Month: June 2012

WordPress 3.4.1

WordPress 3.4.1 has been release and it is both a maintenance release that fixes 18 bugs and security release that fixes vulnerabilities that relates to multisite installs with untrusted users.

Maintenance
Some of the 18 bugs include:

  • Fixes an issue where a theme’s page templates were sometimes not detected.
  • Addresses problems with some category permalink structures.
  • Better handling for plugins or themes loading JavaScript incorrectly.
  • Adds early support for uploading images on iOS 6 devices.
  • Allows for a technique commonly used by plugins to detect a network-wide activation.
  • Better compatibility with servers running certain versions of PHP (5.2.4, 5.4) or with uncommon setups (safe mode, open_basedir), which had caused warnings or in some cases prevented emails from being sent.

Security
Version 3.4.1 also fixes a few security issues and contains some security hardening. The vulnerabilities included potential information disclosure as well as an bug that affects multisite installs with untrusted users. These issues were discovered and fixed by the WordPress security team.

Download: WordPress 3.4.1
Auto Update: Dashboard -> Updates

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (115 votes, average: 3.95 out of 5)

WordPress 3.4

WordPress 3.4 has been released.

For Users

The biggest change in 3.4 is the theme customizer which allows you to play around with various looks and settings for your current theme or one you’re thinking about switching to without publishing those changes to the whole world. For themes that support it, you can change colors, backgrounds, and of course custom image headers. We have more planned for the customizer down the road.

Throughout the rest of the admin you’ll notice tweaks to make your everyday life easier. For example, if you have lots of themes we’ve made it quicker to browse them all at once without paging. We’ve made it possible to use images from your media library to populate custom headers, and for you to choose the height and width of your header images.

We’ve expanded our embed support to include tweets: just put a Twitter permalink on its own line in the post editor and we’ll turn it into a beautiful embedded Tweet. And finally, image captions have been improved to allow HTML, like links, in them.

For Developers

There are hundreds of under-the-hood improvements in this release, notably in the XML-RPC, themes, and custom header APIs, and significant performance improvements in WP_Query and the translation system. The Codex has a pretty good summary of the developer features, and you can always dive into Trac directly.

[wpvideo Gg0EFixV]

Download: WordPress 3.4

PS: My plugins should work with WordPress 3.4, if you discovered any bug, just drop me an email, lesterchan AT gmail.

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (105 votes, average: 4.15 out of 5)

AJAX Not Working For WP-Email, WP-Polls, WP-PostRatings or WP-PostViews?

About 2 weeks ago, I release an update to r WP-Email, WP-Polls, WP-PostRatings and WP-PostViews which added some nonce check and moved the AJAX request to be handled by /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php.

3 common issues that users are facing.

“-1” or “Failed To Verify Referrer”
This means that most likely you are using a caching plugin like W3 Total Cache (W3TC) and the Javascript being minified/combined and cached is outdated. Just empty the JS/CSS cache under the “Minify” section of W3TC in WP-Admin and W3TC will regenerate it again. This will solve the problem.

Password Protected /wp-admin/ Will Not Work
If you are using .htpasswd to protect your /wp-admin/ folder, AJAX request to /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php will not work. This problem is not unique to my plugin. Any WordPress Plugins that uses the WordPress AJAX API will break. As mentioned in this Codex, Hardening WordPress:

Simply securing the wp-admin/ directory might also break some WordPress functionality, such as the AJAX handler at wp-admin/admin-ajax.php

To bypass this, check out this tutorial, Password protecting the wp-admin directory, this tutorial will teach you how to whitelist admin-ajax.php in your /wp-admin/ using .htaccess.

I still hope in the future version of WordPress, they will separate front facing AJAX requests vs backend AJAX requests.

Your WP-Admin Is HTTPS While Your Site Is Not
If your WP-Admin is behind SSL aka HTTPS and you have the following config in your wp-config.php define('FORCE_SSL_ADMIN', true);, the AJAX will fail because https://yoursite.com is different from http://yoursite.com and the browser treat it as different domain.

To solve this issue do the following:
Find:
'ajax_url' => admin_url('admin-ajax.php'),
Replace:
'ajax_url' => admin_url('admin-ajax.php', (is_ssl() ? 'https' : 'http')),

What the code does is basically forcing http to be used when calling admin-ajax.php for AJAX request. Again this is a hack, I am trying to figure a way around it.

I have pushed the code to trunk of all the respective plugins.

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (411 votes, average: 4.16 out of 5)