Last night the WordPress team announced a critical security issue that came about in WordPress 2.1.1 after a hacker gained access to the servers and edited a couple files allowing a possible remote php execution. Supposedly, the code was only found in 2.1.1 downloads from the past few days, but WordPress recommended that everyone upgrades to 2.1.2. If you haven’t done so already, I highly recommend it. While we’re on the subject of hackers, I suggest you have a look at this post on using the htaccess to hide your wordpress admin folder if you’re worried about potential security issues.
Style Your Feeds With WP Feed Styler v1.0
Feed Styler is a WordPress plugin for WordPress users who are comfortable with CSS and would like to be able to style their feeds. Feed Styler enables you to keep your existing class and ID style declarations in your content, but allows a different style to be applied to the feed of that same content. No longer do feeds have to be stripped of style and color.
To download Feed Styler, please go to the Feed Styler plugin page.
Here’s a screenshot
Brett Terpstra from Circle Six Design provided a screenshot that demonstrates what Feed Styler can do.
A little background
I was skimming through several posts in my feed reader when something caught my eye: an image was aligned correctly. As simple as aligning an image is, I had never considered what my blog posts actually looked like in a feed reader. I quickly added my blog into the reader and was ashamed. The images/text combination was horrid.
After a quick investigation, I came to the conclusion that in order to make images show up correctly in feeds, inline attributes must be used. In order to get images to show up correctly, the code had attributes such as width, height, and align. To my dismay, the code also had deprecated attributes (if using XHTML 1.0 Strict) such as vspace and hspace.
To solve the problem of deprecated tags and such, I began adding inline styles to my images. They showed up great. But I now had a new problem. What if I wanted to change the appearance of all my images? Furthermore, what if I wanted to change the appearance of something other than images in my feed? I could add inline styles to all my elements, but that negates any benefit that style sheets have to offer (and would make printer-friendly pages a pain).
I thought to myself that there must be a way to be able to generically label an element (with a class, or id name) and still be able to specify inline styles for a feed.
Try it out for yourself
Head over to the Feed Styler plugin page and try it for yourself. You’ll find all of the documentation there as well.
WordPress 2.1 Shipped
Just a few short hours ago the first release of WordPress 2.1 (final) was announced. The new version, also known as “Ella” features numerous improvements. We’ll be upgrading from the RC1 to the 2.1 final shortly, but heres the official WordPress improvement list for this new release. As always, you can grab it from WordPress.org.
- Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again.
- Our new tabbed editor allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post.
- The lossless XML import and export makes it easy for you to move your content between WordPress blogs.
- Our completely redone visual editor also now includes spell checking.
- New search engine privacy option allows you take you to indicate your blog shouldn’t ping or be indexed by search engines like Google.
- You can set any “page” to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system.
- Much more efficient database code, faster than previous versions. Domas Mituzas from MySQL went over all our queries with a fine-toothed comb.
- Links in your blogroll now support sub-categories and you can add categories on the fly.
- Redesigned login screen from the Shuttle project.
- More AJAX to make custom fields, moderation, deletions, and more all faster. My favorite is the comments page, which new lets you approve or unapprove things instantly.
- Pages can now be drafts, or private.
- Our admin has been refreshed to load faster and be more visually consistent.
- The dashboard now instantly and brings RSS feeds asynchronously in the background.
- Comment feeds now include all the comments, not just the last 10.
- Better internationalization and support for right-to-left languages.
- The upload manager lets you easily manage all your uploads pictures, video, and audio.
- A new version of the Akismet plugin is bundled.
Customizing WordPress: Advanced
On a day where more of the focus is on 9Rules, we’re back to finish the layouting elements of our WordPress Customization series.
In our last few articles, we’ve covered the importance of the WordPress Header file, and beginning layout changes, which were mostly minor code edits to accomplish certain things. Now we get to the heart of WordPress – taking advantage of it’s features to use it as much more than a blog.
Here We Go Again
Most beginners accept WordPress as what it is – a simple way for them to get their own ideas and opinions out by posting blog entries. Then there are the designers or more code-knowledgeable people who take WordPress to the next step, by adding there own graphics and customizing design elements in css files. Finally, there are those who understand everything wordpress is capable of, and they take advantage of all those features.
Multiple Post Queries
One great feature of WordPress is it’s ability to run multiple post queries. So, what does that mean in English? First, you must understand that WordPress knows what it’s doing by using a function called “The Loop“. The loop is how everything is done in WordPress, and it is used over and over again (hence, the loop ;)).
The loop decides how each post will be displayed, and what parameters go into certain functions. So what exactly is multiple queries? By default, WordPress themes tend to have a standard loop on their main index, which gathers all posts from every categories, and displays a certain amount as set in the options page. Sometimes by making small changes like indicated last week, the posts can be full or excerpts. Multiple queries allow you to layout posts from different categories in different areas of the site. For example, a three column layout with posts from one specific category in each.
In our case, we use multiple queries to display posts from our “Articles” and “Interviews” categories in their own columns, spacing them out from regular site news so they are more easily recognizable.
Let’s take a look at our code to see how we did this:
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