The first AWSOM plugin video tutorial, titled ‘Create Your First AWSOM Pixgallery Image Gallery Page‘, is now available at the AWSOM.org website. This first tutorial is for the AWSOM Pixgallery plugin for Wordpress and is designed to show you how to set up your first image gallery in just a few minutes.

I plan on adding new tutorials over time to detail out all of the different capabilities of this plugin as well as others in the AWSOM series. Upcoming tutorials will feature how to use the FastFlow method of setting up your AWSOM Pixgallery image/gallery captions as well as details on how the different settings in Pixgallery affect your gallery look and feel.

Please feel free to contact me or leave comments if you have specific ideas for tutorials you’d like to see. I’m also considering creating regular Wordpress video tutorials which would go through the core areas of Wordpress set up and usage.

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Hi everyone, some people seem to be having major issues using the new Flash based image uploader function for pages/posts in Wordpress 2.5.x. There is a “fix” available that might help–a no-flash plugin that returns the regular image upload function from previous versions of Wordpress. The plugin is available from the Wordpress.org website here.

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WordPress 2.5.1 has been released, and all 2.5 users should immediately upgrade to the new version. There is apparently some kind of security vulnerability fix in the new version, so this is a critical upgrade for all users. I suspect it’s probably related to the ongoing series of issues that are causing spam attacks on older versions of WordPress, so this is a pretty big reason to be constantly on the lookout for irregular things occurring on your sites and make sure you always have the most updated versions of plugins and such installed.

So far it looks like all of the AWSOM plugins are unaffected by the upgrade and still work properly. If you encounter any issues though please let me know.

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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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