Question mark graffiti by bilal-kamoon

I knocked myself around trying to figure out why my plugin was not coping with ‘foreign’, multi byte, Greek, Japanese, Chinese characters.  Those damn questions marks ‘????’ – I had it all sorted before in another plugin – what was going on here ?   I had all the multi-byte functions happening.    Then I remembered – the database tables – of course!

Default Mysql

MySQL’s default database charset is usually latin1 and  thecollation is latin1_swedish_ci.  This can vary based on server configuration.  This is usually set before wordpress is installed.

Default wordpress

WordPress usually creates it’s table with charset utf8 and collation utf8_general_ci.    You can overwrite this in the config file.

See http://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-config.php#Database_character_set.

Fix your wordpress database

You can Alter the database after the fact.  This will help the plugins who haven’t figured out that many of us (you?) haven’t set up our databases as well as they could be.

ALTER DATABASE yourdb CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

Plugin authors

Make life easy on your self and others when creating custom tables.  Have a look at the wordpress db schema.  Note that there is a global $charset_collate.  Use it!

 global $wpdb, $charset_collate;

if ($wpdb->get_var("show tables like '$table_name'") != $table_name) {
 $sql = "CREATE TABLE " . $table_name . " (
 id bigint NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
 field1 text NOT NULL,
 field2 text NOT NULL,
 PRIMARY KEY (id) )
 ".$charset_collate. ";";

require_once(ABSPATH . 'wp-admin/includes/upgrade.php');

dbDelta($sql);

if($wpdb->get_var("show tables like '$table_name'") != $table_name) {
 error_log($table_name.' not created');
 return false;
 }
 else return true;

Resources:

• http://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-config.php#Database_character_set
• http://hakre.wordpress.com/2010/12/26/wordpress-database-charset-and-collation-configuration/
• http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/charset.html

http://www.exploit-db.com lists vulnerabilities found in various wordpress plugins.

It is always the ‘old’ stuff that gets you.

I thought I had done such a great job tightening up things and then seemed to get hit with some repetitive trackback spam notifications.  Since the notifications are coming from one of MY websites, they don’t get marked easily as spam.

A few minutes of googling and a timely post at question-defence.com, published a few days ago pin pointed the problem (Many thanks to google for thier quick search index updating!.. remember the old days?)

Ping status =  ‘open’

Many existing posts still had their ping status set to open.  So to stop trackback spam in it’s tracks (ha! lqtm), take action as follows:

Future posts:

1. Go to WordPress settings > Discussions >
2. untick “Allow Link Notifications From Other Blogs”

Past Posts:

1. Hop into your phpmyadmin
2. Find your posts table, note the name with your sites prefix
3. Goto the SQL view, type in

update  prefix-posts set ping_status = 'closed';

and you are done.  All posts and custom post types now set to NOT accept trackbacks.