What a different world it was, upgrading WordPress took time and people just didn’t bother even though new versions which contain security fixes had been released.

Now we are just about to get WordPress 2.8, people can upgrade with the click of a button and there hasn’t needed to be a security release for WordPress 2.7 how things change.

In celebration of this I have decided to take down the web-service which supported the plugin and have started the shutdown process by changing the message returned to point to this blog post.  So please un-install the plugin and rely on the notification that has been built in to WordPress for a few releases now.

Oh and don’t forget if your one of those people who has been ignoring these messages and are still running v1.5.2 (yes you know who you are) then please upgrade.

I am now happy to announce that I can provide these examples and have updated the plugin documentation on in the WordPress plugin directory to match as well.

Firstly we have an example page template (based on the default theme) for listing the children of a page:

<?php
/*
Template Name: Page with Children
*/
get_header(); ?>

<div id="content" role="main">

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<div id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
<div>
<?php the_content('<p>Read the rest of this page &amp;raquo;</p>'); ?>

<?php wp_link_pages(array('before' => '<p><strong>Pages:</strong> ', 'after' => '</p>', 'next_or_number' => 'number')); ?>

</div>
</div>
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>
<?php edit_post_link('Edit this entry.', '<p>', '</p>'); ?>
<div id="children">
<dl>
<?php query_posts('static=true&amp;posts_per_page=-1&amp;child_of='.$id.'&amp;order=ASC'); ?>
<?php if(have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<dt><a href="<?php the_permalink();?>"><?php the_title();?>:</a></dt>
<dd style=""><em><?php the_excerpt(); ?></em></dd>
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>
</dl>
</div>
</div>

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

<?php get_footer(); ?>

Next we have an example page template, again based on the default theme, for listing grandchildren:

<?php
/*
Template Name: Page with GrandChildren
*/
get_header(); ?>

<div id="content" role="main">

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<div id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
<div>
<?php the_content('<p>Read the rest of this page &amp;raquo;</p>'); ?>

<?php wp_link_pages(array('before' => '<p><strong>Pages:</strong> ', 'after' => '</p>', 'next_or_number' => 'number')); ?>

</div>
</div>
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>
<?php edit_post_link('Edit this entry.', '<p>', '</p>'); ?>
<div id="children">
<dl>
<?php query_posts('static=true&amp;posts_per_page=-1&amp;child_of='.$id.'&amp;order=ASC'); ?>
<?php if(have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<?php     $inner_query = new WP_Query("post_type=page&amp;posts_per_page=-1&amp;child_of={$id}&amp;order=ASC");
while ($inner_query->have_posts()) : $inner_query->the_post(); ?>
<dt><a href="<?php the_permalink();?>"><?php the_title();?>:</a></dt>
<dd style=""><em><?php the_excerpt(); ?></em></dd>
<?php endwhile; endwhile; endif; ?>
</dl>
</div>
</div>

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

<?php get_footer(); ?>

Hopefully these examples are illuminating!

According to there counts I have made 500 commits to the trunk section on the WordPress subversion repository.

This plugin will remind you if you have not posted something new on your blog recently enough based on a threshold you set on a per-user basis.

Ideal for making sure a site keeps getting updated with fresh content on a regular basis.

Hopefully it is going to make me post more often here too!

The plugin is also now hosted on WordPress.org Extend as PJW Query Child Of and I have also writen up some example php code so as to make it really easy to use!

curl "http://phpdoc.wordpress.org/trunk/li_WordPress.html" | grep "wp_list_pages" | sed "s/^.*'\(.*\)'.*'.*'.*$/http:\/\/phpdoc.wordpress.org\/trunk\/\1/"

It needs some optimisation though.  It’s too long to tweet!

In the presentation I also gave a demo of the current state of WordPress 2.7 including a live demo of new features like the core updater and plugin installer.

I had been planning for a while to get a slicehost vps server to move all the web properties onto so as to have more bandwidth available for visitors – this site was shifting 5G of traffic a month up my adsl connection on it’s own!

Hopefully all of this site should be running fine now I have got apache2/mysql tuned to run in the limited environment of my 256M slice and wp-super-cache up and running.

Please let me know if anything is broken!

It seems like hardly a week goes by without a new vulnerability in WordPress or one of its many plugins. Many of them are actively being exploited to own popular WordPress blogs and use them to serve spam or client-side exploits to unsuspecting visitors. The popularity of WordPress combined with the abysmal security practices of WordPress plugin developers places the entire Internet at risk and is worthy of a nomination.

To be fair many of the vulnerabities that are reported are within plugin code rather than the core. For more information on the CVEs reported for WordPress and WordPress plugins this year you can head over to the codex.