Category: WordPress

All things wordpress

My Must Have WordPress Plugins

On By westiIn Useful Links, WordPress1 Comment

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:

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.

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 😉

Are Blog Spammers changing tack?

On By westiIn Security, WordPress

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.

WordPress v2.0 Beta 1 Available

On By westiIn Asides, Development, Useful Links, WordPress

WordPress v2.0 Beta 1 was made available late last week and by the looks of the activity over on the special beta forum a lot of people are giving it a good test!

There is a growing list of plugins which have been tested with the beta for compatibility which can be found on the codex and everyone is welcome to contribute. I for one have to work on my version checker plugin to make it WordPress v2.0 compatible as the current css leaves it overlapping the main logout and profile links.

Windows WordPress Toolbox

On By westiIn Development, Tutorials, WordPress22 Comments

In preparation for the first WordPress Bug Hunt this weekend Mark Jaquith has written some excellent instructions on how he “does work” on WordPress on Linux / Mac OS X.

Skippy who is one of the hosts of the bug hunt was looking for a Windows version of Mark’s cheat sheet – So here or those of you using Windows the following instructions show you how to achieve the same things.

First of all you need to install an svn client, the svn client of choice on Windows has to be TortoiseSVN which is not only a subversion client but also includes patch application functionality and visual merge tools. Once you have installed TortoiseSVN you will now be set and ready. So here is the “Working on Windows” version on Mark’s instructions:
Continue reading “Windows WordPress Toolbox” →