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…

LINICKX.com is evolving, I’m not sure how yet but I’ve started by introducing twitter tools, google has changed the face of websites, according to google analytics my home page is not longer the top landing page, i.e. most people visiting my site hit the content they want directly and don’t need to navigate through the site… with this in mind I’m thinking about turning linickx.com into a tumblr type thing… twitter tools allows me to post short “thoughts” and “comments” without having to go through the full WordPress write post thing.

It’s taken me a few days to catch up with my x-mas RSS backlog, the below are worth a mention

• A WordPress Plugin that removes the version info by BlogSecurity
• AirX for the n800 fixed so I play display X apps on my tablet
• An interesting GMail Security Article hit digg.
• Some nice images (wallpaper) for my n800.
• How to Backup your google account.
• Cisco VPN Client for n800 ITOS2008 Released.
• Some wordpress admin themes.
• A Critical WordPress Upgrade 2.3.2 including a custom DB Error Page, which I suggested (believe it or not).

Before.

As part of my website overhaul, I’ve finally gotten round to styling my /files/ directory. I was surprised at how easy it was actually, and the benefits far out way the time taken to set it up, not only does this part of the site now “fit in”, but I can apply analytics tracking and adsense I’m sure there probably is a wordpress plugin that can achieve the same thing… probably better, but I find my list of plugins ever growing and since I don’t need on for this I figure if Apache can do it, let Apache do it!

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.

Today has been a busy day for linickx.com the poor server must be tired, I’ve made a whole load of changes today including wordpress upgrades and url moves - I’ve removed the word “blog” from everywhere as it was kinda redundant

Some content still needs to be ported from my custom php to wordpress, but it should all be finished soon. I’ve got the wonderful redirection plug-in taking care of everything, if you experience any problems please let me know !

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