If I wasn’t paying attention, how did I find out, you ask? I planned a sale on my jewelry website, only to find out it had been hacked. And so began my two month journey to remove/replace all the hacked code across my websites.

When I finally had a chance to start working on the jewelry website (because as is the plight of an independent contractor, clients come first always), I was able to migrate it from Textpattern to WordPress, but not without some trouble. The latest of which was fixing a discrepancy with post comment counts in WordPress.

I originally tried a few solutions, but myPHPAdmin was yelling at me… it didn’t like how the SQL was formatted for making the updates. Another quick search and I found this post: Reseting Post and Comment Count in WordPress by Ankur Banerjee. He wasn’t sure that it would function on everyone’s servers due to timeout settings, but it worked like a charm for me.

How about you out there porting from Textpattern to WordPress… What issues did you encounter that were not easily handled by the Textpattern importer plugin in WordPress?

We know that Textpattern relies heavily on sections. Traditionally, if you want to setup one section of your site as the blog, the RSS functionality for Textpattern will only add articles for that particular section. So what happens when you want to combine two or more sections into one RSS feed? Previously, you were out of luck…that is, until the aks_header plugin came along.

With this plugin, you can group sections into one feed. Exactly what I needed to do with the A Pretty Rock website, to allow feeding one RSS feed to NetworkedBlogs for its Facebook Fan page. It works great!

Want to learn how to do this yourself? Read this excellent article: Create and customize your own RSS feeds. It explains a method using the plugin aks_header to group and manage RSS feeds like ordinary Textpattern articles. Note that the Textpattern tag, “txp_article_custom”, permits the use of comma separated list of sections, which is how you get your feed to pull from more than one section.

Problem solved!

reCAPTCHA is a free service that takes CAPTCHA one step further. If you’re not familiar with a CAPTCHA, it’s a program that helps control the amount of spam received through web forms by generating tests that humans, but not computers, can pass. For example, when you visit a blog to comment and you are asked to type out a set of words, numbers, or phrase in order to submit your comment, that is a CAPTCHA.

What makes reCAPTCHA different is that they are using these web forms to help digitize material like books, newspapers and radio shows. By having humans process words that current computers find difficult reading, they are processing internet archives and old editions of the New York Times, for starters. I think this is one of the neatest ideas I’ve heard all week.

Check out this ScienCentral video explaining reCAPTCHA:

They have application plugins for WordPress, Movable Type, and Joomla among several others. Go check them out!

Have any other spam control plug-ins or addons I should consider? Let me know below!