Making Sense of Obfuscated Code

It should be no surprise that some plugin authors can no be trusted. We’ve seen that with the BlogPress SEO plugin, but that one was just sloppy. Others actually try to hide what they are doing. An easy way of doing this is to use a PHP code obfuscating application. These will produce code such as:

<?php if(!function_exists("TC9A16C47DA8EEE87")){function TC9A16C47DA8EEE87(...

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Breadcrumb NavXT 3.7.0

Holy networked sites batman! With Breadcrumb NavXT 3.7.0, you can now have a complete, multi site wide, breadcrumb trail. Also new to this release are custom post type root pages, these are similar to the posts page setting that WordPress has for posts. Other notable features include the ability to use posts as a taxonomy for custom posts, and a settings version checker alerting to incomplete installs.

This version has many under the hood enhancements and bug fixes in regards to saving, and importing settings, installation, detection of unsupported PHP versions, and some rare use cases for Breadcrumb NavXT. Many of the previous upgrade and installation issues have a good workaround in place.

Please note that the following translations have not been updated by their authors:

  • Russian
  • French
  • Spanish (update available in SVN trunk)
  • German
  • Indonesian

If you are fluent in any of these languages and wish to update these translations,  let me know. I am sure many users will be grateful.

You can grab the latest version of Breadcrumb NavXT from the Breadcrumb NavXT page.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

Conditionally Remove Home from the Breadcrumb Trail

Since Breadcrumb NavXT 3.5.0, two WordPress actions have been added into Breadcrumb NavXT. They are the bcn_before_fill and bcn_after_fill actions. As their names suggest, the first runs at the beginning of bcn_breadcrumb_trail::fill(), and the second runs at the end of the same function. Both actions pass a reference to the current bcn_breadcrumb_trail instance into the hooked function. This post quickly covers a use case for the bcn_after_fill action.

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Breadcrumb NavXT 3.7.0 Preview

What will become Breadcrumb NavXT 3.7.0 has been released for translation to the translation team. With the upcoming holiday next week in the US, the official release is planned for Monday, November 29th. While the translators update their translations, there is plenty of time for interested users to try out the new version, play with the new features, and look for bugs.

There has been a ton of code change in regards to settings installs and upgrades. Support for multi sites has been added, and I definitely need feedback on the current implementation. Changes were made to how custom post types are supported, and a root page akin to the “page on front” and “posts page” settings in WordPress were added for each custom post type. Breadcrumb trails for attachments should display the full hierarchy once again. I accidentally broke that in the 3.6.0 release.

I will be performing several regression tests, on top of what has already been done, over the next week. Hopefully, this will be the smoothest release to date.

Grab the Breadcrumb NavXT SVN Trunk version to try out 3.7.0 before it is released.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

BlogPress SEO is Malware

As with most scamming attempts, it all started with an email—which I ignored when I received it on Wednesday. It made claims of terrific SEO improvements using backlinks—yeah right. I do not use SEO enhancement plugins (other than Google XML sitemaps), and never plan on doing so. Anyways, the sender’s name as Saurabh, and his message was as follows:

Hello, My name is Saurabh, and I am here to offer you a unique wordpress plugin which will get you 100’s of backlinks like crazy. The plugin is 100% free and I can also offer installation help. http://BlogPressSEO.com Why backlinks are important for getting traffic. http://BlogPressSEO.com/#1 This is how the plugin works http://BlogPressSEO.com/#2 Thanks

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