In celebration of this great start, Main Street is bringing back our 5 hour labor block for the price of 4 special – for this week only. Normally our 5 hour pre-paid labor block is $500, this week it is available for $400. (Dallas area customer are still eligible for this offer.)

Prepaid labor blocks can be used for WordPress customization, support, graphic design, consulting and other labor services.

Prepaid labor blocks are good for up to one year from purchase. Time is billed in 1/2 hour increments, all labor block purchases are final, and are not refundable.

Click here to receive the special pricing.

WooThemes.com has released version 5.3.12 of the WooFramework. They report it fixes a critical vulnerability in shortcodes that has been published online. They strongly urge immediately updating all WooFramework themes. Details here.

StudioPress has released version 1.8.1 of their Genesis Framework. It fixed a potential security issue. They also recommend updating immediately.  StudioPress site.

One of the major benefits to open source code is that fact that the community can identify and fix security issues like these so quickly.

All platforms have security holes — it is a mathematical certainty in systems this complex. The difference between open source and proprietary system is that the open source community is willing (or forced) to admit to the issues when identified and quickly make patches public to everyone.

Many times other platforms will quietly fix security issues for major clients, but not release public updates for months or years after the exploit is common knowledge among the hacker community.

Feel free to contact Main Street if you have any questions about your themes or WordPress security.

We do recommend installing this update to secure your WordPress site. As always, we recommend a full backup of your site and databases before installing the update. Contact Main Street for help on the backups or updates.

Currently the new features are limited to some theme customization options and some back-end optimization and international support. This will probably not be a critical update for many existing WordPress users. We’ll get more details on the new features as the release version is finalized.

The beta version is available for download now. As usual, we NEVER recommend running a beta version on a production site, and we usually recommend waiting for a couple weeks after the final version is released before updating. This allows time for someone else to find the final bugs that were missed in beta.

As always, we recommend backing up your site before installing updates. Please contact Main Street if you help with the backups or update.