But this time, not only because this new version of Wordpress introduces very exciting features, but also because wordpress 3.2 drops backward compatibility with legacy browser (ie6), PHP engine 4 (PHP4) and Mysql 4.x (5.0+ required).

Some PHP and Mysql restrictions

Indeed, if you try to install a recent wordpress (3.2 or greater), you may face some error messages. Before proceeding, make sure your hosting plan offers :

• PHP 5.2.4 or greater (old requirement was PHP 4.3 or greater since WordPress 2.5 )
• MySQL 5.0.15 or greater (old requirement was MySQL 4.1.2 or greater since WordPress 2.9 , MySQL 4.x prior to WP2.9)

If you get a message like:

Your server is running PHP version 4.4.9 but WordPress 3.2.1 requires at least 5.2.4.

Don’t panic, you may keep your hosting plan by tweaking some settings. Indeed, some allow to “force” the version of PHP used. For instance, Alwaysdata will provide such an option in your admin panel:

Other hosting companies will allow to force php5 by using a specific command to be inserted in the “.htaccess” file located at the root of the web directory (usually “www”): “AddType x-mapp-php5 .php” for 1and1, “AddHandler x-httpd-php5 .php” for GoDaddy, “SetEnv PHP_VER 5″ for OVH, …

A bunch of new features

Wordpress 3.2 introduces a deep change in the backend: lighter, faster, easier to use… Just try by yourself or watch the video below.

For copywritters, a new editing mode where you get a “blank sheet”, without any disburbing icon or menu around.

And a brand new HTML5 theme, named Twenty Eleven, that embed nice features like the ability to have multiple rotating header images to highlight all of your favorite photos.

For all of this, have a look at the Wordpress.tv video:

Open a .iso file like an archive

As the title suggests, we’ll use a sofware able to read ISO file to explore the .iso file content. I’ve currently found the following tools able to read an ISO file:

• WinRAR, a shareware free to try.
• 7-Zip, which is free and opensource.

In both cases, you simply open the ISO file and access it through the embeded  explorer. You may drag/drop files from the ISO file to your hard-disk.

Mount a virtual CD drive

If you wish to access the CD as if you burnt it, you need to use a virtual CD drive. There are plenty of offers, here are 2 freewares:

• MagicISO
• Virtual CloneDrive

Other tools to manipulate ISO files

And you, are you using any other (free) tool to read or even create ISO files?

I’m not especially proud of this hack. However, I was getting crazy by how the category used for a post permalink is choosen. And I could not figure out a clean way to control which is the primary permalink (I hope it’s not part of Wordpress 3.0…).

You may need to set the primary category for permalink in two situations:

• First, you want some consistency among your posts, having them in the same primary category.
• Second, it’s never fun when, by adding an additional category to an existing post, it changes the post permalink!

If you wonder how the “primary” category for a permalink is defined by wordpress, the answer is quite simple: they are ordered by ascending ID. So, if you add an old category to an existing post, your existing post will have a new permalink. And if, like me, you’re using wordpressMu, you’ll discover that a newly added category in a blog may have a very low ID because this category (or tag…) has already been used by any of the other blogs.

The dirty hack

It’s really not a code-hack I’m proud of. However, as I needed something, I believe some others may need it too, that’s why I’m sharing it.

To be on the safe side, I recommend to leave this hack in a standalone file (with my active theme files, in my case), and include it in the functions.php file.

The idea is to alter the “the_permalink” filter. So, let’s add the filter:

add_filter('the_permalink', 'custom_cat_order');

Then, the custom filter function:

// Order by cat_order, otherwise by name, assuming it's a post permalink (dirty!)
function custom_cat_order( $content ) {
global $post;

// in case no post data found, do nothing
if ( @empty($post->ID) ) return $content;
// otherwise, assuming current post is the right post (dirty!)

// custom/primary slug cat order defined here (dirty!)
$cat_order = array("directory", "bonus", "blog");
// add all remaining categories (with duplicates, dirty!)
$all_cats = get_categories();

// Build an array with categories slug
foreach( $all_cats as $cat)
$cat_order[] = $cat->slug;

$cats = get_the_category($post->ID);
if ( $cats ) {
// Build an array with Post categories slug
   foreach( $cats as $cat)
   $post_cats[] = $cat->slug;
   $the_cats = array_intersect($cat_order, $post_cats);
   usort($cats, '_usort_terms_by_ID'); // order by ID
   $category0 = $cats[0]->slug;

   $the_cat = array_shift($the_cats);
   // Assuming category is in-between slashes (dirty!)
   $content = str_replace("/".$category0."/", "/".$the_cat."/", $content);
}

return $content;
}

So, basically, I’m defining the categories with higher priority in the $cat_order array, and at the end search/replace the old category slug by the one with higher priority.

As you can see, it’s quite dirty… So if you figure out a cleanest way to do it, please let me know!

Most of modern hard drives support a function called AAM (Automatic Acoustic Management), often disabled by default. Noise reduction is obtained by reducing the head speed, thus increasing the disk access time. If you prefer silence over performance you might want to enable AAM to decrease the noise level of your hard drive and slightly increase the access time.

Note that access time is about moving the head, not transfering data. So, activating AAM may have no impact to your overall system at all. Highest performance impact reported is around -5%.Thus, for a desktop computer (or notebook), it’s wise to enable AAM. In addition, enabling AAM (and thus reducing head speed) has a good side-effect: reduce the disk power consumption, especially interesting for a laptop.

Choose the best value for AAM by tweaking around the recommended one, depending on the silent level you target. Possible values depend on the drive itself (maybe from zero to 254, or only two states: 128 or 254 for instance).

Howto Enable AAM on a computer

Just download the freeware Hitachi Feature Tool, and run the setup tool to generate a bootable floppy or CD. Then, boot your computer over the created media to start the IBM/Hitachi Feature Tool. This tool makes it possible to enable, disable or choose a custom value for the Automatic Accustic Management feature, for any disk brand (not only Hitachi).

Howto enable AAM on a Linux box

Under Linux, you will need the hdparm utility. It is included in most Linux distributions, but on some “boxes”, like the Synology NAS, you’ll need to install it first.

Then, setting AAM is as simple as:

#hdparm -M 128 /dev/hda

to set a value of 128 (rather quiet) for drive hda. The higher the value, the higher the speed (and thus the noise).

The google analytics plugin for wordpress is useful: it allows to insert the google analytics tracking code without any change to the theme file.

There is however something very irritating with this plugin: each time I upgraded the plugin, I had to re-enter the settings. And more frustrating: as long as you don’t update the settings, your stats are not recorded anymore by google analytics. This is why I’m almost not upgrading it anymore

I got an even worst surprise after an upgrade of both worpdress and the google analytics plugin: I was unable to save the parametrs, each try ended with:

Google Analytics settings reset to default.

For an unknown reason, after saving, the corrupted settings were reloaded.

The only workaround I found was a bit drastic: in the MySQL wp_options table, I’ve simply erased the “GoogleAnalyticsPP” entry.

To do the same thing (at your own risk, of course):

• Access your wordpress database using phpmyadmin for instance;
• Search into the wp_options table the row where option_name = ‘GoogleAnalyticsPP’
• Edit this entry, erase content, save.
  

You should now be again able to save your google analytics parameters.

However, I could not find any ready to use PHP function, although PHP5 provides some interesting functions, like scandir().

After completing writting such a function, I decided to share it. So here is it.

Bare in mind it requires PHP5 (or later), as it relies on scandir() and on fnmatch(). Finally, this function while return the filtered directory content, regardless of the content being a file, a link or a directory.

Additional feature: by default, if you call the function more than once in your script in order to scan the same directory, it will read the directory only once: next times, it will use a cached content. To disable caching, set the third parameter to 1.

function searchdir( $path='.', $mask='*', $nocache=0 ){
 static $dir = array();
 if ( !isset($dir[$path]) || $nocache) {
 $dir[$path] = scandir($path);
 }
 foreach ($dir[$path] as $i=>$entry) {
 if ($entry!='.' && $entry!='..' && fnmatch($mask, $entry) ) {
 $sdir[] = $entry;
 }
 }
 if ($nocache)
 unset($dir);
 return ($sdir);
}

Did you find this small function useful? Do you have any improvment suggestion?

You may be tempted to upgrade your blog using the automatic function after discovering the exciting new feature included.

But, wait… There are some flaws in this release. So, you’d better wait for the patch version 2.9.1 (already available as beta).

However, unlike the 2.8.6 release, the 2.9 release is worth considering the upgrade, with new features targetting end-users, like

• Built-in image editor (crop, resize, rotate images),
• Batch plugin update (update all plugins at once),
• Trash feature for posts (now, you can undelete a post),
• Easy video embed (using a single link)

Themes designers will also get some interesting features (copied from the original announcement):

• Themes can register “post thumbnails” which allow them to attach an image to the post, especially useful for magazine-style themes.
• A new commentmeta table that allows arbitrary key/value pairs to be attached to comments, just like posts, so you can now expand greatly what you can do in the comment framework.
• Custom post types have been upgraded with better API support so you can juggle more types than just post, page, and attachment. (More of this planned for 3.0.)
• You can set custom theme directories, so a plugin can register a theme to be bundled with it or you can have multiple shared theme directories on your server.
• Specify category templates not just by ID, like before, but by slug, which will make it easier for theme developers to do custom things with categories — like post types!
• Registration and profiles are now extensible to allow you to collect things more easily, like a user’s Twitter account or any other fields you can imagine.

• The HDD is used in a Network Attached Storage (NAS) running Linux, thus data on it are in native Linux format.
• The source HDD is twice the size of the target HDD, while that actual data volume is of course smaller than the space available on the target HDD.

Trust me, doing this “simple task” turned into a 3 days (and nights) nightmare. The good side of this, is that I (re-) discovered fantastic tools everyone should be aware of. All this “Tools Suits” are a collection of useful tools, compiled over a bootable CD, or even bootable usb stick.

My advice: you should select the compilation that better fit your need and make a bootable CD now. The day your computer will stop booting, you’ll thank me

Howto Use a USB stick or bootable CD

To run a bootable CD or bootable USB stick, you may need to do more than just inserting the media. Or not. So, get a first try: insert the media, and reboot your computer. If your computer starts Windows (or MacOS, or Linux or whatever you used to run), then you indeed have to do something more.

You’ll have t tell the computer to look for a bootable external media: it’s either an option during computer startup sequence (known as POST), like pressing the F8 key like crazy on some ASUS motherboard based computer, or holding donw the ‘c’ key on a recent MacBook.

If you don’t find such option, your last chance is to go to the “BIOS SETUP” (again, press a specific key, may be [F1], may be [DELETE], may be [F10]… depending on your computer: read the manual … or the screen!), go to the “BOOT” submenu, then change the order to have your media booting first. However, remember that if you forget to change it back, your computer will always try to boot from the removable media first… if an infected media is inserted, you’ll infect your computer while booting (this is probably the oldest computer virus infection scheme: bootable floppies).

Finally, keep in mind that even if almost 100% of “running” computers are able to boot from a CD (while it was not true in 90’s for instance), some of them may not be able to boot from a USB stick. Especially if the stick is not plugged directly to the computer, but through an USB hub. If this is the case, try again with the USB stick plugged directly to any of the computer USB port.

The way to get the bootable media depends on the “Tools suit”:

Ultimate Boot CD

The Ultimate Boot CD is a collection of “DOS-Like” tools. Being “DOS-Like” doesn’t means that you will need to learn complex command lines: most of the included tools comes with a delicious 90’s  “graphical” interface:

The included tools range from diagnostic to repair, in various areas:

• Motherboard tools (CPU, memory, peripherals, …)
• Hard Disk Tools (vendor specific and universal partition and cloning tools)
• Filesystem Tools (NT password, AntiVirus, …)
• Miscellaneous Tools (Network, DOS & Linux boot disks, …)

UBCD USB stick or CD creation

To build a CD, you just need to download the ISO image and use any burn software.

To get a bootable USB stick, it’s a bit more complicated:
First, you will need to either burn the ISO file to a CD, or extract the files within the ISO file to your hard disk using a suitable utility. Then, use the included tools\ubcd2usb\ubcd2usb.bat to write UBCD to your USB memory stick. Note that ubcd2usb.bat will format and erase your entire USB memory stick. And remember: some of the UBCD apps may not work when started from the bootable USB stick.

UBCD4Win

UBCD4Win stands for Ultimate Boot CD For Windows. As it’s name suggests, it’s the Windows based version of the Ultimate Boot CD mentionned above. Once you’ve booted on the UBCD4Win, you’ll experience a classical WinXP environnement, allowing to run Windows Applications and tools.

Among the provided tools, you’ll find:

• Disk cloning and partition tools
• Anti-Virus softwares
• A bunch of drivers for various disk, LAN and other interfaces
• Disk, memory and benchmark diagnotic tools
• Some commercial tools (licence to be purchased separately)

Howto create a UBCD4Win Bootable CD

Due to the WinXP boot environnement, you’ll not download an ISO image, but a tool allowing to build a bootable CD. And you will need a Windows XP (SP1 or SP2) original CD. So the steps are:

1. Download latest Ultimate Boot CD for Windows
2. Install the configuration tool
3. Run the configuration tool, generate an ISO image
4. Burn the Iso image onto a CD

SystemRescueCD

The SystemRescueCd is a Linux system rescue disk useful for administrating or repairing your system and data after a crash. It embeds various Linux environments, from command line to graphical ones. The SystemRescueCd is available is several versions: one for x86 compatible architecture (PC’s and Intel MacBooks), one for SPARC (SUN), one for PowerPC (older Mac computers).

It comes with a lot of linux software such:

• as system tools (parted, partimage, fstools, …)
• basic tools (editors, midnight commander, network tools…)

As most of the tools are graphical, newbie should not be afraid by the “Linux world”. However, beware: Unix command lines won’t ask you “are sure?”. It will obey, whatever you ask them to do. Even erase your main Hard Disk Drive in 2 secs. So, think twice when using command line tools!

Howto burn a SystemRescueCD or create a bootable USB stick

To burn a SystemRescueCd, it is as simple as download the ISO image and burn the image onto a blank CD. However, make sure to download the correct ISO file:

• The x86 edition supports both 32bits (IA32) and 64bits (AMD64 / EM64T) processors will probably be the one for you, even if you have a Intel based MacBook.
• The SPARC edition is also available if you have an hardware based on the Sun architecture.
• The PowerPC edition is needed for older Mac Computers, but may work for other PowerPC based computing units, like some NAS.

To get a bootable stick, some more steps are required, as explained on the SystemRescueCd Wiki.

CloneZilla

The CloneZilla bootable CD is focusing on one system administrator activity: making system disk image and duplicating the image over several computer for either repair, student classroom reload or computer deployment.

Clonezilla is available in two versions: Clonezilla live and Clonezilla SE (server edition). Clonezilla live is suitable for single machine backup and restore. While Clonezilla SE is for massive deployment, it can clone many (40 plus!) computers simultaneously. Clonezilla saves and restores only used blocks in the harddisk. This increases the clone efficiency: 10 minutes to clone a 5.6 GBytes system image to 41 computers via multicasting! Duplicate IP addresses and computer names can be avoided using drbl-Winroll, also written by the CloneZilla team.

Clonezilla is using several Linux tools:

• DRBL,
• Partition Image,
• ntfsclone,
• partclone,
• udpcast

HowTo create and use a Clonezilla bootable media

Making a bootable CloneZilla live CD/DVD is pretty easy: download the Clonezilla live ISO image and burn it.

Making a bootable CloneZilla Live USB stick is a bit easier than usual: no need to burn a CD! To make your USB flash drive or hard drive bootable, first download Clonezilla live zip file and extract the files on your USB flash drive or USB hard drive. Then, make it bootable on a MS Windows or GNU/Linux computer (look at the CloneZilla instructions).

To setup a CloneZilla Server, read carefully the CloneZilla documentation!

Important CloneZilla Live password information:

Two accounts are available:

1. account “user” with sudo privilege, password is “live”,
2. administration account “root”, no password. Therefore you can not login as root, the only way to get root privilege is to login as user, and run “sudo su -” to become root.

Bart’s PE

I could’nt close this review without a mention of Bart’s Preinstalled Environment (BartPE) bootable live windows CD/DVD. Developped from scratch by Bart Lagerweij, it opened a new Era in home (and company) computer deployment. Inspired by Microsoft WinPE, and application only available to Microsoft Software Assurance Members.

So, if you want to generate your own BartPE bootable CD, you should have a look at the PE Builder software written by Bart. Of course, you’ll still need a WinXP original CD, like for UBCD4Win… which is indeed based on Bart’s PE Builder Software.

What about you ?

Do you have any experience to share using one of this tools, or even another bootable media to suggest?

Feel free to post your comments!

Each time there is a new release, you’re invited to upgrade your wordpress setup.

In a perfect world, everyone is doing so. But in our (crazy) world, you may want to defer the upgrade. And regarding wordpress version 2.8.6, you would be right. Provided you’re not concerned by this security warning:

2.8.6 fixes two security problems that can be exploited by registered, logged in users who have posting privileges.  If you have untrusted authors on your blog, upgrading to 2.8.6 is recommended.

In other words, if only you (or trusted users) have posting privileges, you may just wait for next wordpress release