Recently I’ve been having this problem with my WordPress + Bad Behavior + Delicious blog posting combo, in a nut shell, delicious was showing an error:

[10/22/08 05:00:03 AM -0700] Creating blog post at http://correct_url.com/xmlrpc.php …ERROR: Failed due to General Exception: Curl returned non 200 HTTP code: 417. Response body:

And I couldn’t work out why, after some digging/googling, I thought to look in my bad behaviour logs, and found a match for my apache log…


76.13.6.189 - - [19/Oct/2008:23:00:29 +0100] “POST /xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.1″ 417 796 “-” “PEAR_XML_RCP2/0.0.x”

I’ve contacted both yahoo (who now own delicious)

Thanks to Scott Kingsley Clark for giving me the kick I needed, but I’ve finally gotten around to updating my root Cookie plugin for WordPress, we’re now at Version 1.3 !!

The point of the plugin is to strip out the path from the cookie so that it can be referenced by other applications; wordpress 2.6 has a whole new cookie structure and this broke the old version, but I’ve been so swamped recently that it wasn’t maintained.

Scott is one of the very few nice people in the world who instead of grumbling offered up a patched plugin, actually I’ve done it a different way but I appreciate his support anyway.

I thought I’d write a post about this error message as it’s pretty much the main reason that I ever receive comments or e-mails from the WordPress community. Sadly the complaints I receive from the community out weigh the complements, but I guess that’s life

Thank you to all those who have downloaded and enjoyed my plug-in and all those who have taken to say something nice.

The problem with this error message Missing argument 1 for phpbb_topics() is that I don’t actually know how to fix it. If you look in the source code you’ll see that I’ve tried to trap “empty variables”…

It’s been a while since I’ve used bbPress, but a major milestone from the automattic guys has pretty much broken the theme.

I’ve done a complete re-write; as before I’m only distributing the style.css (and a screenshot) no template.php files, this ensure that no security issues are associated with my theme.

Installation

• Create a “my-templates” directory in your bbPress installation directory
• Download unzip k2 for bbpress in that directory
• Under “design” and “themes” select k2
• done

Admin GUI

It’s been a year since the last release so perhaps this version should be called “about time!” v0.4 has primarily been released as a bugfix version, if you’re happy with v0.3 and have it running fine then don’t bother, in fact edit phpbb_recent_topics.php so that WordPress stops complaining about finding a newer version.

Download phpBB_Recent_Topics_0.4 from wordpress.org

What’s New?

• Most importantly I have tested this plugin with phpBB3 and WP2.5 so I’ve updated the readme.txt to reflect this.
• I finally quashed the install bug where by phpbb-recent-topics was confused with phpbb_recent_topics.

So WP2.5 is out, and I figured it was about time I squashed that load bug on phpbb_recent_topics, while I’m at it I figure I’ll wigetize it.

The problem is that the example on the automattic site doesn’t actually work! If you paste…

function widget_myuniquewidget($args) {
    extract($args);
?>
        <?php echo $before_widget; ?>
            <?php echo $before_title
                . 'My Unique Widget'
                . $after_title; ?>
            Hello, World!
        <?php echo $after_widget; ?>
<?php
}
register_sidebar_widget('My Unique Widget','widget_myuniquewidget');

Into a blank plugin you get this in your logs…

I’ve been following the activity over at blogsecurity, their activities are very interesting and quite commendable. After some shameless delay I decided to read though their WP Security White Paper and apply some of the steps… yes I did say some, harden security folk will insist that you should follow all of the whitepaper to be security, which is probably true, but one should never forget that security is about risk… and in basic terms accessibility vs security, for example I won’t ever lock my wp-admin down to a single IP as I’ve been know to blog at work, home, around my parents place and even moderate comments on the train! Thus my wp-admin isn’t as secure as someone who did lock it down, but this is a risk I’m willing to live with.

I thought I’d post a quick note to say thanks Tobias for letting me know that my files download area was broken, I was playing with mod_rewrite over the weekend and forgot to check that - DOH !

Anywho, all is sorted now, sorry to those that couldn’t get to my wordpress goodies!

Could that title get any longer !

Hopefully you get the point, sometimes you need different tools for different jobs, if you want a full development platform with SVN support I suggest you take a look at eclipse (with subclipse ) but what if you already have done the development and you just want to do a quick upload.

My phpbb_recent_topics plugin is hosted here, and when the nice guys at wordpress gave me an svn account, I just wanted a quick way to upload what I’ve done. Now I must stress this may not be the “proper” way to use svn (there’s a book for that) but it is enough to achieve what we want, a straight forward upload.

I’ve posted about the popularity or wordpress having a negative effect before. Here I pointed out only days after a security bug being patched by the WP Team, an exploit was freely available….. the up-shot being that we’ve only days to respond and patch our blogs (this could be a real problem should we dare to take a holiday ! )

The thing is, the problem appears to be getting worse, now plug-in exploits [1] [2] [3] are being posted, this is worse because many of us use a lot of plug-ins and without some kind of updating mechanism it’s difficult to stay onto of patching.

Following yesterdays security announcement for wordpress, a freely available exploit has been published on milw0rm. What this means is… if you haven’t upgraded DO IT NOW, as the amount of attacks will go up very quickly.

If you look through the exploit you can see that it takes advantage of existing user accounts, so a further security option can be to disable the “anyone can register” option… within wordpress admin, click options -> general and “untick” the box. (If it is on and you don’t need it)

UPDATE: This Plugin has been updated, please download the update from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/phpbb-recent-topics/, and please comment on the new post, thanks.

Admin GUI

Another day, another plug-in update…..Version 0.2 never saw the light of day, after fixing my compatibility issue I moved straight into setting up the admin interface. So here we have it, a proper implementation

Download phpBB Recent Topics

Installation

• Unzip phpbb_recent_topics.tgz in your `/wp-content/plugins/` directory. (You’ll have a new directory, with this plugin in /wp-content/plugins/phpbb_recent_topics)
• Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress

I’ve been a bit slow, aja pointed out the fault a few days ago, but I’ve been a bit slow off the mark

Anyway, here’s the official announcement,

root cookie version 1.2

This version primarily fixed the logout issue, and yup, I’ve learnt by my mistakes it loads it gently too

Wordpress like many web applications relies on apache (or something else) to serve the HTTP pages and mysql to store the data. Your wordpress website is important to you, so you need an external monitoring system to let you know what’s going on.

Nagios is a great, enterprise class, open-source monitoring application; and what you need do is configure it to exactly represent how wordpress works; if you can get that right you can immediately get notified if any piece of the puzzle fails.

I’ve recently run into a compatibility problem with my phpbb topic plugin, basically I tried to copy the code I did ( the ob_start / stop buffer thing ) and I found that the second time I ran the loop it didn’t work !

Anyway in lieu of working on an admin interface for setting up the phpbb connection I’m solving this, if anyone is having a similar issue please let me know.

Oh, and this might be of interest…

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Nick
Date: 12-Mar-2007 11:38
Subject: Re: Recent phpBB Topics on Wordpress Plugin
To: Paul Stokes