The Visual Editor function in the current versions of AWSOM News Announcement and AWSOM Pixgallery do not function entirely properly with WordPress 2.5.1. The new version of WordPress added in a new version of tinyMCE (updated from 2.x to 3.x) and as a result broke the code that I use to add the editor to my plugins. The Visual Editor still works fine for versions of WordPress previous to 2.5.1, but I’m working to get it to work properly in the current version. The most obvious issues are with missing language text for some of the functions, and improper relative URL paths being created when attempting to add images using the editor. Keep checking back and I hope to get this fixed soon.

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I’ve had a few reports come in that people using the AWSOM News Announcement plugin or Pixgallery have been having some issues displaying different language types, most notably Asian or other non-English based character sets. The fix for these issues with AWSOM plugins, or any other plugins displaying this phenomenon, is within the Wordpress database. When a database is set up in MySQL one of the things you can assign to it is the language encoding type. In addition, all of it’s fields and tables can also be assigned a language encoding type. By default MySQL utilizes Swedish as it’s encoding type (MySQL was developed in Sweden). Wordpress typically tries to set up it’s database as UTF-8. In some cases this doesn’t work right, especially if the admin has updated their version of Wordpress continually from a version previous to Wordpress 2.1.x where this wasn’t defined.

So, the fix is to go to the database directly though phpmyadmin or another database editor and change the language type for the affected Tables and fields to the language type that you need to display. For AWSOM plugins it’s pretty obvious which tables are for what plugin by their name (I make great pains to place the plugin name as the table name)

In extreme cases you can contact me to help you out, but the best bet is to do a google search for how to use phpmyadmin.

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There is currently a large scale spam attack on Wordpress sites that is ongoing and affects primarily Wordpress versions 2.1.x and 2.2.x (it’s not clear if 2.3.x or 2.0.x are affected, but it seems likely they aren’t). The attack results in a large number of spam listings injected into either posts or theme files which are then set to be hidden through css. Your will typically find that you’ve been affected when Google contacts you to say you are being de-listed due to a high number of spam links on your site. It is also typical for the attackers to delete all of your pages from your site for some reason, so if you load your site and all of your pages are gone you may have been hacked.

It’s not entirely clear what method the hackers are using to get admin access to the affected sites, but from my observation it may be a privilege escalation attack using the comment system. In some cases a random user account was created right before the attack. It was also noted that the comments.php theme file was altered to add in a console access applet which allowed for low level server access. If you get hacked make sure you check every theme file to make sure no malicious code was added–or better yet, reload your theme files from a backed up or fresh copy, and delete out any suspect user registrations.

Wordpress 2.5 is apparently not affected by this problem, so an upgrade should help. I have upgraded my sites to 2.5 and have managed to mostly get things working (though my archive page on this site is currently non-functional). It looks like this is the unfortunate little push that will force most people to upgrade, though I strongly suggest making sure first that there are updated plugins that work with 2.5.

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As I expected, the Wordpress.org forums are filled with issues in regard to upgrading and using Wordpress 2.5. I would highly suggest most people wait a bit on upgrading until the issues with plugins and themes are dealt with by either new versions of the plugins becoming available, or a new version of Wordpress comes out that handles memory a bit better. I’m definitely seeing many people having issues with the “Server 500″ error which I believe has much to do with the 8mb php default memory limit. So unless you have to upgrade, you might want to wait awhile.

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I have just released new versions of the AWSOM Pixgallery(4.5.3), AWSOM News Announcement(1.4.2), and AWSOM Uninstaller (1.0.2) plugins for Wordpress that have been made specifically compatible with the upcoming Wordpress 2.5 release (the AWSOM Archive plugin was already fully 2.5 compatible with version 1.4.0). This means that they will install properly and work as they currently do. AWSOM plugin versions previous to these new releases will NOT install properly on Wordpress 2.5 due to a major change in their plugin protocol (though I believe that already installed plugins will not stop working, I can’t guarantee that–especially if you deactivate/reactivate them during the Wordpress upgrade process).

I will probably come out with another minor release of the plugins after Wordpress 2.5 is officially released that does some cosmetic changes to my admin pages for the plugins, but this will have to wait until they finalize the CSS they are using for their admin pages (right now they all look fine, but don’t really match the new look of the admin area in 2.5). For the moment though everything will work properly, so you at least have one less worry if you plan on upgrading to Wordpress 2.5 :)

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