ivovic

that *is* true, but with people running around chmodding everything to 777… that’s gotta be reaching critical mass at some point.

Anyway, that point wasn’t *just* about security, it is much nicer having a certain amount of allocated cpu and ram, especially now that wordpress is getting a little hungrier.

I agree with you though… a) it’s not the most important point I’ve ever made, and b) none of these guys want to pay that much per year, let alone per month.

neatening:

$sidebar = 'Default';
while ($parentid) {
 echo '<li class="widget">Parentid = '.$parentid.'</li>';
 if ($parentid==20) $sidebar = 'CLC';
 if ($parentid==34) $sidebar = 'Community Link';
 if ($parentid==11) $sidebar = 'Recycle Scotland';
 if ($parentid==12) $sidebar = 'Stepping Stones';
 $page = get_post($parentid);
 $parentid = $page->post_parent;
}
dynamic_sidebar($sidebar);

eventually when you functionize this, this should end up in your template:

dynamic_sidebar(eval_sidebar($pageid));

with eval_sidebar being your new function, which returns the name of the sidebar, given a page ID.

That dog won’t hunt

wow, that’s a real saying? I thought Dr Phil was just talking out of his arse, I didn’t realise all texans did it :P~~

lemme jump in on the dogpile too…

The real problem here is PHP itself, it makes it way too easy to build websites with hard-to-find vulnerabilities, so much so that even experienced PHP coders like those at WordPress screw up periodically.

“easy to build websites with hard to find vulnerabilities”

I’m surprised the universe didn’t implode when you said that. If it’s easy to build… then surely it’s easier to find the vulnerabilities than if it were HARD to build with it, right?

What’s your point anyway? You want something absolutely bug-free? Sorry it doesn’t exist.

The more popular something becomes, the bigger a target it is. You chose wordpress because everyone thinks it’s great. That’s the same reason the hackers are after it.

Deal, or switch to a publishing platform nobody’s ever heard of. It won’t be any more secure, but you’ll feel safer because you don’t have a big red target painted on your ass.

Trade ease of use, compatibility and extensibility for obscurity, then we’ll see you on their forum complaining that they don’t have as many nice features as wordpress.

if you’ve been hacked on a previous version, and then upgraded to wp2.5.1, chances are you didn’t clear out all your files from your hosting space, and whatever was planted there by your hackers is still there.

a fresh install doesn’t mean anything if have not changed your passwords to *everything* including the DB and all privileged user accounts on your blog, or if you allowed any files to remain on your hosting space when you uploaded this fresh copy of wordpress.

the other possibility of course, is that your shared hosting environment is poorly configured to allow your neighbours to write into your space. In that case, no matter what you do, if Joe next door is hacked, so are you.

ask your host to install an ISAPI rewrite filter on their windows boxes.

if they refuse, ask them why they bother putting php and mysql on windows boxes, if they won’t do something simple like making sure the MOST REQUESTED FEATURE EVER is available as well.

(not sure what happens if the post doesn’t have a parent?)

if it doesn’t, then the variable is empty, and the while loop is essentially skipped.

I posted that on the fly without thinking too much about it, so let me make a slight correction, which I’ll then explain in plain english.

$parentid = $post->post_parent;
while ($parentid) {
  if ($parentid==2) echo 'this is a child of the About page';
  if ($parentid==483) echo 'this is a child of a test page';
  $page = get_page($parentid);
  $parentid = $page->post_parent;
}

I just swapped the order, because what I originally posted wouldn’t have caught the immediate parent… only the grandparent (oops).

Here it is in plain english:

lets see if the page we're on has a parent.
if it does, and while we have parents to keep checking...
   Have we found an ID we like? If so, do this. If not, do nothing.
   ...
   lets pull the parent page so we can see what its parent is
   lets grab the ID of that grandparent now, so we can check it
keep looping

The loop stops when the last line inside the loop, sets $parentid to an empty value. No parents = no loop.

the reason you’re probably not getting any joy is because I screwed up the order of if-statements, and you didn’t have enough sub-subs to test with.

also, this needs to be in page.php, or a suitable page template, but I’m asuming you’ve got that covered already. If by chance you’re using this in your functions.php, you’ll have to modify it to pull the initial value (but you’re not, right?)

my original code also only checks parents / grandparents / great grandparent, not the page you’re on now… to do that, you’d need something like this:

if (is_page(2)) echo 'this is About';
elseif (is_page(483)) echo 'this is Test';
else {
  $parentid = $post->post_parent;
  while ($parentid) {
    if ($parentid==2) echo 'this is a child of the About page';
    if ($parentid==483) echo 'this is a child of a test page';
    $page = get_page($parentid);
    $parentid = $page->post_parent;
  }
}

this will continue to do absolutely nothing unless one of the IDs are matched (that is, it will just fail silently without a default result).

Please keep in mind, I haven’t tested any of this since I have my hands a little full right now, but I *think* it’ll work… barring any typos or brain farts.

record time, most people take at least an hour to solve their own problem 😉