You may well have heard all about the TimThumb issue by now, but if not; TimThumb is an image resizing script used by a lot of WordPress themes (Including us). A serious security issue was recently discovered in TimThumb which can lead to your site being compromised, so please do read on to fix this.

It is important that everyone takes steps to fix this issue. To do this, you need to do the following:

• Go here, and save this file as timthumb.php (Or just right click that link and choose “Save Target As”).
• Log into your site via FTP.
• Browse to wp-content > themes > pliablepress > admin > scripts
• Upload your new timthumb.php file over the one in that folder.
• Open the “cache” folder (In the same location as timthumb.php) and delete everything inside it.

If you are not sure how to use FTP, please contact your webhost for further advice. If needs be, tell them it is to solve this widespread security issue and they may even do it for you (Hacked sites are in no-one’s benefit!).

(Just as a sidenote; the vast majority of our resizing is done using WordPress’ built-in functionality, however, TimThumb is there for anyone who used to use custom fields to set post thumbnails)

Tomorrow will be one year to the day since we first launched. A lot has happened in the year (Not least of which is around 150 support topics answered on our support board. I’m pleased to say that not one issue has ever gone unsolved!) and a lot of great sites have been built on our themes.

However, our pace of theme development definitely hasn’t been as I originally planned. We haven’t been lazy; we’ve brought out a tonne of updates to our framework, and updated each of our themes several times as well. But in terms of bringing out new themes; we fell behind, no doubt about it.

That’s a consequence of us being a very small team here. Really, there are just two of us. And as we also do a lot of client work, we haven’t been able to schedule nearly enough time to new theme development for PliablePress.

So far.

One way or the other, things are going to change. Our first 6 months were great. Our past 6 months haven’t been so great (Support and bug-fixes have never paused at any point though! And still a constant stream of new customers, so don’t read this as an obituary either! ).

I need to sit down and work out what is best for PliablePress, and what is best for our customers.

The first step in that is buying more time. All of our individual theme purchases are lifetime payments, so everyone there is sorted already. For our Plus+ customers though, you paid for an annual subscription and as part of that you expected to see more themes than you did. For that, I’m giving everyone who bought a Plus+ membership from us in 2010 an extra year, totally free.

You don’t have to do anything to get it. Your account has already been upgraded, and won’t expire until 2012 now.

I’ll be keeping you updated here as we start to plan the new future for PliablePress! And in the meantime, thank you for joining us and bearing with us as we find our feet!

On the form, Melondome asked if it was possible to embed posts from a certain category into a page. I’m going to show you how to do it here (And it’s a great example of just how powerful hooks can be!)

You can see the end result on the Aquinas Grammar School website, where they have a Page for each subject, and the posts about that subject embedded below.

The next version of WordPress (3.1) is adding support for themes to use “custom post formats.” If you’re familiar with Tumblr, you will already know what these are. It’s a way of formatting a post depending on the type of content in it.

For example, all of your posts right now look the same. However, if you wanted to publish a quick link instead of a full article, then clicking the “Link” custom format would lay out your post slightly differently (e.g. perhaps no post title, author, date etc. or a different background color on it, or a link icon).

Some examples of formats would be links, videos, images, short asides, and quotes.

I’d love to get your feedback on how much you would use this if we were to add it to our themes. Would you prefer custom formatting for these types of content, or would you rather keep all of your posts looking consistent?

(Other things we’re working on at the minute are finally publishing our next theme, as well as designing the one coming after, and the long awaited style options. Would post formats come above these to you, or would you prefer them to wait to after, even if you do want them?)

We’re teaming up with the guys at Cool Handle webhosting to offer you a great deal; a free theme from us when you sign up to their hosting (Plus support and upgrades as normal of course!).

Webhosting is a cost that you are already paying, or are going to have to pay if you’re still thinking about setting up a site of your own. But now if you choose Cool Handle to be your webhost, then you can get your PliablePress theme for free.

The full details are on our partnership page, but there is no fine print and no catch. You even still get the full 30 day moneyback guarantee. If you’d like to look around on Cool Handle, check out the PliablePress page here!

The next version of our framework is ready. 1.2 brings a lot of new features, all of them aimed at making life for the site’s owner easier.

The video above is a quick walk through that shows you each of the new features and how to use it. If you’d like a summary though, here’s what we’ve added:

Chameleon is our WordPress theme framework. It’s the system that all of our themes are built on (And a system that you yourself can take and build your own themes from).

Lately though, we’ve been wondering if we named it right. The name is cool and it shows our vision for the framework clearly (It can become whatever it wants to become), but is that clear to anyone who isn’t already familiar with it?

I’d love to get your response to a question, if you have a minute: When you first saw/heard of Chameleon, did you know what it was? (i.e. did you know that it was a framework, or did it seem like just another theme?)