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.

However, many WordPress sites have multiple authors, and each author has their own Facebook profile.

The improved FT FacePress II plugin allows each WordPress author to update their own Facebook profile and/or a Facebook page. Furthermore, WordPress admins can setup FT FacePress II to publish post information from all WordPress authors to another Facebook profile and/or page. When the author publishes a post (or when a scheduled post is published), the plugin publishes the post information (title, url, and/or excerpt) to the author’s Facebook profile status. Also, each author can direct the plugin to publish the post information to a Facebook page. These settings are updated in the FacePress II User Options.

Admins can use the FacePress II Admin Options to direct the plugin to publish post information for all WordPress to the Facebook page and/or profile designated in the FacePress II Admin Options screen.

Furthermore, if the admin checks the “Update All Facebook Profiles” checkbox (only in the FacePress II Admin Options screen), then when any author publishes a post, the information goes to all author’s profiles and/or pages as well as the admin profile/page.

Finally, FacePress allows each author and the admin user to set the format of the post information published to Facebook, and to set the categories to include/exclude from publishing.

Screen Shots and Option Settings

FacePress II Admin Options Submenu

The FacePress II plugin adds a submenu to the Settings menu (”FacePress II Admin Options”). Admins can use this submenu to set FacePress to publish their posts, and to direct FacePress to publish their post information to the profile/pages of all authors.

Admins should fill in the “Profile” and/or “Page” unique email fields. NOTE: Do not fill in these fields with the email address that  you use to log in to Facebook. Instead, fill in these fields with the unique email address that Facebook creates for each profile and page. Follow the directions on the options page to find the Facebook created unique email addresses.

When any user publishes a post, the post information will be published to the Facebook profile and/or page that is entered in the FacePress II Admin Options page (if either the Facebook profile or the Facebook page unique email address is entered).

If the “Update All Facebook Profiles” option is checked, then when any user publishes a WordPress post, then the post information will be published to all user and admin Facebook profiles and pages.

FacePress II User Options

The plugin also adds a submenu to the User Profile menu (”FacePress II User Options”). This menu allows each author to set FacePress to publish their own posts.

Each user should fill in their own “Profile” and/or “Page” unique email fields. NOTE: Do not fill in these fields with the email address that  you use to log in to Facebook. Instead, fill in these fields with the unique email address that Facebook creates for each profile and page. Follow the directions on the options page to find the Facebook created unique email addresses.

When any user publishes a post, the post information will be published to the Facebook profile and/or page that is entered in the FacePress II Users Options page for that user (if either the Facebook profile or the Facebook page unique email address is entered), as well as to the Admin’s Facebook profile and/or page as indicated above.

FacePress II Post Options

Finally, the plugin also adds a section to the edit post window. These options may be used to override the general settings on a per post basis. If “Exclude this Post” is checked, then this post information will not be published to Facebook. Similarly, if the “Format” field is entered, this post format will override the Format fields on either the Admin or User Options pages.

Download the latest version.

This shows you how to save the data. I’ll update the post later to provide a complete example.

A couple of disclaimers:

• The hook name changes from 2.9.1 to 3.0 for adding the field to the form… hence the conditional in the code
• If you’re running trunk, the extra field will appear twice because of a bug in the code. I placed a ticket in trac: http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/12171

This following code, placed in your theme’s functions.php file:

// Adds fields to add category screen
function ft_add_category_field(){
	?>
	<div class="form-field">
		<label for="extra"><?php _e('Extra Field') ?></label>
		<textarea name="extra" id="extra" rows="5" cols="40"></textarea>
		<p><?php _e('The description of the extra field.'); ?></p>
	</div>
	<?php
}
if ( get_bloginfo('version') < 3 ){
	add_action('edit_category_form','ft_add_category_field');
}else{
	add_action('add_category_form_fields','ft_add_category_field');
}

// On Insert Category
function ft_created_category($term_id,$tt_id){
	// This lets you see the values of the two args being passed in
	echo "term_id = ".$term_id."<br />";
	echo "tt_id = ".$tt_id."<br />";

	// This is the name of your extra fields
	echo "extra = ".$_POST['extra'];

	// You should now have everything you need to update options.
}
add_action('created_category','ft_created_category',10,2);

Download a text file with the above code: here

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.

Rules are simple:

• Referrals are not officially recognized until the client has signed a contract and delivered their down payment to FullThrottle via PayPal or check
• Client and Referrer must inform FullThrottle of referral prior to contract and down payment being received by FullThrottle.
• Referrals will be for one of the following areas of work:
  • Web Design
  • WordPress Plugin Development
  • WordPress Theme Development
• Winners will be determined as followed:
  • The first officially recognized referral wins 1st place
  • The second officially recognized referral wins 2nd place
  • The third officially recognized referral wins 3rd place
  • The fourth officially recognized referral wins 4th place
  • The fifth officially recognized referral wins 5th place

Prizes are Crazy

• First place
  • Referred client receives 50% off of their final quote
  • Referrer receives 100% of the client’s down payment*

• Second place
  • Referred client receives 40% off of their final quote
  • Referrer receives 50% of the client’s down payment*

• Third place
  • Referred client receives 30% off of their final quote
  • Referrer receives 25% of the client’s down payment*

• Fourth place
  • Referred client receives 20% off of their final quote
  • Referrer receives 13% of the client’s down payment*

• Fifth place
  • Referred client receives 10% off of their final quote
  • Referrer receives 7% of the client’s down payment*

Note: FullThrottle’s down payments usually fall between 30% and 50% of the project’s quote.

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.