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WordPress Wednesday News: WordPress Themes Hacked, WordPress Schwag for Sale, Life Without Akismet, Flickr Edits, and New WordPress Baby
The Blog Herald
The Blog Herald

WordPress Wednesday News: WordPress Themes Hacked, WordPress Schwag for Sale, Life Without Akismet, Flickr Edits, and New WordPress Baby

by
December 5, 2007

More WordPress Themes hacked. Buy WordPress t-shirts and hoodies for the holidays. Will you give up Akismet for a day? Live Journal sold. Flickr edits. WordPress 2.4 on track. And a new WordPress baby is born.

WordPress News

WordPress Security News: Scott Rosenber’s WordYard reports on “WordPress Footer Follies, his attempt to clean up unwanted hacked spam links in his footer, tracing it back to a script inserted into the index.php files that recreated the spam links in the footer even after they had been deleted. Reports on other Theme hacks, including on Gigaom, are coming out frequently. All because WordPress users are not upgrading WordPress and their Themes. No more excuses. Upgrade WordPress now.

Blog Security recently reported on vulnerabilities with WordPress. They include:

They also are offering a new program called WPIDS – WordPress Intruder Detection System which is designed to detect attacks on your blog and more.

Buy WordPress Stuff: Want to give the gift of WordPress. There are t-shirts and hoodies for sale in the WordPress Shop. They warn that if you want your WordPress goodies to arrive in time for the holidays you need to order them now, and list the shipment arrival dates for countries around the world.

Are Spammers Giving Up? Wired reports “Spammers Giving Up? Google Thinks So”, a report that claims Google thinks that email spam growth is stabilized or dropping, while others claim it is still growing. With the threat of and their competition growing, any chance we’ll see the same drop for blog comment spam?

Are You Willing to Stop Using Akismet for a Day? Mark of Akismet asks if you are willing to turn off Akismet for a day. Jesper Rønn-Jensen is turning off all comment spam protection on December 15 to experience what it is really like to go without Akismet for just 24 hours. I asked my readers if they were willing to naked for a day, as did others such as PlanetOzh and Quick Online Tips, and the response was a resounding “no”. Still, if you do decide to experiment, Mark asks you to report in to Akismet and let them know what the experience was like to be “comment spam protection free” for a day.

New WordPress Baby: Congrats to Ryan Boren and family for the joyful addition of Chase Boren to the WordPress family!

WordPress on Your Calendar: Here are some WordPress-related dates and events to put on your calendar as found on the WordPress Roadmap and the WordPress Meetup Group Listings (subject to change):

If you are having a WordPress-related event that isn’t on the calendar, post them below or via email.

Best WordPress Mashables: The Best of Mashable: WordPress by Mashable lists their “best” articles on WordPress over the past year.

WordPress 2.4 Digest: This week, Westi reported on fixes, development, and features for WordPress 2.4 including changing the verb “Login” to “Log in” as well as improvements to the login process, a new get_user_by_email() function and improvements and fixes in the get_user functions, improved support for mt_allow_comments, and a warning that the change to the login value stored in the database will make reverting upgrades messy and may require resetting passwords, so back up your users table before updating to the latest trunk. You can also follow along in the weekly Trac Timeline for WordPress 2.4 development.

Flickr Offers Edit Photos Online: WordPress users who suffer from the inability to edit their images via the WordPress Administration Panels might try the new Flickr Photo Editor. Using Picnik, Flickr members can edit their photographs online, and through a variety of WordPress Plugins or Flickr tools to include the images in your WordPress blog.

WordPress Survival Guide: Ninja Blog Setup offers the “WordPress Blogger’s Survival Guide”, a fast list of things-to-do-when-WordPress-doesn’t.

LiveJournal Sold to Russian Company: One of the oldest blogging platforms, Live Journal, has been sold by Six Apart to a Russian company, SUP, who promises expansion and improvement to the “pioneering online community”. Blog services, networks, and communities are changing hangs, becoming investment commodities.

Upgrade WordPress Tips: All Things Marked offers a how-to on updating WordPress with minimal downtime with the reminder to create a “We’ll be right back” temporary “landing page” to greet visitors who arrive during the “5 minute” upgrade. :D

Vote for WordPress Ideas: Did you know you could have your say in how WordPress works? You can add your idea and vote on any of the ideas to push them to the top in getting them added or removed from WordPress future versions. The section on WordPress is an open forum for you to have your say. Why not take advantage of it and add your voice to the vote.

Akismet Answering Comment Spam Questions: Mark is answering questions about comment spam on the Akismet blog, beginning with It really is spam?. He explains what comment spam used to look like, and how it is grown, and covers important points you need to know about including how the nofollow doesn’t work, comment spam/trackback spam association, spam economics, pingbacks/trackbacks and content theft, and how Akismet works best when we all work together.

Last Week’s WordPress Wednesday News: Last week’s WordPress Wednesday News report covered Will You Turn Off Akismet? WordPress 2.4 Delayed, and More WordPress News, if you would like to catch up with the news on WordPress.

WordPress.com News

WordPress.com W logoWordPress.com November Stats: The November Wrap-up for WordPress.com blogs and service is out with 198 thousand new blogs and 207 thousand new users. The amazing server that handles WordPress.com blogs clocked 20 million spam comments blocked, 2.9 million logins, and 585 million pageviews total. Out of the 1,935,373 blogs counted, there were 554,812 active (human viewed) blogs in November.

New WordPress Theme for WordPress.com: WordPress.com announced a new Theme, The Journalist, has been added to its collection. It’s a simple, black-on-white, journalist/writer design with a fixed-width, two column layout and Widget support.

What’s Hot on WordPress.com? The hottest blogs on WordPress.com were:

The hottest blog posts on WordPress.com were:

New To WordPress.com: If you are new to blogging on WordPress.com, check out this basic guide on What Do I Do With My New WordPress.com Blog?.

WordPress Plugins and Themes News

WordPress Plugins DatabasePerishable Press shares their “WordPress Core Hacks Used” on their newly upgraded design including customization of the default “read more” link, customizing password-protected posts and default links for individual post-comment feeds and quicktag buttons.

Interesting WordPress Plugins: Some interesting WordPress Plugins I’ve stumbled across recently include:

See Also
Apple Silicon Processor
Apple Delays Launch of New M3 Apple Silicon into 2024

Finding WordPress Plugins: For more WordPress Plugins see the official WordPress Plugin Directory, which now lists 1,204 plugins and 2,177,105 downloads, the WordPress Plugins Database, and Weblog Tools Collection of WordPress Plugins released daily.

Most Popular WordPress Themes: The WordPress Theme Viewer was down at the time of publishing this news summary.

WordPress Techniques and Tips

Here are some featured articles and videos from around the WordPress Community and the , the online manual for WordPress Users, the source to turn to first for your WordPress help.

NOTE: If you would like your WordPress tip and technique included in this list, see Tips For Writing Good WordPress Tips.

WordPress Community News

WordPress Community graphicWordPress Podcast: WordPress Podcast: Episode 31: Automattic acquires Gravatar, Automattic being acquired? is the latest podcast for the WordPress Community and covers those topics and more including the new native tag feature in WordPress, hot Plugins, Themes, and news.

WordPress for Dummies: WordPress for Dummies was officially released Monday, October 29 by Lisa Sabin-Wilson and is available in bookstores and online.

Need Help With WordPressMU? Work is ongoing to improve the WordPressMU documentation on the WordPress Codex. If you need help and information on WordPressMU, start there.

WordPress Installed For Free: If you have problems installing the full version of WordPress, visit Installing WordPress for Free (aka Install4Free WordPress). This free, volunteer-driven service is limited to personal blogs only, and they help only with installations, not upgrades.

Looking for a WordPress Expert? WordPress Consultants on is a list of experts you can hire to help you with WordPress Themes, WordPress development, WordPress Plugins, or other WordPress-related expertise. Also see the WordPress Jobs listings, the WP-Pro mailing list.

Using WordPress in Your Blog’s Name: WordPress is a trademark and you are not allowed to use WordPress in your blog’s name or URL unless you have permission of and . Also, remember, it’s spelled “WordPress” not “WordPress”. Oh, and Plugin is Plugin, not plug-in (what you put into a wall electrical socket).

If You Are Reading This: If you are reading this blog post NOT on the Blog Herald or from within your feed reader, it is being used against the copyright policy of the copyright owners. Please report it immediately so action may be taken to break some heads and feed scraping blogs.

Even More WordPress News?

Past WordPress Wednesday News Reports

WordPress News Sources

Each Wednesday on is WordPress Wednesday, featuring the news around the WordPress Community. If you have a WordPress news item or tip to suggest, please contact me at this special email address: lorelleonwordpress@gmail.com

The author of Lorelle on WordPress and the fast-selling book, Blogging Tips: What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging, as well as several other blogs, Lorelle VanFossen has been blogging for over 15 years, covering blogging, WordPress, travel, nature and travel photography, web design, web theory and development extensively as web technologies developed.

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