BuyHTTP Company Blog

WordPress has released version 2.8.2. This releases fixes an XSS vulnerability with URLs not being fully sanitized when viewing in the admin. It is recommended that you upgrade to protect yourself from this issue.

One of our clients has written up a good overview of how to quickly and easily turn your Joomla 1.5 installation into a multi-site setup. The basic steps:

1. Setup Joomla on your main domain
2. Park the second domain on your main domain
3. Add a php header redirect to your template’s index.php file

If you want multiple templates for each site that is also easy to control. So if you need to control multiple sites from one Joomla installation, this will work perfectly for you.

View the writeup at docs.joomla.org.

WordPress has released version 2.8.1 of their popular blogging software. Along with 51 fixed bugs there was a possible security issue addressed with unprivileged users able to access admin pages for some plugins. For that reason this upgrade is strongly recommended. If you don’t want to do the upgrade yourself you can order our upgrade service.

Some highlights of this release:

• Certain themes were calling get_categories() in such a way that it would fail in 2.8. 2.8.1 works around this so these themes won’t have to change.
• Dashboard memory usage is reduced. Some people were running out of memory when loading the dashboard, resulting in an incomplete page.
• The automatic upgrade no longer accidentally deletes files when cleaning up from a failed upgrade.
• A problem where the rich text editor wasn’t being loaded due to compression issues has been worked around.
• Extra security has been put in place to better protect you from plugins that do not do explicit permission checks.
• Translation of role names fixed.
• wp_page_menu() defaults to sorting by the user specified menu order rather than the page title.
• Upload error messages are now correctly reported.
• Autosave error experienced by some IE users is fixed.
• Styling glitch in the plugin editor fixed.
• SSH2 filesystem requirements updated.
• Switched back to curl as the default transport.
• Updated the translation library to avoid a problem with mbstring.func_overload.
• Stricter inline style sanitization.
• Stricter menu security.
• Disabled code highlighting due to browser incompatibilities.
• RTL layout fixes.

So you’ve decided you want to make a site with WordPress, that’s the easy part. How do you get traffic to it? The most obvious answers are SEO and link building, but both of those require lots of time to produce and visible results. The easy way is to let your visitors do the promotion for you by leveraging social networking and bookmarking.

Social Networking

Users of social networks like Facebook and Twitter are very curious and love to click links making them sources for driving huge amounts of traffic. There are several plugins available for adding Facebook links to your blog posts automatically. One of the most downloaded and, in our opinion, better plugins is Add To Facebook. Twitter traffic is even more powerful. Two plugins that we recommend are TwitThis and TweetMeme.

Social Bookmarking

Allowing your users to easily add bookmarks to sites like StumbleUpon and del.icio.us can also be helpful in building traffic to your site. The well recognized king in this area is the Sociable plugin.

What We Use

Instead of cluttering the page with several plugins linking to all of these services we use ShareThis. You can customize the feel a little bit and it allows both Facebook and Twitter posting as well as social bookmarking.