WP-DB-Backup under new management
Il Filosofo was the first to contact me about picking up maintenance of wp-db-backup, so the backup plugin will live on! If you'd like to help Il Filosofo, or if you just want to send feature requests, contact him directly, please!
Matt clarifies the security issues, which is to say that there are no known security issues with wp-db-backup at this time.
Ryan complains about the plugin, saying "That was the third security fix for wp-db-backup since it was introduced to core. It is unmaintained, and I'm tired of fielding the email it generates." I must not be privvy to the first two security announcements about my plugin -- maybe they're posted for public review on a whiteboard at the Automattic compound somewhere. As for dropping it because they're tired of the email it generates, boy it must be nice to weild supreme executive power like that. Heavens know there were plenty of questions I was sick of answering on the support forums -- a sentiment shared by all of the support forum volunteers, I'd wager -- but never did I have the luxury of simply removing the problem.
There were some very nice comments on my Autocrattic post, and some very well-thought-out opinions were put forward. Thanks for the kind words, the support, and the temperance of calm reason.
I'm surprised, honestly. I always thought that supreme executive power derived from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
*grin*
It's good to see that there will be continued updates to this fantastic plugin. I am rather obsessive about backups, and this plugin definately makes my life easier. If only wp-cron was doing what it was supposed to do, like it used to. I'll figure that one out later.
So now your completely plugin free. :-)
Joe: pretty much. wp-db-backup and subscribe2 were definitely my more popular plugins. The gravatar plugin is still used, but better options existed even before I stopped working on it.
wp-cron is being supplanted in WP 2.1 by a new scheduling system developed (unsurprisingly) by Automattic. I'm sure theirs is better, since wp-cron was always a crude hack at best, but again one sees the "not developed here" mentality at work over there...
in-series has some outstanding bugs, and is available for adoption by someone else.
Impostercide -- or something like it -- ought to be included in the core comment handling routines, and not as a plugin. non-numeric-names is only useful for folks not using Akismet or some other anti-spam plugin. (I would suggest Owen's OSA, but it seems to be temporarily unavailable while he rebuilds redalt.com.)
The bulk of the other plugins are all niche players, and aren't used by many folks (of which I'm aware). They're available for adoption, should someone want to start making improvements / updates.
Are you going to build a part of this plugin working also with files? so that new files or modifyed files could bu updated in some way by mail or other?
[...] That’s too bad for them, because WordPress 2.1 includes a new cron feature that provides a great opportunity to enhance the backup plugin. Specifically, it makes it really easy to schedule regular database backups. After taking over the wp-db-backup.php development a few months ago, I rewrote part of the plugin to support WordPress’s new cron feature, fixed a couple of minor bugs, and released it as version 2.0. [...]