I’m working on an Anti-Malware plugin for WordPress.

I haven’t posted anything this whole month because one of my servers got hacked and I’ve spent the last three week working on a new plugin to scan and remove malicious software from my server.

It wasn’t enough for me to just remove the hack. I had to make sure it wouldn’t come back and because it was such a widespread exploit I thought it would be good to release a plugin for other website admins to check their site for themselves.

I looks like my infestation of nasty scripts came in through a vulnerability in an older version of timthumb.php. Apparently any version older that 2.0 can be used to place a file on the server. If that file is a back-door of some kind then the person who put it there could have full access to your server.

I’m still testing and working out the kinks in my security scanner but it should be ready soon…


New features added to my Related Posts plugin now downloaded over 4,000 times!

Download my latest version (1.2.01.18) and you can customize the placement of the Menu Item. Plus, I’ve made the Tag and Category headings in the Tree View widget link to that Tag or Category. With over 4,000 downloads I’m finally starting to get some good feedback too. Keep it coming!


New “Tree View” options for the Widget

I added “Tree View” to the Widget options with the ability to show the Widget on pages with multiple Posts. This new option displays links to related post under a subheading for the Tag or Category that it is related by. It also features a multi layered loop that dynamically removed duplicate Post Links and auto balances the remaining link so the Widget shows a relatively equal amount of Post Links under each Tag or Category. So, download version 1.2.01.04 and use the Widget on pages that have multiple Posts.


Artiss YouTube Embed

I embeded these YouTube Videos using Artiss YouTube Embed By David Artiss. It was a great Plugin for WordPress YouTube videos but it was taken over by another developer and it’s not as well liked any more. Besides which, with the new version of WordPress you can now embed YouTube videos automatically just by pasting the shortlink into a Page or Post.


Fixed The “Illegal mix of collations” Error In My TERRIBL WordPress Plugin

Well, I finally found a server that would reproduce the “Illegal mix of collations” error that MySQL troughs when executing some queries in my TERRIBL Plugin. See, I guess alot of servers use latin1_swedish_ci as the default collation for their MySQL databases. This seems to cause an error in some queries, especially those that use foreign characters. So I have patched  my Plugin by explicitly setting all my database collations to utf8_general_ci. I also added an error handler that looks for this error in database table that may have been created by older versions of the Plugin and the new version will now fix the old tables using an “Alter Table” statement. So upgrade to version 1.1.12.21 now.