Warning: cannot yet handle MBCS in html_entity_decode

If you are using PHP 4 and using some of my plugins, the error message “Warning: cannot yet handle MBCS in html_entity_decode” will get displayed on your page. This is not a bug in my plugin but a bug in PHP 4 itself.

My recommendation would definitely be asking you to upgrade to PHP 5. PHP group has announced the end of life for PHP 4 on the 13th July 2007.

Today it is exactly three years ago since PHP 5 has been released. In those three years it has seen many improvements over PHP 4. PHP 5 is fast, stable & production-ready and as PHP 6 is on the way, PHP 4 will be discontinued.

The PHP development team hereby announces that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. We will continue to make critical security fixes available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08. Please use the rest of this year to make your application suitable to run on PHP 5.

As you can see, there would not be any more PHP 4 updates and security fixes will be available till 8th August 2008 which is only 2 more months. If you want to upgrade to PHP 5, this is the best time to do it.

If for some reasons you are not able to upgrade to PHP 5, the only thing you can do is to turn off error message display. You can refer to this thread for more information. This is definitely not an elegant solution.

If you host supports PHP 5 but you are on PHP 4, you can take a look at the solution posted by Thomas Arie Setiawan.

Softwares like MediaWiki which powered Wikipedia requires your server to be running PHP 5, and vBulletin has beginning asking customers to upgrade to PHP 5. It would be a matter of time before WordPress requires a minimum of PHP 5 to be running.

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Packed Javascript For WP-Polls

As I have received many request to optimized the Javascript for WP-Polls (I will also do it for other plugins but I will beta test it with WP-Polls first), I have used Dean Edwards Packer to pack my Javascript for WP-Polls and then I have moved the Dynamic Javascript variables out of the Javascript file and into the PHP page and now I can renamed it back to .js extension instead of .php.

These 2 things that I have done should help reduce the load on the server.

If are interested to test it out, you can download WP-Polls 2.30 Beta 1.

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My Plugins And WordPress 2.5

The current version of all my plugins will work on WordPress 2.5 PROVIDED you have upgraded your WordPress blog from WP 2.x to WP 2.5.

If you are using a fresh copy of WordPress 2.5 together with my plugins, it WILL NOT work as WordPress 2.5 changes the Activation Global Scope Of The Plugins. In simpler terms, it means that upon activation of my plugins in WP-Admin, it will not create the tables needed by the respective plugins.

To solve this problem temporary, do the following in polls.php (I am using WP-Polls as an example):

Find:

$wpdb->pollsq = $table_prefix.'pollsq';
$wpdb->pollsa = $table_prefix.'pollsa';
$wpdb->pollsip = $table_prefix.'pollsip';

Replace:

global $wpdb;
$wpdb->pollsq = $wpdb->prefix.'pollsq';
$wpdb->pollsa = $wpdb->prefix.'pollsa';
$wpdb->pollsip = $wpdb->prefix.'pollsip';

Note the addition of the “global $wpdb;” and the replacement of “$table_prefix” with “$wpdb->prefix“.

I have updated WP-Polls, WP-ServerInfo, WP-Sticky and WP-UserOnline to work with WordPress 2.5. You can get them here at my downloads page (do note that they are still in beta). Those plugins that end with a “Beta 2” means it will work for WordPress 2.5.

Some of the updates are:

  • Making sure that the styling, alignment and color of the plugin matches WordPress 2.5
  • Fixes the “Activation Global Scope” issue
  • Updated WP-Polls TinyMCE plugin to work with TinyMCE 3.0
  • Added a summary of WP-ServerInfo as a Dashboard Widget
  • Added a summary of WP-UserOnline in the Right Now Dashboard Widget
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WordPress 2.8.3

WordPress 2.8.3 has been released and similar to WordPress 2.8.2, this is a security fix.

Unfortunately, I missed some places when fixing the privilege escalation issues for 2.8.1. Luckily, the entire WordPress community has our backs. Several folks in the community dug deeper and discovered areas that were overlooked. With their help, the remaining issues are fixed in 2.8.3. Since this is a security release, upgrading is highly recommended

Changelog: WordPress 2.8.3
Download: WordPress 2.8.3
Download: Modified files since WordPress 2.8.2

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