Category Archives: Wordpress

Updated to PHP 5.2.0

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I’ve upgraded this server to PHP 5.2.0 using the Debian Backports repository, please post a comment or email me (send it to chris at this domain) if you spot any problems!

First impressions are very good, I’ve not been bitten by these WordPress problems (yet) and memory usage seems a hell of a lot better than 5.1. The only wrinkle is that I had to increase memory_limit to 128M to get posting articles to work, but whereas before that would have killed the system completely it seems OK for now..

WordPress 2.0.5 is out

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WordPress have just announced the release of WordPress 2.0.5, you can see the changes at the Trac page for the release.

It’s new release time. The latest in our venerable 2.0 series, which now counts over 1.2 million downloads, is available for download immediately, and we suggest everyone upgrade as this includes security fixes.

Congratulations to Ryan Boren on his new baby, Ronan, after whom this release is named!

Update: The upgrade here was painless, nice work folks!. There’s also some more details in this blog post.

Update 2: Brian Layman has asked me to point out that this fixes some serious security problems.

New Blog Anti-Spam Tools

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Recently I’ve added a three new tools to my anti-spam arsenal. A few weeks back Rich gave me a heads up that he’d gotten the time to modify the WP 2.0 Akismet plugin to allow you to simply ban spamming IP addresses to your blog based on what Akismet classifies as spam.

Basically you get a top-10 of comments ordered by IP address and URL allowing you to quickly dispatch (and ban in the case of IP addresses) those evil posts. It works rather nicely, I must say.

This evening I’ve just added the Did You Pass Maths plugin from Aussie Steven Herod which is kind of a numeric captcha plugin for comments.

But this won’t stop trackback spam which seems to come in bursts, so I’ve also added the Trackback Validator Plugin from the Computer Security Lab at Rice University which visits the referrers of trackbacks received to ensure that there is really a link to you from that site in that page.

It’s not infallible as spammers can still configure a fake blog with links to your site, but they believe that when that happens it is no longer completely a spam trackback as it does originate from a real posting somewhere – just that you may disagree with the content and agenda behind it.

So, we’ll see what happens!

Partial PHP5 Fix to Rich Boakes “Most Wanted” Plugin

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Figured out that if you replace:

MostWanted::mostwanted();

with

$m = new MostWanted();
$m->mostwanted();

It gets rid of the annoying PHP-5 error:

Fatal error: Non-static method MostWanted::mostwanted() cannot be called statically in [...]

The only downside is that for me it lists the top-5 twice, for some reason. Oh, that and when I left a comment with the fix for Rich I managed to miss the leading $ in the second line (which is present above).

NB: I’m using this as the widget version, caveat emptor.

Upgraded to PHP5

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I’ve taken the plunge and upgraded Apache to use PHP5 (with mod-fcgid) and so far the only casualty has been Rich Boakes’s Most Wanted plugin (so if anyone has any PHP5 foo to spare, could they point it in Rich’s direction please ?)

The only other issue was with wp-cache 2.0 which needed this little tweak by Kelson to fix the “odd blank screen bug” properly.

Now if only I could figure out how to get stattraq to play nicely with wp-cache all would be good..