Now you can view this site in Safari and it’s formatted to be easily readable on your iPhone.

The home page will look like this:

You can scroll down and even look at the posts by category.
Select a post, and it will load and look like:

Give it a go, and leave a message if you have any problems.

What’s going on? Short answer – your Wordpress account has been hacked.

More than likely you have been running an old version (ie not the current one) and you have succumbed to an exploit.

The two telling signs is that you have two administrator users (one that ou cannot see), and that your permalink structure has changed. There are other things as well but they are the two main ones.

More detailed discussion can be read about it here.

First and foremost, you should be making sure you have a backup of all your files and SQL database (it should be a regular thing anyway!) before making any changes.

Note: All care but no responsibility is taken with the accuracy of this post.

To find the hidden user, go to the /wp-admin/users.php page and click the link near the top of the page to view only Administrators. The page will not show the hidden administrator, but you can “view source” of this page, and you’ll find the additional username somewhere in the HTML. The key thing to find is the user id, which then can be used with the following URL (substituting the hacker’s user id for xx):

http:///wp-admin/user-edit.php?user_id=xx

Once you’re in the page to edit the user, you can change its role back to ‘Subscriber’ and delete the bogus ‘first name’ field. (Also you’ll have to insert an email address so that you can save your changes – just enter any old email address) After saving the changes, return to the normal user list, and select this user and delete it.

Upgrade your Wordpress to the latest version, and don’t forget to change your permalink structure. I would also suggest changing your admin password, and having a read of this page to consider other actions to secure your wordpress install.

Finally, thanks to the guys at NachoTech. The post there helped me sort out and fix my WP issues without any loss of data.

Wordpress 2.5 has recently been released. It is a major update to previous releases, and I must say it has a nice feel to it. But I nearly didn’t get to enjoy it….

I realise how important it is to backup your wordpress install (and database) should an upgrade not work.

Here’s what happened:

I upgraded via fantastico, and for the last few updates, I haven’t bothered backing up my data etc because I’ve never had problems.
When I loaded up my site, yeah it looked fine. But when I tried to go to my admin panel, a message (shown below) came up:

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare activate_plugin() (previously declared in /home/username/public_html/wp-content/plugins/installer/includes/functions.inc.php:69) in /home/username/public_html/wp-admin/includes/plugin.php on line 116

What the? After asking my friend Google what he problem was, it appears to be the ‘installer’ plugin that was causing the issue. I FTP’ed into my plugins and renamed the installer folder – which in effect made it treated like a new plugin (by Wordpress), and thus deactivated. I was then able to get into my admin panel and carry on as normal.

The moral? Keep regular backups of your Wordpress installation and SQL database, as well as deactivate all your plugins prior to upgrading.
Also, backups are fine, but have you ever tested doing a restore?
Another thing to keep in mind is that I decided to try and use the backup tar file that fantastico auto generates when updating. Guess what? the file was corrupt

Evrt since Wordpress 2.3 was released, the (brilliant) plugin Ultimate Tag Warrier has not worked. To date there hasn’t been an update for this plugin, but I have managed to find a replacement that appears to work quite well.

It’s call Simple Tags. Check it out. There is plenty of info and even video tutorials that show you what it does and how to implement it on your existing website.

Long live the tag!

Well, I’ve had enough of Mambo so I’m gonna continue this site in Wordpress.

Give me a couple of days to fix it all up, and then everything will be back to normal….