my blogs for quite a while now and until recently it worked swimmingly. It still does, but some time in the last 2 weeks Ultimate Tag Warrior stopped working properly. Whenever someone made a comment on a post the tags on that post would be deleted. It’s gotten so bad now that I’m moderating all comments, and opening those posts in the editor before approving the comments.

A half-way fix is available but moderated comments will still delete the tags so once I verify that the fix does what it does comment moderation will go back to the way it was before.

You should upgrade WP-Cache to the new 2.0.22 release too. It fixed problems I was seeing here with comments and posts not showing up until I deleted the cache manually. Yay!

If you’re interested, a new WordPress MU release will follow in a day or so. More here.

I forgot to mention, do I recommend you upgrade to WordPress 2.1? Yes. If you run a site that is in any way popular your database server will thank you. WordPress uses the MySQL query cache in a much more efficient manner than ever before when reading posts. Make sure your query cache is activated and tweak it until you hit the sweet spot. It’ll make a big difference when your server is under load.

Fix Fix Fix!

HandySolo spotted a simple fix for the tag problem! Check out the thread on this post and scroll to the entry by 082net.com where he outlines a simple fix for the disappearing tag problem. I just tried it and it works!

Here’s a temporary patch for resetting tags.
Modify ‘ultimate_save_tags()’ function on ‘ultimate-tag-warrior-actions.php’ about line 502:
if (isset($_POST['comment_post_ID'])) return $postID;
if (isset($_POST['not_spam'])) return $postID; // akismet fix
if (isset($_POST["comment"])) return $postID; // moderation.php fix

Even with the fix above, deleting a comment will delete the tags, and sending a trackback/pingback will do the same. 082net.com fixed that too. You can remove the above fix and apply the following.
Around line 862 of ultimate-tag-warrior-actions.php find the following chunk of code:

// Save changes to tags
add_action('publish_post', array('UltimateTagWarriorActions','ultimate_save_tags'));
add_action('edit_post', array('UltimateTagWarriorActions','ultimate_save_tags'));
add_action('save_post', array('UltimateTagWarriorActions','ultimate_save_tags'));
add_action('wp_insert_post', array('UltimateTagWarriorActions','ultimate_save_tags'));

Replace that code with:

// Save changes to tags
add_action('save_post', array('UltimateTagWarriorActions','ultimate_save_tags'));
if($wp_db_version < 3308 ) { // if lesser than WP 2.0
  add_action('publish_post', array('UltimateTagWarriorActions','ultimate_save_tags'));
  add_action('edit_post', array('UltimateTagWarriorActions','ultimate_save_tags'));
  add_action('wp_insert_post', array('UltimateTagWarriorActions','ultimate_save_tags'));
}

PS. Stephen Spencer has discovered why UTW doesn’t always work with custom permalinks. This is a longstanding bug, and it’s why I had to use the ?tag= format on my photoblog.

We are live from BarCamp South East!

Here I am blogging away at BarCamp South East. It’s been a great day so far. My talk was scheduled for 10:50am which was a relief to get out of the way. Feedback has been positive too and horrors of horrors, I actually enjoyed the talk! Video and podcasts will be online eventually and I’ll update this post when they’re available. Elly left Bernie’s dictaphone on the seat next to me, Joe and Conor had video cameras so I’m sure you’ll get to hear or watch me talk about WordPress one way or another if you’re interested!

Thank you all for the comments on yesterday’s post. I’m hopeful that things will return to normal sooner or later on inphotos.org!

Now, I’m off to look around and mingle with the rest of the attendees!

Just spotted on Lifehacker, is How to manage kids in the home office, a topic brushed upon in my talk.

I’m sitting in the Drupal talk now by Alan Burke and Stephane Corlosquet on the laptop. John Handelaar is showing off his voter site written in Drupal. It’s a great presentation on the power of Drupal and it’s plugins.

Ken McGuire has a review of the day, and apart from everything else, and it was great to talk to Justin Mason finally.

Great day. I think everyone’s looking forward to the next one in May!

Conor O’Neill has posted videos of my talk on his blog. I could embed them here, but he went to all the trouble of uploading them, so go visit his blog and check them out. There are bits there about scaling WPMU by hashing blog_ids and partitioning databases, as well as how to get past the 32,000 file limit of ext2/ext3 in the blogs.dir files directory. Also, if you work from home I discuss my experiences doing the same, and communicating within a virtual company.

Bernie has posted the first podcast of my talk. He’s posting the second half tomorrow about working from home and in a virtual company.

The second part of Bernie’s podcast is online today! In this part I talk about working from home and balancing work and home life. Should be of interest to everyone working from home!

Getting to know the Trotts

Just goes to show what a hectic week it was last week. Despite it being on the front cover of the Business Section, I completely missed this Sunday Times interview with Mena and Ben Trott, the founders of Six Apart, makers of blog software Moveable Type, Vox, Typepad and owners of Livejournal.

It’s a personable interview that doesn’t go into any great technical detail but it’s interesting for me to find out a little about the competition from my outpost across the Atlantic.

Ask the developer

On January 20th I’ll be speaking at BarCamp South East on the subject of WordPress.com and WordPress MU. The talk is titled, “WordPress.com – running the biggest wpmu site in the world” which is vague enough that I could talk about anything but I’d like to know what you want to hear.

Public speaking isn’t my strong point, I prefer to be behind the keyboard, or looking through a camera lens but sometimes you have to push yourself to do unfamiliar things. Here’s my go at public speaking.

Talks will be in 45 minute slots and I would like to make mine more of a discussion forum like the WPMU talk we had at WordCamp way back in August last year. It went really well and everyone got something out of it.

Subjects I’m considering include:

  • Merging code from WP core which is horribly exciting, have you ever seen vimdiff in action?
  • Site stats – did you know we publish them?
  • Hardware – server porn. How do we handle the load generated by Slashdots, Diggs, and almost 600,000 blogs?
  • Hooks and plugins – new hooks in the signup process and wpmu admin backend.
  • Anyone interested in working from home and virtual company issues? Automattic has employees in at least four countries.

So, if you’ll be there I want to hear from you. If you won’t, I still want to hear from you because I’m sure Bernie or someone will record the talk and put it up online.