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How does DD32's tool determine the WordPress version of an installation. Its not working fine for WP 3.1 but it doesn't uses meta generator tag or the readme.txt of WP. So what else can it be?

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  • You could try reverse engineering it, just have it check your own site and watch the HTTP requests it generates.
    – mtekk
    Feb 27, 2011 at 21:39

3 Answers 3

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I'm just assuming here but this is usually done by fingerprinting for specific version files/directory's/code and sometimes even size.

For example you can remove all the meta versions tags ( isn't there like 12 places) and .txt file for 3.1 but since 3.1 is the only version to include the following new file by default, it is rather easy to fingerprint.

wp-includes/js/l10n.js

Since each release has many new additions, if you spend enough time writing a smart bot, it not very hard to find release specific data. Hiding all this info would be a lot of work for every release.

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  • 1
    What do you mean by 12 meta version tags? Feb 27, 2011 at 22:36
  • I got your point but +1 for Simon's question
    – Ashfame
    Feb 27, 2011 at 23:26
  • 1
    Sorry I should make that more clear. The meta version tag is inserted in several places, for instance you can get rid of it on the default header of your blog, but it shows up elsewhere. That's why you use a global "get rid of it" filter instead of just commenting out the html header output. That number is probably exaggerated though. For instance look at Otto's script below.
    – Wyck
    Feb 28, 2011 at 3:17
12

This is a bit of code I wrote a while back to do WP version detection in the most obvious ways: http://ottodestruct.com/class-wp-detection.phps

There are other methods, more subtle and less obvious. His method is file fingerprinting. Basically checking for whether certain files exist or not.

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0

I know there's already been an accepted answer, but just throwing this out there. The way I do it is parse out the $wp_version variable from your blog dir's 'wp-includes/version.php' file:

function get_wp_version() {
 $versionFile = ABS_PATH.'/wp-includes/version.php'
 // NO VERSION FILE //
 if (($versionStr = @file_get_contents($versionFile))=='') return ''; 

 $regex = "wp_version.*'(?<wpVersion>.*)'";
 if (preg_match('/'.$regex.'/', $versionStr, $matches)) {
  return $matches['wpVersion'];
 }
 return '';
}
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  • Nice but I can bump it up & if I run the latest version, I shouldn't have any problem.
    – Ashfame
    Feb 28, 2011 at 5:31
  • Moreover you should be executing on the same server for this to work. Didn't notice that before. lol
    – Ashfame
    Nov 22, 2011 at 14:42

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