Tag Archives: wordpress

Site Updates: New Theme, Forums Down for Work

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No need to adjust your picture, this is the same Free UTOPIA you know and love. The old theme had become dated, both in terms of having been around for a while and not conforming to the latest visual standards, and it was time for a change. Text should be more readable, especially with inline comment replies, and it should be a lot easier to make updates.

I also took down the old forum because the only people using it were hawking questionable male enhancement products and the like and the old 1.x branch of bbPress is no longer being updated. I’ve been working with bbPress 2.0 which is now a WordPress plugin. Once I can get it setup properly, the forum will be back in action. If I can figure out how to do it properly, it may even allow posting without registration, but without the pesky spam problems. You’ll know more when I do.

If you have any problems or see anything missing, just let me know.

Hacked! (Or, Why it's really REALLY important to keep WordPress up to date)

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I noticed some rather, er, strange behavior when I had comments e-mailed to me this morning, specifically that some odd code was being appended to the end of permalinks in WordPress. It took all of about 5 seconds to realize that my install of WordPress had been compromised. I’ve since updated to the latest version of WordPress and removed the offending code snippets, so things should be back to normal. Thankfully, they didn’t gain access to the admin panel or appear to have modified any posts or comments. Apparently Apache and PHP are configured properly so that these injection attacks result in a big bucket of fail for the attackers.

Moral of the story? Keep WordPress up to date.

Website Updates: WordPress 2.5.1, bbPress 0.9.0.2

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Since the old forums have stopped working and WordPress was badly out of date, I decided it was time to do some big upgrades. The website is now running on WordPress 2.5.1 instead of 2.1.3 and I’ve updated a bunch of plugins to match.

Bigger news is that I’ve ditched the old phpBB forums in favor of bbPress after we heard from a responsive web design in Perth Australia company telling us all this information. It’s from the guys at WordPress and seems to be a much more modern and clean design inside and out. It also has the most excellent Akismet spam protection, an area where phpBB just flat-out stinks. Unfortunately, all of the old posts and user accounts registered for phpBB will not be migrated. There wasn’t much content and the pain involved in figuring out how to do it? No thanks.

Let me know if you encounter any oddities with either the site or new forums.