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Quick look at WordPress issues in July:
WordPress 2.0.4 was released on the 29th. With over 60 bugs squashed since 2.0.3 (including what little substantive portion there was of Dr. Doom’s(sic) “OMG-The-Sky-Is-Falling” reference) this is the most secure, stable release or WordPress. Upgrade now. Shh. Zip it! Just do it. In addition, Mark Jaquith has posted a 2.0.3 > 2.0.4 changed/diff list and .zip (especially handy for custom sites and multiple upgrades).
Admin Autumn Theme Version 2.0 was released on the 23rd. 2.0 has optimized CSS, better IE6 rendering and menu icons.
Bad Behavior is at 2.0.4 now. I wouldn’t manage an internet blog without it. However, if you have “Display statistics in blog footer” then to validate (and look right for my theme) I had to change line 138 of bad-behavior-wordpress.php to: echo sprintf(' I removed the
%1$s %2$s %3$s %4$s’, __(’Bad Behavior’), __(’has blocked’), $blocked[0]["COUNT(*)"], __(’access attempts in the last 7 days.’));
and changed the leading
to
Came across a rockin’ plugin released by Chris Hwang, WP-phpMyAdmin. Activate this and you have phpMyAdmin in your WordPress admin pages, same interface, colors and layout… I love it, and if you ever find yourself bouncing between the admin pages and phpMyAdmin, you’ll love it too. Damnit. ;’) Careful when installing, some users are digging too far into the zip file (directory structure should look like wp-content/plugins/wp-phpmyadmin NOT wp-content/plugins/phpmyadmin.
Dagon Design’s Secure Form Mailer Plugin For Wordpress is at 4.2 now. I’ve had good success with this, and it allows me to have multiple forms/layouts as well…
I’ve been having fun with the Hot Dates Plugin for Wordpress…
Some time ago I changed the lyrics displayed by the ‘Hello Dolly’ plugin (distributed with WordPress) to “Papa was a Rolling Stone” by the Temptations ;’) Sharing it now, for those interested. Hello Dolly plugin with different lyrics.
Trevor has added Arabic to his Translator Widget.
Ultimate Tag Warrior 3.14 was released, note:
- Mark wrote a thing which caches tags, so a whole-bunch less database queries will take place. Thanks Mark! (:
- There?s a shiny new option (on the options page) which will automatically include the appropriate tags in a meta keyword field, in the page header.
- I think I?ve fixed the thing with tag suggestions that was causing javascript errors for people. (Also, you can push both buttons and both sets of tag suggestions will display)
- There?s also a new predefined format that will create a tag cloud in the form ordered list of coloured/sized tags. It?s called tagcloudlist. It?s not as important as the other three, but someone wanted one, so there you go.
I noticed a changed Sidebar Widgets was released. This one has a version number of 1.0.20060711.
About a month after my release of the About Me widget for WordPress there have been over 300 downloads and 6 revisions (thanks for the feedback!).
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17 Users Commented on " Quick look at WordPress issues in July: "
Hi Sam,
I follow your blog (and darn good it is too).
I’m hoping you, as a WP guru, may be able to point me in the direction of an answer to an annoying problem.
I use widgets for my sidebar, and thus the old code in the sidebar.php, which excluded much of the sidebar except on the homepage, no longer works.
Is there anyway you can exclude some of the sidebar menu when using widgets? Any clues would be lovely!
Cheers.
Really good question that I don’t have an answer for 
You can have multiple ‘widgetized’ sidebars in one theme, so why not qualify which is displayed according to whether is_home() or is_page()?
Unfortunately you can’t duplicate widgets on both sidebars and I suspect that may reflect the real issue/conflict with this approach.
I’m going to cc this back to the thread you already started at http://wordpress.org/support/topic/81313?replies=1 and see if we can’t get some better ideas there…
Thanks, Sam.
I’ll follow the progress (or lack thereof…) over in the WP support forums.
I’m actually quite amazed this hasn’t already had a thorough going over since widgets were implemented; evidently people didn’t feel the need for it!
Posted there and will add for continuity here: WP won’t do this natively, but this plugin looks pretty good for the job:
I modified the about me widget to allow for my “Adventures in Discretionary Money”. You can see it on my page
This is off-topic, but I couldn’t reach you via your Contact page (there’s an error with the validation image code).
I ran into the same problem you posted about on WordPress.org about Widget and Page and XHTML validation. I solved it after tracing the problem back to /wp_content/plugins/widgets/widgets.php, line 54. My custom stylesheet didn’t even use the widgettitle class, and the escaped quotes around it were driving me nuts. At line 54, remove the class=”widgettitle” part and you’ll validate no problem, unless your theme relies on it being there.
nita: Very cool!
Jacob: Between upgrading widgets.php and 2.0.4 the problem went away ;’)
I did add a ‘widgettitle’ class to my test site, experimenting with bg’s for the titles, so I’m glad this got resolved.
Thanks for the heads-up on the contact form, just updated it and ASSumed it was fine! All better now…
I got the following error message when I tried to include my picture in the widget:
Warning: getimagesize(): URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration in /home … /kilcrease.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/widgets/aboutme.php on line 35
Warning: getimagesize(http://kilcrease.com/ … Portrait 120X150.GIF): failed to open stream: no suitable wrapper could be found in /home … /kilcrease.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/widgets/aboutme.php on line 35
The Dreamhost documenttion recommended a cURL change in the code, but I couldn’t find where to put it in your code. Do you have any suggestions?
Thanks,
Worth
Worth: I don’t, not yet at least. Still trying to see about implementing a cURL wrapper. I will probably send you an email directly as soon as I get something ‘testable’.
Hi
I got a same error message:
Warning: getimagesize(): URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration in /home/content/XXX/html/wp-content/plugins/aboutme.php on line 35
Warning: getimagesize(http://www.XXX): failed to open stream: no suitable wrapper could be found in /XXX/html/wp-content/plugins/aboutme.php on line 35
Gal: Adding you to that email ;’) I really hope to get something done this week. I want to make sure it will still work in non safe_mode environments…
Sam: Tack me on the list, too 
This getimagesize CURL stuff is killin’ me, and there is NO documentation in the entire internet that makes sense to me.
If you come across a working solution, please let me know!
Thanks again.
Yup, ran into this Deamhost / getImageSize() too when i migrated my site from MT to Dreamhost. As nice as the Dreamhost folks are, they couldn’t help me out here…
Anyway, I found a way to deal with this - its pretty damn ugly, but ill describe it quickly here.
Using curl, you can suck the image into memory, then write it to a local file, then perform getImageSize() on it.
Here’s a quick snippet that gets the image size of an image off flickr:
$ch = curl_init();
$timeout = 5; // set to zero for no timeout
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://static.flickr.com/81/241245048_ae78cfa7f7.jpg');
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
$file_contents = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$fp = fopen("temp.jpg", "w+");
fwrite($fp, $file_contents);
$parts = getimagesize();
print_r ($parts);
exit;
My situation is a mess, because I am running this on a flickr image for users to my site. This means I have to create a temp work space and give these files a unique name, then delete them.
I’ll post a full description to my blog (http://www.slowerbetter.com) when i get this ironed out for anyone who needs it.
Billy
Billy: Thanks for the comment… What if the server isn’t using safe_mode/cURL? Is there a test/conditional for that?
Sam: I think if (!function_exists(’curl_init’)) should work 
