hwa2u.com

As you all probably know, I used Twitter Tool by Alex King to retrieve my tweets from my Twitter, and post it here. However, ever since the plugin been updated to version 3, the previous version of Twitter Tool stopped working, at least for my site. I’m not sure why is this happening, by right it shouldn’t. But I didn’t bother to upgrade it, because the new Twitter Tool is relying another plugin, which is the Social plugin to accomplish all the Twitter job.

You see, I’m trying to make my blog not to rely too much on third party tools, services, to keep it independence. Unless I have no choice to do so, or the third party service/plugins is worth for it. So I decided to take the matters into my own hand, by develop a WordPress plugin to replace it.

Introducing Twitter Pull by hwa2u.com, a Twitter plugin for WordPress that will pull tweets from your Twitter account every 10 minutes, simple as that. The plugin use Twitter OAuth to authenticate with Twitter so even if your Tweets are protected, the plugin will still be able to pull tweets, cool huh?

Apart from pulling tweets, the plugin can pull pictures from tweets as well, and post it nicely in WordPress, take a look at this tweets from my Twitter. The pictures will be downloaded from Twitter and save it in a folder defined by user.

Other than that, the plugin also has configuration to allow you to filter mentions or retweets to be pulled, that including words or sentences defined by user, pretty neat huh?

So now the question, when am I going to release this awesome plugin? Sorry to say that, I never intended to release, yet. I’m still testing the plugin out, there are a bunch of features I want to include, such as able to retrieve geo location, better error report to user etc. At least until I satisfy with the product then I’ll be releasing it.

For now, if you really want to try the plugin, feel free to email me, I might consider to host the code in GitHub so you guys can download it, or you may suggest me the features you want to include.

The latest WordPress, WordPress 2.3 named “Dexter” is now out for grab, and below are the main juice of WordPress 2.3 taken from WordPress blog.

1. Full and complete Atom 1.0 support, including the publishing protocol.
2. We’re using the new jQuery which is “800% faster”.
3. Behind the user-facing tags system is a really kickass taxonomy system, which adds a ton of flexibility. It’s probably the biggest schema upgrade since version 1.5.
4. The importers have been revamped to be more memory efficient, and you can now add an importer through a plugin.
5. Through hooks and filters you can now override the update system, the dashboard RSS feeds, the feed parser, and tons more than you could in 2.2.
6. The new $wpdb->prepare() way of doing SQL queries.
7. Finally there were over 351 tickets in Trac closed for this release, with over a hundred people contributing. This is the polish, the hundreds of tiny bug fixes and features that make WordPress what it is.

And here are some of the new features offered from WordPress 2.3.

1. Native tagging support allows you to use tags in addition to categories on your posts, if you so choose. We’ve included importers for the Ultimate Tag Warrior, Jerome’s Keywords, Simple Tags, and Bunny’s Technorati Tag plugins so if you’ve already been using a tagging plugin you can bring your data into the new system. The tagging system is also wicked-fast, so your host won’t mind.
2. Our new update notification lets you know when there is a new release of WordPress or when any of the plugins you use has an update available. It works by sending your blog URL, plugins, and version information to our new api.wordpress.org service which then compares it to the plugin database and tells you whats the latest and greatest you can use.
3. We’ve cleaned up URLs a bunch in a feature we call canonical URLs which does things like enforce your no-www preference, redirect posts with changed slugs so a link never goes bad, redirect URLs that get cut off in emails on similar to the correct post, and much more. This helps your users, and it also helps your search engine optimization, as search engines like for each page to be available in one canonical location. More info here.
4. Our new pending review feature will be great for multi-author blogs. It allows authors to submit a post for review by an editor or administrator, where before they would just have to save a draft and hope someone noticed it.
5. There is new advanced WYSIWYG functionality (we call it the kitchen sink button) that allows you to access some features of TinyMCE that were previously hidden.

You might want to pay a visit to WordPress codex for more details and instructions on how to upgrade or install WordPress 2.3.

Just upgraded my WordPress to version 2.2.2! Very nice figure. 🙂

Anyway! Please go to WordPress download section to download the latest version, for the instruction on how to upgrade your WordPress, you can go here, or you here for fresh installation instruction.

WordPress had released their latest branch of WordPress 2.1 and WordPress 2.0, this release is a security update and also fixed several issues, including the XSS issues, one major XML-RPC issue.

Head over to their download page to download the latest version of WordPress, and if you are upgrade from previous version, here are the upgrade instructions. 🙂

WordPress MU 1.2 just released not long ago, according to Donncha, most of the changes are bug fixes, but there are some security fix as well, so it’s advised that all the WordPress MU user upgrade to the latest version! And if you encounter any problems, please go to WordPress MU forum.

Apparently there are some problems with the theme in WordPress MU 1.2, but worry not! Because version 1.2.1 is here!! 😆 So if you upgrade from 1.2, all you have to do is just change the following files:

• wp-admin/themes.php
• htaccess.dist
• wp-includes/version.php
• wp-admin/admin-db.php
• wp-admin/themes.php
• wp-admin/wpmu-themes.php

Oh and don’t forget to go "Site Admin > Themes" and click save to update the theme list! 😉

It had been quite some time i didn’t write anything since the last WordPress update, which is WordPress 2.1.2, but today when i was trying to delete the spam comment, i found a bug that already been in WordPress for like don’t know since which version already.

Basically the bug will just interrupt you and say “You don’t have permission to do that.” when you are trying to delete a comment or adding/removing a category, then of course you can’t delete the comment and do anything with category.

However i can still delete the comment in mass edit mode without any problem, i’m guessing that this must have some issues with AJAX or something, because when in mass edit mode it doesn’t deal with AJAX and everything is working fine.

There already been quite many report regarding this matter, and i hope that the WordPress team will solve this problem as soon as possible.

It’s true that the greatest success for WordPress is the plugin development, in fact i think that it’s the plugin which make WordPress become so success, thanks to those plugin developers for their hardwork.

However, one bad thing about WordPress plugin is that until now there are still no place to collect all the WordPress plugin, or a database to put all the plugins so WordPress user will easily find the plugin they want, although there is wp-plugins.org but the lack of user interface and not up to date plugins make people would rather search plugins by them self.

Many works had already done to promote WordPress plugins though, such as daily plugin update by Weblog Tools Collection and A Month of WordPress Plugins by Lorelle where he spend the whole month talking and reviewing about WordPress plugins. These works will more or less promote WordPress plugins until a certain level but still we need a place that’s more particular and more general.

But fear not! Today WordPress.org had upgraded their extend section and now it act like a plugin directory for WordPress, now you can find the latest and most popular WordPress plugin there!!

So if you are WordPress plugin developer, please add your plugin there, hopefully this will bring up all the WordPress plugins.

WordPress.org had released their WordPress 2.1.2 today, but sadly it’s is not a feature upgrade, instead it’s an emergency security upgrade due to believe that a hacker had changed one of the WordPress 2.1.1 file in one of the WordPress server, here is what Matt said:

It was determined that a cracker had gained user-level access to one of the servers that powers wordpress.org, and had used that access to modify the download file. We have locked down that server for further forensics, but at this time it appears that the 2.1.1 download was the only thing touched by the attack. They modified two files in WP to include code that would allow for remote PHP execution.

This is something very serious and the thing that u think will ever happen in your nightmare, but now it happened, so if your are using WordPress 2.1.1, Please upgrade immediately!!

Since the release of WordPress 2.1, WordPress is now divided into two main version, the WordPress 2.1 which require PHP version 4.2 or greater and MySQL version 4.0 or greater and as well as some several minimum requirements.

Today WordPress got new bugfix and security release for each of their version, the WordPress 2.1.1 and WordPress 2.0.9. According to Matt, the version 2.1.1 have around 30 bug fixes and version 2.0.9 is only security update.

You can head over to WordPress official site To download WordPress 2.1.1, and to download version 2.0.9 please go to their release archive.

This is actually quite an old news already, the bbPress 0.8 Desmond was already released on 8th February.

Here are some of the feature this version had improved, quoted from bbPress blog:

• Forum deletion
• Multibyte tags
• Custom locations for themes, plugins and config.php
• Multiple theme support

And these are the new features that’s added in this version, also quoted from bbPress blog: 🙂

• Better timezone support, You’re no longer restricted to showing all your times in the timezone of your server (what an odd requirement that was)
• Whitespace preservation of ‘backticked’ blocks.

There’s a special instruction for those who want to upgrade to this version, because this version support multiple theme and you have to put each of the theme files into sub directory of my-templates, just put your current theme into any folder and upload this folder to my-templates, then activate the theme in your bbPress’ Presentation Admin panel.