The Overnightscape MetaFeed

As we near completion of the 2.9 milestone, it’s that time of dev cycle again, when we ask all you community developers who’ve been putting off contributing to core to dust off your dev environments and help us get closer to being release-ready. How? Bug hunts! Yes, that time-honored tradition (in the time of WordPress, anyway) of everyone pitching in to test patches and report the results, working on solutions to major bugs, and helping to clear out Trac has come around again, and we’re scheduling not one, but two bug hunts over the next couple of weeks to ensure that everyone has enough time to prepare and participate.

#1 – The first bug hunt of 2.9 will be Thursday through Saturday, November 5-7, 2009. This should give people a few days to plan for it, upgrade their dev environments if they haven’t been following trunk, and figure out how to allot their time. We’re stretching over both weekdays and weekend to try and accommodate everyone’s schedule.

#2 - The second bug hunt will be a week later, Saturday through Monday, November 14-16, 2009. This should make it possible for anyone who needs more than a week to set some time aside to participate. This bug hunt will coincide with WordCamp NYC, where a special Hacker Room will be set aside for people to go and work on 2.9 bug tickets alongside regular core contributors including Mark Jaquith and Matt Martz (sivel from IRC).

The Goals

Test, test, test existing patches! You can see all tickets with patches that need testing by checking this report. When you’ve tested a patch, report your results in the ticket comments, so core committers can see how the patch is faring.

Fix known bugs! You can see the bugs that need patches by checking this report. Look for the ones that seem that they’ll affect the most people or have the biggest impact by being fixed. Edge case bugs should be lower priority.

Report new bugs! As you’re testing out the development version, if you come across a bug, search trac to see if someone has reported it yet. If so, add a comment with your experience to the ticket so we’ll know it’s affecting more than one person. If no ticket exists yet, create one.

Core committers will be around (in the #wordpress-dev channel at irc.freenode.com) both weekends to review patches that have been thoroughly tested, answer questions as needed, and give feedback on patches that need more work before being commit-worthy.

If you’ve never participated in a WordPress bug hunt before, but you’d like to get involved, we’d love to have you join us! To prepare, you’ll want to set up a test environment, start using the current development version/maybe install the beta testing plugin, join us in the #wordpress-dev IRC channel, and read up on automated testing.

Stuff I Sold on eBay in 2003

The number one reason people give us for not upgrading to the latest version of WordPress is fear that their plugins won’t be compatible. As part of our continuing efforts to make WordPress core, plugin, and theme upgrades as painless as possible, Michael Adams developed and launched a beta of a new “Compatibility” feature in the plugin directory, powered by your votes. When viewing a plugin in the directory, select a WordPress version and a plugin version from the drop-downs. If there has been feedback about this WordPress / plugin version combination, we’ll show you what percentage of responses marked that combination as compatible vs how many marked it as incompatible.

If you log in, you’ll be able to help us gather this information! Just select a WordPress version / plugin version combination and click the “Works” or the “Broken” button. Please note that this shouldn’t be used to report minor issues with a plugin. You should mark a plugin as “Broken” only if its core functionality is truly broken when run on the specified WordPress version.

Right now we’re just in information gathering mode. So get out there and vote! Don’t just vote on broken plugins… cast a “Works” vote for every plugin that works on the version of WordPress you are using. This can help improve the signal-to-noise ratio in our data and prevent a few mistaken “Broken” votes from weighing too heavily.

For developers, we’re now including this data in our API. The plugin_information action now returns a “compatibility” member with the multidimensional array format:

array( {WP version} => array( {plugin version} => array( {% of reporters who say it works}, {# responses} ) ) )

If the API knows which version of WordPress you are using (for example, if you are making this query using the plugins_api() function from with WordPress), the API will only return compatibility information for your version of WordPress.

Eventually, we’d like to gather this compatibility feedback from within WordPress, allowing you to vote directly from your plugins admin screen. The ultimate goal is to use this information to inform you of plugin incompatibilities with a new version of WordPress during the upgrade process. For that to be useful we need a large set of high quality compatibility data. Start voting!

Morning Commute (with Bob) #7 - “Running Late” (10/27/09) 21.13 (45:55 / 42.2 MB)
The Overnightscape Underground - October 2009 - Track 13
“Your Late Night Broadcast” online at onsug.com
Created by Frank Edward Nora (frank@theovernightscape.com) in New Jersey, USA
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Join Bob LeMent (from Static Radio) rambling on his morning commute into St. Louis, Missouri…  “Running Late” - Into Your Head, East Meets West, double speed and hydroplaning, sliding into second with another morning commute.
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License for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/). Attribution: by Bob LeMent - more info at onsug.com and StaticRadio.com
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Check out the site:

http://onsug.com/box/

Morning Commute (with Bob) #6 - “Waterhole” (10/20/09) 21.12 (40:24 / 37.1 MB)
The Overnightscape Underground - October 2009 - Track 12
“Your Late Night Broadcast” online at onsug.com
Created by Frank Edward Nora (frank@theovernightscape.com) in New Jersey, USA
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Join Bob LeMent (from Static Radio) rambling on his morning commute into St. Louis, Missouri…  “Waterhole” - Corner Gas,  water tables, moon phases and wishing wells, just another wet and wild morning commute.
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License for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/). Attribution: by Bob LeMent - more info at onsug.com and StaticRadio.com
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As you know over the past couple of months we have been working on the new features for WordPress 2.9. We have also been working on trying to make WordPress as secure as possible and during this process we have identified a number of security hardening changes that we thought were worth back-porting to the 2.8 branch so as to get these improvements out there and make all your sites as secure as possible.

The headline changes in this release are:

• A fix for the Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently being seen.
• Removal of areas within the code where php code in variables was evaluated.
• Switched the file upload functionality to be whitelisted for all users including Admins.
• Retiring of the two importers of Tag data from old plugins.

We would recommend that all sites are upgraded to this new version of WordPress to ensure that you have the best available protection.

If you think your site may have been hit by one of the recent exploits and you would like to make sure that you have cleared out all traces of the exploit then we would recommend that you take a look at the WordPress Exploit Scanner.  This is a plugin which searches the files on your website, and the posts and comments tables of your database for anything suspicious. It also examines your list of active plugins for unusual filenames.  You can read more about this plugin here – “WordPress Exploit Scanner“

Back in April, Yahoo announced that it would be closing GeoCities “later this year”.

Last week they set a date: October 26, 2009. One week from today!

This is your one-and-only reminder that DreamHost is offering two free years of hosting for GeoCities refugees. When the clock strikes midnight on the 26th, former GeoCities customers will lose access to their old accounts forever, and this offer from DreamHost will disappear for all eternity – buried at the bottom of the sea or melted in a nuclear apocalypse. (We haven’t decided yet.)

Bring us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…hosting.

As you may have heard on yesterday’s recording, “The Radio Vacation”, I am going to take a few weeks off from recording and releasing stuff. I’ll be back next month (November 2009).

In other news, I am very close to completing OnsugBox - a nearly 1,500-hour collection of just about all of my recorded work - up to and including yesterday’s recording! The main version will be around 75 GB and the Portable Version (with a lower audio bitrate) will fit on a 16 GB flash drive. My hope is that people can buy their own media and mail it to someone who already has the data, and is able to copy the data and then mail the media back to them. (Online distribution is also possible…) Stay tuned to onsug.com to see when it will be available.