Wordpress Arena » Plugins

How to Monitor WordPress 3.0 Security Problems through Plugins

Nur — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 17:05:30 +0000

WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world but the down side is that it attracts a lots of hackers. Make sure your WordPress installation is up to date with the latest release. However, there are a number of other little things you can do, today I’ll walk you through several plugins that will help you maintain a secure installation.

1. WordPress Firewall

WordPress Firewall monitors HTTP requests for blacklisted phrases and can email you when it finds
something suspicious. This WordPress plugin investigates web requests with simple WordPress-specific heuristics to identify and stop most obvious attacks. There exist a few powerful generic modules that do this; but they’re not always installed on web servers, and difficult to configure.

Download WordPress Firewall | Plugin Homepage

2. Exploit Scanner

This plugin searches the files on your website, and the posts and comments tables of your database for anything suspicious. It also examines your list of active plugins for unusual filenames.
It does not remove anything. That is left to the user to do.

Download Exploit Scanner | Plugin Homepage

3. Audit Trail

Audit Trail is a plugin to keep track of what is going on inside your blog. It does this by recording certain actions (such as who logged in and when) and storing this information in the form of a log. Not only that but it records the full contents of posts (and pages) and allows you to restore a post to a previous version at any time.

Download Audit Trail | Plugin Homepage

I’ve shown you a handful of plugins that help you keep an eye on your installation. Now that you know what to look for, these tools should help you maintain a fast, healthy WordPress site.

Document Sharing Plugins for WordPress 3.0

Nur — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 21:15:07 +0000

WordPress with combination of plugins, it is possible to share documents. Although, It is always very tricky for a committee or a club, finding a good way to share news and documents. The Members Only plugin from ChurChcrunch is a WordPress plugin that allows you to make your blog only viewable to visitors that are logged in.

Again, Sidebar Login from blue-anvil is useful for letting people log in without dealing with the somewhat intimidating Dashboard.

The List Child Attachments plugin will list any files uploaded to a post or page, without the user having to insert each one into the content individually. In other words, it works like a gallery, but for files other than images.

The Event Calendar (his plugin is a more enhanced version of the basic calendar provided by WordPress.) or GigPress (a powerful WordPress plugin designed for musicians and other performers. Manage all of your upcoming and past performances) will be useful if your group needs to keep track of events.

To let the group stay in touch by e-mail, Subscribe 2 and Subscribe to Comments (a robust plugin that enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries)will notify all users of new posts
and new comments.
If your group needs to review documents, the Comment Author Checklist plugin (a WordPress plugin for writers’ critique groups and any other group blog doing some kind of document review) prints a list of registered users and crosses people’s names off the list once they’ve commented on a post.

The Digress.it plugin from Digres.it and Visudo Labs lets you comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text.

Reference: Beginning WordPress 3

CollabPress Plugin – Task and Project Management for WordPress and WPMU

Nur — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 18:00:12 +0000

The CollabPress plugin builds basic project management, such as task assignments and due dates, into
the dashboard screens. The plugin includes e-mail notifications for newly assigned tasks, and it places a widget on the Dashboard displaying recent activity.

Download: CollabPress | Author Homepage

The Power of WordPress Custom Fields

Nur — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 09:42:17 +0000

Custom Fields is the most powerful tools for customizing template files, these are special fields in the WordPress database that you can create yourself by giving them a name (which can be then shared by all other posts or pages) and assigning a value for the particular post.

Custom fields are actually post metadata that is associated with the post, it can open up an avenue for custom theme display. Custom fields is located in the Custom Fields module below the post editing box. If you would like to create a new custom field, you can create a new one. The most common use case for custom fields was associating an image URL with a custom field. In the latest version of WordPress, a new template tag, the_post_thumbnail(), is used to retrieve the first post attachment and render it in the layout.

Theme and plugin developers who want to use custom fields can do so by using the get_post_meta() function

When I started writing about this Powerful tool I found a very useful and well written tutorials, so I decided to compile these tutorials instead of writing my own. I hope you must find them very useful.

Tutorials and Resources for Working with WordPress Custom Fields:

1. Using WordPress Custom Fields: Introduction

This tutorial will introduce you about WordPress Custom Fields and explain you the basic usage of this power toll.

2. Using Custom Fields from WordPress Codex

This the official documentation of WordPress Codex on the subject of custom fields. It will explain more specifically and in detail about the subject, How to use this function for theme and plugin development, and you will find other related information.

3. WordPress Custom Field Tutorial from 8164.org

In this tutorial Jin Yang explains how to customize a blog post by using the Custom Fields. He is presenting the very cool trick about how to set post background using the custom field image.

4. Using WordPress Custom Fields: Part 1 – The Basics

Perishable Press has written about Custom Field in 2 Parts. In part first he explain the basic usage of Custom Fields And he explain how to add thumnail in sidebar by using the Custom Field.

5. WordPress Custom Fields: Part 2 – Tips and Tricks

Part 2 provide more detail on working with custom fields. The article covers topics like conditional display of custom field data, and showing data only if a custom field exists.

6. WordPress Custom Fields: Adding Images to Posts

This tutorial is the part of Justin Tadlock’s series and this tutorial will explain how to add images to your posts using WordPress custom fields.

7. Add Thumbnails to WordPress with Custom Fields

Tutorial9 giving the basics of custom fields and using them to show thumbnails on the front page or on the post page.

8. WordPress Custom Fields: Laying Text Over Your Lead Graphic

Derek Punsalan shows a really nice approach to use a custom field for adding a background image behind the post title.

9. How to Easily Get the Value of a Custom Field

A cool trick from WPRecipes in which they explain how you can use the value of a custom field, Also they provided the necessary code.

10. An Easy Way to Get the Contents of a Custom Field

Nathan Rice shows a way to get the contents of a custom field by using less code. he explains how to use this Function in functions.php file.

11. How to Display Multiple Values of a Custom Field Key

Well explained article on how to use custom fields in situations where a post may have multiple values of a custom Fields.

12. Display Inline Ads with Custom Fields and WordPress

For this purpose there a few plugins are available but plugin always cost you a load on your blog database, so better way to do it manually. In this Tutorial they explain how to use Custom Fields to add Adsnse or other ads to specific post.

13. How to Add Videos to Your WordPress Sidebar

This is another post in Justin Tadlock’s series. In this article he shows how you can add YouTube videos to your sidebar, controlled by custom fields.

14. WordPress Custom Fields: Listing a Series of Posts

Justin Tadlock shows how make a list other posts from the series by using custom fields. The end result would be similar to a related posts plugin, except you would have more control over which posts are listed.

15. In Praise of WordPress Template Tags: Part 2

Darren Hoyt explain how to use custom fields to display Template Tags.

16. WordPress Tip: 3 Awesome Custom Field Tricks

Chris Cagle’s covers three things you can do with custom fields: 1) a custom “read more”, 2) awesome thumbnailed recent posts, and 3) post-specific CSS overrides.

18. Jazz Up Your Site: 28 Ways to Use Custom Fields

Raj Dash’s explains the potential of custom fields.

19. Creating Custom Write Panels in WordPress

Function explains in this tutorial how to create the custom write panels that will allow you to accomplish the same things as custom fields.

20. Custom Fields Hacks For WordPress

They have compiled a list of 10 useful things that you can do with custom fields in WordPress. Among them are setting expiration time for posts, defining how blog posts are displayed on the front page, displaying your mood or music, embedding custom CSS styles, disabling search engine indexing for individual posts, inserting a “Digg this” button only when you need it and, of course, displaying thumbnails next to your posts.

Plugins for Working with Custom Fields:

There are a number of plugins that enhance the use of custom fields. Here is a list of useful plugins that are compatible with the latest version of WordPress.

1. Custom Field Template

The Custom Field Template plugin adds the default custom fields on the Write Post/Page. The template format is almost same as the one of the rc:custom_field_gui plugin.

2. Custom Fields Shortcode

You can use this plugin to show custom fields in your posts by using shortcode, with no modification required for your theme.

3. Custom Field Images

With this plugin you can easily add images to your posts, pages and feeds. There is also functionality to display recent posts as images instead of text links.

4. Custom Field Taxonomies

Custom Field Taxonomies will allow you to enhance the capabilities of your site by making some of your custom fields act like tags.

5. Advanced Custom Field Widget

The Advanced Custom Field Widget is an extension of the Custom Field Widget by Scott Wallick, and displays values of custom field keys, allowing post- and page-specific meta sidebar content.

6. Custom Field List Widget

This plugin lists all values of a choosable custom field name, groups the values of of a post and (hyper-) links the values to their posts as a sidebar widget.

7. WP Custom Fields Search

This is a search plugin for wordpress, designed to filter posts in a more structured way than the default wordpress search. Specifically it allows multiple form inputs to be configured to search different aspects of a post, i.e. one term could search the post content, one the post title and one could search a custom field associated with the post.

8. More Fields

More Fields is a WordPress plugin that adds boxes to the Write/Edit page. These boxes contains input fields, so that additional (more) fields can be added to a post. For example, if you write about books, you can add a box where you can enter title and author, etc. The boxes can be placed either to the right or to the left on the Write/Edit page.

Common Uses for WordPress Plugins

Nur — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 13:12:26 +0000

The beauty of WordPress is its extensibility. It is possible to make WordPress do just about anything you can think of with plugins. This is the list of Plugin categories to help you expand your site. It has included the specific plugin names to make it easier when you want to extent and searching fr the plugins.

1. Social Networking

With the help of Social networking plugin, Visitors can publish about your site on their profile page while clicking on any particular social media icon from your site. Thats is why Social networking plugins are the hottest topic for plugin developers. Here is the list of major Social media Plugin for WordPress but never install all of these because it will cost you load on your website. So Be careful on your selection.

Digg Digg:

Will let you quickly add the Digg button to your posts with commands for left or right float, before and after content and a few other tweaks.

Digg This:

This particular Digg plugin only adds the Digg button if it detects that your post has been submitted to the popular site.

DiggZ-Et:

Allows you to automatically insert Digg buttons into the pages and posts of your choice. Also lets you choose where the button will show up in the post, amongst other options.

Dugg Widget:

Will place a widget in your sidebar that displays the last 10 posts from your blog that have made it on Digg.

FriendFeed Activity Widget:

Share your FriendFeed activity with readers on your blog.

FriendFeed Comments WordPress Plugin:

This plugin is used by Mashable and displays the number of times an articles has been marked as “Favorite” and will display the actual comments from the FriendFeed discussion on your site.

Stumble Reviews:

Allows you to add the reviews that appear on StumbleUpon for a given page to be displayed on that page.

Twitter Updater:

Send a Tweet to your Twitter account anytime you publish a new post to your blog, will automatically shrink it down via TinyURL.

WordPress Twitter Widget:

Displays your Twitter feed in your sidebar and can turn “@username” and other info into links, while also displaying user avatars.

WP-Profilactic:

Allows you to build a page around your Profilactic lifestreaming account so your blog readers can follow all of your links to nearly 200 possible social accounts.

obsocialbookmarker:

Allows you to add the submission links for multiple social sites such as Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon and more.

ShareThis:

Easily adds the well-known green ShareThis icon to your blog, allowing people to quickly submit your articles to the most popular social sites or just email them to their friends.

Sociable:

This plugin allows you to add a dizzying number of social submission icons to the bottom of your blog posts. If you activated all of them, your blog posts would certainly be colorful!

Social Bookmarking RELOADED:

Adds numerous social bookmarking icons to your posts and/or pages, available in English or Italian.

Social Bookmarks:

Gives you 50 social bookmarking submission icons to choose from including all of the major bookmarking services and several smaller ones.

SociBook:

Adds over 60 social bookmarking sites to your site by simply clicking on the name of each you want.

SocioFluid:

While it does what many other plugins do by adding social bookmarking icons to the bottom of your posts, it keeps them small until the user passes their mouse over the icon and then enlarges. Is definitely one of the more visually interesting solutions out there.

WP PunchCard:

Puts 40 social bookmarking sites into as small an area as possible to conserve space in your posts. Supports the usual major sites and others such as Yahoo My Web, Squidoo and more.

Follow Me:

Adds a sidebar hub for your social networking profiles such as Digg, Twitter, YouTube, Mixx and more.

Meet Your Commenters:

Takes the information your commenters leave and shows you their social networking profiles in your dashboard so you can add them and get to know them more.

Retaggr:

Make a virtual business card for yourself that includes links to your most important social network profiles and include more information about yourself.

SocialBoaster:

Turns your Digg, Twitter and Delicious activities into a blog post that will be shared on your blog.

Social Homes:

Adds favicons to your sidebar for your various social networks so that your readers can easily find you on those social networks.

2. Mobile

WordPress Mobile Edition is a plugin and a theme — the plugin detects if someone is viewing your site
on a mobile device and switches them to the special theme that is designed for mobile viewing. You can
update the list of devices detected.

WPhone:

With the help of this plugin administer your WordPress site through a mobile device, WPhone can help by giving you the choice at login of viewing the admin screens in a special format.

WPtouch:

More than just a plugin, WPtouch is a mobile theme for your WordPress website.

WordPress Mobile Pack:

The WordPress Mobile Pack is a complete toolkit to help mobilize your WordPress site and blog. This plugin offers a combination of viewer and admin interfaces, plus automated features like cached image scaling, splitting posts into multiple pages, and special widgets aimed at mobile users.

MobilePress:

This is a free WordPress plugin which turns your WordPress blog into a mobile friendly blog when viewed on a cell phone. MobilePress also allows you to create custom mobile themes for different handheld devices and mobile browsers such as the iPhone, Opera Mini and Windows Mobile.

WordPress Mobile Edition:

WordPress Mobile Edition is a plugin that shows an interface designed for a mobile device when visitors come to your site on a mobile device.
Mobile browsers are automatically detected, the list of mobile browsers can be customized on the settings page.

Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for WordPress:

Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for WordPress is a plugin that allows you to mobilize your blog in minutes.
Every single mobile device is detected and all aspects of your blog are tailored to the visiting handset. Sites aren’t dumbed down to the lowest common denominator but instead use the features and functionality that advanced phones offer.

WordPress PDA & iPhone:

This plugin helps the users to view your blog in a pda and iPhone browser. iPhone is still in beta testing state. Soon more updates will follow.

Mobilize by Mippin wordpress plugin:

The Mobilize by Mippin WordPress Plugin is a configuration free add on. Once installed any cell phone accessing your URL will be redirected to the Mippin rendering of your blog. Mippin renders perfectly for every cell phone type. Even the iPhone renders your blog better and faster than going to the direct PC URL.

Wetomo WordPress to Mobile:

Wetomo (Web to Mobile) is a service that allows publishers to display their existing web content to users on mobile phones and other handheld devices. This plugin detects when a user is on a mobile phone and automatically redirects them to Wetomo, which acts a a proxy between the mobile phone and the WordPress site and adapts the web site content to the mobile phone capabilities.

Quick SMS:

Quick SMS allows visitors to your blog pages to send you SMS messages direct to your mobile phone, wherever you are. All you need is a mobile phone registered with one of the supported networks.

WP-WAP:

Browse your WordPress’s blog entries on a WAP enabled mobile phone.

MobileZone Free WordPress Theme:

MobileZone is an ultimate web 2.0 free wordpress theme for mobile lovers. This theme is very selected for mobile related wordpress blogs. This is Magazine Style based Wp Theme with pre installed Twitter plugin.

3. Ad Managers

Ad management plugins for WordPress roughly fall into two categories: those that manage ads delivered
through networks and those that manage both network ads and ones from your own advertisers.

WP125:

This is a great plugin that can be used in two manners. You can selling your own ad space for 125 x 125 graphic ads or you can use it as affiliate sites banners.

Advertising Manager:

This is the plugin previously known Adsense Manager. This one will manage and rotate ads from Google Adsense as well as Adbrite, Adify, AdGridWork, Adpinion, Chitika, Commission Junction, CrispAds, OpenX, ShoppingAds, Yahoo!PN and Widgetbucks.

Smart Ads:

Smart Ads automatically inserts advertisements like Google’s Adsense above and below your post content. These advertisements are only visible when viewing a single post (single.php or page.php). Since it doesn’t make sense to fill small posts with ads, users can set a “Wordcount” minimum for their advertisements.

WP Tag Ads:

Start making money with your blog today with WP Tag Ads! WP Tag Ads is a way to display eBay auctions on your WordPress blog. This is a unique plugin that uses the tags on your blog entries to display eBay products based on those keywords on your post.

All in One Adsense and YPN:

This is a Free and Open Source WordPress plugin which is able to automatically insert google adsense ads or yahoo publisher network (YPN) ads in to your posts on the fly.

Ads For Old Posts:
This plug-in automatically inserts an ad block in your posts once they’re past a certain age.

OIO Publisher:
An ad manager that focuses on maximising your revenue, saving you time, and keeping you in complete control of your ad space. The php-script can be used to sell and serve ads and it is also available as a ready-to-be-used WordPress plugin.

Ad Management Tutorials And Articles

Which Ad Manager Plug-In Makes Managing Ads Easiest?
This article provides a great comparison of ad management plug-ins for WordPress, listing the pros and cons of each.

Blogtalks.net

A collection of articles about managing ads on your blog, including “How to track clicks” and “Tips for using OpenAds with WordPress.”

How to Integrate Advertising into Your Blog
A great overview of things to consider when integrating advertising in your blog, as well as some practical how-to information.

How to Set Up Google Ad Manager on Your Blog/Website
Comprehensive overview and set-up instructions for using Google Ad Manager on your website or blog.

Banner Rotator
Another PHP tutorial on showing rotating banner ads on your website. This one stores information about the ads and the views that each ad gets in a MySQL database.

Rotating Banner Ads Using a Database
An ASP tutorial on creating a database-driven banner-ad rotation script.

Dynamic Banner Administration
A comprehensive ASP tutorial on putting rotating banner ads on your website.

4. Search Engine Optimization

There are many plugins that can help you with this task, and the granddaddy of them all is All in One SEO Pack. for more detail look at this article. Some SEO plugins focus on particular tasks, such as SEO Title Tag, which let’s you create search-engine friendly HTML title tags (your page may be titled About, but the title tag needs more detail). If you want to have easy control over how search engines index your site, Robots Meta is a very powerful plugin. If you’ve just installed WordPress you might consider the SEO Automatic WP_CORE_TWEAKS plugin which helps you take care of lots of little things, like switching the default post category from Uncategorized, getting rid of the Hello World post, and other little details.

All in One SEO Pack:
One of the most popular plugins ever for WordPress, this plugin does a bit of everything for you from helping choose the best post title and keywords, to helping you avoid duplicate content and more.

Automatic SEO Links:

Automatic SEO Links allows you to choose a word or phrase for automatic linking, both internal and external, set anchor text, choose if it should be “nofollow” or not, and more. One of the best features of this plugin is that it will only do this for the first occurrence of a word in a post so you don’t have to worry about spamming your post with numerous links to the same thing.

Google XML Sitemaps:

An essential tool in any blogger’s armory of SEO tools. While the name only mentions “Google,” this plugin creates an XML-sitemap that can be read by Ask, MSN and Yahoo also.

HeadSpace2:

This plugin allows you to install all sorts of meta-data, add specific JavaScript and CSS to pages, suggests tags for your posts and a whole lot more.

Meta Robots WordPress plugin:

An easy solution for adding robot metadata to any page you choose on your blog. You can use it to make your front page links into “nofollows,” prevent indexing of search pages, disable author and date-based archives, prevent indexing of your login page and numerous other feature

Nofollow Case by Case:

This plugin allows you to strip the “nofollow” command from your comments, and then you can apply it to only the comments you don’t wish to support.

Platinum SEO Plugin:

The Platinum SEO Plugin offers you such features as automatic 301 redirects for permalink changes, auto-generation of META tags, post slug optimization, help in avoiding duplicate content and a host of other features.

Redirection:

For any number of reasons you sometimes need to move a page from one spot on your blog to another, but then you risk losing that page’s status in search results. Redirection helps you with your 301 redirects, captures a log of 404s so you can work on correcting them, sets up an RSS feed for errors and more.

SEO Blogroll:

Do you worry that the people you link to in your blogroll are feeding off of your PageRank? With SEO Blogroll you can make separate sections for various groupings of links, with an unlimited number in each, and all of them will receive the “nofollow” attribute.

SEO for Paged Comments:

With the introduction of paged comments in WordPress 2.7, there was a potential problem with search engines thinking you had duplicate content as the post would appear on each page. This plugin aims to take care of this issue for you until the folks at WordPress change things up.

SEO friendly and HTML valid subheadings:

Some themes for WordPress will confuse your sub-header tags based on the page they are to be displayed on, but this plugin will automatically reset them to make them more SEO friendly by moving them down one spot in the hierarchical tree. In other words, h2 becomes h3, h3 becomes h4 and so on.

SEO Friendly Images:

Images can be a great source of traffic as people search for images of various subjects, and this plugin helps you with making sure that you have “alt” and “title” tags on all of your images so that the search engines can properly index them.

SEO No Duplicate WordPress Plugin:

If you must have duplicate content on your site for whatever reason, SEO No Duplicate will allow you to state which version of the post search engines should index while ignoring the others.

SEO Post Link:

The post slug is the blog title you see in a browser’s URL bar, and if it’s too long, search engines won’t take a liking to it. SEO Post Link comes with an already populated list of words to cut from a title when it turns into a URL to make your post addresses that much friendlier. You can set it so that it’s limited to a certain number of characters, cut short words, cut unnecessary words and more.

SEO Smart Links:

Interlinking your blog can be the key to getting more people to read more of your posts, but it is time consuming and tedious to do it by hand. SEO Smart Links does this for you automatically when you tell it what words to link to what URLs, and it also allows you to set “nofollow” and “open in window” comands for the links.

SEO Tag Cloud Widget:

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, a lot of people use tag clouds on their blogs. Since their inception they have been fairly unreadable by search engines, but with this plugin they will be converted to an SEO-friendly HTML markup that can be indexed.

SEO Title Tag:

Your tags are an important part of your site for making sure that search engines know where to place your posts, and SEO Title Tag focuses exclusively on this. Unlike some other plugins, and WordPress itself, this extension will allow you to add tags to your pages, your main page and even any URL anywhere on your site.

Simple Tags:

An extremely popular plugin that focuses on helping you choose the best tags for your posts by offering suggestions, auto-completion of tags as you type, an AJAX admin interface, mass tag editing and a whole lot more.

Sitemap Generator:

This is a more customizable sitemap generator than most with options to support multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, permalink support, choices on what to display, options to show number of comments and more.

TGFI.net SEO WordPress Plugin:

This particular plugin will do most of the usual SEO work of optimizing titles and keywords, but it adds a unique twist as it is mainly directed at people who use WordPress as a CMS.

5. E-commerce

There are so many excellent open source shopping programs are available that it can be difficult to justify
all the work needed to create WordPress plugins that will match their power and sophistication. read more how to create and useful plugins for e-Commerce at How to use WordPress as an E-Commerce Store.

6. Podcasting and Videos

There is an excellent WordPress Plugin for video sharing, it’s well worth installing a plugin to help display and manage them. One of the most powerful for managing videos is wordTube. For more Video and Podcasting kindly read this article How to Add Podcast to your WordPress Blog.

7. Comment Enhancement

Comments are an important part of the interactivity and sense of community that you’re trying to make. One of the best plugin which keep your visitors connected to your site is to use a plugin like Subscribe to comments. The detail along with other Plugins are giving bellow.

CommentLuv:

Plugin to show a link to the last post from the commenters blog by parsing the feed at their given URL when they leave a comment. Rewards your readers and encourage more comments.

Comment Redirect:

Redirect commenters who just made their first comment to a page of your choice. This plugin is a kind way to redirect readers to a thank you page.

WordPress Thread Comment:

This Plugin is an enhancement for WordPress’s comment function. It enables users to reply on a exist comment, and the discussion will be displayed threaded or nested.

Comment Relish:

Visitors love interaction, especially a personable approach at gaining their attention and spiking their interests. Comment relish is a WordPress plugin developed to send an e-mail message to users who comment on your website who have never commented before.

WP Twitip ID:
Adds another field to the comment form to allow the user to include their twitter id.

Subscribe To Comments:

Subscribe to Comments is a robust plugin that enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries. The plugin includes a full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts, block all notifications, or even change their notification e-mail address

8. Spam

By default, WordPress comes with an anti-spam plugin called Akismet for which you’ll need an API
Key from WordPress.com, for more detail read “How To Stop Image Hotlinking through .htaccess” and “Stopping spam with reCAPTCHA”

I suggest you search the WordPress.org plugins directory and get a feel for the variety of functions WordPress plugins can perform for your site.

References:

Canonical URLs effects on WordPress Blog

Nur — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 10:43:58 +0000

Before explaining the effects of Canonical URLs on your blog, let me tell you the definition of this term according to Wikipedia “URL normalization (or URL canonicalization) is the process by which URLs are modified and standardized in a consistent manner. The goal of the normalization process is to transform a URL into a normalized or canonical URL so it is possible to determine if two syntactically different URLs are equivalent”.

Canonical URLs, The word derives from the word canon, which describes law and genuineness. The problem with many blog platforms is that the same content often appears in different places on a site, with exactly the same presentation but an entirely different URL.

The Canonical URL for WPArena is now http://wparena.com. This doesn’t mean that we won’t get the visitors that type in the www’s. If you go to http://www.wparena.com you’ll see in the address bar that you were automatically redirected to http://wparena.com. This is why it doesn’t really matter which you choose.

URLs with www as well as those without it, They are treated as duplicate content by Search Engines and the version found to be non-authoritative is penalized. Canonical URLs redirects were added to WordPress in version 2.3 to help alleviate this problem. Now WordPress take it single URL either it is with WWW or Without it, What you have set in General setting of your blog. A Blog Address setting to use the www or the non-www version of the domain, both are equally fine, so it is merely a personal choice.

How Google searches your Blog:

Analyze the result of your blog by typing n Google search :
1. site: wparena.com
2. site: www.warena.cm
This will give you a result of how many pages Google knows about.

A concise representation of Google’s basis to create the order of the search results displayed on SERP:

For example, you can see that my site, has 845 results for the non-www version of my domain. It is a well-indexed site and those numbers are right on track. Yahoo! shows 8,770 results while Bing shows nearly 266 results. Here Yahoo search engine love to index pages with www and without it. It also index the pages of you links n other sites, it means Yahoo index your backlinks.

Google Webmaster Tools

Tell google which version you want to use for your blog and it should be same as you set in your WordPress Blog. If you tell WordPress one thing and Google another, you will prevent your site from being indexed.

To set up the proper URL redirection for your site, follow these steps:

WordPress Setting:

1. In WordPress Admin, choose General setting.
2. In Blog address field type your blog’s URL in the forrmat which you want e.g. http://wparena.com and save your setting by clicking on Save Changes.

Google Webmaster Tools Setting:

1. Log in to Google Webmaster Tools.
2. Click the plus sign next to Site Configuration to expand the Site Configuration menu. Select the Setting link
3. Under preferred domain, select the Display URLs as wparena.com option and save your setting to complete the process.

The All in One SEO plugin

This is an excellent plugin, it automatically takes care of much of search engine optimization. Download All in One SEO Plugin.
After activating the plugin, go to “All in One SEO” under setting, and change setting according to your requirment as follow:

1. Home Title

If you leave it blank, the normal Blog Title is used instead.

2. Home Description

If you leave the Home Description field blank, it defaults to the Blog Tagline set under General Description.

3. Home Keywords

Like Home Description, the Home Keywords field controls a meta tag. Make sure you list all your keywords as
comma-separated values.

4. Canonical URLs

Be careful while enabling this option and get more information on risks for using this feature at Canonical Url Errors with All-in-One SEO WordPress Plugin.

5. Rewrite Titles

Select this option because the title tag will always be rewritten to make the most sense from an SEO point of view.

6. Title Formats

Be careful in this area because “placeholder words” are used to represent key data points.
By default, the following formats are used:

Post Title Format = %post_title% – %blog_title%
Page Title Format = %page_title% – %blog_title%
Category Title Format = %category_title% – %blog_title%
Archive Title Format = %date% – %blog_title%
Tag Title Format = %tag% – %blog_title%
Search Title Format = %search% – %blog_title%
Description Format = %description%
404 Title Format = Nothing Found for %request_words%
Paged Format = Part %page%

7. Use Categories for META Keywords

You have the opportunity to append the categories a single post is in, because these keywords can be appended into the meta keywords field as well, which will help search engine

8. Dynamically Generate Keywords for Posts Page

The Dynamically Generate Keywords for Posts Page option is not required because WordPress will automatically do this.

9. Noindex Options

Eeliminating certain pages from being indexed by the search engine and also help avoiding duplicate content penalties.

10. Autogenerate Descriptions

Selecting this option enables it to automatically create a description that fits the blog post.

11. Additional Headers

This is not important relevant to SEO, it can help you to insert extra text or tags into the header.

12. Log important events

It will make a log file for important events, making, deleting editing posts.

At the end we can conclude that WordPress handles canonical URLs automatically. Configuring the All in One SEO plugin will solve many SEO challenges.

References: seodesignsolutions, semperfiwebdesign

Stopping spam with reCAPTCHA

Nur — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 09:53:08 +0000

The most useful spam fighting plugins are reCAPTCHA and Bad Behavior. The reCAPTCHA plugin check the commenter is a human or spam bot and Bad behavior makes a list of known spammers and block them from commenting on or accessing your site.

1. Stopping spam with reCAPTCHA

CAPTCHA actually stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. The aim of reCAPTCHA is to make a CAPTCHA that can be read by most humans but is too difficult for OCR (Optical Character Recognition) bots to correctly interpret.

1. Sign up for an account at recaptcha.net and add your blog they will provide you two free keys for your blog. This is a global key. It will work across all domains. Make a note of the two keys, as you will need them later.

2. Download the recaptcha Plugin and other code from reCAPTCHA plugins and libraries or Download WordPress Plugin from WordPress.org

3. Extract, Upload and activate reCAPTCHA plugin from Site admin.

4. Go to reCAPTCHA setting and add your Public Key and Private Key because without entering these keys it will not activated properly.

5. According to your requirement Enable reCAPTCHA for comments, Hide reCAPTCHA for registered users who can Publish Posts, and Enable reCAPTCHA for registrations.

Useful Tutorial, Tips and Plugins for WordPress Blogs Security

Nur — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 11:06:24 +0000

The downfall of using the most popular blogging platform out there is that WordPress blogs are targets for hackers. If you will not keep your blog up to date , some hackers could exploit a know security vulnerability in your blog. I’ve seen this situation happen to very savvy bloggers, so don’t think that it can’t happen to you.

Usually, a hacker looking for vulnerable installations of WordPress. When it finds a vulnerable blog, they exploit the vulnerability to access your blog and insert links to various sites of ill repute. This technique is an effort to use your blog to increase those sites’ Google PageRank scores.

Problems always comes up, but never lost the hope when you encounter a problem. Don’t panic—in this section, I outline a few simple tips, Tutorials and few Plugins that should get you out of many common jams.

1. Link Injection

SQL injection is a code injection technique that exploits a security vulnerability occurring in the database layer of an application. Hackers look for known exploits (SQL Injection, folder perm etc). This allows them to insert spam files/links into you WordPress Themes, plugins and core files.

CSS can Hide the Spam as follow:

and the result would be:

Website was dropped by Google completely
Page-rank would go down from 6 to 5
Hack also infected phpBB forums links
Organic traffic for “fishy things” started showing up

2. Do not use the admin account

Change the user name “admin” in Mysql, run this query in your mysql admin

update wp-users set user_login=’newuser’ where user_login=’admin’;

or create a new /unique account with administrator privileges.

1. Create a new account with unique username
2. Assign as an administrator role
3. Log out and log back in with New account
4. Delete admin account

Be careful while confirming the Deleting of admin account because it will ask you to delete all Posts and links related to that account as follow:

3. Secure with File and Folder Permission

1. File should have 644 permision
2. Folder Permission should be 755

Permission can be set Via FTP as follow:

or Via Shell access with the following comments

find[your path here] -type d -exec chmod 755{} \;
find[your path here] -type f -exec chmod 644{} \;

4. Move the we-config.php file

Up to WordPress 2.6, the software has the abillity to check your wp-config.php on root directory, which will make impossible to find or access your wp-config.php file.

So you can change the location of your wp-config.php file from
puplic_html/wordpress/wp-config.php
To
puplic_html/wp-config.php

5. Remove WordPress Version from Header

Find in header.php this line and remove it.

” />

6. Stay on Updates

Keep WordPress core, plugins and theme files up to date

7. Use Secure Password

Password Generator to create good, secure passwords: goodpassword.com

An other excellent article on How To Make a Simple Password 580 Million Years Hacker

8. Use Secret Key

A secret key is a hashing salt which makes your site harder to hack by adding random elements to the password

1. Edite wp-config.php
2. Visit https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1
Get your key and replace it in wp-config.php

9. Change WordPressTable Prefix

1. Change wp-config.ohp before installing WordPress
2. Change the prefix wp_ to something unique:

How To Change WordPress Table Prefix

Other resource:

Protect WordPress Against Malicious URL Requests
13 Vital Tips and Hacks to Protect Your WordPress Admin Area
Firewalling and Hack Proofing Your WordPress Blog

Plugins for Protecting WordPress Blog

1. WP security Scan

Scans your WordPress installation for security vulnerabilities and suggests corrective actions.

2. Semisecure Login Reimagined

Semisecure Login Reimagined increases the security of the login process by using a combination of public and secret-key encryption to encrypt the password on the client-side when a user logs in.

3. Login LockDown

4. WordPress File Monitor

Monitors your WordPress installation for added/deleted/changed files. When a change is detected an email alert can be sent to a specified address.

5. Stealth Login

This plugin allows you to create custom URLs for logging in, logging out, administration and registering for your WordPress blog.

How to Customize fonts in WordPress blog with CSS3

Nur — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 01:28:18 +0000

Before start, Would like to tell you a very important thing that Font designers work very hard to create fonts, their work is copyrighted and licensed. Thats why, keep in mind before embedding any font into your site, make sure you’re using truly “open” and free font or have the right to use them in your blog.

Fonts type that can be used for Safari, Chrome and Firefox3.1+ are .ttf(True Type Font) and .otf(open type font). Both support the @font-face rule that allows stylesheet to point to a .ttf or .otf on server. IE has little problem with .otf. After declaring the @font-face rule give reference(I hope you know how to give reference in stylesheet ) to your required font-family property in your stylesheet as following:

  @font-face {
   font-family: MEgalopolis Extra; src: url(‘MEgalopolis-Extra.otf');
   }
  h3 { font-family: MEgalopolis Extra, sans-serif; }

Reference:
@font-face {
 font-family: MEgalopolis Extra;
 src: url('MEgalopolis-Extra.otf');
}

Example:

MEgalopolis Extra

The drawback of embedding fonts in stylesheet is again licensing and infringement issues which you can handle with the sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) method. There is a well explained article on sIFR implementing the core method, you can find it at Mike Industries’s Blog “sIFR 2.0: Rich Accessible Typography for the Masses“.
There are lots of websites where you can find Free and useful resources.

1. For @Font-face friendly fonts: Font Squirrel

2. Fonts available for @font-face embedding: Web Fonts

3. OpenType for your desktop and webfonts: Font Spring

Font resource Compilation:

1. 75+ Excellent Free Fonts For Professional Design

In this article tripwire magazine presents an overview of more than 75 excellent free fonts you should consider using for your designs. Not all free Fonts are worth using but the Fonts listed in this article have all been picked out because they are better than the rest.

2. 20 High Quality Free Fonts for Designers

Here are 20 high quality free fonts for you to use in your designs. In this selection, you will find a variety of styles.

3. 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

4. 50 Amazing Free Fonts For Designers

They have rounded up some of the top favorites of designers around the world. These fonts can fall in all categories when put to creativity by users with your wildest imagination.

5. 104 Free Fonts for Web Designers and Logo Artists

You’ll find Over 100 Free Downloadable Fonts for Web Designers and Logo Artists by which you can save money and focus on making great applications.

6. Top 20 Sites To Download Free Fonts

A list of most recommended and visited sites to download free fonts.

Customize Fonts through WordPress Plugin:

1. 10 WordPress Plugins For Enhancing Typography

2. AutoTTF WordPress Plugin for Rendering True Type Fonts

3. Custom Fonts WordPress Plugin (v 5)

Useful Tooltips Tutorials and jQuery Plugins

Nur — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 06:15:37 +0000

The tooltip is a common graphical user interface element. It is used in conjunction with a cursor, usually a mouse pointer. The user hovers the cursor over an item, without clicking it, and a tooltip may appear — a small “hover box” with information about the item being hovered over.

I have compiled few tutorials and jQuery Plugins for Tooltips.

1. TinyTips – Lightweight jQuery Plugin for Tooltips

TinyTips is a very lightweight jQuery plugin that gives the ability to add tooltips to pretty much any element on a page. Thoroughly documented and designer friendly.

Demo | Download: Development Version, Production Version

2. Flickr-Style Photo Tagging Using jQuery

jQuery Photo Tagger comes in at about 1,000 lines of code. As such, you can either check out the project page or try the online demo for yourself. Please note that you have to hold CTRL key when clicking mouse to create hotspot.

Demo | Download

3. TipTip Custom Tooltip jQuery Plugin with Zero Images

TipTip uses the title attribute just like the native browser tooltip does. However, the title will be copied and then removed from the element when using TipTip so that the browser tooltip will not show up.
TipTip only generates one set of popup elements total, rather then generating one set of popup elements for each element with TipTip applied to it. This helps speed things up and reduces processing time. The elements generated are all div elements and are appended to the end of the body element.

Demo | Download

4. How to Build the New Visual Annotations with CSS3

ZURB has taught us How to Build the New Visual Annotations. The solution was not technically too complex. With Notable, they have embraced the concept of graceful degradation: they take advantage of new CSS techniques that degrade cleanly to older browsers.

Demo

5. Show Your Links as a Drop Down List with Pluralink

Pluralink is an amazing javascript plugin to arrange multiple links in your text.

6. Greyscale Hover Effect with CSS & jQuery

Greyscale Hover Effect with CSS & jQuery relies on CSS Sprites and a few lines of jQuery, but requires a bit of preparation before it can be implemented. It is not recommended for large scale projects and probably best for displaying portfolio pieces.
Demo

7. Get a Closer Look with AnythingZoomer jQuery Plugin

You have a small area. You mouse over it. An area pops up giving you a zoomed in closer look. This is a jQuery plugin that does it. I’m not going to tell you what you should use it for or elaborate use-case scenarios. Your own creativity can help you there.

Demo

8. Create a Content Rich Tooltip with JSON and jQuery

This tutorial will demonstrate how to build tooltips that are powered by jQuery, with information pulled from a JSON array.

Demo

9. Replace Your Default Tooltip with Pretty (mb)Tooltip

(mb)Tooltip is a beautiful tooltip for your webpage in jQuery.

Demo | Download | jQuery project page

10. Captify Displays Pretty Image Captions Appear On Rollover

Captify is a plugin for jQuery written by Brian Reavis to display simple, pretty image captions that appear on rollover. It has been tested on Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and the wretched Internet Explorer. Captify was inspired by ImageCaptions, another jQuery plugin for displaying captions like these.

Demo

11. Preview Images with imgPreview jQuery Plugin

Peter Higgins has created Dojo Zoomer. It is divided into 3 panels. By hovering over the image on the left panel, right panel dynamically displays the cropped portion of the image, so that you can focus explicitly on the portion of the main image that interests you.

Demo

12. jQuery Javascript Image Magnifier under GPL

JQZoom is a javascript image magnifier built at the top of the popular jQuery javascript framework.jQzoom is a great and a really easy to use script to magnify what you want.

13. Simple Transparent Tooltips with jQuery and CSS

CSS tooltips are very popular in modern web design and contrary to popular belief it is really easy to create them, especially with one of the all so popular javascript frameworks.

Demo

14. Magic Toolbox – Javascript and Flash Image Zoom Tools

Magic Toolbox has created 2 amazing javascript image zoom tools ( Magic Zoom and Magic Magnify ). Magic Zoom is a JavaScript zoom tool. It’s the best way to display images in incredible detail.

Demo

15. Prototip 2 – Create Beautiful Tooltips with Ease

Prototip allows you to easily create both simple and complex tooltips using the Prototype javascript framework.

Demo

16. Easiest Tooltip and Image Preview Using jQuery

Easiest Tooltip and Image Preview is one of those tooltip-like bubble popups that appears when you roll over link or a thumbnail.

Demo | Download

17. Coda Style Popup Bubble Tooltips with jQuery

Coda is one of the new web development tools for the Mac – and it’s popular amongst designers and developers.

Demo

18. Taggify Clickable Image Region Shows Popup Tooltip

Taggify is a web widget which allows bloggers and publishers enhance their sites by adding image tooltips linked to certain image’s reqions.
Demo

19. Unobtrosive Bubble Tooltips with Javascript and CSS

Bubble Tooltips are an easy way to add (via a bit of CSS and javascript) fancy tooltips with a balloon shape to any web page.

Demo

20. Fade In and Out Tooltips for Prototype and Scriptaculous

CoolTips is a lightweight unobtrusive JavaScript web-browser tooltips replacement technique.
CoolTips is used to replace conventional web-browser tooltips. The tooltips get contents of title attribute, so it’s fully unobtrusive. CoolTips is an OO class based on Prototype JS and script.aculo.us frameworks.

Demo

21. Sweet Titles Transparent and Fading Tooltips

Sweet Titles Fading Tooptips is not a knock-off from NICE Titles nor is it trying to improve on Dunstan’s revised attempt. And it most definitely isn’t ripped from one of those event-handler infested scripts from Dynamic Drive .

Demo

22. Prototip Most Features Tooltips for Prototype

Prototip allows you to easily create both simple and complex tooltips using the Prototype javascript framework. If you also use Scriptaculous you can even add some nice effects to them.

Demo

23. BoxOver DHTML/Javascript Lightweight Tooltips

BoxOver uses javascript / DHTML to show tooltips on a website. Implementation of the tooltips, however, requires no knowledge of DHTML or javascript. There are many tweaks which can be set to customise it to your needs by setting through a tag’s “title” attribute.