JaypeeOnline » WordPress Plugins

Weekend Roundup #141

Jaypee Habaradas — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 19:12:44 +0000

Hello World! Welcome to the 141st edition of the Weekend Roundup. Hope you all are having/had a good weekend like me. Anyways, I’ve made sure to once again have this week’s edition published on time. I sure hope you enjoy reading and sharing the articles and links featured in this Weekend Roundup. Enjoy!

Blogging

WordPress

SEO

Social Media

Technology

Gadgets

Pinoy Blogs

JaypeeOnline Weekly Recap

If you have any questions, comments, suggestions or would want to share your article or any interesting story that you found in the Internet and have it featured in the next Weekend Roundup, feel free to leave a comment or send me a message via the contact page.

WordPress.org Resets Passwords

Jaypee Habaradas — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 21:18:59 +0000

Last Tuesday, the WordPress team discovered some suspicious activity involving several popular WordPress plugins – AddThis, WPtouch and W3 Total Cache. Backdoors or malicious code were added to the plugins and the changes were done not by the author but someone who has gained access to the plugin author’s WordPress.org account.

As soon as these suspicous changes were discovered and confirming that the changes were not made by the authors, the WordPress team immediately rolled back the plugins, issued updates to the plugins and shut down the plugin repository. As another counter measure, they’ve also force-reset all WordPress.org passwords (same goes for bbPress.org and BuddyPress.org). So if you have a WordPress.org account and would want to access the forums, trac, plugin repository or commit to a plugin/theme, then you’ll have to reset your password and get a new one.

A lot of websites and services are getting hacked these days so to play safe, make sure you don’t or never use the same password for two different websites or online services. Also, if you’re gonna reset your WordPress.org password, make sure you use a new one and do not use the same old password.

For those who don’t know what “backdoors” are, these are exploits or lines of code that are added/inserted to plugins (or any other piece of software) and gives unauthorized users like hackers access to the blog or website. So if you’re using any of these plugins – AddThis, WPtouch or W3 Total Cache, make sure that you immediately update to the latest versions. Updating these plugins will remove the backdoors because the files and lines of code will all be replaced.

I’d like to share something with regards to this incident. A few days before this announcement was made, I noticed that there were a few available plugin updates. When I checked, WPtouch and W3 Total Cache were some of the plugins that had an update. Personally, I make it a habit to keep WordPress and all plugins up-to-date. In the past I would’ve immediately download and installed the updates but this time, I didn’t. I don’t know what it was but something inside of me kept me from updating the plugins. When I read about the incident, I was glad I listened to my gut feeling. In this case, it was good that I didn’t immediately update my WordPress plugins.

Just to make it clear, the password reset doesn’t affect WordPress.com or self-hosted WordPress.org accounts. The only account password you need to reset is the one used on the WordPress.org forums, plugin repository and trac.

WordPress 3.2 Release Candidate 1

Jaypee Habaradas — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 02:06:28 +0000

The WordPress dev team released the first Release Candidate (RC1) for WordPress 3.2 a couple days ago. Release Candidates are versions of the software that are released after the beta phase and before the final release.

Some important stuff to tak note for those who are using/testing WordPress 3.2 RC1:

WordPress plugin and theme authors are encouraged to test their plugins and themes now to make sure that all compatibility issues are discovered and addressed before the final version is released.
WordPress users are also encouraged to test it and inform plugin or theme authors if you find any compatibility issues with any plugins/themes you use on your blog.
You can find known issues for WordPress 3.2 RC1 here.

Here’s how/where you can submit bug reports:

Post it to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums or wp-testers
Join the development IRC channel and tell us live at irc.freenode.net #wordpress-dev
File a bug ticket on the WordPress Trac

Remember that WordPress 3.2 RC1 is meant for testing purposes so make sure you don’t install it on your main/live blog or website but rather install it on your test site.

Download WordPress 3.2 Release Candidate 1

WPMU DEV Premium Elite Membership Giveaway

Jaypee Habaradas — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 21:57:48 +0000

Our previous giveaway – MediaLoot Elite Membership giveaway was for graphic artists, web developers and design aficionados. This time, I have something special for all WordPress fans and users out there. In cooperation with WPMU DEV and AppSumo, JaypeeOnline will be giving away 3 1-year WPMU DEV Elite Memberships worth $420. For those who aren’t familiar with WPMU DEV, it is one of the best sources for all your WordPress needs – themes, plugins, support, etc.

So what do you get with a WPMU DEV Elite Membership? Access to over 100+ plugins for WP, Multisite and BuddyPress, 150+ premium highly customizable themes and unlimited live and forum-based help and support. Aside from those, you also get the following:

Unlimited use of all plugins & themes, forever!
Upgrades and support guaranteed
Helpful live chat and forums
Access to all new plugins & themes
New feature development requests
Full access to WPMU Jobs

Here’s some of the most popular WPMU DEV products:

WP Membership – The most powerful, easy to use and flexible membership plugin for WordPress, Multisite and BuddyPress sites available. Offer downloads, posts, pages, forums and more to paid members.

MarketPress – The complete WordPress ecommerce plugin – works perfectly with BuddyPress and WP Multisite too to create a social marketplace, where you can take a percentage!

Premium WordPress Themes

CONTEST MECHANICS:
(choose either Twitter or Facebook. You can do both if you want but you won’t any extra points for it.)

via Twitter

Follow WPMU DEV @wpmudev, AppSumo @AppSumo and JaypeeOnline @jaypee.
Retweet this post. Please use the exact tweet below including the bit.ly shortlink and make sure to mention @WPMUDEV, @AppSumo and @jaypee on your tweet.

Win a WPMU DEV Elite Membership worth $420 from @wpmudev @AppSumo @jaypee – http://bit.ly/m0Pcyc

Leave a comment on this post to let us know that you joined the contest. Please include the link to your tweet and your Twitter ID/username.

via Facebook

Share this post on Facebook. Please use the exact message below including the bit.ly shortlink.

Win a WPMU DEV Elite Membership worth $420 from WPMU DEV, AppSumo & JaypeeOnline – http://bit.ly/m0Pcyc

Leave a comment on this post to let us know that you joined the contest. Please include the link to the Facebook post and your Facebook ID/username.

Contest starts as soon as this post is published. All entries should be in by midnight of June 29th (US Eastern Time). Three (3) lucky winners will be chosen using Random.org’s List Randomizer and their names will be announced the following day – June 30th.

Coincidentally, AppSumo’s deal of the day is a WPMU DEV Elite Membership for only $79. This usually costs $420 so with this deal, you get an 81% discount and $341 savings. If you don’t feel lucky joining this giveaway, you can take advantage of this awesome deal. Check out the official WPMU DEV promo page on AppSumo*

*The MediaLoot AppSumo deal starts on June 7th at 12AM CST and ends after 11:59:59 PM CST

Weekend Roundup #127

Jaypee Habaradas — Mon, 02 May 2011 17:46:53 +0000

Hi folks! How are you all doing? Welcome to the 127th edition of the Weekend Roundup. Had a very busy weekend – went out of state (NJ & NY) and did a lot of driving. Was too tired and didn’t have enough time to prepare this post and publish it on time. Anyways, this week’s edition still has a lot of very cool and interesting articles and links so make sure to check all of them. I have several posts lined up for this week, including another contest so for those of you who like contests and giveaways, make sure to check back so you won’t miss it.

Here’s this week’s edition of the Weekend Roundup. Enjoy!