As we face an uncertain and worrying New Year, we can at least console ourselves with the fact that we are not living 1,600 years ago, and about to begin the year 410. In this year Rome was sacked, and the empire gave up trying to defend Britain. While this marks the glorious beginnings of "English history", as Anglo-Saxon barbarians began their inexorable conquest of lowland Britain, it was also the start of a recession that puts all recent crises in the shade. Read More…

• One major bug was simply dismissed;
• A related critical bug was only partially fixed;
• A last critical bug (and its child bug) crept in at the last moment.

As a result of this:

• RSS widgets are completely broken on servers that are missing both of iconv and multi-byte string functions;
• The curl transport is broken on some servers with an outdated library. This breaks the WP cron, and with it future posting, pings, etc.

Not all sites are affected, of course. Most aren't, in fact. But for those few who are, the situation is frustrating.

Fixing your site

If you have upgraded your sites to WP 2.9 and are experiencing any of these issues, the fix should be a matter of uploading these three patched files to your site(s):

They go in your wp-includes folder; simply overwrite them as needed.

Please note that the fix to the SimplePie/RSS widget problem merely prevents SimplePie from failing when it's trying to convert UTF-8 into UTF-8. The correct fix would be that your host installs multi-byte string functions or iconv on your server.

Big hat tip to miqrogroove, who took the time to formally diagnose the curl problem, and scribu, who identified where the fatal errors in RSS widgets came from.

Customer reminder

As discussed in a previous post, Semiologic Pro users are advised to wait for WP 2.9.1.

Update: all three bugs are fixed in WP 2.9.1, so we'll be good to go with that release.

$foo = 0;
var_dump('foo' == $foo); // true
var_dump($foo == 'foo'); // true
var_dump('foo' === $foo); // false
var_dump($foo === 'foo'); // false

If your scripts are returning completely unexplainable results on php 5.3 platforms, that's one possibility to keep in mind. I initially found it while looking into memcached-related problems.

The worst part of it, though, is that it's not a bug: it's a feature.

The key highlights for old time users who haven't upgraded in a year… (Those who did will find today's earlier post on Version Checker more interesting.)

The first and most important change is a new theme. The legacy theme has lived its time and is now officially deprecated. I'll keep maintaining it until something major breaks. It won't happen in WP 2.9, but it might in WP 3.0. Thus, please do yourself a favor if you're still using it, and switch to the new Semiologic theme — code-named Semiologic Reloaded while it was being developed.

The new theme has a whole bunch of skins (nearly 60 as I write); new layouts; a custom CSS editor; it upgrades from the WP admin interface without losing your custom.css files; and many more toys that users are have been playing with since its initial alpha last year.

Migrating from the old theme to the new one is a three step process: activate the new theme, pick a new skin, and re-upload your header if necessary (the new widgets are 950px, 750px and 620px).

The second important change is Version Checker v.2. Version Checker re-invents the way installs and upgrades are conducted, allowing to eliminate the need to upgrade everything at once. This should make the software-development process much more dynamic than it has been in the past three years. As a bonus, it works without a hiccup on every host we've tried it on.

While we're on the topic, I'd like to stress that there will be no public Semiologic Pro 6.1 announcement: the theme and the plugins can all be upgraded independently, so there isn't much point in giving a version number to the package as a whole — except for internal use.

The third noteworthy change is Mediacaster v.2. It includes the unbranded FLV Player from Long Tail Video, and comes complete with Video Ad Support. The media files are now uploaded straight through WP, and the video player allows for on-the-fly snapshot creation.

Google Analytics v.4 is certainly worth a mention as well. It automatically tracks ads inserted using the Ad Manager plugin, media usage when combined with Mediacaster, newsletter subscriptions when used with the Newsletter Manager plugin, and more.

Search Reloaded v.4 deserves a note too: it's now leveraging Yahoo's build your own search engine web service. As does Nav Menus v.2, which has merged the functionality of the old Silo Pages widget — the remaining Silo widgets remain around, with new functionality. Or Related Widgets v.3, which got a significant performance increase. Or Fancy Excerpt v.3, which now keeps media files in excerpts.

Come to think of it, much about every plugin in Semiologic Pro has been updated in a way or another.

The road ahead… is for me to take a year off. :-) Joke aside, I've a new back-end plugin in the works, and I'd like to give the Semiologic Cache plugin a big update. I'll be on those two once the dust settles. I hope we'll be using both on this site by the end of the year.

Once those are done, we'll look into using those newly introduced WP 2.9 thumbnails all over the place, and adding new functionality to Google Analytics.

This is a huge milestone for Semologic Pro users. Many thanks to all those of you who took the time to test it — in particular during the last round, when I've been fine-tuning the installer.

The new upgrader shows up prominently in the admin area when new versions of your active plugins are available:

Mass Plugin Upgrader

Simply click the button when you see it appear in your admin area, and it'll upgrade each of your individual plugins automatically.

I'm going to release a batch of other plugins in the coming days — almost all of it WP 2.9-related. So be sure to upgrade Version Checker first.

The new installer works a bit the same. I'll go through the details in Version Checker's documentation. Key highlights, though:

1. WordPress, Plugins, and the theme are now installed separately, one after the other, rather than all at once.
2. Everything you need is located under Tools / Semiologic, which is available once you've entered your Semiologic API Key.
3. The mass plugin installer takes care of creating a .htaccess file, permission changes, and activating permalinks on your site.

The big news is, I've yet to see the new installer and upgrader fail on a single site. Crossing my fingers…

Please note that this is NOT cPanel hosting … this is a real VPS with real support — of the kind you've probably never had — by the very best system administrator I've ever encountered.

The Entreprise HA plan, for instance, was created based on my own requirements: that is not one private, but a load-balanced environment instead, so as to minimize the number of single points of failure.

Anyway, highly recommended — even if you're not one of the lucky 15.

Extra note for my own customers: on hub.org, you get to install Semiologic Pro in one click using scripts that I maintain myself. (Non-Semiologic Pro users get to install WordPress using the same scripts.)

The changes are massive and subtle at the same time. A quick breakdown:

• The theme has a completely new set of skins… Each color scheme has been re-defined in a rather systematic manner.
• Two new color schemes (beige and olive) have made it in the zip. v.1.0 of the theme will have all of the core skins (except shades) in 12 schemes: beige, black, blue, brown, gold, green, navy, olive, purple, red, silver and teal. I might add a few more schemes by then, e.g. marine, pink, violet… (opinions welcome)
• The canvas has got a few slight edits, but old skin customizations should continue to work as expected in spite of them. Two exceptions. One is the widget title backgrounds for the boxed skins, which *might* break; and
• The number of inline boxes has changed, from 2, 3, or 4 boxes depending on the width of the layout, to 2, 2, or 3 boxes. That one would break any custom theme if you're using the header or footer boxes bar.
• The typography got some love, resulting in slight changes to the font stacks.
• The classy skin, which is now the default skin, has been completely redone. I dearly hope it'll live up to its name.
• The Custom CSS editor got a slight improvement, in that it now has an "Extra" area where you can add arbitrary CSS. That screen also includes pointers on the theme's CSS selectors.

Expanding on the first and last points… Over the years, vocal Semiologic theme users have been requesting shadows, rounded corners… all sorts of fancy stuff. In the past year, I've mostly been hearing about easier to customize colors and (most importantly) background colors.

These new skins have been redesigned in such a way that they look "the way they should" in modern browsers that understand CSS3, and very acceptable in other browsers (read: IE).

In other words, background images are mostly gone, and it's once again easy to change background colors. As a bonus, the skins load much faster, and the zip's size was trimmed so much that I added 12 more skins.

On the minus side, it means that rounded corners and shadows no longer work in IE (except for the letter template); I can live with that. I hope you can too.

By the way… at the time of writing, I'm still not entirely happy with the boxed and copywriter skins. Basically, I hate the header. I tried white, and it felt empty; a neighboring color, but it looked weird; a saturated, slightly brighter color, but a few (red) looked horrible; and finally an unsaturated, much brighter color, but it lacks some tonic. I'll keep trying to find something. :-)

Update: RC2 is out, with yet more skins and improvements.

This serves three purposes:

1. It allows for lengthier news items when needed, rather than tiny tid bits
2. It frees my twitter account from the constraints of needing to discuss Semiologic Pro and WordPress dev news only (the WordPress news feed on this site seems to do this just fine) without being able to reply to @username when needed
3. And one never knows whether bit.ly or twitter.com will be around in a year or two, so might as well keep things in a "safe" location

I end up re-opening comments on posts, in order to keep the thing interaction friendly. While doing so, I noticed that the Semiologic theme needed a few more tweaks and enhancements on that front. I'll publish them shortly, alongside Version Checker.

• Google Flu Trends
• S&P 500 Heat Map, by FinViz
• Map of US Credit Conditions, by the Federal Reserve
• Map of Failed Banks, by the Wall Street Journal
• Global Debt Clock, by The Economist

Enjoy.

Here's how to know if you're infected.