We Fix WordPress Blogs

ContentRobot, our parent company, announced the launch of their latest service – BlogOnCloud9 – today.

What is it? BlogOnCloud9 is the premier destination to host your WordPress blog.  Bloggers can get the best of both worlds and take advantage of a scalable “cloud” hosting plan coupled with expert WordPress support from ContentRobot.

WeFixWP is excited about its new “sibling” and think it’s a perfect addition to the family.

Go read more about it at ContentRobot and check out BlogOnCloud9!

The WeFixWP team is starting off our 2010 tour with WordCamp Boston.

This time around we are not doing any Genius bar duties, but we plan enjoy the show fully. There’s so much to do from the Unconference to Ignite WordCamp so it will be a juggling act to get to get in all in. We can’t wait to see our WordPress buddies and meet more friends.

Looks like it’s going to be a great event … will we meet you there?

Happy 2010! We also welcome WordPress 2.9.1, which was released last night.

Version 2.9 was a bit problematic on some hosts (scheduled posts and pingbacks are not processed correctly), so this release fixes that and a handful of minor issues.

WeFixWP will be happy to help you upgrade to this latest stable version. Blog.on!

Today is New Year’s eve, wow! Where has the time gone?

The ContentRobot team launched WeFixWP about 14 months ago and since then we’ve been able to fix, migrate, upgrade many WordPress bloggers throughout the world. Some of the more interesting bloggers we helped in 2009 were:

• TV bloggers  Give Me My Remote and theTVaddict are always entertaining
• Business bloggers Blue Sky Factory and Freedompreneur are always inspiring
• Book blogger Life is a Fork in the Road and social media blogger Gray Matter Minute always teach us how to connect to others
• Tech bloggers Edward Khoo and The Trend Junkie are geeky good
• Legal bloggers BevLawBlog and NutriSupLaw always gives us hope that lawyers can be fun and funny

While most of our work is quite virtual, the WeFixWP team also helped a bunch of bloggers at two WordCamps (Las Vegas and NYC) this year.

We are actually very excited about 2010 coming up in a few hours (we are on US Eastern time here at WeFixWP). We get to help many more WordPress bloggers – and we can’t wait!

Automattic wanted to give everyone an early gift and released WordPress 2.9 yesterday in an official announcement.

Some of the features you will see include:

• Global undo/”trash” feature - allows you to bring back posts and comments that were accidentally deleted (Matt Mullenweg said this was his favorite feature at WordCamp NY last month)
• Built-in image editor -  allows you to crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images (we’ve been waiting for this one for a while)
• Batch plugin update and compatibility checking – update 10 plugins at once (this one still makes us nervous)
• Easier video embeds – paste a URL on its own line and have it magically turn it into the proper embed code (we do still like Viper’s Video Quicktags, but it could be helpful)
• Automatic database optimization support – those technically inclined can enable in your wp-config.php (could be a nice addition)
• Upgraded TinyMCE WYSIWYG editing (always happy with editor improvements)

While this is an exciting release (boy, they have been busy this year), we are recommending that our clients hold off for 2.9.1 to arrive, which should be sometime in early 2010. We always advise holding off on point-zero releases because of our past experiences with them.

The WeFixWP team are big fans of Jean-Baptiste Jung’s WpRecipes.com blog, and we were excited to learn that he had written WordPress 2.7 Cookbook (published by Packt Publishing this past summer).

This book is a great reference for advanced bloggers who are looking to do more enhancing of their site’s themes, widgets, plug-ins, security, and SEO techniques – over 100 recipes in all.

Even though Automattic has since released WordPress 2.8, fear not, most recipes (if not all) should work with the latest WordPress versions.

Jung jumps right in, so be forewarned that readers should be fairly comfortable with PHP, CSS, FTP, MySQL, and WordPress functions. The plus, however, is that he does offer various ways to do a particular task, whether by developing code chunkets, performing some “hacks,” or installing and configuring particular plugins to perform the various tweaks.

Because we get asked to do some of the very same enhancements for our clients, our favorite recipes included how to:

• Integrate Feedburner, Twitter, and Google Analytics
• Install and configure plugins such as WP Database Backup, WP Super Cache, All in One SEO, and iWPhone for WordPress (great recommendations)
• Display posts in various ways (via excerpting, showcasing by category, multi-column views, etc.)
• Perform and integrate a variety of security, SEO, and advertising techniques (from simple tips to more complex interations)
• Implement enhanced blog navigation with drop-down menus, breadcrumbs, and sidebar tabs

Like a cookbook, this book is not to be read from cover-to-cover like a novel, rather WeFixWP recommends that readers keep WordPress 2.7 Cookbook on their shelves ready to be referenced. Bloggers can leaf through it whenever want make their WordPress blog stand out or run better. Why? There’s a recipe for that.

We are heading to the Big Apple tomorrow for WordCamp NYC and we are super excited.

We will be helping at the Genius Bar on Saturday from 12pm-1pm (we had such a good time at WordCamp Las Vegas, we had to do it again!). We can’t wait to answer any WordPress questions, issues, and concerns anyone has!

If you are a newbie, come ask us about a  book that can help you get started blogging. If you are a themer, developer, and/or just a passionate WordPress user, we look forward to chatting.

Ah, that pesky WordPress update prompt is active again! WordPress has patched some more security holes and has released 2.8.6. According to WordPress:

2.8.6 fixes two security problems that can be exploited by registered, logged in users who have posting privileges.  If you have untrusted authors on your blog, upgrading to 2.8.6 is recommended.

The first problem is an XSS vulnerability in Press This discovered by Benjamin Flesch.  The second problem, discovered by Dawid Golunski, is an issue with sanitizing uploaded file names that can be exploited in certain Apache configurations. Thanks to Benjamin and Dawid for finding and reporting these.

As always, WeFixWP recommends that you backup those WordPress files, folders, and database. While it’s an incremental release, it’s also good to test the upgrade offline first. Now go get updating!

For those of you on shared hosting plans, you may notice that WordPress needs more memory than ever. Perhaps you’ve found that out while you’ve attempted to upgrade to WP 2.8.5. We’ve seen:

• WordPress and/or certain plugin updates hanging
• WordPress and/or some plugins not installing completely
• The the now-popular white screen (in both the dashboard and on the blog itself
• The “WordPress Upgrade Error Allowed Memory Size Exhausted” error
• A fatal error similar to: Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 2354671 bytes) in ../public_html/wordpress/wp-includes/http.php on line 1331

What’s the fix?

To increase the memory limit, add this bit of code to the top of your wp-config.php file:
@ini_set("memory_limit","64M");

If your host doesn’t allow this memory increase, it may be time to migrate to a better performing one.

Other Issues
We have read that certain plugins, such as Google XML Sitemaps and Super Cache (we often recommend using both of these), also needs a bunch of memory. So you’ll need that to update your wp-config.php just to keep those running properly. Finally, it’s also good practice to review your all your plugins and remove any that you no longer need.

Good luck with those upgrades!

WordPress announced that 2.8.5 or “The  Hardening Release” is now available for download.

According to WP:

The headline changes in this release are:

• A fix for the Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently being seen.
• Removal of areas within the code where php code in variables was evaluated.
• Switched the file upload functionality to be whitelisted for all users including Admins.
• Retiring of the two importers of Tag data from old plugins.

We would recommend that all sites are upgraded to this new version of WordPress to ensure that you have the best available protection.

If your blog has been hit by the recent WordPress exploits, they also recommended to install the WordPress Exploit Scanner plugin to help you remove any traces of  hack.