cmsXperts

Web advertising company Chitika recently released a WordPress plugin, named “Chitika|Premium”, to make it even easier for webmasters to publish their ads on their blogs.

The startup company — whose name, according to their website, comes from the Telugu language and means “snap of the fingers”, referring to the speed at which webmasters would be able to deploy their advertisement services on their websites — was founded in May 2003 by Chief Executive Officer Venkat Kolluri and Chief Technology Officer Alden DoRosario, both former Terra Lycos data mining engineers.

An example of a Chitika|Premium ad on a WordPress blog

In June 2005, the company launched the company’s flagship product “Chitika eMiniMalls”, an interactive ad unit featuring relevant content and comparative shopping information without the visitor needing to leave the original website. EMiniMalls soon gained popularity among webmasters thanks to the company’s vast product repository, and opened the road to one of today’s best-known web advertising companies.

Launched in May, “Chitika|Premium” is the company’s latest product and, like many other company creations, targets specifically users who have found a given WordPress site via a search engine and modifies its behavior accordingly.

As illustrated in the WP Plugin Directory, in fact, the ads are only being displayed for visitors who have reached the site via a search engine and, if so, searches Chitika’s vast product repository for the same keyword the user has used to reach the site, displaying ads of products that satisfy the search query.

Ads are, by default, displayed at the top of the page, in a format that vaguely resembles that of Google AdSense, except it also features small pictures of the product next to its description. The ad unit generates revenues based on the number of clicks by visitors and, as explained on the WordPress site, its admin interface allows webmasters to personalize a wide range of features such as ad size, link text and colors, display position (above or below the post), and channel (for tracking purposes).

The description page also claims Chitika is AdSense compatible, meaning that Premium ads can be displayed on the same page as AdSense, unlike most contextual advertisement platforms. The ads specifically target traffic coming from either US or Canada and are available in a variety of different sizes — over 20 — to fit the specific webmasters’ needs.

After an almost one-month delay, the next version of WordPress has finally graduated from beta stage and will be available to download later today, as announced by Jane Wells from the WP team in a recent blog post on the WordPress.com website.

According to Wells, the much anticipated new version of the best known content management system on the Web will go live at 8pm Eastern Time, when the company servers are likely to experience a particularly high spike in traffic.

The current WordPress version number is 2.6.5, which was released shortly after version 2.6.3 to deter webmasters from using a fake 2.6.4 version that was developed and distributed by malicious users to interfere with the normal webmasters’ activities.

The release comes after a fairly long wait and a couple of delays due to stability issues: version 2.7 was in fact initially scheduled for October 10th, but the development cycle — typically very smooth and fast, especially for a product of this size — had to be prolonged to enable developers to fix some pending stability bugs that were introduced by the new features.

As for the changes introduced by the new version, the blog post on the Wordpress website contains a very thorough list of what users should expect from the update.

The first, most noticeable change will be the navigation bar, now at the left side of the screen, which will feature contractible panes and allow for a quicker, one-click navigation as opposed to the previous top navigation bar that only listed the main categories. Each category will feature an icon (the sets were selected thanks to an internal competition we covered earlier last week) to improve the visual impact of the interface.

On the organization front, some minor changes are also being made: posts, pages and comments will now have their own categories instead of being all grouped together under the “Write” and “Manage” tags, for an improved usability and even quicker access to what are, without doubt, some of the most used feature in just about any content management system.

The new WordPress 2.7 sidebar

The display will also be customizable: webmasters can very easily rearrange the various modules with a simple drag and drop and can choose to open/close and hide or show every single one of them. The platform will remember the latest updates automatically, without the need for the user to manually save the changes as they are being made.

As for more substantial changes, one of the most welcome new additions is going to be QuickPress, a mini WYSIWYG post editor that allows to create, edit and publish posts (including picture and other media uploads) directly from the dashboard.

Thanks to a new module, webmasters will also be able to moderate comments directly from the dashboard, too: actions such as Approve/Unapprove, Mark as Spam, Delete, or Reply to a Comment will be easily accessible within the module itself.

Other improvements include a new WordPress software updater for self-install users that will automatically download and install the latest version with one click: previously, users had to install a third-party plug-in that would do the job for them.

Finally, a new category called “Media” is going to be added to the platform, from which users can select several default settings — such as image sizes or crop settings — for the images and videos they upload to the site.

As Wells warned on the post, this WordPress version will be particularly JavaScript-intensive, which is the reason why the team suggests using one of either Firefox 3 or Google Chrome browser, currently the two products with the best performance in that field.

A release candidate has been available on the WordPress website since Monday, and only a few minor bug fixes (if at all) should have been made to the platform. As many have noted, with every new update the platform is leaning more and more towards website publishing rather than simple blog posting.

In a recent post appeared on the WordPress.org Official Blog, the developer team announced the winner of the “Project Icon” competition to decide which set of icons will be featured in the menu of the upcoming 2.7 version of the software.

As revealed in an announcement on October 22nd, the menu icons that were being used this far in presentations and product previews — which were taken from the Crystal Project and released under the LGPL license — were merely temporary and only served as placeholders. In the same post, the WordPress team invited any interested designer to submit their works for user evaluation.

“Icons should be subtle, with a classic/designed look, nothing cartoonish. Thin lines. Maybe a little old-fashioned looking. They’ll be grayscale by default, possibly with a color version for active menu items”, the post reports. However, the timing requirements were very stringent since the release of 2.7 was initially scheduled for November 10th.

Interested designers had to send an email to the WordPress team with a cover letter complete with their portfolios to be considered for the application, after which the team would announce the details on how the winner would be chosen.

After the release of 2.7 was delayed by a couple weeks, a second post on the WordPress.org blog explained that, since about a dozen of designers from all around the world responded to the invitation, the team had decided to let users vote to decide which set of icons would be featured in the new WordPress version.

Following the announcement, about half of the designers backed out from the competition: the remaining ones submitted two icons (Posts and Links) to the WordPress team as samples of their designs, and two of them were “thanked for their submissions but eliminated from the competition because their icons were considered too far afield from the WordPress visual style”.

The WordPress team then published the competing icon sets, each with a short designer introduction and some feedback from the CMS developer team, encouraging everyone to vote and leave feedback on the various designs — all in grayscale rather than color, as per specifications — within 48 hours.

Last Monday, after over 3,700 users gave feedback on the finalist designs, a third post on the WordPress blog announced the winner of the competiton: designer, artist and professor and  Ben Dunkle from upstate/western New York State managed to grasp 35 percent of the total votes, while the runner-up Verena Segert was second with 29 percent.

Both icon sets will be featured in the 2.7 version, since the runner-up set will become the alternate palette selectable from the profile screen. Now, as we approach to the new version, both designers will revise their sets and produce the colored “on” states for when the menu section corresponding to a given icon is being browsed.

The two designers will also have to produce larger versions of each icon, to be featured in the h2 scren headers. As per user vote, Dunkle and Segert will have to change a few icons in order to adapt them to the metaphores voted by the community.

In particular, 40 percent of users who participated in the survey on the WordPress site chose a house as the best metaphore for the “Dashboard” icon, 65 percent chose a camera + musical note as the logo for the “Media” section, and 53 percent chose an outlet plug as the best icon to illustrate the “Plugins” section.

Thoughout the next week, the two designers will adapt and uniform their sets to make them even more complementary, while the launch of the new 2.7 WordPress version, which was delayed by a couple of weeks, is now expected to be released within the end of the month.

Yesterday, WordPress released yet another update to its platform in order to fix a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability.

As explained by the WP team its most recent blog post, the bug only affects IP-based virtual servers running on Apache 2.x versions: in those setups, it might be possible for hackers to affect systems so that they serve up malicious Java Script from domains under their control.

The update also addresses three minor stability features: the first prevents accidentally saving meta data into a post revision; the second prevents the XML-RPC protocol from fetching incorrect post types, while the third adds some user ID sanitization during bulk delete requests.

Users who are only interested in the XSS-related security fix are advised to simply copy the wp-includes/feed.php and wp-includes/version.php files from the 2.6.5 release package.

Some webmasters will note that the version numbering has skipped 2.6.4: WordPress developers explained that this was the case because the team didn’t want to create confusion with 2.6.4, a fake version recently offered via a third party site. According to The Register, system administrators were directed to download the backdoor-rigged code earlier this month by hackers exploiting vulnerabilities in the software.

The latest version can be downloaded from here, while the full changelog can be found on the WordPress.com website, allowing users to easily change the code themselves without the need to download the full package: the number of changes for the new version is in fact apparently very limited.

WordPress is about to release version 1.2 for the iPhone. The new version, expected to be released very soon, will introduce a host of new functionality along with bug fixes and enhancements including:

• Landscape mode with the extra wide keyboard
• Link creation help
• Support for editing and creating Pages
• Comment moderation
• Asynchronous publishing
• Photo resizing options

Today, the WordPress community released the second beta version of its platform. While an unfinished product still in its testing stage and with reportedly several glitches when run on browsers such as Internet Explorer, WordPress 2.7 Beta 2 brings many innovations and layout changes to the table.

The announcement was made by Ryan Boren on the WordPress.org website and also explains that, while we are reaching the final stages of the development process, the team is about two weeks behind schedule, which means the 2.7 version will probably be released within the end of the month, but not before November 10 as originally planned.

Preview of the new post interface for WordPress 2.7

Aspects that still have to be fixed before the production version can be released are particularly with regard to the new design in the administrative interface, which will feature a left side panel and provide a much clearer navigational structure, along with a cleaner interface that should make the task of managing websites even easier to achieve.

As explained in the post, the current beta seems to be working best on browsers such as Firefox and Safari, while Internet Explorer users might still face some problems at the moment. Regardless of the browser adopted, users are recommended to test the beta version and provide feedback to developers, in order to find out as many bugs as possible and come up with a reasonably stable release, in the spirit of the open source community.

Boren also wrote that the current plan in the development team is to keep working as if the release date was Nov. 10, when, instead of version 2.7, the release candidate — an high quality, almost finished release that only needs polishing in a few corners that is already recommendable for broad use — will see the light. After that, a final release date will be set and the software will be rolled out within the end of the month.

Peter Hagopian from InformationWeek reports that his installation of 2.7 Beta 1 went without a hitch and that everything seems to be working fine in his own testing experience: those who don’t want to take any chances should however wait for 2.7 to be out. The latest official update to the production code of the WordPress platform, version 2.6.3, was released slightly over a week ago and is meant to correct a minor security vulnerability, while the first beta of 2.7 was released on November 1.

Preview of the new Dashboard featured in WordPress 2.7

A post by Jane Wells from the WordPress team details the innovations in the visual design that 2.7 will feature. As explained there, one of the main objectives was to reduce the need to load new pages just to access sub-navigation menus: a new, dynamic menu with voices that can be vertically expanded and contracted to reveal subcategories will therefore be a cornerstone new feature that should be appreciated by many regular users.

The new dashboard is the other notable innovation in the admin interface, and appears much more user friendly than before, allowing you to monitor your entire site with just a glimpse of an eye and with customizable modules that can show information such as site visits, post and comment statistics, and so on.

Further details on the new features WordPress 2.7 will bring to the market can be found on Ryan Boren’s website and will also be released during the next two weeks on the WordPress blog as the end of the month nears.

During the last couple of days, both the WordPress and the LiveJournal blogging platforms have been hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

Yesterday morning WordPress.com, the for-profit branch of the company, was hit by a denial of service attack directed at one of its three data centers. As a result, some of the blogs hosted by the Automattic-owned company were either taken down for a short while or resulted slower to access, but no permanent damage was done, also thanks to the redundancy of its data centers that made it possible for most sites to keep running smoothly without consequences.

“I think maybe a few blogs were down for just a little while this morning, but most of them were just running a bit slower,” a spokesperson for Automattic told AppScout this morning. “We have three data centers. Our system is designed to lose a data center and keep running.”

The site has experienced similar attacks before, out of which the most severe was the one occurring in mid February, when another DDoS attack prevented all its users from logging for almost an entire day, according to an anonymous source interviewed by ComputerWorld at the time.

A denial of service attack (Dos) is, in simple terms, an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users, which is usually obtained by flooding the target servers with a huge amount of traffic, and results in the site loading to be very slow for actual visitors, to the point where the site becomes impossible to navigate. In a distrubited Dos (DDos), the traffic simply comes from a number of different locations controlled by the attacker.

Motives for DoS attacks may vary, but perpetrators mostly target companies with high-profile, highly trafficked Web sites. On some occasions, the attackers are providers of security services that choose to target the websites of potential clients in order to demonstrate the need for their services; some other times, the attacks can come directly from the most prominent business rivals.

Whatever the cause, a similar attack has been perpetrated on the popular blogging platform LiveJournal: over the past couple of days, the site has suffered another denial of service attack that slowed down (and momentarily put offline) the site in two different occasions, as confirmed by a LiveJournal spokesman. The company is at the moment unable to state whether the perpetrators are the same who have attacked the WordPress website, even though the circumstances make this the most likely option.

Social bookmarking has been considerably growing in importance in the latest years as an effective tool to feature interesting news and pages that visitors find on your site. Luckily, WordPress offers a variety of plugins which allow you to automatically display all sorts of social bookmarking links and help promote your website with nearly no effort.

Sociable

Sociable admin interface

Sociable is a great plugin, compatible with WordPress installations 2.2 to 2.5.1 in its current version, that allows you to select which social bookmarking links to display at the end of each blog post. You can select among 65+ bookmarking sites, both generic and topic-specific, simply by ticking a box in the admin interface.

On the plugin website, it is explained that the original developer, Peter Harkins, hasn’t been updating the tool for about eight months, and that the project has therefore been maintained by a second developer, who also recently added some interesting features to it.

While displaying the bookmark links at the bottom of the page is the default behavior, that can be easily changed by embedding a code snippet into the code of your WordPress theme. You can also use a snippet to display only a portion of the links, overriding the admin settings. Finally, adding a new bookmarking site to Sociable is also relatively easy and can be done by following the instructions you will find on the plugin homepage.

ShareThis

ShareThis is yet another useful tool to share your posts with the rest of the world. Apart from the usual social bookmarking sites, it also allows you to send your post link via email, AIM, Facebook, MySpace and much more.

According to the statistics hosted on the WordPress website, ShareThis is also among the most downloaded social bookmarking plugins, with peaks of 2,000 daily hits. The tool is being developed by a company which offers additional integration allowing you to store all your bookmarks on a remote server for easy access.

I Love Social Bookmarking

“I Love Social Bookmarking” (ILSB) is another complete and easy to manage tool for your social bookmarking needs. Just like with Sociable, you are able to add and remove websites from the list with a single mouse click from an intuitive admin interface.

While the features and functionality are very similar to those of Sociable, the main difference lays in the layout: instead of simply listing the links, you can use a scroll-down menu to display the list of websites you want to feature on your site, which might turn out useful especially if you don’t want to use much of your page space. Other options in the admin interface also include the background color in the dropdown menu and other minor details.

Tell a Friend

Tell a Friend allows you to add a “Share this post” button after each post using the service provided by FreeTellAFriend.com, which also has e-mail address book and favorite capabilities.

Tell a Friend Plugin

When clicking on the button, a non-intrusive popup will open asking you what you wish to do: visitors can in fact use their email address books and share the item with their entire contact list once logged once logged into their webmail service, enter the emails of friends manually, favorite the site or simply submit the item to a traditional bookmarking site.

Of all the social bookmarking tools for WordPress encountered so far, Tell a Friend is certainly the most flexible one. Of course, there are minor issues arising from its approach, such as the choice of using popups, which might get blocked by some browsers, or even the possibility to remotely access your webmail server, which means your visitors have to trust that the service won’t collect their login data.

… and many others

Those features in this article are a small part of the plugins listed in the WordPress website. If none of the tools described here fit your specific needs, you can simply make a search to find the right tool for you.

A vulnerability has been discovered in Snoopy, which WordPress uses to display feeds shown in the dashboard. It is a low risk vulnerability for WordPress users. You can download WP 2.6.3 at WordPress.org.

In a move that has taken many by surprise, Microsoft recently added support for the open source Drupal and WordPress content management systems to its new Web Application Installer, as a further confirmation that such products have now reached a quality at least equal to that of other commercially available products.

As explained in the Web Application Installer homepage, the platform — which was launched on October 15 — is meant to facilitate the process of configuring and running some of the best-known and most reliable Web applications, providing support for both PHP and ASP.net:

“With just a few simple clicks, Web AI will check your machine for the necessary pre-requisites, download these applications from their source location in the community, walk you through basic configuration items and then install them on your computer.”

The executable is free to download and only 650 KB in size and, although just in its beta stage, support is already available through the user forums, which are just starting to become populated with messages. Software requisites include Windows Vista RTM, Windows Vista SP1 or Windows Server 2008 as the operating system and the .NET 2.0 Framework. In addition, only x86 and 64-bit architectures are currently supported by the program.

Apart from WordPress and Drupal, the software also enables easy installation of DotNetNuke, Graffiti CMS, osCommerce and the popular open source phpBB bulletin board frontend. In other words, Microsoft would seem to have made a meaningful step in the world of open source applications with its latest creation.

This somewhat surprising move from the company becomes a reason of surprise for many market analysts, particularly after Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, took a clear position against the open source movement in general, even coming to the point of calling the Linux operating system “a cancer” a few years back, as reported by The Register at the time.

Since that controversial declaration, it would seem that the company has been gradually changed its perspective towards the entire free software movement, providing indirect support when needed instead of taking a close-minded position like before. This has been the case, for instance, with both Apache and JQuery library, sponsoring the former and adopting the latter in an effort to develop increasingly efficient Web applications.

In a recent article appeared on CNET it is reported that Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft’s top intellectual property lawyer, stated that the differences between closed and open source code are going to be fading in the near future to create a “mixed source” model in which the two can coexist:

“I actually think the war between proprietary and open source is a thing of the past [...] [But] if every effort to license proves not to be fruitful, ultimately we have a responsibility to customers that have licenses and to our shareholders to ensure our intellectual property is respected.”

In fact, Microsoft has asserted on many occasions that GNU/Linux violates a number of its patents and intellectual properties, although allegations have never been too specific and no legal action has been taken so far by the company, which has instead signed several agreements with Linux distributions such as Red Hat.

The reaction in the open source world has been overall positive, although inevitably skeptic. Drupal founder Dries Buytaert reports the news with excitement on his own blog, speculating that it could end up introducing the platform to — potentially — millions of users, even though the software is just in its beta stage at the moment.

Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of WordPress, also reports the news, withouth hiding a good dose of surprise. Hopefully, this is just the continuation of a very slow process of acceptance by Microsoft of the fact that open source projects and initiatives can no more be ignored, particularly when it comes to Web frameworks and applications.