WordPress is a complex web application that comprises more than 200 .php files. When you open any page, WordPress loads index.php which, in turn, loads many other .php files using the require() function. WordPress admin interface also relies on multiple .php files. In all cases, WordPress loads wp-config.php file which contains database credentials and other important information required for normal operation.

So what happens if both index.php and wp-config.php are infected with the gumblar backdoor scripts? Since Gumblar injects identical backdoor scripts into files on the same site, they’ll have declarations of identically named functions, which PHP doesn’t allow. Hence the “cannot redeclare zsmh() …” error.

One thing not mentioned in the Unmasked Parasites post is information regarding which specific versions of WordPress are at risk or are safe to use. I’ve left a comment on the blog post to try and get an answer but until then, Denis Sinegubko provides detection and removal instructions while also suggesting the use of the WordPress Exploit Scanner which scans for WordPress files for signs of suspicious activity.

Based on the reports of infection, this does not appear to be a WordPress centric issue pointing to a problem with the software.

1. Drain Hole
   I’ve been using Drain Hole on my personal site to serve up my files for a couple years now. So far it is the best download manager plugin I’ve been able to find. It does everything it advertises and does it well. I’ve not yet had any issues with this plugin. I highly recommend it!
2. WP-DownloadManager
   Before I found Drain Hole I used WP-DownloadManager exclusively. It did what I wanted and didn’t seem to have many problems. It has the features most would expect in such a plugin. It also has some you might not. Such things as custom templates, categories, RSS feeds, and more.
3. WP-Filebase
   I actually just recently learned of WP-Filebase. I can’t speak from personal experience but from the research I’ve done on it I think it would be one of the best options. It has the obvious features you expect from a download manager. Some of the highlights are quick tags, top downloads widget, extensive file details, and even download pausing.
4. Wordpress Download Monitor
   I really like the interface of Wordpress Download Monitor. It’s simple yet complete. It does its job as a download manager and keeps it simple at the same time. Some of the attraction points of this plugin are: simple custom download URLs, custom error pages, download mirrors, and even custom fields for all files.
5. Simple Download Monitor
   What’s great about Simple Download Monitor is right in its name. It’s simple! To quote the author of the plugin “…I wanted to monitor the number of downloads of my files without having to maintain any kind of database or making any special download links. I just wanted to upload a file to a designated directory using FTP, provide a direct link to it and once in a while check the number of downloads“. This plugin also allows advanced logging.

What I think is especially nice is that all these plugins seem to be compatible with the upcoming WordPress 2.9. That means that they are future-proof for at least the foreseeable future. I took time to test each one of these plugins during the writing of this post. But, feel free to let me know if you have experienced anything to the contrary with any of them.

Well, that’s all for now. I hope you enjoyed the post and I hope you might be able to get something useful out of this list.

Do you have a good idea for the next article in the Best-Of series? Drop a comment here or contact us and your idea just might be next in the series!

It first started out as a discussion on the WordPress Hackers mailing list concerning the addition of email notifications to the core of WordPress to keep administrators abreast of new versions of WordPress as they were released. The discussion became long winded but a response by Lynne Pope provided one of those why didn’t I think of that moments.

Change the sample data – instead of, “this is a post”, provide some meaningful information. With a link to subscribe to WP-Announce. Make an entry announcing that WP-Announce is being used, so this will show in the dashboard feeds. Bloggers will quickly pick up on this and news of it will spread.

Needless to say, her idea sparked a series of kudos with other suggestions for what to include in the sample data. Then, in a WordPress development chat regarding the topic that was discussed on the hackers mailing list, it was agreed that the best course of action would be to not only revive the WP-Announcements mailing list, but to also change the Hello World! post in WordPress to something more useful. A fellow by the name of Demetris took it upon himself to create a draft of what the sample data should be. The discussion surrounding the change including links to see drafts and revisions were included in ticket number 11008. The ticket has been open for two weeks and in today’s developer chat, Demetris published a link to his draft which you can view here. There was a unanimous decision to include the sample post data into the core of WordPress starting with version 2.9. If the sample data needs editing, it will be done throughout the beta process before the stable release.

There you have it. A time line of events that happened in quick succession which provided a small change with huge benefits without having one line of code written. Let me know your thoughts in the comments with regards to the new sample data that will be provided in any new installation of WordPress starting with 2.9.

Local Time

Using JavaScript, Local Time automatically transforms all dates and times on your blog into the visitor’s timezone.

Fytch Comments

Fytch is a fully featured plugin that provides comment publishing to http://fytch.com It allows to assign a Fytch topic to each post so that wordpress comments are co-published under the appropriate topic on http://fytch.com. It not only allows to publish comments to http://fytch.com but to Twitter and FriendFeed as well.

vlam-a-post

vlam-a-post automatically creates a vl.am URL for every post you publish and keeps track of the number of clicks the vl.am URL received. After publishing your post you can easily post your vl.am URL to twitter.

Amazon Affiliate Linker

The Amazon Affiliate Linker Plugin allows easy linking to Amazon.com products by only using the ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number). It also allows you to embed your Amazon Associate link so that you can pick up affiliate commissions on your links.

Facebook Share New

The Facebook Share (new) button easily allows your blog to be shared. The button also provides a current count of how many times your story has been shared throughout Facebook.

Thumblated Related Post

This plugin shows thumblated related posts. It allows you to design your own layout using simple and easy interface.

Random Post Link

Generates a link to random post, but never the same as before.

Gweather

With the gweather plugin you can display and embed Google Weather Feeds in your WordPress posts and pages.

Simple Facebook Connect

Makes it easy to add Facebook Connect functionality to any WordPress site. Modular: activate only the pieces you need.

URL Shortener

Allows you to create your own short url using the WordPress Post ID and also integrates multiple URL Shortening service with your WordPress.org installation bringing a similar functionality to that of WordPress.com’s WP.me shortlinks feature but using 3rd party URL Shorteners.

Page.ly Reseller Management

This plugin is a Reseller dashboard to manage client accounts on the page.ly WordPress hosting system.

Updated Plugins

GD Star Rating

GD Star Rating is post, page and comment rating and review plugin for WordPress. Plugin supports different image sets, rating moderation, vote rules, time restricted voting, templates, trend calculations, multi ratings, templated rendering, has a widgets build in and extensive shortcode support. Plugin can be integrated with comments for making a review website.

Visitor Blogroll

The visitor blogroll is a Wordpress Plugin/Widget which allows visitors to your blog to leave an RSS feed of their blog which is then displayed on your visitor blogroll.

WordBB

WordBB is an integration between the blogging platform WordPress and the bulletin board system MyBB.

Digg This Button

Adds the smarter digg button. Extended options like topics, prefilled descriptions, shortcodes etc. allow full control of your digg icons.

hRecipe

This is a plugin to allow the easy entry of microformat content for recipes (i.e. the hRecipe microformat) in WordPress pages and posts.

Check out the live demo before you download the guide.

If you choose “depends”, let me know why in the comments. Also, feel free to put in your opinions no matter what you choose. What would such an application need to be able to do? Everything the web-based app can do? Just a subset of the features? What do you think?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this!

A WordPress theme written mostly in JavaScript. Layout, behavior and look&feel are made with Ext Js Library

ThrillingTheme

Two column theme with three widget ready areas and available in three color schemes.

Color3

Colorful clean and stylish theme with two columns, right sidebar dropdown menu and widget-ready.

Are you a theme author? Submit your theme to get these listed in our release posts.

I'm that guy in Northern Ohio

Of course, WPWorldMap is only as helpful as the amount of people who decide to signup and appropriately apply their approximate location so if interested, sign up and leave your mark. You might be surprised by the number of WordPress fans in your neighborhood!

Fortune Kookie

This WordPress plugin adds a sidebar widget to display a random fortune cookie fortune. The database hosted on FortuneKookie.com has over 1500 unique fortunes and each fortune includes the front message, the back word(s), and the lucky numbers.

Custom Login Page

Wordpress Custom Login Page allows you to customize your login page beyond any plugin previously available. Your background image, logo image, and form div background are all customizable.

Category Checklist Tree

Prevents checked categories from going to the top of the checklist on the post editing screen.

WP Content Slideshow

WP Content Slideshow is the perfect Slideshow for Wordpress. It displays up to 5 Posts with Tile, Description and Image for every Post.

JR_Quotes

This plugin allows you to display geek quotes, pop quotes, general quotes, religious quotes and sci-fi quotes, all with a simple widget.

Updated Plugins

Regenerate Thumbnails

Regenerate Thumbnails allows you to regenerate the thumbnails for all of your image attachments. This is very handy if you’ve changed any of your thumbnail dimensions (via Settings -> Media) after previously uploading images.

RSS Cloud

Adds RSSCloud capabilities to your RSS feed.

New User Email Set up

The function of the plugin is to provide a basic interface so that admins can define a custom email that is sent to users when they first register. Subject, Text Body, From Address, Admin Subject and Admin Text Body can all be defined, to allow for a more personalised feel to your blog, that doesn’t have such a generic ‘welcome’ email.

Clicky Tracking

Helps you integrate Clicky in your website. Clicky Web Analytics helps you monitor, analyze, and react to your blog or web site’s traffic in real time.

Shadowbox JS

Shadowbox is an online media viewing application that supports all of the web’s most popular media publishing formats. Shadowbox is written entirely in JavaScript and CSS and is highly customizable. Using Shadowbox, website authors can display a wide assortment of media in all major browsers without navigating users away from the linking page.

Store Locator

The Store Locator plugin empowers web developers & web site owners to easily manage and display any set of important stores, products, or other locations on their website in an easily searchable manner. Uses Google Maps.

jQuery Lightbox for Native Galleries

jQuery Lightbox For Native Galleries makes the native WordPress galleries use a lightbox script called ColorBox to display the fullsize images.

I hesitate to mention another project on a WordPress focused site but I believe there are lessons that can be learned from how Joomla has handled this situation. Joomla has a site called http://community.joomla.org/. The front page of this site acts as a portal to vital aspects of the project including team member blogs, events, featured articles, translations, etc. It’s as if everything I would need to know or have quick access to is right on the front page housed within this portal.

On the WordPress side of things, you have to dive into the documentation to find the Codex article that discusses WordPress in your language. The site contains one blog, the development blog for announcements specifically dealing with the software. It’s not like the good old days when multiple posts per month covering all aspects of the project would be published here. Now you’re lucky to see two posts or more a month on it. Each WordPress team member has their own blog, most with a WordPress category that is tied into a separate entity called the WordPress Planet that is accessed in the dashboard called Other WordPress News. Not only are the team members added to this site, but so are a number of other projects/sites that are not strictly WordPress related. I realize the team members are busy and some of them contribute to the WordPress project not employed by Automattic but I would like to see more posts published by them focused on the WordPress project. For example, I attend some of the developer chats and I see requests for unit tests or explanations as to how tickets in Trac should be treated yet I don’t see consistent information published to the public explaining this. Sure, the end user facing crowd has no interest in this, but there are a ton of plugin and theme authors as well as enthusiasts who would be. To be frank, I think that if it were not for websites such as Weblogtoolscollection.com and a host of other WordPress centric community sites, a majority of us would have no clue as to the progress of WordPress except for when a release was imminent.

I would love to see is a complete redesign of WordPress.org which served as a portal. A portal that could be visited daily to see posts from team members regarding the project, latest posts in the WordPress forum, upcoming WordCamps, a featured WordPress.TV Video, links to some of the most important pages in the Codex, the 3 or 5 newest themes and plugins added to the repository, etc. This post may be premature though as the best thing that could happen to the site is the redesign, plus the ability to use BuddyPress as a means of creating the collaboration hub of it all. I know the BuddyPress situation is currently being worked on and may end up being a reality some day on WordPress.org but for everything else, there is certainly room for improvement across the board.

What Say you?

First off, what do you think of the current way WordPress.org the project along with the website is laid out? If you had the opportunity, how would you completely restructure the website and team members to turn the site into a collaboration/information hub all about WordPress?

The Ines BuddyPress WP theme, edgy styles for a BuddyPress powered site with the brandnew Ines BuddyPress Theme, featuring a three column fluid layout, enabled with options panel, widgetized sidebars and footers, flickr support, pagenavi support, frontpage slider, orelated posts and recent comments are built into the theme.

cleanPRESS

Two column, feature rich theme with support for featured articles, post options and twitter options

Bare Minimum

This theme uses the bare minimum files that are needed for a WordPress theme – The theme uses no CSS and contains everything needed to run the theme in index.php.

Moi Magazine

Moi Magazine is a free 2 column magazine style WordPress Theme. It looks very modern and elegant from the front end and offering vast Admin options at the back end. With wide variety of tune able Theme options in the admin menu you don’t need to edit .php files manually to do basic theme adjustments.

Are you a theme author? Submit your theme to get it listed in these posts.

Just upgraded three plugins in about 30 seconds using one-click upgrade — wish you could do them all at once though.

Well, now you can. I attended the WordPress developers chat today and according to the devs, the bulk upgrader works, all it needs now is to be tied into the API along with some cosmetics. I’m sure there are plenty of you, including myself that is pleased to see this addition to WordPress. However, I wonder what happens if during a bulk upgrade, one of the plugins fails. Does the upgrader skip the plugin and move on to the next one or does it ruin the entire upgrade? Looking forward to the answer in the comments.

• A new, more efficient user interface that makes it faster to switch between comments, posts, and pages.
• Various user interface refinements and bug fixes
• New Comments interface, with Gravatars and the author URL shown in the comment list
• Passwords are now stored in the keychain
• Posts are now automatically saved and restored if network connection is lost during publishing
• Added persistence, so the app re-opens in the blog you last used
• Added an interface for manually entering the XMLRPC endpoint for non-standard setups
• Fixed rotation-related visual glitches
• Fixed errors where malformed XML prevented access to XMLRPC endpoint
• Fixed edge case where local drafts were sometimes not saved
• Fixed the order of photos so that they’re displayed in the order they’re uploaded/

Please note: The WordPress for iPhone 2 is a completely new application. If you are using a older version of WordPress app for iPhone, you will not be able to upgrade it, you will have to download the new application instead. You can safely remove the older version of the app, once you have installed version 2.0.

Download WordPress for iPhone 2 from App Store

Ponticlaro Media Settings

It has a really nifty [media] shortcode that hacks into the great built-in WordPress gallery.  You can put one [media] in your post and it will access the first image in the gallery without any code.

Table of Contents Creator

Table of Contents Creator (TOCC) automatically generates a dynamic site wide table of contents that is always up-to-date. All entries are navigable making your site extremely SEO friendly. TOCC can be configured to display static pages, blog entries and forum comments. Another great feature of TOCC is the ability to include anchor tags marked with a special class. This feature allows links to articles, downloads or even other sites to appear within the table of contents as if they are part of your site’s navigation.

Posty Widget

Displays the contents of two custom fields in a Sidebar Widget. The widget can stay the same (and in the same place) but the content can be dynamic and set to provide more information about the post you’re looking at.

WP Grins Lite

A “lite” version of the original WP Grins plugin using the lighter-weight jQuery library. This plugin allows smilies to be inserted into your comment form.

Static Random Posts

Allows the display of random posts, but allows the admin to determine how often the random posts are refreshed. With Static Random Posts, the random posts will remain the same for a set amount of time.

SyntaxHL-Editor

Offers an easy to use graphical user interface for Syntax Highlighter and Code Colorizer for Wordpress. You can easily enter and modify source-code highlighted in your posts as well as specify options for every single snippet.

Updated Plugins

Twitter Goodies

Twitter Goodies plugin will show your tweets under Sidebar Area (Widget), Post and/or Pages. REFRESH AUTOMATICALLY and you have 5 different Color Option.

AVH First Defense Against Spam

The AVH First Defense Against Spam plugin gives you the ability to block spammers before any content is served. Spammers are identified by checking if the visitors IP exists in a database served by stopforumspam.com, the Project Honey Pot or a local blacklist.

Yet Another Featured Posts Plugin (YAFPP)

Yet Another Featured Posts Plugin provides an easy interface for featuring and unfeaturing posts.

Page Meta

Adds the ability to override the page meta title and add in meta descriptions and keywords for pages.

Extended Page List

Add custom configured page lists to your posts, pages and sidebar.

Broken Link Checker

This plugin will check your posts, custom fields and the blogroll for broken links and missing images and notify you if any are found.

Strategically the most important thing we need to figure out is how to integrate bbPress better with WP more for people who want that — right now it’s easier to use one of the WP plugins for forums than bbPress.

I’ve only installed bbPress locally once to check it out but it’s not my cup of tea. I think the bbPress forum software is aimed at developers since it comes with all the basics to build on or around but doesn’t contain the feature set of modern forum software out of the box. For example, the SimplePress plugin for WordPress Matt mentions is packed with more features than the dedicated forum software. One idea I’ve heard Matt discuss with Sam that I think has a ton of potential is to replace or add onto the WordPress comment system with bbPress. This type of tight integration between the two is what I believe Matt wants to figure out. It would be awesome to have such an easy way to not only have a forum where visitors can start their own conversations, but also leave comments on articles on the blog side of things. I hesitate to mention Vbulletin but it’s the software that comes to mind that takes this to the next level by offering their own CMS with the forum software built into it.

One of the best things bbPress has going for it right now is the work of Andy Peatling. In BuddyPress 1.1 Andy rewrote the forums component from the ground up to provide one click internal bbPress forum integration enabling users to setup forums in a fraction of the time. BuddyPress is gaining traction and as Matt says, has all the ingredients to become as large and successful as WordPress. I think the more people that use BuddyPress, the more that will use bbPress building that community simultaneously with BuddyPress.

Your Thoughts:

You tell me, or Matt. What is the future of bbPress you would like to see turn into a reality? Also, if you use bbPress, tell me why and how.

As per the screenshot, the majority of those using WordPress 2.8.5 with version 3.1.7 of the Google XML Sitemaps plugin reported that it’s working. The beauty of this system is that it leverages the community in order to figure out what works with what. However, just because it works for the majority of users is no guarantee it will work on your particular setup. But using these statistics, it should make it easier to figure out whether the issue is with the plugin and WordPress or with your setup.

One of the biggest fears users have when it comes time to upgrade WordPress is whether their plugins will work on the newest version or not. There are a large handful of people who upgrade to the latest version of WordPress as soon as it’s released and the hope is, these folks will visit the plugin page and report their findings for others to take advantage of. If more users see that their plugins work on the newest version, they are more likely to upgrade.

What are your thoughts on this system? Any ideas to enhance it?

A Hybrid child theme built for small businesses that that is tailored towards the basics of gaining customers.

THATSimple

Two column theme with a custom header and theme options

Furvious

This beautiful theme has 5 different style to choose from with built-in related post, pagination and others – customizable through its cool Theme Options page.

Boxpulse

Two-column Hybrid child theme that offers a certain elegance and includes a template made specifically for the included slider.

Modern Blue Dark

Modern Blue Dark is a sleek, modern design in blue with a dark background and Web 2.0-inspired wraparound headings. Widget-ready, gravatar-enabled, and set to download.

Are you a theme author? Submit your theme to get it featured in these posts.

• My work schedule is now setup to allow me to be more active in the community again, which means I can now get podPress dev and my Podcast going again.
• Tons of people keep bugging me for updates, and I have appreciated every one of them
• And special thanks to the new sponsor for giving me the final push that was needed to get going on development again.

However, the post on MightySeek.com was published on August 16th. There are a few other posts from the same time period yet the MightySeek blog has gone silent once again so I am unsure as to whether or not the plugin will actually be coming back. I’ve tried to get in touch with the author of the plugin but to no avail.

How many of you would like to see PodPress make a triumphant return?

Instant Weekly Roundup

Helps you create the weekly or monthly or any span roundups of your blog posts in a few mouse clicks and within some seconds.

WordPress Custom Menu Plugin

Manage navigation menus from the admin panel in WordPress instead of having to code the template each time a menu or a menu item was added, removed or changed.

Zamango Money Extractor

Zamango Money Extractor is a WordPress plugin which helps to earn money from affiliate sales of a software content released by many publishers and by using of free services only. Requires an account with Zamango.

Tagspace

The Tagspace widget lets visitors browse your blog’s categories in an dynamic & engaging 3D environment. A single click on any category tag changes the color of the category tag and propels the visitor further into tagspace, revealing additional category tags.

WordCamp NYC Badge

WordCamp NYC Badge, is a WordPress Plugin which helps you to display the badge for WordCamp NYC in your sidebar.

Secondary HTML Content

Add a second block of HTML content to WordPress pages. A perfect solution for layouts with two distinct content areas or “blocks”, such as a sidebar or two column view. When editing a page, a second WordPress WYSIWYG content editor will appear beneath the standard page editing block.

Updated Plugins

Ajax Edit Comments

WP Ajax Edit Comments (for WP 2.5+) allows users and admins to edit comments on a post. Users can edit their own comments for a limited time, while admins can edit all comments.

Cute Profiles

Brings all your Social Profiles at one location i.e. either left or right side of your blog pages in a well decent floating manner, saving your premium space in sidebar or footer for ads or other important data and widgets.

iTunes Affiliate Link

The plugin adds an itunes button to the visual editor which when clicked brings forward a dialog containing a search for the iTunes store link maker.

Store Locator

The Store Locator plugin empowers web developers & web site owners to easily manage and display any set of important stores, products, or other locations on their website in an easily searchable manner. Uses Google Maps.

WordPress Exploit Scanner

This plugin searches the files and database of your website for signs of suspicious activity. It will not stop someone hacking into your site, but it may help you find any uploaded or compromised files left by the hacker.