Beware of Naughty Plugins

I was working on my WordPress empire, and got a bit too careless with updating plugins. I tried out a host of new things for collaborative editing, multilingual WordPress, slideshows, backups, and so on.
And then: snap! The back end was inaccessible, even to me, the superadmin. I googled the error message, as you should always do, but to no avail. En passant I found a useful tip on the site of WPML: If you haven’t done yet, generate your Nonces and Salts in wp-config. (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, safely ignore until your site starts acting strangely, then pay a geek a lot of money to fix it

Anyway, in my case (a regular 3.5.1. multisite install) it was a plugin called “Portfolio slideshow” that caused a message like “you have no permission to view this page”. Just delete the plugin and things should work again.

If not, the malicious plugin might have changed that database, and if you’re mental like me, you don’t have a backup lying on the shelve, so you have to open phpmysql and edit your options table directly (look at table prefixes and user permissions)

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Multilingual translations

For some language obsessed people, alright let’s call them language geeks, like myself, it is a slight disappointment that Google Translate’s Web Interface, translate.google.com only translates into one language simultaneously.

Sometimes I want to know it all at once (and I do believe that this has benefits for language learning, because learning an expression in different languages creates an extra association, which in turn eases memorizing the words associated). Of course there are websites for that.

The easiest is www.nicetranslator.com, which simply uses Google Translate to produce results in some 37 languages. I use it to check a word in seven languages (Dutch, English, French, German, Korean, Russian, and Spanish) and it really helps me combat the occasional frustration of not knowing a word.

Another handy way is using Google Spreadsheets, which allows automated translation as well, like so:

=GoogleTranslate(A3,"en", "ru")


This would translate the contents of a cell from English into Russian. Note that the ISO language codes need to be in apostrophes. The source value can also be “auto”. I then simply apply this formula to different columns to obtain the desired result.

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