Looks like I spoke a little too soon…

I noticed that Bad Behavior 2.0.13 had been updated by the plugin’s authors, and so attempted an automatic upgrade (part of the improvements with WP 2.5), and was greeted with

Downloading update from http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/bad-behavior.2.0.14.zip

Unpacking the update

Deactivating the plugin

Removing the old version of the plugin

Installing the latest version

Installation failed

Not exactly the end of the world, and once I realised that the core file ( bad-behavior-wordpress.php ) had been deleted during the process (normal behaviour), I didn’t worry about it no longer appearing in the list of plugins available for activation. I uploaded the file, and then overwrote the original associated updated bad-behavior directory, and proceeded to activate it with no problems.

So, assuming you take the time to read any messages during attempting an automatic upgrade of plugins, no harm is done

btw, this is the first plugin I’ve found that did not like the upgrade process…

I have just noticed the link in my dashboard, informing me that a security update has been released for Wordpress. See the Wordpress dev blog post on this subject here. Basically, a security flaw was discovered, where IF you had registration enabled on your blog, members could theoretically hack in and edit other people’s posts. Although this doesn’t effect this blog, (anyone is welcome to leave a comment, but no one can register), I’ll be uploading the new xmlrpc.php to my 20 blogs tonight, and probably update them properly to 2.3.3 tomorrow morning. As ever, head on over to the official Wordpress download page to grab the latest stable release. (If you are looking for nightly builds, I doubt you need me to go digging about for the URL, I imagine it is imprinted on your brain already )
Anyway, if you have any friends with Wordpress powered blogs (that is those who host their own files, and download the software from wordpress.org, not those who use wordpress.com services), do them a favour and drop them a line to give them a heads up on this update.

So, the transfer process from my old host to this new one (Bluehost) is complete, and I took the opportunity to basically build this blog up from the ground again. With the amount of plugins I tested over the last 18 months, there was an awful lot of clutter left in the SQL tables, and I had experienced problems with the old host and their security updates. During the process of exporting the posts from the old home of the blog to this one (more on that later), I ended up losing the post numbers; where this post might have previously been something like http://www.chrismerriman.com/index.php/archives/2023 , it would now be ……/1926 .
As this meant that any deep links to specific posts from external sites were lost (and the number shift was not purely sequential, so no fancy redirect equations would work), I decided to change the fancy permalink strategy, hence this post can now be found at http://chrismerriman.com/blog-vamp-completed . This makes addresses a little more memorable, and possibly could improve this site’s standings with the search engines (once the bots have completed crawling around, finding the old content under it’s new addresses.)
Back to the export/import process. Ideally, I would have done this properly, but part of the reason for me moving hosts was that I was again unable to access the backend of this site - the admin section of wordpress. Without access to my plugins, I was unable to take a proper backup of the existing posts, comments, pages etc. Luckily, I had an 8 day old XML file that I’d exported as a temporary backup. However, I hit an unforseen snag when I attempted to import that file into this site - it was over 2Mb, and therefore exceeded the PHP restrictions in place. Rather than wait around for tech. support to confirm if they’d be willing to, at least temporarily, relax the limits, I decided to delve into the XML file and see what could be done. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find 2.7Mb of data to drop, so I decided to try an experiment. Checking through the structure of the file, I kept the beginning and end of the file, then removed around 2/3 of the posts and comments. Saving the resulting file, this imported fine; I then kept the same empty structure, and inserted the middle 1/3 of posts & comments, to my surprise this then imported fine without wiping anything out from the previous import, and then the last 1/3 went in fine. Basically, I kept all the content bar a week or two, and I luckily still had the old site open in a different tab, so just needed to copy’n'paste that into new posts.
I decided to try a new theme for the blog, and also drastically cut down on the plugins installed, hoping it would speed up page load times, especially for first time visitors to this site. This seems to have worked reasonably well, and I repeated the process for this site’s brother blog (test.chrismerriman.com).
I’ve also completed some work on John’s new site, and started the process of converting my old niche article sites into blogs as well, but more on that later.

As I mentioned earlier on, I have now instigated a few changes in the way this blog is coded, to enable Wordpress to be upgraded to 2.3.1
As this blog has a few features that only are supposed to work within certain categories, I previously used the King Text plugin; with which you can easily stipulate exactly where the code should be run, and where it should be skipped. Unfortunately, using versions of Wordpress above 2.1.3 would disable this plugin, and as no script bodges were announced that actually worked, this blog has been stuck without an upgrade for some time. Not only has this meant that some features (such as native support for tagging) have been unavailable, but also vital security patches were not applied.
Anyway, a fellow forum user (Sorensicai) over at PPP suggested using
if(is_home())
{ echo '//widget code'; }
as a way to manually force the site to only use scripts on certain areas. Of course you can change
(is_home()) for (is_category(CaTeGoRy%)) or whatever is required.

Anyway, I took the plunge, as I had not managed to break anything whilst upgrading my other WP blog to 2.3.1, and to my surprise it worked! Having had the shackles of the old plugin removed, I upgraded this blog, and updated a few other plugins, and did a little tidying up of some other code. I also realised I could move a lot of my current widgets from a specialist PHP Exec style plugin to a normal WP Text widget, as no fancy code was involved, just some images.
Anyhow, once I figure out how to call RSS feeds only within certain categories, and whether I can stack different conditions for different code snippets within one widget, I’ll be happy