Over Labor Day weekend, word was sent out regarding older versions of the WordPress blogging platform. A nasty worm was circulating around older WP installations by searching for them through Google. When an old (that is, anything older than 2.7.1, I believe) installation was found, this worm would create and then hide an admin account. From there, it could potentially corrupt MySQL databases and, filling blog posts with spam content. So, needless to say, it was a nasty problem that could be easily avoided.
I took over the technology side of Monticello Live a few months ago, and have been keeping things in order. The problem arose over the holiday weekend when this worm was announced—Monticello Live was running on a much older WordPress installation (try 2.4, if I remember right).
I backed everything up after checking for any worm problems, and updated to the latest WordPress build. I’ve been working on a new theme for ML for several weeks now, and figured this was as good a time as any to implement the changes. Over the past two weeks, I’ve been tinkering and making changes and building the site back to near-completion.
I hope the local community finds this refresh of the layout a welcome change, since the site has remained virtually unchanged since Jeff Nobles created it back in 2006.
I plan on adding a lot more to the site as far as web standards go, but for now, it’s running well and should be completely operational.