Photos from last night’s Hackathon

Description

FullThrottle Development is thrilled to announce our latest and greatest WordPress plugin! This ground breaking piece of craftsmanship will instantly turn your WordPress blogging software into a full fledged CMS. Just install, activate, and partake. Sreenshots below.

Download:

• Click to download

Features include but are not limited to the following:

• Full standards compliance — We have gone to great lengths to make sure every bit of WordPress generated code is in full compliance with the standards of the W3C. This is important not only for interoperability with today’s browser but also for forward compatibility with the tools of the next generation. Your web site is a beautiful thing, and you should demand nothing less.
• No rebuilding — Changes you make to your templates or entries are reflected immediately on your site, with no need for regenerating static pages.
• WordPress Pages — Pages allow you to manage non-blog content easily, so for example you could have a static “About” page that you manage through WordPress. For an idea of how powerful this is, the entire WordPress.org site could be run off WordPress alone. (We don’t for technical mirroring reasons.)
• WordPress Links — Links allows you to create, maintain, and update any number of blogrolls through your administration interface. This is much faster than calling an external blogroll manager.
• WordPress Themes — WordPress comes with a full theme system which makes designing everything from the simplest blog to the most complicated webzine a piece of cake, and you can even have multiple themes with totally different looks that you switch with a single click. Have a new design every day.
• Cross-blog communication tools— WordPress fully supports both the Trackback and Pingback standards, and we are committed to supporting future standards as they develop.
• Comments — Visitors to your site can leave comments on individual entries, and through Trackback or Pingback can comment on their own site. You can enable or disable comments on a per-post basis.
• Spam protection — Out of the box WordPress comes with very robust tools such as an integrated blacklist and open proxy checker to manage and eliminate comment spam on your blog, and there is also a rich array of plugins that can take this functionality a step further.
• Full user registration — WordPress has a built-in user registration system that (if you choose) can allow people to register and maintain profiles and leave authenticated comments on your blog. You can optionally close comments for non-registered users. There are also plugins that hide posts from lower level users.

Screenshot

Colophon

• WordPress Ultimate CMS plugin is proud to stand on the shoulders of ‘Hello Dolly‘ by Matt Mullenweg
• WordPress Ultimate CMS plugin’s feature list is slightly used.

WordPress is a great piece of software driving billions of sites across the internet. One of the main reason WordPress does so well is because the community gives back freely and often. While these community contributions to the project mean that WordPress is continually enhancing its feature set, it also means that a web site powered by WordPress is continually in need of upgrades.

Being the excellent software that it is, WordPress gives you the ability to ‘Auto Upgrade’ to the latest version. If you’re running an unmodified installation and you don’t have too many plugins, this is an excellent option and I would highly suggest you give it a try.

If you’re going to upgrade WordPress to 2.9 on your own, we want to provide you with the following suggestions and resources.

1. Always backup your database and your file structure (especially the wp-content folder) before upgrading. You can never be too safe. This goes for manual upgrades as well as auto upgrades!
2. Always deactivate plugins prior to upgrading. If you have a lot of plugins and your site gets a lot of traffic, this may be tricky. It’s not ‘necessary’ but its safe practice because if one of your plugins doesn’t mesh with the new version of WordPress it may render your site inaccessible.
3. We would suggest checking with all your plugins’ authors to see if their plugin is compatible with the latest release of WordPress prior to upgrading.
4. Most hosts give priority to index.html over index.php. We often use this tactic to put up a nice “Site down for scheduled maintenance” message during the upgrade. This is obviously optional.
5. You can find a detailed step-by-step instructions for manually upgrading WordPress on their website: http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress_Extended

Finally – and lets be honest, the real reason we wrote this post – if you have had trouble with WordPress upgrades in the past or are a little bit hesitant to do it yourself, check out http://wpupgrade.com. It’s a site that FullThrottle just launched with the sole purpose of helping others upgrade their WordPress installations.

It has recently been reported that WordPress blogs are being attacked by a Brute-Force campaign.

A Brute-Force attack happens when a malicious individual creates an automated script with the sole purpose of guessing your administrative password. It does this by pointing the script at your blog’s login URL: http://yourblogsdomain.com/wp-login.php. The script repeatedly guesses at your login name and password from a dictionary of commonly used usernames and passwords.

Here is an explanation from the post linked above:

The wp_brute_attempt() function takes 3 parameters, $ch which is cURL’s structure (cURL is a command line tools that can be used to perform HTTP requests). The other two parameters define the site and the password that will be tried. If the script logged in successfully, the page that gets returned by the server will contain the phrase “Log Out”, and the function will return a true value.

If you are currently running a WordPress blog and would like to secure your site against these attacks, the easiest thing to do is to simply change your admin username and to make sure you have a strong password in place.

If you would like assistance securing your site against this attack, FullThrottle is available to help. Simply contact us for more details.

Sebastian Bergmann has put together a slideshow highlighting several tips for good PHP coding techniques. Th e slideshow is called “Quality Assurance in PHP Projects“.

The slideshow includes several examples of coding and testing techniques.

FullThrottle Development is excited to take part in WordCampRDU 2009 on Saturday, June 13, 2009. WordCampRDU will be held at the School of Education at North Carolina Central University in Durham, NC from 9:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m. (For a complete schedule, click here.)

FullThrottle Development is participating in WordCampRDU 2009 is several ways. First, we are one of the Gold Sponsors of the event. Second, three of our developers are speaking during the event (see below for more information). Finally, we will be taking part in the “Q&A” in the “genius lounge”.

The following representatives of FullThrottle Development will be speaking during WordCampRDU 2009:

• Glenn Ansley will speak on the topic “WordPress as a Factory: The Fundamentals of Plug-in Development” at 10:15 a.m.
• Lew Ayotte will speak on the topic “WordPress Mu: Installation, Plug-in Management, and Features” at 3:00 p.m.
• Alan Knox will speak on the topic “Implementing WordPress in Corporate & Educational Environments” at 5:00 p.m.

(We plan to record our sessions and post the videos and slide shows here.)

Other representatives of FullThrottle Development will be attending WordCampRDU sessions, meeting people, volunteering, and answering questions.

Also, we will live blog as much of WordCampRDU as possible.

Finally, don’t miss our BIG ANNOUNCEMENT at 11:45 a.m.

We hope to see you at WordCampRDU!