swansonager – what is matt up to?

Not to steal Nike’s tagline, but with all the recent Wordpress Security Issues with 2.8.4, now is as good as time as any to make sure your standalone Wordpress installation is patched and up to date. I’ve upgraded Swansonager and will be sure to report any issues I find over the next week or so. Here’s the summary from Wordpress on the 2.8.5 release:

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 you think your site may have been hit by one of the recent exploits and you would like to make sure that you have cleared out all traces of the exploit then we would recommend that you take a look at the WordPress Exploit Scanner.  This is a plugin which searches the files on your website, and the posts and comments tables of your database for anything suspicious. It also examines your list of active plugins for unusual filenames.  You can read more about this plugin here – “WordPress Exploit Scanner“

This releases introduces a big upgrade on how the app finds your site via XML-RPC. If you’ve had trouble adding your sites with the previous betas, it’s time to upgrade and try this one out. Here is the full list of changes with this release:

* XML-RPC discovery upgrade
* Fix for the category field not being focusable
* Added a paste option to the link assistant (thanks acedanger)
* Added menu item to check if there is a newer version of the app
* Big improvements on how the app handles images. App can now work with jpeg and png image, without format conversion.

Download it from your Blackberry today >>

Today, Wordpress 2.8.1 was released. For those of you running a Wordpress based standalone install, you probably want to download the newest version. It will only take you 5 seconds to upgrade.

Here’s how to upgrade Wordpress

:

Now wasn’t that easy to do – thanks Wordpress!w