phpWordPress 3.25 upgrade patch released (June 2006)

The forum post of 7 June 2006 is brief: “We just released the upgrade patch with several updates and fixes.” Customers could download it from their Administration Control Panels. The post then introduces a changelog, but the archived copy of the thread kept only the empty “Quote” labels, so the list itself is not in the thread. We use the product’s changelog page instead.

phpWordPress was a commercial PHP article manager from Spoonlabs, renamed Vivvo in July 2006 and unrelated to WordPress. The release history places 3.25 as the last version before the rename.

What did the 3.25 changelog record?

The changelog’s 3.25 section runs from 17 May to 4 June 2006. The new or enhanced items are:

• An AJAX calendar replacing the standard one (17 May).
• Collapsible categories (3 June).
• An importing filter in the Newsletter plugin for bringing in third-party email addresses (4 June).
• Stripping JavaScript tags in the WYSIWYG editor (30 May).

The rest are bug fixes: an AdvancedSearch bug on the MySQL 3.x branch, rotating headlines misbehaving when the author or date fields were off, a fix for RSS validation of images, error reporting turned off for Ajax frames, and a change in how rewrite rules were rotated in .htaccess. That mix is typical for a patch release, and it tells a publisher that most of the work was repair.

What did a patch mean for publishers in 2006?

A downloadable patch put the work on the customer. Someone had to fetch it from the control panel and apply it to a live site. The news page of the same date pointed customers to the forum for details. For a small team without a developer, patching was a task with its own risk of breaking a customised template.

The sequence around this release matters. Version 3.2 came on 8 May, and the upgrade-pack problems showed up within days. The 3.25 patch followed a month later. Then, on 12 July, the news page said the product would live under the name Vivvo, which would inherit the v3.25 release, with licences and benefits staying the same.

How do publishers handle patching now?

The same questions remain, with different tools. Look at how the CMS you use delivers fixes:

1. Automatic or manual. Some systems apply minor security updates by themselves. Others expect you to run them.
2. Release notes. A clear changelog, like the one used here, lets you judge risk before you apply anything.
3. Staging. Test on a copy of the site before changing the live one.
4. Rollback. Know how to restore the previous version.

The guides explain how to set up a trial copy. Vivvo still trades under its own name, and this page makes no claims about its current products. The Product Updates board holds the other patch threads, such as the AJAX features in 3.0.1 that the calendar here continued.