Overnight WordPress 2.0 entered the public release candidate stage and I thought it was time to update after running a test blog for quite a while.

Upgrading was really smooth after I had run the recommended backup and this is my first post written using the new rich text editor.

Wordpress Version Check v1.00 is now available.

The follow changes have been made in v1.00:

1. Added support for WordPress v2.0-RC1 (see below for a screen shot)
2. Added timeout to XML-RPC calls.
3. Updated version number to 1.00.

(Read on …)

Richard has been asking me for a while what WordPress plugins I use on this site. As Darren Rowse of has recently put up a list of his active plugins in a post called I’ll Show you Mine if You Show me Yours (WP Plugins). I thought it was time to share my list of “Must Have” WordPress plugins. So here is my list of must have WordPress plugins:

For their added functionality:

Spam Karma 2

No other comment spam blocking plugin works as successfully for me.

Gravatars

Easily integrate gravatars within your site.

InSeries

Provides navigation controls for next/previous within a connected series of posts.

WP-ContactForm

A drop in contact form.

WordPress Database Backup

An excellent backup plugin.

WP-CC

The original WordPress Creative Commons licensing plugin.

Subscribe To Comments

An excellent plugin which allows your readers to subscribe to the comments for a post.

CJD Notepad

Draft posts to your hearts content.

WordPress Version Check

Ensure you get visible notification of new WordPress releases within your dashboard.

These ones fix bugs/features of WordPress v1.5 and won’t be required once I upgrade to v2.0:

FixBack

Fixes trackback and pingback URLs when publishing draft posts.

Permalinks redirect

Ensure everyone is viewing my posts via their one true permalink.

These lists don’t include every single plugin that I am using but they represent the plugins that I would install on a new WordPress install before I even started posting

It seems that the comment spammers of the world are getting bored of fighting against comment spam prevention tools such as Spam Karma and Akismet and are looking for new angles in which to exploit the blogosphere. I awoke this morning to find my inbox brimming with Contact Form messages posted through the contact form on this site. The cheeky spammer(s) were trying to exploit the Contact Form as a way of sending email spam. Thankfully Ryan did a good job in writing his WP-ContactForm plugin and the spammer failed in his quest to turn my blog into an email spam gateway.

The spammer(s) it seems are trying a very simple trick to try and send blind carbon copy by including standard email headers in the contact form contents like the following example (original bcc email address removed) :

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: came of with his
bcc: email.address@domain.name

5b4d9f4fd9e11dd3e4f434625a0848b7

I suspect that md5 looking string in the content is the spammers unique tracking id for this attempt so that they can keep track of which attempts succeeded.