As an avid WordPress evangelists, one of the most obvious missing elements in the arsenal has been a viable e-commerce solution. While options have existed for some time, none were great, and even the best of them required tons of time to adapt to your specific needs. And, as we all know, time is money.

About a year ago, WooThemes announced its intention to change the playing field and launched  WooCommerce, an open-source WordPress plugin aimed at doing e-commerce right.

Fourteen months and several beta tests later and the reviews are in: WooCommerce is good.

The basic WooCommerce plugin is completely free to download and use. It’s built on top of standard WordPress Custom Post Types and straight out of the box, is extremely powerful with a lot of functionality. WooCommerce comes with all the standard features that you’d expect within an eCommerce plugin such as;

• Various types of reporting on sales, customers and stock
• Dashboard widgets that allow you to keep an eye on various aspects of your store from the main WordPress dashboard page
• Shipping & Tax settings
• Customers & Orders
• Product & Inventory
• Marketing & Promotions including the ability to add “coupons”
• And most importantly, various Payment Gateways & payment methods

If you’ve ever had to suffer through the frustration of developing with WP E-commerce (fair warning: don’t believe the hype), WooCommerce will make you absolutely jubilant.

The latest VideoPress upgrade rocks.

The VideoPress upgrade, which allows you to upload and embed your own videos on your blog, now comfortably handles videos from iPhones and iPads. You can shoot vertically or horizontally, and we’ll take care of rotating it for you so that your video looks great when it’s published on your site.

Yet another reason why WordPress is the best CMS ever.

An exploit that allows remote attackers to take over your Web site has been found in the extremely popular TimThumb photo-resizing script.

The vulnerability allows third parties to upload and execute arbitrary PHP code in the TimThumb cache directory. Once the PHP code has been uploaded and executed, your site can be compromised however the attacker likes.

We recommend deleting timthumb.php or thumb.php if your site will work without them. If the file exists in a theme or plugin that you’re no longer using you may want to remove the entire theme or plugin directory. After you remove the TimThumb library make sure you check that your site is still working correctly.

This is potentially a massive threat because, literally, millions of Web sites use the Tim Thumb script. And every one of them needs to be updated. Help spread the word.

For complete technical details, visit the post detailing the discovery on Mark Maunder’s site.

Saturday March 19, 2 p.m., at HackerspacePP. Dig it.

The second Phnom Penh WordPress Meetup is scheduled for Saturday February 19, 12:30 p.m., at HackerspacePP. Come as you are.

Who should attend? Anyone who wants to learn more about the world’s leading content management system.

And it’s free.

I just installed the Firefox 4 Beta. And now my WordPress Dashboard looks like this:

Other sites work just fine. And the WP Dashboard still looks good in Rockmelt. A quick (very quick) Google search turned up nothing obvious.

About a dozen people turned out for the first WordPress Phnom Penh meetup held Saturday at HackerspacePP. Informal conversations drifted from theme designing to Custom Post Types, to community building, BuddyPress and more. A few people arrived late, and conversations were still going strong at 2 p.m., when I had to leave.

The February meet will be held Feb 19 in the same place.

I just stumbled across DukaPress, what appears to be a fully fledged e-commerce plugin for WordPress.

DukaPress is a simple and free WordPress e-commerce system. It is open source. With DukaPress you can quickly and easily set up a fully featured online shop which can be used to sell digital or physical goods to customers all over the world.

That is no small claim. Shopping cart and e-commerce functionality have always been sorely lacking in WordPress. While there are a few shopping cart plugins out there, none are very robust. If DukaPress really is as good as it looks, then e-commerce for WordPress has finally arrived.

Calling all Phnom Penh WordPress Users!

I am trying to get a WordPress Meetup going. If you are WordPress user, or would like to learn more about WordPress with a group of like-minded people, please join the community. Sign-up details after the jump.

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If you haven’t already, update your WordPress installation. It’s really easy. And 3.0.2 provides a “mandatory” security update.

The haiku:

Fixed on day zero
One-click update makes you safe
This used to be hard

One click updates! Reason No. 43,954 that WordPress is better than Joomla or Drupal. Jus’ sayin’.