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Dylan Tweney writes on how to take back control of your own social networks.

A new update of WordPress for Windows Phone is now available in the Windows Phone Store. We’re pleased to introduce version 1.9, which adds some very powerful features! Here’s what’s new:

Featured Images Support

We’re happy to report that you can now upload a Featured Image for your blog posts as long as your theme supports it. To set an image as featured, just tap on it after adding it to the post content area and click the ‘feature’ button — see the screenshot on the right.

Note that you’ll need WordPress 3.4.1 or greater and a theme that supports featured images in order to use this feature.

Full Screen Editing

Your phone has a relatively small screen and when writing a post, a large portion of it is taken up by the keyboard. While you’re not likely to write “The Divine Comedy” on your phone, wouldn’t it be great to have just a little more space? In 1.9 the content editor has its own page that fills the whole screen.

When the post is ready to go, just press the back button and you’ll be right back in the Post editor.

Reliability Improvements

In addition to the new features, we’ve worked hard on making the app even more stable and fast. In total, almost 20 bugs and crashes have been fixed in this release. You can see the details on what was taken care of on the trac roadmap.

Download

Ready to get the latest? Click the link below to update the best WordPress app for Windows Phone so far.

Download AppWordPress for Windows PhoneSupported: WordPress.com or self-hosted WordPress (v. 2.9+)

Contributors

A huge thanks to the contributors that worked on this release:  aerych, daniloercoli.

Would you like to get in on the fun? Let us know at windowsphonedev.wordpress.org  or head on over to make/mobile on WordPress.org and we’ll help you get started as a contributor.  Do you have an idea for a new feature or have you encountered a bug that needs fixing? Tell us about it on the WordPress for Windows Phone Trac.

Make sure to follow @WPWindowsPhone on Twitter to get the latest news first.

If you’re using Social and haven’t yet upgraded to 2.7, make sure to do so before January 15th. The URL endpoint that Social talks to has changed and the old endpoint (used on versions prior to 2.7) will be going away on January 15th.

New plugins

FikraTicker is a simple newsticker that displays the recent news/posts on your website/blog.

Jellyfish Invaders adds animated flying retro space invaders to your blog.

WP Ads Within Contents allows you to show ads within your post content.

Updated plugins

CloudFlare ensures your WordPress blog is running optimally on the CloudFlare platform.

Contextual Related Posts helps you increase reader retention and reduce bounce rates by displaying a set of related posts on your website or in your feed.

Fast Secure Contact Form lets your visitors send you a quick e-mail message and blocks all common spammer tactics. Additionally, the plugin has a multi-form feature, optional extra fields, and an option to redirect visitors to any URL after the message is sent.

Jetpack allows you to supercharge your WordPress site with powerful features previously only available to WordPress.com users.

Twenty-twelve was an exciting year for Automattic. We added 48 new Automatticians and it’s been delightful to see the effect the new folks have had on the company. We made over 40,000 commits to our various repositories, about half of those on WP.com alone. Contained in those commits are countless improvements to the experience for WP.com, but I’m just as proud of the things we removed and streamlined: the WP.com homepage has been drastically simplified, and a completely revamped reader is launching this week. Engagement started rising again after being flat in 2011. Support responses that used to take days now take hours or less. We added 75M uniques to our our network. There is a demo WordPress app on every iPhone and iPad in every Apple store I’ve visited in the US. (If you contribute to WordPress, show it to your friends next time you’re in a store and say “I help make this!”) We did two acquisitions, one announced, one not yet. It looks like we’ll grow the team by at least another 60 people this year. There’s so much more already done that hasn’t been announced yet or that’s coming that I’m bursting to share, but the surprise is at least half the fun. Stay tuned.

Cell is a clean and lightweight theme.

CyberChimps features Twitter Bootstrap, and responsive touch friendly theme options.

Fotogram is a clean and fast loading theme.

Spartan is a responsive magazine theme.

Zenith is a responsive theme designed for blogs and magazines that aren’t about fluff.

Here’s an interesting TED talk on a team challenge on building the tallest structure with twenty sticks of spaghetti and a marshmallow. See why kindergarten students do better than business school graduates. (Hint: Learning by shipping.)

New plugins

Advanced Blog Metrics allows you to learn more about your readers and how they react to your posts.

Media Library Assistant provides several enhancements for managing the Media library

Updated plugins

Block Bad Queries protects your website against malicious URL requests.

Jetpack allows you to supercharge your WordPress site with powerful features previously only available to WordPress.com users.

Steven Sinofsky, known at Microsoft for turning around the Office franchise and most recently as head of Windows, where he turned it around post-Vista. He left Microsoft a few months ago, and just started a blog on WordPress.com called Learning by Shipping. It’s a concept I’m particularly fond of.

WordPress had a great 2012, bbPress had a great 2012, and we had a great 2012 too!

This handy report was generated for several WordPress.com and Jetpack-powered WordPress.org blogs with moderate to high traffic, and it really is quite nice. Here’s one of my favorite excerpts from our report.

About 55,000 tourists visit Liechtenstein every year. This blog was viewed about 950,000 times in 2012. If it were Liechtenstein, it would take about 17 years for that many people to see it. Your blog had more visits than a small country in Europe!

So, with visits from 217 countries world-wide, and the United States, India, and the United Kingdom rounding out the top, we had more visits than 17 years worth of tourists to a small European country. That’s not bad, but we could always do better.

What would you kind folks love to see from us in 2013?

I’ve had a few people ask about how best to use Social and Disqus at the same time. I’ve added an FAQ to the README for the next release:

Can I use Social and Disqus at the same time?

Both Social and Disqus try to replace the default WordPress comment experience by default. If you want to use Social’s broadcasting features but prefer to use Disqus for your comments, you probably want to check the “Disable Social’s comment display (use standard theme output instead).” box under Advanced Options. This will allow Disqus to take over comment display without any interference from Social.

Minis is a minimal, simple, clean, yet graphically bold theme that would be great for any blog or website.

Simple Style is a white and blue single-column theme.

Voyage is a flexible and responsive theme that allows you change layout and style through theme options.

WordPress has had a rather exciting year, all covered in their handy A Look Back post.

2012 saw two major WordPress releases, addressing primarily theme customization and media management. There were also five security releases, a new default theme, and a record number of code contributions in the 3.5 release.

The site itself also saw some improvements, including a new plugin page design with plugin and theme reviews, and Make.WordPress.org, a network of sites where teams and contributors can easily communicate with each other.

Speaking of teams and contributors, 2012 also saw the very first WordPress Community Summit, a 2-day event attended by 108 of the top WordPress development, support, and overall community volunteers.

2012 was certainly a big year for WordPress, and with planning for WordPress 3.6 already underway, it looks like they’re going to hit the ground running in 2013.

Another year is coming to a close, and it’s time to look back and reflect on what we’ve accomplished in the past twelve months. The WordPress community is stronger than ever, and some of the accomplishments of the past year are definitely worth remembering.

Software Releases

We had two major releases of the WordPress web application with versions 3.4 and 3.5, as well as 5 security releases during 2012. 3.4 included the theme customizer, while 3.5 became the long awaited “media release” featuring a new uploader and gallery management tool. 3.5 contained code contributions from more people than ever, and we hope to continue growing the contributor ranks in the year ahead. We currently have native apps on 6 mobile platforms — iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, Nokia, and WebOS — and saw several updates there as well.

Plugin Directory

A number of improvements were made to the Plugin Directory in 2012. More cosmetic  updates, like the introduction of branded plugin page headers, make it a nicer browsing experience, while functional changes like better-integrated support forums, plugin reviews, and a favorites system made the plugin directory even more useful as a resource.

The “Make” Network and Team Reps

2012 was the year that saw the creation of Make.wordpress.org, a network of sites for the teams of contributors responsible for the different areas of the WordPress project. Now anyone can follow along and get involved with the teams that work on core, theme review, forum support, documentation, and more. In 2013 we’ll work to improve these sites to make it easier to become a contributor. Each team also now has elected Team Reps, a new role that has already led to more cross-team communication. Team reps post each week to the Updates blog so that the other reps can keep up with what’s going on in other teams.

WordPress Community Summit

At the end of October, about 100 of the most influential and respected members of the WordPress community attended an inaugural summit to discuss where we all stand, and to figure out where we go next with WordPress. A “conference of conversations,” this unconference made everyone an active participant, and while not every issue brought to the table was solved by the end of the event, the right questions were being asked.

Meetup.com

The WordPress Foundation now has a central account with Meetup.com. We’ve brought in a couple dozen existing meetup groups as a pilot to test the system, and are in the process of working with more existing meetups (as well as new ones) to join us so that local organizers won’t have to pay organizer dues and can get more support from the WordPress project.

Internet Blackout Day

We participated in the protest against SOPA/PIPA, Internet Blackout Day, on January 18. Though we usually stay out of politics, this campaign was important, and we not only participated in the blackout on WordPress.org, we encouraged our users to do so as well, and recommended plugins to provide blackout functionality. It was deemed the largest online protest in history.

WordCamps

And finally, it wouldn’t be a recap without counting up the WordCamps! There were 67 WordCamps around the world in 2012, bringing together WordPress users, developers, and fans. If you didn’t make it to a WordCamp this year, maybe it can be one of your new year resolutions: check the schedule to find one near you!

New plugins

Document Feedback allows you to get feedback from readers on the documentation you write.

DuckDuckGo Search Widget allows users to search your site using the DuckDuckGo search engine.

Restore Image Title restores the title attribute when images are inserted into posts.

Updated plugins

CampTix Event Ticketing is an easy to use and flexible event ticketing plugin.

W3 Total Cache allows you to improve site performance and user experience via caching.

bbPress, the forum “cousin” of WordPress, has had a rather exciting year in 2012, and it’s all been wrapped up with a nice bow in their year in review post.

Over the course of 2012, bbPress has seen two major version releases, a new core committer, and a redesigned site with an emphasis on showcasing and supporting bbPress.

In 2013, the team plans to focus on improved searching, more integration with BuddyPress, and various performance improvements.

The team is excited to announce version 1.8 of WordPress for Windows Phone! This update not only runs better but also has a cool new comments moderation UI.

Comments moderation changes

Save time by moderating several comments at once with the new “bulk edit” mode. The ability to moderate multiple comments at once is now available right from the comments list.

Simply tap the moderate icon in the toolbar to access bulk moderation. Tap the checkboxes next to the comments to select them, then tap a moderation option to moderate them all at once.

But wait, there’s more! It’s now possible to filter comments by their status, just open the menu and select one of the filters.

Here are other improvements and bugs fixed in version 1.8:

• Multi-sites and subdirectory installations can now be added to the app without hassle, as long as the app can access the RSD endpoint of your site.
• Bug fix: the loading indicator no longer occasionally stays on the screen when the back button is pressed.
• A bunch of minor issues related to the connectivity layer were fixed in this release.

Contributors

The following contributors have worked on this release of WordPress for Windows Phone:  aerych, daniloercoli.

Would you like to get in on the fun? Let us know at windowsphonedev.wordpress.org and we’ll help you get started as a contributor.  Do you have an idea for a new feature or have you encountered a bug that needs fixing? Tell us about it on the WordPress for Windows Phone Trac.

Make sure to follow @WPWindowsPhone on Twitter to get the latest news first.

We’re very happy to announce that version 1.7 of WordPress for Windows Phone is now available in the Windows Phone Store! This update adds many new features such as Local Drafts, Multimedia Management, and Post Formats. It also resolves many of the outstanding issues and quirks that you have mentioned on the forums and on Twitter. Read on to find out more.

New Features

• Local Drafts
  Nothing’s worse than working on a great post only to have it disappear because of a bad internet connection. That’s why we made it possible to save a new post or page as a Local Draft on your device.
• Multimedia Management improvements
  Adding photos to your blog posts is now easier than ever. You can choose to upload straight from the camera or from the photo library on your device. You can also now set the positioning (i.e: display at the top or bottom of your post) by tapping the picture on the Edit screen.
• Post Format Support
  At the bottom of the Edit screen, you’ll now see an option for setting the post format for your posts. The app will check with your blog to get a list of post formats that your theme supports.
• Windows Phone 8 compatibility
  While this release focuses mainly on bugs and performance enhancements, it also includes some updates to help Windows Phone users take advantage of the latest addition from Microsoft: Windows Phone 8!

Version 1.7 also includes numerous other bug fixes and improvements not listed here. For a full list, visit the 1.7 Trac milestone.

As always, your feedback and input on this release will help guide us as we work hard on the next release, which we’ve already started coding. If you feel like 1.7 is an improvement over the previous release, feel free to leave us a review in the Marketplace to let everyone else know that they should upgrade.

Additionally, we welcome your feedback in the forums and on Twitter.

Contributors

The following contributors have worked on this release of WordPress for Windows Phone:  aerych, isaackeyet, daniloercoli, and mrroundhill!

Getting Involved?

Development is continuing at a very rapid pace. We are already marching towards the next release of the app. So far we are keen on adding a better Post Editor, and support for Featured Images. Want to help out? Check out make.wordpress.org/mobile and the WordPress for Windows Phone dev blog to see how you can get involved!

If you’d like to help us translate the app into your native language, check out the translation project.

Happy blogging!

Automattic or more aptly VaultPress, has acquired security company, CodeGarage. This is the first time I’ve ever heard about CodeGarage but they appear to be a VaultPress alternative. Looking over the pricing and plans for each service, I see that CodeGarage was definitely cheaper as you can monitor 5 websites for $25 a month while VaultPress charges a flat fee PER website. The acquisition appears to be a talent grab as well as being a learning exercise. As an example, CodeGarage has a great pricing structure that allows businesses to have multiple websites monitored for a nominal fee, something which VaultPress doesn’t have.

I have to say though, I’m a bit perplexed as to why Automattic/VaultPress would continue to build and expand upon CodeGarage considering the existence of VaultPress. Even though it was not announced, if I were a customer of CodeGarage, I’d be watching the news very carefully to watch for any hints of the service shutting down and everyone having to migrate over to the VaultPress platform.

Over the past few days, I’ve read various posts regarding a security hole discovered in the popular W3 Total Cache plugin. According to a security bulletin published by Jason Donenfeld on Seclist.org, after installing the plugin from the WordPress plugin repository through the backend of WordPress, there are two avenues of attack left open.

1) Directory listings were enabled on the cache directory, which means anyone could easily recursively download all the database cache keys,
and extract ones containing sensitive information, such as password hashes. A simple google search of “inurl:wp-content/plugins/w3tc/dbcache” and maybe some other magic reveals this wasn’t just an issue for me. As W3 Total Cache already futzes with the .htaccess file, I see no reason for it not to add “Options -Indexes” to it upon installation. I haven’t read any W3 documentation, so it’s possible this is a known and documented misconfiguration, but maybe not.

2) Even with directory listings off, cache files are by default publicly downloadable, and the key values / file names of the database cache items are easily predictable. Again, it seems odd that “deny from all” isn’t added to the .htaccess file. Maybe it’s documented somewhere that you should secure your directories, or maybe it isn’t; I’m not sure.

However, within the plugin’s support forums on WordPress.org, Otto suggested that until a fix is released, to check and see if you’re using “Disk: Basic” or “Disk: Enhanced” for database caching. If so, disable database caching and clear out those caches.

John James Jacoby has published the 2012 year in review post for bbPress. It’s been one year since the project went from being stand alone software to a WordPress plugin. So far, it looks like the project is progressing along quite steadily. Among some of the cool stuff added to bbPress during 2012 are retina support, theme compatibility, multiple user roles, private/hidden forums, BuddyPress integration, Akismet integration, and improved multisite support. Although it’s taken awhile, it looks like the community is really starting to rally behind the project again.

For those of you that are using the plugin version of bbPress, what are your thoughts on the new project so far?

New plugins

Font Emoticons replaces WordPress’ smileys with font-based emoticons.

MU Plugins Tool allows you to selectively enable/disable any MU (must-use) plugins you have installed.

Updated plugins

Fast Secure Contact Form lets your visitors send you a quick e-mail message and blocks all common spammer tactics. Additionally, the plugin has a multi-form feature, optional extra fields, and an option to redirect visitors to any URL after the message is sent.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin displays a list of related entries on your site and feeds based on a unique algorithm.

bbPress.org

bbPress.org went through a serious clean-up effort in 2012. The site now runs a minimal set of plugins, with an emphasis on supporting the project proper and showcasing it in a much more subtle and focused way.

bbPress.org’s plugin repository was retired, and all new plugins are located in WordPress.org extend. This makes perfect sense right now, and really goes a long way towards more tightly integrating the WordPress/bbPress ecosystems together.

bbPress Releases

bbPress saw the release of 2.1 and 2.2 this year, both major versions that included some pretty nifty and progressive features, such as: retina support, theme compatibility, multiple user roles, private/hidden forums, BuddyPress integration, Akismet integration, and improved multisite support.

bbPress recently welcomed Jennifer M. Dodd as a core committer, and she’s already doing great. We’ve also started doing weekly team chats, and have regulars that are helping run the show, triage trac, and follow closely inline with the successes of WordPress core.

In 2013, bbPress will see:

• Forum specific searching.
• More BuddyPress integration.
• More migrations to 2.x in the various .org usages.
• Performance improvements around recalculating metadata.
• Improved capability mapping, to allow more granular access control.
• Hopefully, another core committer.

In closing

2012 has been a great year for the bb’s. The community is really rallying behind bbPress again, and our BuddyPress users are anxiously awaiting the 1.7 release to alleviate all of their theming woes. Overall, I’m very proud about what we were able to accomplish this year, and am excited about what we have planned for 2013.

BuddyPress.org

BuddyPress.org went through another serious clean-up effort in 2012. It now runs a minimal set of plugins, with an emphasis on supporting the project proper.

BuddyPress.org’s group forums were retired. They were a fun experiment, but largely confusing to users and a moderation nightmare for site staffers. BuddyPress.org also experienced another redesign, taking much inspiration from bbPress.org and shifting focus away from evangelizing and towards supporting and showcasing what a nicely integrated BuddyPress installation can be.

BuddyPress Releases

BuddyPress saw both 1.5 and 1.6, with focus on cleaning up the codebase, gently migrating off of bbPress 1.1 for group forums, activity stream administration, performance improvements, and better single and multisite switching support. We also had our very first BuddyCamp in Vancouver, which was an amazing event thanks to Matt, the event organizers, sponsors, and all-of-the-other awesome contributors.

In 2012, we added our 4th core committer, Raymond Hoh. Ray has been a prolific contributor since the early days, and recently stepped up his game where him not having commit access was slowing him down. We also started experimenting with new default themes, codenamed Status, and Turtleshell respectively. Neither has made it directly into core, but TS is showing promise as a great compliment to 1.7 as we roll out theme compatibility in BuddyPress.

In 2013, BuddyPress will likely see:

• Theme compatibility with all WordPress themes.
• Dropping the ability to create new bbPress 1.1 powered group forums, relying solely on bbPress 2.x.
• Notifications being extracted into its own component.
• More wp-admin integration, starting with Groups management.
• Retina all-of-the-things.
• What’s New and Credits pages, ala WordPress core.
• Again, hopefully another prolific core committer.
• A BuddyCamp or two wouldn’t hurt.

In closing

2012 has been a great year for the bb’s. The community is really rallying behind bbPress again, and our BuddyPress users are anxiously awaiting the 1.7 release to alleviate all of their theming woes. Overall, I’m very proud about what we were able to accomplish this year, and am excited about what we have planned for 2013.