Blogging Fool

WordPress, the blogging platform from Automattic has without a doubt become the de facto framework for serious bloggers, with thousands of plugins and themes available and huge active community of independent developers.

One of the more esoteric elements and hurdles for WordPress over the years has been trying to get it to play catch up with the power of social networks, and to this end, a sort of elaborate and extensive hack class WordPress MU (multi-user) was developed that allowed WordPress to act more like a social networking destination wherein users could view and exchange content and messages across registered profiles. WordPress MU is capable of scaling to tens of millions of pageviews per day, supports unlimited users and blogs and allows different permissions on all of those different blogs

Well the hack seems to have gone pretty well as WordPress MU is now going to be merged directly into WordPress proper. The caveat is that you won;t simply be able to merge a non MU and an MU site together and be on your way, but now setting up an MU WP site will be a heck of a lot easier.

Version 3.0  will also come with the new Twenty Ten default theme, a welcome upgrade from the customizable, but now venerable Kubrick default template.

To learn more, or to download the WordPress 3.0 Beta 1 installation files and try it out for yourself, visit the official WordPress blog.

Automattic just won’t let anything slide, now will its community of developers and users. The fourth in a series of .1 updates created to address possible security issues that could be exploited by malicious users or even registered contributors, WP 2.8.5 includes the following key changes:

* 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.

The update for custom WordPress installation can be easily applied from the admin panel and it is strongly recommended that you do. When last we check, there was even a 2.8.6 release cooking. We may have to wait just a little longer for 2.9 but at least we will sleep more soundly knowing that the doors have been locked.