As you can maybe tell by the new look, I’ve upgraded WordPress to 1.5. I’ve been very happy with the update for a few reasons:

The biggest win has been the new template system. I can create my look and feel and when wordpress updates, I won’t have to lose what I’ve done. In previous versions of wordpress I was having to update index.php every release, which caused me to not upgrade, even in the case of security fixes.

The downside is that I haven’t yet found a good anti-spam solution. By default, WordPress is pretty good about putting stuff that it thinks is spam into the moderation queue. However, on spam heavy days, I can see myself flushing out 100s of bad messages.

The other problem is that comment spammers have moved on to trackback spamming. Everyone with a WordPress blog (and many with Movable Type) were hammered this weekend with trackback spam. In 1.2.x and 1.5, trackbacks do not go through a moderation step by default, they end up right on the page. From reading other blogs that cover this, it seems to all come from one asshole and counter measures are being worked on. *sigh*

One really cool thing I found while editing has been the Plugin Manager. Its a great tool for plugins it knows about. It lets you know if they are up to date, and if you configure things properly, you can even do one-click installs of a lot of plugins.

The plugin manager led me to the MyNetflix plugin by Jimmy Oliver, which was written for pre-1.5. Since WP 1.5 comes with all the RSS functions, MyNetflix has some namespace collisions due to its included RSS library. The plugin also just dumped the whole queue, which really clogged up the sidebar as I have 124 DVDs in my queue, I would have liked to limit that. You also had to hard code the URL in the php source file, which was silly. It meant you could only ever follow one queue. So, based on Jimmy’s work I created KTGNetflix that fixes these few things. KTGNetflix requires wordpress 1.5. You can call it like ktgnetflix("your rss url") and it’ll show you the top 20 items in your queue or you can specify the limit by passing an integer argument like ktgnetflix("your rss url", 12) . KTGNetflix is now powering the netflix queue you see on the sidebar.