WordPress.org

Just in case anyone forgot, the first of the November bug hunts for version 2.9 is now in progress, and will last another day. If you’ve got a dev environment set up, please consider pitching in to run some tests and help get us closer to the 2.9 milestone release.

According to the blog Unmask Parasites, there is a new version of the Gumblar botnet making the rounds on PHP based websites. Back in May of this year, this malicious botnet was responsible for infecting a large number of websites in a short period of time. This time around however, the Gumblar botnet has buggy code which is leading to a number of infected WordPress sites breaking.

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.

We continue our Best-Of Series today with download managers. Or, plugins for WordPress that will allow you to provide various files to your website visitors for download. Over the years I’ve gone through many. Everyone will have a different preference but, here is a list of my top plugins for managing downloads with WordPress…

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!

There are six WordCamps coming up before the end of the year, and since I like to make sure people know about it when there’s a WordCamp near them, here’s the list, with some personal commentary thrown in. If you just want the list without my asides, check out the full schedule at WordCamp.org.

WordCamp Phoenix is first up, on November 13. I’d planned on attending this one myself before they changed the date (it was originally scheduled for the 7th), but will sadly have to miss it as it conflicts with WordCamp NYC. If you, like me, can’t make it to Phoenix, be sure to check their web site for information on the live stream they’re planning to provide. If it’s anywhere near the quality of the stream from Portland or Seattle earlier this fall, it’ll be just like being there, but without a t-shirt to show for it (and theirs has stripes, so if you’re local, you should go!). My only consolation in missing this WordCamp is that I’ve seen about half of the speakers before. If you’re going, don’t miss the session by John Hawkins on Building a WordPress Plugin; it got me to write my first plugin in Portland! Matt‘ll be there, will you?

WordCamp Victoria is next, on November 14. This is another one I’d love to go to, but can’t because it’s at the same time as New York’s. I would especially have liked to go because it looks like the speakers are all local, and I haven’t seen any of them speak before. Occasionally WordCamps lose a little of the local feeling by focusing on visiting speakers, so it’s nice to see so many Vancouverites on the list. They’ll have a Blogger track and a Technical track running concurrently, so there should a little something for everyone. No word on a live stream, but hopefully they’ll be able to catch some of the presentations on video and post them to WordPress.tv after the event.

WordCamp Bangkok is scheduled for November 15. I have to admit that the first thing that catches my eye on their agenda is “WordPress Band.” I’ve known WordCamps to have people performing songs before, but a whole band? Might be a first. I hope they’ll post the video to WordPress.tv, too.

WordCamp New York City is the same weekend as the previous three, on November 14-15. In the interest of full disclosure, I need to tell you that I’m one of the organizers of WordCamp NYC, so my informative comment about it here may be a little biased. That said, we have over 50 confirmed speakers (both local and visiting), and 2 full days of content in 8 — count ‘em, 8 — tracks. Newbies get a free year of hosting and walked through setting up a WordPress blog in workshop format, while the other tracks have specialized content for Bloggers, CMS Users, Beginning Developers, Advanced Developers, Academic Users, people interested in MU/BuddyPress, and the Open Source Community. Did I mention the theme and plugin contest? Or the awesome shirts? How about the Genius Bar, or the Hacker Room? The additional Unconference sessions? If you’re anywhere near NYC that weekend (and with the Acela, that’s anywhere from Boston to D.C.), you should definitely come. I’ll be there, Matt’ll be there, lead developer Mark Jaquith will be there, lead developer of BuddyPress Andy Peatling will be there, and too many other WordPress luminaries and locals to mention. If we hit 800 registrations by November 12, I’m baking cookies for everyone.

WordCamp Peru will be on November 28 in Lima. I was checking out their topics list, and it looks like they’re planning to cover all the usual topics around blog administration, security, increasing traffic, and integration with social media sites. No speaker list yet, but if you’re in Peru, it looks like this will be a nice gathering of WordPress users, and they’re hoping to have around 100 people attend.

WordCamp Orlando is the last of the year, on December 5. They haven’t published a speaker list or schedule yet, but I know Matt will be there, Mark Jaquith will be there, and I will be there. I know some other awesome core contributors are planning to come, but I don’t want to jinx anything, so if you’re curious, come see for yourself. Plus, Florida in December!

During the WordPress development chat today, one of the topics of discussion centered around the suggestion of changing the Hello World post that is seen with every new install of WordPress to something that contained useful WordPress specific information such as links to the release mailing list, the codex and other helpful material. I’d like to break down how this change came about to show how easy it is to contribute to the WordPress project without writing a line of code.

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.

New Plugins

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.

Antonio Lupetti of Woorkup.com has created and released an awesome visual cheat sheet for WordPress 2.8. The cheat sheet contains a practical reference guide to 2.8 with references to WP Template Tags as well as sample code. Definitely worthy of being added to your resources bin.

Check out the live demo before you download the guide.

CoPress Pushes Innovation, Shows Value of Open-Source Platforms.

Here’s a quick one: If you had access to a desktop application that could connect to your WordPress site and allow you to manage it, like the web-based control panel currently allows, would you use it?

Would You Use a WordPress Desktop Application?(answers)

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!

ExtizeMe

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.

How cool would it be to take a look at a Google map to see if there are any WordPress fans near your location? Thanks to a new site called WPWorldmap.net, now you can. The site is made up of a Google map with a draggable window that contains the options to sign up or to apply filters such as fans, core developers, users/bloggers, etc. The other neat thing about this site is that it shows upcoming WordCamp events across the world. Signing up was a breeze and if you use Twitter, you can use your account to sign up while also following anyone who has registered to the site already.

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!

I’ve finally found the time to write up some documentation for developers who want to work with WP Super Cache.

It’s a work in progress but should help other plugin developers who want to interact with the cache.

Suggestions and comments welcome.

PS. If you’re in Cork on November 14th, head along to BarCamp Cork III. I’ll be giving a talk, “How WP Super Cache Works”. It’ll be less technical than this but I’ll answer questions too. Check out the other sessions too.

Related Posts

• WP Super Cache 0.8.4, the garbage collector
• WP Super Cache 0.8.7
• WP Super Cache 0.9.5

New Plugins

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.

As we near completion of the 2.9 milestone, it’s that time of dev cycle again, when we ask all you community developers who’ve been putting off contributing to core to dust off your dev environments and help us get closer to being release-ready. How? Bug hunts! Yes, that time-honored tradition (in the time of WordPress, anyway) of everyone pitching in to test patches and report the results, working on solutions to major bugs, and helping to clear out Trac has come around again, and we’re scheduling not one, but two bug hunts over the next couple of weeks to ensure that everyone has enough time to prepare and participate.

#1 – The first bug hunt of 2.9 will be Thursday through Saturday, November 5-7, 2009. This should give people a few days to plan for it, upgrade their dev environments if they haven’t been following trunk, and figure out how to allot their time. We’re stretching over both weekdays and weekend to try and accommodate everyone’s schedule.

#2 - The second bug hunt will be a week later, Saturday through Monday, November 14-16, 2009. This should make it possible for anyone who needs more than a week to set some time aside to participate. This bug hunt will coincide with WordCamp NYC, where a special Hacker Room will be set aside for people to go and work on 2.9 bug tickets alongside regular core contributors including Mark Jaquith and Matt Martz (sivel from IRC).

The Goals

Test, test, test existing patches! You can see all tickets with patches that need testing by checking this report. When you’ve tested a patch, report your results in the ticket comments, so core committers can see how the patch is faring.

Fix known bugs! You can see the bugs that need patches by checking this report. Look for the ones that seem that they’ll affect the most people or have the biggest impact by being fixed. Edge case bugs should be lower priority.

Report new bugs! As you’re testing out the development version, if you come across a bug, search trac to see if someone has reported it yet. If so, add a comment with your experience to the ticket so we’ll know it’s affecting more than one person. If no ticket exists yet, create one.

Core committers will be around (in the #wordpress-dev channel at irc.freenode.com) both weekends to review patches that have been thoroughly tested, answer questions as needed, and give feedback on patches that need more work before being commit-worthy.

If you’ve never participated in a WordPress bug hunt before, but you’d like to get involved, we’d love to have you join us! To prepare, you’ll want to set up a test environment, start using the current development version/maybe install the beta testing plugin, join us in the #wordpress-dev IRC channel, and read up on automated testing.

Update! WordPress MU 2.8.5.2 has a tiny fix for a post publish bug. You can download it from the usual place.

WordPress MU 2.8.5.1 has just been released and may be downloaded immediately.

This is a security and bugfix release and a recommended upgrade for every WordPress MU site. What happened to 2.8.5? I had it tagged and ready for release when Luke reported a little problem. It wasn’t possible to edit blogs! It was an easy bug to fix but code had been tagged and zip/tarball archives created so I had to create new ones. Thanks Luke! Saved the day.

Thanks to everyone else who contributed and helped in any way during the making of this release. Your help is invaluable.

This release also fixes a problem with slashes in blog and site options. You’ll be prompted to run the site upgrader. Please run it on all your blogs. For a more comprehensive look at what has changed recently, take a look at the Trac Timeline.

Related Posts

• WordPress MU 2.7
• WordPress MU 2.6.1
• WordPress MU 2.8.1

One of the most difficult tasks I see for the WordPress project in the next 1-2 years is creating a place to harness the power of the WordPress community into a central location. In my opinion, the WordPress community is like peanut butter, spread across the web really thin. You have to be subscribed to a bunch of different blogs throughout the community in order to get a grasp as to what is happening with the WordPress project. Other than enthusiast sites, you have to know which mailing lists to subscribe to, the developments prologue site, attend the developer chats, and occasionally read a WordPress centric blog post or two from one of the core developers in order to figure out what is going on. I don’t like this situation. Instead, I would love to see a community portal developed on the WordPress.org site that contains the tools necessary to create a collaboration hub.

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?

Ines BuddyPress

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.

I’d like to congratulate John James Jacoby (aka jjj) for doubling the size of the core development team and gaining commit access to the project!

BuddyPress is growing, and at a pace that just one core developer cannot possibly keep up with. I’ve been looking to expand the size of the core development team for a while now and I’m excited to be able to announce the first stop along that road.

If you’re a regular in the forums or trac you’ll already know who John is. He has been an unrelenting force for some time with quick responses to questions and quality core patches.

John will be helping with bug fixing to begin with, then looking to take on some of the new features listed on the roadmap. Congratulations again John, I’m very excited to have you on the core team.

As mentioned by WP Engineer, WordPress 2.9 recently had a new feature added to it called bulk plugin upgrades. The interesting thing about this feature is back on September 11th, Matt published this through his Twitter feed:

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.

WordPress 2 for iPhone is now available for downloads in the App Store. The new app is packed with lots of features which include:

• 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

Version 0.4.1 of the rssCloud WordPress plugin is now available. The biggest change is adding support for the domain parameter in notification requests. This means that rssCloud updates processed by the plugin are no longer limited to being sent to the IP address that the request came from. Support for the domain parameter is live on WordPress.com as well.

When a domain parameter is included with a notification request the verification process does the following:

• Sends an HTTP GET request to the {domain}:{port}{path} URL
• That HTTP GET includes to pieces of data: url and challenge. The url field contains the URL of the feed that we’ll been sending pings about. The challenge field contains a random string of characters
• The response back must have a status code of 2xx and the body must contain EXACTLY the contents of the challenge field. If both of those conditions are not met then the verification process will consider this a failure

For notification requests that have no domain parameter the verification process is unchanged from before.

Another item that some may find helpful is a new constant – RSSCLOUD_FEED_URL – if that is defined they it will be used as the feed URL of the blog instead of determining it via get_bloginfo( 'rss2_url' );. For plugin authors that provide options for an alternative feed URL note that can override the default in WordPress via the feed_link filter. That filter can be used instead of the RSSCLOUD_FEED_URL constant and will bubble up through the get_bloginfo( 'rss2_url' ); call.

This year at WordCamp New York there will be a whole track dedicated to WordPress MU and BuddyPress. Some of the topics being presented are:

Getting off the Farm:
WPMU Beyond Blog Hosting. We all know that WPMU can be used to host multiple blogs for public or internal signups. But what else can you do? How far can you stretch it? I’ll be showcasing a number of sites that use WPMU in interesting ways. Speaker: Andrea Rennick.

Writing Plugins for WordPress/MU:
This session will be directed toward plugin developers. We will discuss platform differences & guidelines to keep in mind when writing a plugin for both WordPress & WordPress MU. Speaker: Ron Rennick.

User Authentication with MU in Existing Ecosystems.
Speaker: Casey Bisson.

How-to with MU: Using Multiple Domains, and Building a Member Directory.
A two-part session where we will dig in to two different concepts. First up, we’ll cover how to domain map member blogs, and the difference between multiple sites and multiple domains. The second half will cover how we built a business/member directory and what plugins we used to accomplish this so you can build one too. Speaker: Andrea Rennick.

Growing Community with BuddyPress:
Speaker: Lisa Sabin-Wilson.

Creating Killer Group Extensions in BuddyPress:
In this session learn how to build highly custom feature extensions to BuddyPress groups. Andy will be talking through how you can use the new group extension API to build Twitter stream integration right into your groups. Speaker: Andy Peatling.

Developing BuddyPress as a Collaboration Hub:
In this presentation, I’ll discuss some of the BuddyPress development I’ve done to bridge the WordPress/bbPress/MediaWiki platforms, taking BP beyond its roots as a social networking platform and turning it into a collaboration hub: a space where users can find, friend, and team up with each other (the social networking part BP that does well), work together to produce content (that’s the “collaboration” part), and feed the content back into BP (that’s the “hub” part). Speaker: Boone Gorges.

Other soon-to-be confirmed sessions: Setting up BuddyPress (workshop); BuddyPress theme framework.

For a full list of sessions please see the program page.

It should be a fantastic event with space for up to 1000 people. Tickets are selling out fast so if you’re thinking of attending, now is the time to hop in and buy a ticket. It looks like this is going to be the east coast WordCamp to attend. I’ll see you all there!