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Archive for the ‘WordPress’ Category

Without a doubt, for a self-hosted blog, WordPress is the best blog CMS that you can get. However, being a popular and open source software, it also means that hackers have full access to the code which they can scrutinize to find any exploits they can use to hack into any WordPress-enabled site.

On the good side, one of the best things about WordPress is its plugin system that allows anyone to install any plugins or create your own plugins to extend its functionality, including improving security.

Here, I have listed some wordpress security plugins (and a couple of tricks) that you can use to secure WordPress blog.

All the plugins and tricks listed below are meant for WP 2.7 and above. If you are still using an older version of WordPress, it’s time to upgrade your blog.

Protecting Your Login

1. CHAP Secure Login

This plugin uses the CHAP protocol to encrypt your password.  The password is first salted with a random number (nonce) generated by the session, followed by the md5 transformation algorithm. This result is then sent to the server where it is decrpyted and authenticated. This is a zero-configuration plugin, which means you can use it immediately after activating it.

2. Stealth Login

Stealth Login obfuscates your login page by allowing you to define a custom login page rather than the default wp-login.php. In the event that your password is leaked, the hacker will also have a hard time finding the correct login URL. A good use of this is to prevent any malicious bots from accessing your wp-login.php file and attempting to break in.

3. Login Lockdown

Login Lockdown is useful in preventing a brute force attack. What Login LockDown does is to record the IP address and timestamp of every failed login attempt. If more than a certain number of attempts are detected within a short period of time from the same IP range, it will lockdown the login function and prevent any people from that IP range to log in.

4. AskApache Password Protect

This plugin adds an additional HTTP authentication to provide a second layer of defense for your blog. You can set up password protection for your blog using HTTP Basic Authentication, or you can choose to use the more secure HTTP Digest Authentication.

Note that this plugin might/might not work depending on your server capability. If your site does not pass the AskApache configuration tests (the tests run by the plugin to detect your server capabilities), contact your web host and see if they can make changes on the server side.

5. Semisecure Login Reimagined

This plugin provides a “semisecure” login environment by encrypting your password with the RSA cryptography

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We received the following question today:

“For certain sales pages on my site I do not want to have the distraction of the sidebar items. Is there a way to have a second page template without a sidebar for this purpose?”

Having an optimized sales/landing page does help with sales conversion and it is really easy to create a custom sales/landing page in WordPress. Any readers of this site using the WordPress Simple Shopping cart orWordPress eStore or the WordPress Membership Plugin are most likely selling something online. In this article I have explained how you can create a custom sales page easily in WordPress and use it to optimize your sales conversion.

How do You Create a Custom Sales Page in WordPress?

The answer is custom WordPress page template. Your WordPress theme has a file called “page.php”. When you create a WordPress page, by default it uses this “page.php” template file which makes the page look a certain way. You can easily create another template file which has a different look/structure and use that template file for a particular page.

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There are a select group of WordPress plug-ins & widgets I go about installing as soon as I have set up WordPress, sometimes even before I have activated my theme of choice. In no particular order, below are the plug-ins & widgets I install within the first 24 hours without fail and think you should too…

Contact Form 7

Have your site’s visitors send secure messages to your email inbox with out exposing your email address.

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In WordPress 2.8, there is one small but very useful feature, both for WP web developers, and for bloggers. This is an opportunity to change the appearance of any individual page or group of pages without the need to write either the functions/conditions on php or install plugins. All you need to do is simply add your desired style to your css file.

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Many people want to make simple CSS changes but do not know where to start or are afraid that they will change the wrong thing. As a result of this I get asked a lot of CSS related questions from new WordPress users. The fact is that learning CSS is not really that hard. Once you get a hang of the basics, you can quickly become an advanced CSS user if you keep playing around with it. In this article I have explained how to do simple CSS modifications, hopefully it will be of some help to some of you.

Let’s get started.

First, you should make a back up copy of CSS files you are going to modify. You should do this with any file you plan on modifying incase something goes wrong, you can always revert back to the version you know works properly.

What is CSS

“Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics (that is, the look and formatting) of a document written in a markup language. It’s most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL.” – Wikipedia

A CSS rule (the sentence) has two main parts:

• Selector: This is usually the HTML element you want to style (e.g. Header 1-6, paragraph, body, etc ).
• Declaration: This is what you want to do to the selector. (e.g. Change the text color, text alignment, font, font size, etc).

Here is an example of a CSS rule

• h1{color:green;font:20px;}
• h1= selector color and font = the property green and 20 px = the value

The declaration will consist of a property and a value and each property must have a value.
The CSS declaration will always end with a semicolon (;)example: color:green;The CSS declaration group will always be surrounded with ({}) example {color:green;text-align:center;}

You can make the CSS easier to read by putting each declaration on a separate line.
example:

h1
{
color:purple;
text-align:center;
font:20px;
}

Now that you have a basic understanding on how CSS works let’s move on to some simple changes you can make to your website to give it a little personal touch.

Here is some sample code that I have used in this article to show you how to make simple CSS modifications:

body
{
background:#444;
width:960px;color:#333;
font:13pt Georgia, Arial, Tahoma, Verdana;
margin:0 auto;
padding:0
}

• Body = Your selector.
• Background = the color of your background.
• Width = the width of the body.
• Color = the color of the text.
• Font = the size and font of the body.
• Margin = the size of the margin.
• Padding = the amount of padding you want between the objects.

Let’s go over a few modifications:

Changing colors in CSS

Changing colors in CSS can be done by one of the following ways:

• By name: Red, blue, green and so on
• RGB: A RGB value looks like this (255,0,0)
• Hex: A hex value looks like this (ff0000) or shorthand hex looks like this 333 or 444 and so on.

You can find a list of the hex numbers with a quick search on the internet.

Now let’s make some simple modification to the sample CSS code:

body
{
background:#3300cc; I changed the background color by changing the hex value to 3300cc(dark blue).
width:960px;
color:#bbcbff; I changed the text color from #333 to bbcbff (light grey color).
font:22pt Georgia, Arial, Tahoma, Verdana; I changed the size of the font to 22pt.
margin:0 auto;
padding:0;
}

Once you have made your changes you can save the file and upload it to your site. These are simple modifications you can use to give your site a fresh new look.

Text alignment

Let’s add some text alignment to this bit of code. You can use the following text alignments

• Center
• Left
• Right
• Justify

body
{
background:#444;width:960px;
color:#333;
text-align:center; I entered a text-align property with the value as center.
font:13pt Georgia, Arial, Tahoma, Verdana;
margin:0 auto;
padding:0
}

Background image:

In some cases you may want to use a background image.

Here is an example of how to do this:

body
{
background-image:URL('img_gradent15.png'); URL this is going to be where the image is located.
background-repeat:no-repeat;
background-position:bottom left;
}

This will add an image to the bottom left of the body with no repeating of the image.

To repeat an image you can use the following declaration:

• background-repeat:repeat-x;
• background-repeat:repeat-y;

This will repeat the image along the x or y axis. By default the image will be repeated both horizontally and vertically.

Changing the size of an object:

This modification works very well when you have an object (e.g. a button image) that is appearing too large/small. Some WordPress themes come with a default image size and will make any image you use that size. You can modify the code to override the themes default setting to display the images properly.

For this example we will change the size of the logo for the Infinity Remix theme.

Here is the code for this:

#logo
{
width:450px The width of the logo is 450px. My logo is 625px to change this we need to adjust the px's (pixels)of the width property.
}

This is what the code should look like after the changes have been made.

#logo
{
width:625px I have changed the width to 625px.
}

Remember when you make a size adjustment you may have to modify other part of the CSS to fit everything properly in the space you are modifying (e.g. your header you may need to move other objects or text to accommodate the size change).

These are just a few simple things you can do with CSS. With CSS your creative possibilities are endless. If you have a good CSS resource or would like to leave a comment feel free to in the comments section below.