Have You Upgraded To The Latest Version Of WordPress?

The great folks behind the WordPress software have released a very important update/upgrade. The release is called WordPress 2.3.2. If you are a WordPress user, and haven’t upgraded yet, you should immediately do so.

This release is an urgent security release that fixes some dangerous bugs in the software, found in WordPress 2.3.1, which was the latest version of WordPress, until now. The mot dangerous bug of them all was a vulnerability in the software which could be used to expose your timestamped posts. People could exploit this and then know what a particular blogger was about to publish later. If you don’t know, time stamped posts are those posts you write before hand which are published automatically at a later date, specified by you. To help you understand more, here’s a screen-shot of the Timestamp feature:

So, using some clever code, the ‘black hat’ guys used to sneak into a WordPress blog and then get to know what and when the blogger will publish later. The code used went something like this :

http://www.example.com/?x=wp-admin%2F

This was particularly common with ShoeMoney, as some people would always somehow know what he was going to publish the next day. A real headache for him, but not from now, if he upgrades to WordPress 2.3.2

That was the only major fix in this upgrade. Some other fixes were:

• Suppresses some database related error messages which could give away information about the table structure of the WordPress database.
• It also allows you to define custom error messages for database related issues. For example, you could use a custom error message in place of the default one if WordPress can’t connect to the database.

For more details on what’s new in 2.3.2, you can read the list of fixed bugs and also see the changes between 2.3.1 and 2.3.2.

A Note

WordPress upgrades are often technical and novices can easily screw things up. If you’re like me, and would like and easy alternative, the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin is a life saver. It upgrades your WordPress installation automatically, and also makes up backups of important stuff. Go to the plugin page to find out more.

Again, if

you’ve not upgraded, do so now, because it is worth the time.

Any Incompatibilities?

I don’t think that this upgrade will be incompatible with plugins created for WordPress 2.3.1. But I had some loading issues with the WassUp plugin. But, the latest version of the plugin has fixed it, so no worries. If any of you notice any plugin incompatibilities, you can leave a comment to let the others know!

If You Are Having Problems With WordPress,

consider buying the following books:

UPDATE:   There has been an urgent update to WordPress 2.3.2, which fixes a major bug in the xmlrpc file of WordPress. Therefore, WordPress 2.3.2 now has become obsolete and you are advised to upgrade immediatly to WordPress 2.3.3