Ajax is a great method for loading new content onto a web page without having to do an entire page refresh. It’s sometimes used in WordPress themes for paging, loading in full content after an excerpt, or dynamically displaying new comments as they are posted.

Ajax can also be used to load more significant amounts of content, but it gets more complicated. URLs don’t update by default, which is important if someone wants to bookmark that particular post or share it. Browser navigation buttons for “Back” and “Forward” can also be an issue.

Thankfully there are HTML5 methods for dealing with browser history and states, and an awesome jquery plugin that provides some fallback for older browsers. This tutorial will walk you through the code required for a theme that makes extensive use of ajax and also point you to some live demos.
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Tim Thumb Hacker

Several of my websites were hacked this week using the TimThumb exploit. The issue has been known for a couple weeks now.

Although I had updated the majority of sites and had notified former clients, I still hadn’t gotten to some of the smaller sites yet- like my girlfriend’s food blog.

And word to the wise, your girlfriend’s food blog should always be top priority.

Hackers are using a variety of techniques to hijack WordPress sites right now, but this is how I cleaned up the ones on my server.
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Occasionally a plugin or theme will need to display a notice to users in the WordPress dashboard. This is fairly easy to do using the admin_notices hook, which shows a standard message box at the top of the screen.

Example Admin Notices

You can’t assume everyone is running the latest version of WordPress, especially around big point releases.

Simple Version Check

If you want your code to be backwards compatible (keep it within reason), you can do a simple WordPress version check with conditionals by using:

get_bloginfo('version');

Or just use the global variable $wp_version.
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