Upgrading All Over the Place

Most people know by now about the vulnerability that’s been being used to exploit a vast number of older WordPress and Joomla installations all over the web.

In case it needs reiterating, if you haven’t yet upgraded your WordPress websites to 2.8.4, or your Joomla websites to 1.5.14, upgrade your sites now.

For more details, refer to:

Lorelle on WP: Old WordPress Versions Under Attack
Weblog Tools Collection: Old WordPress version? Attack warning. Please upgrade!

and this link has the resources to help you clean up if you’ve already been hit:
Journey Etc: Wordpress Permalink & Rss problems

If you’ve been wary of upgrading because your favorite WordPress plugin has not been updated in the past two years, it’s worth taking a leap and disabling that plugin, then searching for a replacement for it after you’ve upgraded. If your concern is about a custom theme that might break in a few places after the upgrade, it’s easier to have a missing or misaligned section of your site for a few hours while you get help fixing some WP calls or some CSS definitions than it is to have to constantly guard the broken lock on an older version in order to keep your site’s look undisturbed.

This time, the upside for me is that now a handful of the sites that I manage are a little bit cleaner — I’ve gotten rid of some plugins that were either abandoned or not even being used on their respective sites anymore.

Orphaned Plugins, Revisited

Although they announced their intentions back in July, the team of coders at MaxBlogPress are embarking on an intriguing journey: to update orphaned and abandoned WordPress plugins deemed worthy of continued survival by the website owners and designers whose sites rely on outdated versions of those plugins.

These are the folks behind the WordPress plugin Max Banner Ads and about 10 others, so if anyone is up to the task, in my opinion, this is the group to get the job done.

So far, they’ve taken on 4 plugins: Flash Fader, Easy Custom Fields, Post Format Control, and Access by Category.

Orphaned Plugins

One of the things I try to remind other webfolks I work with to keep in mind is that when you manage a large number of websites, compatibility between your app, your theme and your plugins can make or break performance. One of those bit me over the past couple of days, so I share!

Two of my major sites haven’t been upgraded because of concerns of older coding (calls) in custom themes. One was running WordPress 2.6.5, the other 2.5.1. After checking everything I could think of (or so I thought), I upgraded the 2.6.5 site to 2.7.1… there’s still a 2.8 compatibility question with one of the plugins.

Everything went well, at first. But within 12 hours, the server the site was on was experiencing high loads and crazy mysqld behavior. I resolved that, but the high loads were back within another 24 hours. I resolved the issue again, but the fact that a pattern of wacky behavior was emerging was a concern.

Taking another look at the active plugins on the recently upgraded site yielded a curiosity… an orphaned plugin with no recorded compatibility issues, good or bad. I say orphaned because the plugin was active, but never actively used, not that it’s development was abandoned. It’s usefulness for us was actually superceded by other tools.

Because it was never used, and it never impacted site performance (as in not one problem in the past 4 years), it was “out of sight, out of mind”… never upgraded either. Thus, the version in use was so old that it was not relevant to the things I had checked. But once the plugin was turned off, issues with the site and server disappeared within minutes.

So now I remind myself of one of the things I would on occassion remind other web peers of.

The Joy of Customization: Tubular

This project was one near and dear to my heart, mostly because of the TV series that the website represents.

Charlie Jade was a wonderful, gritty, atmospheric detective noir series with a little scifi mixed in for flavor. It was a Canadian-South African co-production that aired in Canada, South Africa and the UK in 2005-2006, but wasn’t sold to the US market in time to garner funding for a second season. The series is available on Region 2 DVD, and when word came out that SciFi Channel would begin airing the series in reruns in June 2008, there was the chance that good ratings might lead to a domestic DVD release.

But any hopes for that Region 1 DVD release, and for an official soundtrack release, were dashed by the SciFi Channel’s sudden decision to change the broadcast time of the reruns they acquired from Friday nights at 9pm to Tuesday mornings at 3am… after only airing the first two episodes.

Before that happened though, series creator Robert Wertheimer had agreed to do a podcast of creator commentary for the show for FarPoint Media, and we had completed half of the commentaries before SciFi Channel made the broadcast change. After the switch, we still managed to get commentaries done for all but one episode (a pivotal one, unfortunately), and there’s going to be a complete, finite podcast series once the discussions and final interview are finished in July.

The site started out in May 2008 with the Dust theme, because it had the rotating banner I wanted to use, but it wasn’t until April 2009 when I chose to take the Studio Press Tubular theme and do some heavy modifications to get the look I wanted, including adding in that rotating banner code.

The base Tubular theme turned out to be a good fit, and easy to modify away from it’s intended feature video design to the sectioned layout I wanted on the front page, and the only changes I needed to make to existing posts was to use larger versions of the images and add custom fields for the front page thumbnails.

I got the colorful yet industrial feel I wanted in the theme, with most of the information that’s good for newcomers to Charlie Jade being easy enough to find to help get them started.

Site: Charlie Jade Verse
Theme: Tubular

WordPress, Podcasting, and Changes

I’ve been using WordPress and Podpress to set up podcasting sites for almost 4 years now. I loved Podpress… it made it so easy for people without advanced tech skills to still be able to create a podcast of their own (or at least post it to their site and feed).

I stuck with it even during 2008 when there were no updates and the support forums would vanish without warning, partially out of loyalty to a good plugin (and Dan’s a really nice guy), and partially out of regret for my role in the addition of the Podango functionality to podpress.

The challenge is not finding another podcasting plugin to replace podpress — there are several out there that work just fine. The challenge is converting existing posts from using Podpress to using whatever the new plugin might be.

The other drawback is most if not all of the podpress users in my little enclave like the builtin podpress statistics… the instant gratification of seeing that your new episode has been downloaded 500 times within the first half hour of posting it can be addictive, and getting someone started on using a different stats tool can lead to frustration on both ends.

So this is the start of an experiment. I’m going to be testing out Powerpress from RawVoice (mostly because it will work in tandem with Podpress), and see if I can’t figure out a way to easily convert shows that have between 100-300 previous episodes out there.

I’m not in that big a rush, though. The main reason for my wanting to investigate other podcastin plugin options vanished mysteriously about a month ago. My error logs were bloated with podpress statcounts errors (the infamous duplicate entry for key 1 error), literally for a couple of years… until sometime within the past 4-6 weeks.

The errors just went stopped happening. I’m not sure if they upgraded MySQL or PHP on the server where my sites are, or exactly what happened… I do know that the recent Podpress 8.8.1 maintenance release wasn’t what fixed things, because I’ve only installed it on one site, as a test.

But, I continue to explore.

Manually Restoring a Crunchy Database

It’s usually prudent to back up one’s databases fully before transferring a domain from one hosting provider to another. So what do you do when not even that goes according to plan?

I made the mistake of trusting that a full transfer worked, just because the sites and the data on the new location seemed fine. It wasn’t until a few days later, when trying to create new posts, that I uncovered a MySQL glitch.

I’m still not sure what exactly caused the glitch, but on three (possibly four) of the transferred sites, the auto-increment keys were munged, at the very least. At least, that’s the one thing that makes sense from the behavior.

What’s even more interesting is that I ended up taking a different approach to restoring each of the sites.

First site: empty all tables, and restore data from the seemingly incompatible backup. This cleared up the problem, but all of the options from the previous setup were gone, along with a bunch of stats. Not an optimal end solution.

Second site: in order to avoid loss of options and stats, I did a WordPress export of the current site to extract the data needed, then deleted the tables for terms, taxonomy and posts. I recreated those tables using the SQL statements from the Wordpress code from the same version as what was currently running. Once those tables were recreated, I ran the import of the WordPress XML file, and all seemed fine. Turns out the comments were still crunchy.

Third and fourth site: repeate of process for site two, including the comments table from the start.

There are times when all those years spent troubleshooting as a sysadmin pay off.

Lesson learned: never trust what Plesk tells you about your database backup. Go commando if you can (command line interface and mysldump are your safe bets).

Next, to play with DirectAdmin and see if it can give me the same control panel flexibility as Plesk without the same headaches.

The Joy of Customization: mimbo3

I was intrigued when I found mimbo2 last year… it seemed to be the perfect layout for a blog idea that a handful of us had been keeping on the back burner for a couple years: Deep Geeking.

The term “Deep Geeking” comes from a description of what we do when we fall into intense analysis and discussion of a topic; in this case, the source topic was Babylon 5 and what we do on the podcast: in-depth discussion of the episodes and the deeper topics of character and theme. I loved the name, and one of the show’s fans registered the domain for our later use. It was 2 years before I actually got around to setting up a website for it.

I liked the way mimbo2 did article images, and my experience with the way arthemia2 handled images made customizing how I wanted those images to appear using mimbo a fairly easy modification to incorporate as well.

I wasn’t 100% happy with my final look at the time, but it served a purpose.

Then along came mimbo3, and most of the nagging questions I had in my mind about some functionality had been addressed… but the part I liked the most about mimbo2 had been excised completely: article image management.

I may be in the minority, but I like Custom Fields for specific image usage and placement. I like having the option to use one image for a thumbnail and having a different image for an internal article image, if there is one. It’s more interesting, to me personally.

So my challenge was to do some extreme hacking on a child theme for mimbo3 to regain that Custom Field image usage that I adore, while keeping the rest of the layout the same. Since the child theme vintagegreen was close in style to the mimbo2 look I liked and wanted, that’s what I used for my base.

While mimbo3 and its use of child themes seemed as if it would be more work at first, needing to only make changes to a child theme changed my mind about using them… I had been ambivalent about them before, but now I see the upside to them. I don’t know if I’m completely sold on them yet, since I’m not the kind of person who’ll update a base theme frequently enough to need a better solution to keeping my customizations, but I can better appreciate the advantages of them now that I’ve had time to work with them.

Site: Deep Geeking
Theme: mimbo3 / vintagegreen (child theme)

The Joy of Customization: Streamline

The first of the newly rebranded Studio Press designs that I played with was Streamline. It turned out to be the dream theme I knew was possible but hadn’t ever found until it was released.

For a little over two years, I had been keeping an eye out for a new blog-style theme to implement on the Kick-Ass Mystic Ninjas website. I’d always seen things that came close, but nothing ever struck me as being perfect or near-perfect for what I wanted to do, that matched the vague idea I had in mind for the site’s new look… until Streamline came out.

The front page article listing was exactly what I wanted to use for normal paging throughout the site, and the use of the larger icons with the article listings was the perfect match I’d been looking for.

I had to make a few modifications to get the front page layout style to act as the default article listing throughout the site, but the end result was exactly what I had in mind. Slight modifications to the banner were needed to make it fit the new theme sizing, but those were easily implemented by the graphics guru who’d done the original banner.

This one was one of the fastest and easiest customizations I’ve done, and the result was well worth the wait. But there was one odd drawback that I haven’t resolved yet… my favorite contact form stopped working.

I love WordPress-Ready Contact Form, from the Beast-Blog guys; I’ve used it on at least 10 different websites, and that’s in addition to at least another 10 non-WP sites that use the both the v2 and v3 standalone version of the form. But after I customized this Streamline install, the contact form ceased to work, and even more disturbing was that the Configuration admin page for the form stopped loading.

So for the time being I’ve switched to Contact Form 7, until I get the time to sit down and figure that particular failure out… or post something on the Studio Press support forums and ask for a set of fresh eyes to spot what might be the cause of this conflict, because I haven’t tracked it down yet.

Site: Kick-Ass Mystic Ninjas
Theme: Streamline

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