There’s been a lot of controversy over Apple’s decision to ban Flash (and Java for that matter) from the iPhone since the day it was released. Now, with the iPad about to hit retail, there’s been more debate on whether this was a technical decision or not, and whether it’s a severe limitation for the devices, or a blessing. Being both a Flash developer, an iPhone OS user an open source advocate, I thought I’d weigh in on the conversation.

Before I get started though, let me point out that I’m not a fan of Flash. I think it’s a real shame that there’s no open, official standard that lets web designers do the things Flash can. Adobe has the web in an awkward stranglehold right now, and I’d love to see that change. But the reality is that Flash is an integral part of the web today.
More My thoughts on Flash and the iPad

I hate having to do this, but I’m going to be closing the comments on most of the WP-Cumulus related posts on this blog. Because some have several hundred comments, they’ve become impossible to read and I find that the same questions keep getting asked over and over again. I’ve tried to patiently answer all of them, but I’m no longer able to keep up. Blog comments just aren’t a very good support mechanism.

If your question is about WP-Cumulus, the original WordPress plugin, not one of its ports or variations, please post it in the WordPress forums. This allows others to find the answers, and chances are your question has been discussed already. The forums are an invaluable resource, and offer a much better platform for WP-Cumulus support. If you add the “wp-cumulus” tag to your thread, I’ll almost certainly see it.

I’ll also try to update the FAQ more often. It’s a little out of date, but definitely still a good place to start. Oh, and for more info, see my support page.

WP-Cumulus has been ported to quite a few other platforms. I keep bumping into it, often on sites not running WordPress. I’ve given up trying to post about all of these spin-off projects, but this one feels a little special. Gautam Gupta has created a bbPress version. As far as I’m aware this is the first port to another Automattic project (I’m still waiting for a wordpress.com ‘port’, come on Matt ).

So, if you want your forum tags to fly like your blog tags, head over to http://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/bb-cumulus/ for the download.

A few weeks ago I rushed out an update to fix a potentially dangerous Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability in WP-Cumulus. With the PHP part of the plugin shielded from ‘outside use’, I was hoping no more issues would pop up. Still, I’m glad MustLive alerted me to another issue that uses the Flash movie itself. The exploit worked by calling the SWF file directly, and supplying link with javascript. I’m not quite sure how dangerous this is, but I’ve modified the movie so it only executes regular links.

Please update your copy of WP-Cumulus to 1.23 asap. For most users it should only take two clicks.

The should not affect how WP-Cumulus works on WordPress blogs. But there have been a number of ports and other projects that use the Flash movie. I urge the authors of those projects to examine the new Flash movie, and see if it still works in/with their product. The exploit is not unique to WordPress, and they may need to modify the security check to fit their project.

I guess it was about time I updated my Tagnetic Poetry plugin. WP-Cumulus’ lesser known brother now has shortcode support, as well as several other improvements. It’s not as mature as Cumulus, but it’s definitely stable enough to deserve a 1.0 version number.

The Flash movie now has support for the ‘xmlpath’ flashvar that WP-Cumulus has supported for a while now. This affects you only if you’re attempting to use it outside of the context of WordPress, but is very handy if you do. Putting more than one instance of the plugin on a page should also no longer cause issues, and several other little issues were fixed.
More Tagnetic Poetry 1.0 adds shortcode support

It’s been a while since I released the last version of WP-Cumulus. I’ve been very busy with client work, but there were a few important little fixes and features I wanted to release. The most requested of those probably is that the Flash movie now supports the ‘target’ attribute. I’ve also made the XML path (from which the XML file is loaded) configurable. Both these features are of use only to people not using WordPress, but they were requested so frequently that I decided to add them in.
More Finally, a new WP-Cumulus update

Justin Tadlock just released a brilliant WordPress plugin that lets you call template tags (the stuff theme developers use to display things) inside posts and pages as shortcodes. This allows you to do things like displaying your blogroll on a page instead of the sidebar. Or add a list of authors inside that post you just wrote to thank them. By installing this plugin you get 40 new shortcodes that should keep you occupied for a long time .

Every once in a while a user asks me how to change something in WP-Cumulus that fits his or her specific needs. If enough people ask for the same thing (*), it’ll probably be in the next release, but sometimes the modification is so specific to a certain website or project that it makes sense to simply hack it in. Here are the five most common of those, in no particular order.
More The top 5 WP-Cumulus hacks

This distracted me from client work yesterday. I tried modifying WP-Cumulus to load thumbnail images from a Flickr RSS feed instead of passing it WordPress tags. The results surprised me, because I was expecting to see all sorts of depth sorting weirdness. However, because of the limited number of images and the way I distributed them over the sphere, you can hardly spot any quirks.
More WP-Cumulus for Flickr anyone?

I just released Footer Stuff through wordpress.org. Even though it’s a very simple (and lightweight) plugin, it’s not very easy to describe what it does. It offers you a way to add code to your blog’s footer an header sections, without having to edit your theme’s PHP files. Located under WordPress’ design tab it offers easy way of maintaining things like Google Analytics code, without being limited to just that one analytics system.

It’s here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/footer-stuff.