You may remember a while back I wrote about my broken trackbacks and my attempts to fix them. I noticed last month or so that a trackback had appeared on my AIS Blog but didn't want to mention it in case it was a one off. However I've seen a few more appearing so now feel safe to say they're back!

What's different? I honestly don't know! They appeared on a version of WordPress 2.3.2 (I think, or 2.3.3) and have been working since. I can only assume that perhaps it was an issue with one of the core WordPress files, however I presumed it was my own fault as other sites running the same WP version seemed to receive trackbacks without a problem. However, that's not an issue any more as my trackbacks are back. Most are getting caught in Akismet but I check this a few times a week so can dig any out before emptying the spam.

It's nice to have some trackbacks, and luckily the theme I'm running already separates them, saves me the time of implementing Gary's method.

You may think this sounds like an obvious topic, but I've read about so many people having problems or just simply too scared to upgrade in case something goes wrong. It's such a simple thing to do too. I've upgraded both blogs on this domain to WordPress 2.5 today, took less than half an hour to do 2. So I figured I'd write out my own steps which may be of use to some.

1. First off, backup your database. You can do this via phpMyAdmin, if it's available, or use the WP Backup plugin.
2. Next I check my plugins are up to date. This is easily done by viewing the plugins page and see which ones are out of date. You can visit the correct plugin page for each, download the latest version and upload it to your plugins directory. (Remember though, not all plugins will have the auto alert feature so check the plugin author's site to be 100% sure).
3. Next up is updating your wp-config.php file. Use the wp-config-sample.php file from the new WordPress 2.5 folder (that you've just downloaded and extracted), and complete your database connection details and also change the table name prefix from wp_ to whatever you use if necessary. Upload this to your root folder after renaming it to wp-config.php. The new change from WordPress 2.3 to 2.5 won't affect your site, so get this bit done first.
4. Then, in your FTP, remove wp-admin ONLY. The front end site doesn't need wp-admin to function, so delete that first.
5. Once it's finished, upload the new wp-admin directory for WordPress 2.5.
6. Then you want to delete index.php in your root directory for your site. This is the main front end file so we need to prevent people from seeing a broken site.
7. Then either right click in your FTP window and click on new file, and name it index.php, or if you want to be a little more prepared, upload a file called index.php and you can put inside it a message such as "We're currently updating the website, be back soon".
8. Now rename wp-includes to be wp-includes-old, this is because it's quicker.
9. Delete all files in the root that start with wp- besides wp-config.php. Also delete xmlrpc.php.
10. Upload the new wp-includes folder, and then upload all of the root files beginning with wp- and xmlrpc.php (don't upload index.php just yet).
11. Once you're finished uploading, go to /wp-admin/upgrade.php and run the upgrade on your site.
12. If everything is okay now upload index.php, overwriting your holding page.
13. Remove wp-includes-old directory.

That should be all you need to do. It sounds and maybe looks a lot but it's fairly straight forward. I always remove my files before uploading new ones for upgrading. It keeps things tidy and you know that all of your files have uploaded cleanly. By doing this in steps you'll minimise the disruption on your site as the only point at which the site will not be available will be at step 6 and should literally be a few minutes, depending on your internet connection speed.

The upgrade to WordPress 2.5 has been pretty easy and straightforward from my point of view. I have a handful of plugins running on my site and none have broken. All of the popular plugins have already been upgraded, if necessary, to work on 2.5 anyway, and to be honest the main change for 2.5 is the admin area, so front end plugins don't seem to have been affected.

If you are intending to upgrade any time soon then I recommend the following 2.5 only plugins:

• Remove Max Width – Removes the fixed width restriction in the Admin.
• Admin Drop Down Menus – Drop down menus for the admin, brings the menu back into one line too.
• Reveal IDs on Posts/Pages/Links/Categories – Displays the ID in the 'Manage' pages.

You're probably wondering why. It's not to increase your feed reader numbers (is 1 going to make that much difference?!), and yes it's already a good idea anyway to check that your posts are coming through correctly and without display problems. However to me now, the main reason is because of this spate of hacking and injecting hidden links into posts. By subscribing to your feed in something like Google Reader, which displays the feed with little additional formatting, you can see these additional links instantly. It's a WordPress vulnerability that's affected users of older versions (2.5 and possible 2.3.3 are okay as far as I'm aware) but of course these hackers will continue to try and find a way to exploit the latest version too.

A friend of mine was recently hit, I only noticed when I read his latest post and saw a long list of links to spam and adult sites. On checking his site they weren't visible, but they were still there. I upgraded his blog to 2.5 for him and had a look through the last 5 posts he'd made. The last post, which was just 24 hours old, already had one injection of links. Older posts had 4-5 different injections, which contain about 50-100 links each. That's a lot of links. Clearly different injections coming in from different people.

I'm sure some of these injections can go unnoticed in a feed as well, and of course there are other areas of your site that could be vulnerable if you're not running a currently secure version, so a brief check of your source code every so often will be a good idea too, but this is just one additional step that's easy to do. So go subscribe now

After a few release candidates over the past week or so, WordPress 2.5 is now officially released.

So what's new in this release? I had a play with the release candidate 1 when it came out and the first major difference I saw was the admin area, fresh new design and the menu all over the place. Once I upgraded my Admin Dropdown Menus which thankfully brought the menu items back into line, it wasn't as bad. Am I happier with it? Not from the RC1 (I've not installed the new version yet, guess I should before moaning!). The admin look is okay although I prefer the classic design over the fresh one (you can switch between the two), however on the posting page everything's been moved around and not for the better. The comments page looks better though, displaying gravatars.

They've incorporated a few plugins into 2.5, such as Gravatars, and looking on their latest post there's also a gallery in there (I didn't see that in RC1!). That'll be interesting to see how good and flexible it is, very handy for CMS's and blogs alike. It seems like most of the plugins should continue to work fine as there hasn't been any major, if any, database changes. I know my plugins appear to work okay, although I'll double check them on the final release.

I'll be having more of a play locally on the new release, just to make sure everything looks okay, works fine, give it a day or two incase any major problem crops up in the WordPress camp etc. Then it'll be time to deploy it to every blog and CMS based site running it!

I've finally had a chance to finish off what was my first WordPress plugin – What Others Are Saying. This went from just a basic PHP include file to my first plugin, and now, after much reading of the WordPress Codex, in particular the wpdb Class to interact with the database, the plugin is much improved, without the need for an additional text file, as everything is dealt with by the options table.

I've also written my WordPress standard readme.txt file for the plugin, and it's been accepted into the WordPress Plugin Repository, I'm just still working out how to actually add it into the assigned folder! (I'm getting there slowly!).

Anyway, if you've used the plugin on your site then I recommend you upgrade to the latest version (1.3), and you can remove the cachetime.txt file that was needed before. The plugin file itself is smaller too, so that's always a bonus.

I've also got another plugin halfway finished, used on a couple of sites running WordPress as a CMS, so once that's finished I'll be releasing that too