After nearly three years at the offices in Slater Street, we’ve reached the stage where we need better, more professional facilities than those offered by simple office rent.

Slater Street is a characterful place in the middle of Liverpool’s Artistic Quarter. It also has lots of bars and some amazing people. But with that comes noise, occasional mess, and relatively few facilities.

Liverpool Science Park Innovation Centre 2

Liverpool Science Park

So, to celebrate our continued growth, to give us quieter on-site training facilities, conference facilities and a stronger infrastructure, we’ve made the decision to move into Liverpool Science Park, Innovation Centre 2.  This will give us high quality, flexible office infrastructure, access to Liverpool University’s expertise, and much more besides.

The Future

This is all a part of plans for the company.  Interconnect IT has had a successful 2009, with a growth in revenues anticipated to be approximately 75% over 2008 and the same growth for the 2010 financial year.  We have established ourselves firmly in the News & Media sectors with clients such as Informa Group and Telegraph Media Group.  We are also growing our Intranet business and developing new intranet technologies to help business improve their internal communications.

Our success means we need more space, more people and more ancillary services such as a staffed reception, on-site training and conference facilities, modern phone system and more.  Liverpool Science Park provides this, along with excellent business support facilities.  That coupled with being able to work closely with other leading technology companies in Liverpool gives us a very bright outlook even in these difficult times.

– David Coveney, Director.

If you’ve been involved in WordPress over the past few years you’ll have seen it change from being an excellent but limited blogging platform into something on which you can build much more complex websites.  We ourselves have been involved in some pretty sophisticated uses of the system – for example, over at Telecoms.com which makes extensive use of various elements of WP functionality as well as having quite a lot of custom code bolted in. Read more

This is a real-life burglar... still easier to identify than a hacker, sadly. Creative Commons Share-Alike Attribution Picture by Jofus.

There’s been a big fuss lately over the latest WordPress hacks that have targetted older versions of WordPress.

And in my view, they show the less pretty side of WordPress and some people in the community… but not all of them.  The attitude has been a straight “upgrade your blog and you’ll be secure.”

Well, I have news for you.  They’re wrong. Read more

As seen on my local WP development environment

Sometimes you’ve created a site with WordPress standard (not single user), but have had allow the site owners or users to have full admin access to it.  You have plugin and theme dependencies, and if the site owner disables that plugin, you have problems.

For example, you’ve written a plugin that carries out a certain range of syndication functions for your client.  If the client accidentally disables it he will lose money, and you will have a call-out, potentially an angry one, when he finds out.  He wants admin access, but you know he’s dangerous with it.

So, since WordPress 2.8 you’ve had the facility to create a folder in wp-content called mu-plugins.  It will work just like the mu-plugins folder in WordPress MU – as in, any plugin placed there, will run automatically.  Activation code won’t fire off, but apart from that, so long as the plugin is correctly written, everything will work.

I’m not sure if this change is a part of allowing ‘must-use’ plugins support, as suggested in http://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/10737 or if it’s also planned as part of the move towards merging WP single user and WP-MU.  Either way, it’s an incredibly useful tool for those of us who set up and configure sites for clients who are a little prone to fiddling.

Watch out for plugin updates – you can’t auto-update anything in mu-plugins, and you won’t receive any notifications.  Be aware that you have to stay on top of this by yourself, just like in the old days!

Slightly broken code, now fixed.

Those who follow WordPress closely will understand that a vulnerability has been found that, whilst not being especially dangerous, could be very annoying for some – especially for high-profile blogs.

By using a specially crafted URL, it’s possible for an attacker to force a reset of the admin password.  The attacker can’t know this admin password, it will be a random string, and this password will be e-mailed to the administrator of the blog.  However, there’s no denying that this could be annoying to the administrator.  More specifically, an administrator could be locked out of a block while some other exploits are tried, simply by resetting the password at short intervals.

So, it’s not the end of the world, but it’s an annoyance and in a few rare cases a potentially dangerous one.

To fix this vulnerability in older versions of WordPress, such as 2.7, you can manually change wp-login.php using the code shown in the Changeset on the WordPress Trac: http://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/11798 – ideally, you should upgrade to the just released WordPress 2.8.4 but if you have legacy reasons for staying with 2.7 (and many have, for example problems with widgets) then you may need to delay this.

This is the presentation given by David Coveney at WordCamp UK 2009 in Cardiff. It covers the advantages, problems and implementations of WordPress as used by the News & Media sectors.

If you need to view the slide notes (primarily for me, to be honest, but you may see some points that got cut during the presentation) you’ll have to visit the Slideshare site.

This is the presentation given by David Coveney at WordCamp UK 2009 in Cardiff. It covers the advantages, problems and opportunities of WordPress within the Enterprise space.

If you need to view the slide notes you’ll have to visit the Slideshare site. But the notes are really for me, so they’re a little messy.

Be there to get the latest news and network with the leading lights of WordPress in the UK

Last year we decided to keep quiet at WordCamp UK, on the whole, beyond a spot of sponsorship – simply because we didn’t have that much to talk about that we felt could be exciting.  But a year has changed a lot – WordPress is becoming popular for large scale blogging platforms such as The Telegraph Blogs, and for use as a news platform such as at Telecoms.com. Read more