Category Archives: WordPress

The open source publishing platform I co-founded — development, releases, community, and the ecosystem.

New Spring Design

Meta, Press, Quote, WordPress,

Time to come out of your RSS readers and visit the site. In celebration of Spring, Summer, the new domain, and WordPress 2.5 I’m launching a new version of Photo Matt / Ma.tt. Here’s a before and after picture:

Old and new ma.tt

A couple of functionality changes you’ll notice:

  • Thumbnails and photos are now much larger. (Especially photos, now 840px wide.) Imagine it like going HD, you’ll definitely enjoy it more on broadband.
  • I’ve brought back the photo tech details like aperture and focal length.
  • In addition to posts and asides, I’m now doing new post types: galleries, quotes, videos, and highlight photos.
  • You can now click on a photo to go to the next one, making  browsing galleries easier.
  • The header is a lot shorter, so you get to the content faster. You can’t say I have a big head anymore. 🙂
  • I’m starting to use the new taxonomy bits in 2.5 to tag people, places (geotagging), things, and concepts in the various photos. (More on this later, still a bit broken.)
  • This is the first iteration of this site that is powered entirely by WordPress. (I know, 5 years late. The cobbler’s children go shoeless!) Before it was a cobbled together set of PHP includes and software like Gallery. Now 100% WP.
  • Gravatars are much more prominent. I wonder if there’s a way to only allow comments from people with Gravatars? It looks so much better.
  • Name has changed from Photo Matt to Ma.tt, tagline is the same.

The fine design was executed by Nicolò Volpato, the same talented fellow who did the last design. My concept was to evoke Spanish talavera, inspired by my trips to Spain and Argentina and pottery at my parents’ house like this, this, and this. It was a lot of fun to work with Nicolò on and I already have a few ideas for Fall. 🙂

I’ve been noodling on the implementation for months now. Last night I had just arrived from New York and it turned out the Jay-Z/Mary J Blige concert in Oakland got postponed so I found myself with a bit of time on my hands and decided to tie up all the loose ends. There are still a ton of things broken like the photo border on portrait images, I still have 15k old photos to import, and you may see the old design on some older pages, but I wanted to get it out there. There are also some weird things, like Firefox seems to back the background image blurry while it’s razor-sharp in IE and Safari. I feel like I’ve seen that somewhere before.

Finally I’m hoping to release a lot of the work I did here, including a version of the old theme, the plugin + script I’m using to resize all my old images on the fly, the taxonomy stuff, and some core improvements to WP to make some of the things I’m doing here easier. (I got lazy and did some direct SQL queries, etc.)

SecurityFocus SQL Injection Bogus

Press, Spam, WordPress

Since people are asking, this so-called alert on Security Focus appears to be completely false and has no information that an attacker or the WordPress developers could use. It is completely content-free, except for making claims that every version of WP since 2.0 is vulnerable.

Online, apparently, it’s fine for someone to run into a crowded theatre and yell “fire” and the less basis there is in fact the more people link to them. It’s not uncommon to see crying-wolf reports like the above several times in a week, and a big part of what the WP security team is sifting through things to see what’s valid or not.

A valid security report looks like this, it usually includes sample code and a detailed description of the problem. The WP security team was notified of the KSES problem and it was fixed in 2.5. You can impress your friends by saying whether a security report is valid or not, so it’s a good critical facility to pick up.

All that said, there is a wave of attacks going around targeting old WordPress blogs, particularly those on the 2.1 or 2.2 branch. They’re exploiting problems that have been fixed for a year or more. This typically manifests itself through hidden spam being put on your site, either in the post or in a directory, and people notice when they get dropped from Google. (Google will drop your site if it contains links they consider spammy, you’ll remember this is one of the main reasons I came out against sponsored themes.) Google has some guidelines as well, what to do if your site is hacked. If I were to suggest WordPress-specific ones, I would say:

Continue reading SecurityFocus SQL Injection Bogus →

WordCamp Dallas and WordPress 2.5

Press, WordPress, ,

The talk this morning at WordCamp Dallas was quite enjoyable. The audience here is very sharp and on-point, there was a ton of participation and great questions. They also had delicious Rudy’s BBQ for lunch, which I nibbled at as much as I could. Also (roughly) concurrent with the talk we released WordPress 2.5. Funnily because I kept the edit screen for the announcement open from stage the concurrent editing protection prevented anyone else fom publishing the post! Andy told me after I was done and I pushed the button, but it’s good to know the feature works. 🙂

Backing BuddyPress

Press, WordPress, ,

Some of you may remember when I wrote about Chickspeak, a WordPress MU-based social network. Andy Peatling, the fellow behind it, later decided to recreate the work he had done as an Open Source effort he called BuddyPress. And it was good.

Today I’m happy to announce that Andy has joined Automattic full-time and we’ll be taking the BuddyPress project under our wing. We will grow it and support it the same way we support WordPress, MU, bbPress, Akismet, and more.

It’s clear that the future is social. Connections are key. WordPress MU is a platform which has shown itself to be able to operate at Internet-scale and with BuddyPress we can make it friendlier. Someday, perhaps, the world will have a truly Free and Open Source alternative to the walled gardens and open-only-in-API platforms that currently dominate our social landscape.

See also: DiSo, GigaOM, Techcrunch, Mashable, Techvibes.

Scriblio for Libraries

Books, Press, WordPress, ,

Scriblio MATC Project Final Report. Scriblio is a system for helping libraries and is built on top of WordPress. The article describes some of the troubles with the close association with WordPress:

Shortly after the Mellon Foundation announced the award to the Scriblio project, the WordPress core developers reversed their longstanding position on tags and announced that the next release would include tag support. This is significant because metadata such as author or subject is functionally equivalent to tags in Scriblio, and much of the Scriblio code was devoted to managing those tags.

It also describes some of the benefits:

[T]he relationship between the open source WordPress community and commercial participants, including Automattic, the commercial entity that operates WordPress.com, has proven itself to deliver real benefits to all. […]

And the Scriblio project has enjoyed opportunities to contribute to the WordPress community as well. […] One recent example is Ticket #5649, where a change proposed by Scriblio was committed to the baseline code within an hour of its submission.

Overall, a good read on building a project on top of WordPress, helping an under-served community, and giving back by strengthening the underlying platform.