This is a special release as it ends the active development cycle. I officially declare this plugin unmaintained. I don’t plan to work on it again.

The 1.4 will be the last version. Unless you send me code contribution, you’ll not see a 1.5 version.

The reason behind this decision is simple and straightforward: I’ve recently migrated my last e107 website to WordPress. Now that e107 is no longer part of my life, I have no interest in spending time and energy working on this plugin.

So if you plan to get rid of your e107 sites in favor of WordPress, do the migration now, as the plugin will self-deteriorate as WordPress API gets updated.

As usual, my plugin is available on the official WordPress plugin directory.

Here is the detailed changelog:

• Upgrade e107 code to match latest 0.7.25-rc1.
• Fix variable bleeding when importing items in batches.
• Add a new way of handling e107 extended news using WordPress’ excerpts.
• Parse BBCode and replace e107 constants in news excerpt.
• Use internal WordPress library (kses) to parse HTML in the image upload step.
• Do not upload the same images more than once.
• Add a new enhanced BBCode parser on top of the one from e107. Make it the default parser.
• Each time we alter the original imported content, we create a post revision.

This is the first time this plugin is available on the official WordPress plugin repository. This means easy upgrades for you !

I’ve heavily updated the plugin to use the latest WordPress import framework, so everything is now cleanly integrated.

This version was tested with e107 v0.7.24 and WordPress 3.1-RC3.

Here is the changelog:

• Upgrade e107 code from e107 v0.7.24.
• Minimal requirement set to WordPress 3.0.0.
• Use new WordPress importer framework.
• Add an e107 to WordPress 301 redirector plugin (support news, pages, users and feeds).
• Disable the URL rewriting feature introduced in v0.9.
• Make image import optional.
• Add an option to upload images from allowed domains only.
• Align naming conventions with other WordPress importer.
• Add a complete WordPress plugin hosting compatible readme file with full metadatas.
• Add screenshots.
• List all versions of e107 and WordPress I tested this plugin with.
• Add a PayPal donation link.
• Add a minimal FAQ.
• Add an overview of features in description.
• Update source code repository location.
• Remove patching of Kubrick theme to support comments on static pages.

A note for developpers: the reference code base is now located on GitHub. That’s were all new code must be commited. WordPress’ Subversion repository is only a mirror.

If any question, please read the FAQ first.

If Lich’ti’s domain name is dead, QPX’s personal blog is not. His website is powered by WordPress and was available at http://qpx.lich-ti.fr. My job is now to move it to http://qpx.coolcavemen.com. In this post, I’ll tell you how I’ve done it.

Before going further, backup everything, and be ready to revert back to your original situation at any moment ! What works for me will not necessary works for you…

To play nice with your visitors, you can setup a temporary maintenance page while we’re performing the migration.

Let’s start the migration by replacing, in the files served by Apache, all occurrences of the old domain name by the new one:

find /var/www/qpx-blog -mount -print -type f -exec sed -i 's/qpx.lich-ti.fr/qpx.coolcavemen.com/g' "{}" \;

If you have doubts about the efficiency of the command above, you can check the presence of the string we’re looking to replace via this command:

grep -RIi "qpx.lich-ti.fr" ./*

Then, we dump the database containing all WordPress content and config to a local file (the command will prompt for password):

mysqldump -p --host=localhost --port=3306 --user=root --opt --databases "qpx_blog" > qpx_dump.sql

And we replace all strings of the old domain by the new one:

sed 's/qpx.lich-ti.fr/qpx.coolcavemen.com/g' qpx_dump.sql > new_qpx.sql

Finally, we re-inject the modified database content after clearing the original:

mysql -p --host=localhost --port=3306 --user=root --execute='DROP DATABASE `qpx_blog`;'
mysql -p --host=localhost --port=3306 --user=root < new_qpx.sql

Now you can disable the maintenance page and test the blog to check nothing’s broken.

Again, to play nice with your visitors (and search engines), you can redirect old URLs to the new domain, with apache directives similar to this one:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName qpx.lich-ti.fr
  RedirectMatch permanent (.*) http://qpx.coolcavemen.com$1
</VirtualHost>

One of them, Maomium, was hacked last night. Someone created a user account on it then stole my admin identity to post content. As soon as I discovered the hack, I’ve put the blog down and changed all passwords which may have been exposed to the hacker (database, etc…).

Before the hack happened, my apache log show me that a person was looking for blogs powered by WordPress 2.2 and open to registration:

123.76-136-217.adsl-dyn.isp.belgacom.be www.maomium.com - [07/Jun/2007:00:51:55 +0200] "GET /category/wordpress/ HTTP/1.1" 200 2960 "http://www.google.be/search?hl=fr&q=%22powered+by+wordpress+2.2%22+Register&btnG=Rechercher&meta=" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20070515 Firefox/2.0.0.4"

This person was my hacker. As you can see he’s a belgian guy and his broadband provider is Belgacom, to which I sent an abuse request. He register himself as Waryas with his myv4you@hotmail.com email. I know that, thanks to the email WordPress send me each time someone register. Then google told me that this hack was not his first.

If you want to disect his behaviour, you can download my apache log.

This event show us that the WordPress vulnerablility regarding guest account registration is still there. So the advice given by CountZero must be applied !

In the context of my plan to move an e107-based website to WordPress, I need to take care of my RSS subscribers. To let people (and search engines) get my content via old URLs, I will use Apache redirections to do this transparently and permanently. My final goal is to have a WordPress website with all RSS feeds (blog posts and comments) managed by FeedBurner, to gather statistics about my audience.

Actually there is plenty of feeds format available in e107 (RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom and RDF) and one feed can be accessed through multiple URLs. We will reduce this incredible mess by using RSS 2.0 feeds only and redirect all others to it.

First, check that the e107 RSS feed plugin is activated. Then create an account on FeedBurner and setup there two feeds, one for your website’s news and another one for comments. Based on default e107 parameters, your news feed URL is like http://www.my-domain.com/e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss.php?1.2 and comments feed like http://www.my-domain.com/e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss.php?5.2.

Then, create (or edit) the http://www.my-domain.com/.htaccess file, and add following code:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner [NC]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(5|Comments)
RewriteRule e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss\.php http://feeds.feedburner.com/myfeed-comments? [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner [NC]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(1|News|.*)
RewriteRule e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss\.php http://feeds.feedburner.com/myfeed? [R=301,L]

This code is inspired by the one written by Mike Atlas, who had a similar issue and wanted to outsource his e107 forum RSS feeds to FeedBurner.

The first rewrite rule will redirect all URLs that start with http://www.my-domain.com/e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss.php?5 or http://www.my-domain.com/e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss.php?Comments to http://feeds.feedburner.com/myfeed-comments.

The second rewrite rule will redirect all other URLs that start with http://www.my-domain.com/e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss.php (including http://www.my-domain.com/e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss.php?1 and http://www.my-domain.com/e107_plugins/rss_menu/rss.php?News) to http://feeds.feedburner.com/myfeed.

That’s all ! Thanks to this server-side redirection, nobody will notice that the feeds have moved and no subscriber will be bothered to update their aggregator.

In my case, the only remaining task to do is to move my e107 website to WordPress then install FeedSmith plugin. But that’s another story…

Here is the changelog:

• Import images embedded in e107 news and custom pages,
• Import e107 site preferences (like site name and description),
• Better import of user profile data,
• An existing user on the blog can be detected and updated automatically,
• Fix the profanity filter bug,
• Tested with latest WordPress 2.1.3.

I’ve just release a new version of my Sapphire adaptation for K2 theme. This second release not only fix margins regarding the main layout, but also styles of blockquotes and lists (to render them consistently in comments).

Here is a direct download link to this v0.2.

Yesterday I’ve build a new K2 style based on the legacy Sapphire 1.0 WordPress theme by Michael Martine. This is the result of my love to the blue bend of Sapphire and the versatility of K2.

As you can see in the footer of that blog, I’m using my Sapphire 0.1 style right now. So if you like the look and feel of that blog, don’t ask yourself and download Sapphire 0.1 for for K2 !

To install it, unzip the archive to your /wp-content/themes/k2/styles/ folder.