Breadcrumb NavXT 2.0 Beta

Posted by in WordPress > Plugins

The beta is coming soon, very soon. I have a mostly functional version of the breadcrumb class working on my testbed, and tomorrow night I’ll get to work on the administration interface and creating the template for the language files. Then I’ll go back to tidying up loose ends in the class, and release a beta sometime tomorrow evening. So far, just about everything has been rewritten, and all custom wpdb queries were removed. This may cause a slight performance hit, but it should not be that big, unless the pages are very large, and this solves compatibility issues with some other plug-ins, namely the Polyglot plug-in. A the new hierarchical category system has been implemented, and there is now support for multi-paged searches, archives, and home pages. When the beta is released I will need testers that are willing to help debug the plug-in, as well as translators who are willing to write language files for the new administration interface.

Right now I need testers for:

  • Testing PHP4 compatibility (Even though I don’t officially support PHP4 anymore, I do try to keep things working in it)
  • Testing on blogs with various setups for static front pages, including the built in WordPress methods. It seems that the older versions still had bugs in regards to particular implementations of this, and it looked like the old code had some hacks that attempted to get things to work for static front pages. It’s time to get this working properly.
  • General testing, making sure options work as expected, etc.

Once the beta is out I request all bug reports be made in the post that it is announced in, this will keep the Breadcrumb NavXT page’s comment stream cleaner for once the plug-in is officially released.

-John Havlik

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Surgery Complete

Posted by in Weblogs.us

The patient is recovering from the operation and doing well, we’re surprised is held up to that attack. The bullets were removed, and the surgeon decided to do a little liposuction while he was operating. Now that the patent is all sewn up, it’s time to step back and look at what happened.

The Weblogs.us server suffered a massive attack sometime between the 26th of October and the first week of November. Many blogs hosted by Weblogs.us were affected by the attack, which involved SQL injection as mentioned in the previous post. This attack was a spam sort of attack, not a delete/drop tables attack. Though the damage was extensive, not every blog was affected. Additionally, the attack was not limited to the WordPress blogs hosted by Weblogs.us, some of the old Moveable type blogs were affected as well. This means some some passwords were compromised, due to this global password changes may be coming later this week. JD, when looking at the extent of the damage was surprised the database server survived the attack (it was that bad, and that many malicious entries).

What the attack did was enter iframes to googlerank.info/counter which used the css value display:none; to hide them. These appeared at the bottom of every page, and were also cleverly added to some blogroll links by adding a fake and hidden <a href after itself to keep the HTML valid. Googlerank.info is a know mailware site, that preys on users of Internet Explorer. Since Firefox and other modern browsers are not affected by this site, the Russian owners started showing them a fake 404 page that they ripped from Google. Hopefully, the owners of that site will meet an untimely death.

But, the storm is not over yet, someone with malicious intents has been searching Google with the query:

intext:”leave a reply” intext:”Mail (will not be published) (required)” intext:”Responses to” site:us

This is a quick and dirty way to harvest many sites that run WordPress. I have little doubt that the intents of the individual that submitted that query are malicious (either intent to spam or hack). Thus that IP address will be blocked in the Weblogs.us firewall indefinitely.

-John Havlik

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Depreciation Notice

Posted by in Announcements

As of today, October 22, 2007, Breadcrumb Navigation XT version 1.9.x is no longer supported or available for general consumption. A month ago Breadcrumb Navigation XT 1.10.0 was released, bringing with it support for WordPress 2.3’s new taxonomy system. This version has been tested and verified to work on WordPress 2.2 installations, and can be safely used by those of you still blogging using that depreciated platform. Look forward to Breadcrumb NavXT 2.0 sometime next month. Additionally, WordPress 2.2 support will no longer be guaranteed in one more month as I develop in a WordPress 2.3 environment.

-John Havlik

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Breadcrumb Navigation XT 1.10.0

Posted by in WordPress > Plugins

Now with 100% more tags. That’s right, WordPres 2.3 is right around the metaphorical corner, and in preparation Breadcrumb Navigation XT 1.10.0 is now safe for general consumption. Support for the Simple Tagging Plugin was dropped in favor of the WordPress 2.3 taxonomy scheme. Additional changes include some bug fixes with those combobox setting selectors in the administration interface and some code fix ups to use the WordPress API in a more consistent manner when dealing with taxonomy. Remember that this may cause PHP indigestion problems for WordPress 2.2 or earlier. The old version (1.9.x) will remain available for one month. However, version 1.9.x will no longer be supported one week after WordPress 2.3 is released.

-John Havlik

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Make Your List,

Posted by in WordPress

Check it twice, find out whether your plug-ins are Naughty or Nice. Only days remain until WordPress 2.3 graces us with its presence. Due to some quite major changes in the database regarding categories and links, many plug-ins that directly accessed the database in the past will break. Some misbehave to the extent of crashing Apache on your web server. A big-time offender here is Extended Live Archives. While writing Breadcrumb Navigation XT 1.10.0, I spent some time testing various components of my blog in WP2.3. I also managed to update Berry to support tags (partially, as will be visible once WP 2.3 is out).

-John Havlik

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