Image via http://WPCandy.com

Yes! This post’s title is equally filled with juicy controversy as the one written by Joshua Strebel, co-founder of Page.ly, Is Tumblr the New WordPress?

…[We] just want a blog we can easily theme and post to, not [run] a site primary off it. WordPress is over-complicated over-kill for this, Tumblr works fine and is much easier to deal with…

This was the feedback given to Joshua by one of their corporate customers. Indeed its kind of scary for WordPress to know that people are switching to another platform because the number of features of WordPress can be over-whelming for many users (I’m adding “many” because both Tumblr & Posterous have an awesome user base). However, isn’t it too soon to consider Tumblr as an alternative of WordPress? or to even consider it as The New “Old WordPress” ?

Considering the fact WordPress can do everything that Tumblr has to offer and much more, I believe that Tumblr should be on its toes to fight what can be from “some competition” to “lots of competition” in a short span of time!

To come directly on the point, how difficult can it be a for a big WordPress development agency (I’m sure WooThemes can pull this off, looks like they already are thinking about similar stuff!) or a WordPress web hosting company (I would bet on & would want WPWebhost to come up with something like this) to come up as competition of Tumblr using WordPress? WordPress already has features like Tumblr (read: “Post formats” , “QuickPress” & few others that make Tumblr a good offering) & of course, one can use any existing plugin or create new to extend it the way they want it. Thus, offering a solution like Tumblr can’t be that difficult. In fact, here are ingredients to launch a competition of Tumblr -

• WordPress multi-site
• Few good-looking tumblog like themes with theme options
• A robust hosting solution
• Some tweaking on the back-end with restricted accounts

I wonder how many of you will agree with me on this one however, I can clearly see various kind of hosted services tailored specifically for WordPress platform coming up in the future. Here’s a deal: Joshua, if at all you are reading this, then come up with an additional service to help customers run Tumblogs on Page.ly & keep them on our beloved platform rather than send them away on Tumblr ;)

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2011. | Permalink

WordPress 3.1 was released couple of days ago with much fanfare and as usual its loaded with improved features, new features and fixes that were reported in previous releases. Matt, Founder of WordPress himself has proclaimed this release as the best release of the World renowned content management system.

There’s a bucket of candy for developers as well, including our new Post Formats support which makes it easy for themes to create portable tumblelogs with different styling for different types of posts, new CMS capabilities like archive pages for custom content types, a new Network Admin, an overhaul of the import and export system, and the ability to perform advanced taxonomy and custom fields queries. With the 3.1 release, WordPress is more of a CMS than ever before. The only limit to what you can build is your imagination.

Believe me or not, this new release will mean a lot to developers than publishers for couple of reasons -

• Awesome new features – WordCast Team has written a fantastic blog post on WordPress 3.1 and have explained the new features nicely. Check it out to know more about WordPress 3.1. These new features will allow developers to extend and communicate with WordPress to develop rich content sites easily!
• Support requests – Well, This is something for developers and WordPress users alike. As you have noticed that WordPress 3.1 has got loads of changes in the way Posts are handled; a reason why loads of users are facing problems with broken plugins and themes as soon as they upgrade to WordPress 3.1. Developers should release the fixes as soon as possible by referring to the changes they’ve made. Thankfully! WordPress team has always been awesome with the documentation, so as a developer you should not have much problems.

How do I check if my theme/plugin will work with WordPress 3.1?

Normally, you don’t get issues of broken themes & plugins with WordPress upgrades. With major releases, it makes sense that we don’t upgrade on production/live environment and rather create a test environment and then check if everything works fine or not. Our clients faced issues after the upgrade, although they were quick fixes, their site was down and was giving errors while we were fixing the bug.

I would suggest that one should clone their blog on a test location and then follow the upgrade procedure or try to upgrade it automatically through WordPress auto upgrade feature.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2011. | Permalink

For those I thought of listing some of the most useful and popular books on the topic of WordPress design & development.

1. How to be a RockStar WordPress Designer – RockablePress

Managing web content has always been tricky, but with WordPress, any web designer can have a flexible, free and powerful CMS to use not just on blogging projects, but on all sorts of websites. In How To Be a Rockstar WordPress Designer you will learn step by step how to take a straight HTML site and power it with WordPress. You surely need knowledge of HTML & CSS to go forward with this book. The book helps you learn the art of creating WordPress Designs by working on three WordPress designs as examples through out this book. It’s one of my favourites and one that I recommend the most.

2. Build Your Own Wicked WordPress Themes – SitePoint

Build Your Own Wicked WordPress Themes is a step-by-step guide to creating beautiful themes for the world’s most popular CMS, WordPress. By following the book’s advice, readers can produce designs that are aesthetically stunning, consistent, and for-purpose -whether it’s for their own use, or to drive a high price on the theme marketplace. The book was published by SitePoint and is probably one of the reason to buy this book. SitePoint has always been a great resource for webmasters and same can be said about this book too.

3. WordPress Plug-in Development –Vladimir Prelovac

I f you can write WordPress plug-ins, you can make WordPress do just about anything. From making the site easier to administer, to adding the odd tweak or new feature, to completely changing the way your blog works, plug-ins are the method WordPress offers to customize and extend its functionality. Vladimir Prelovac needs no introduction in WordPress community. He’s author of some of the most popular WordPress plug-ins, so its not a wonder that he released this fantastic book. If you are planning to do cool things with WordPress, this is the book that you need to purchase!

4. Smashing WordPress: Beyond The Blog – Smashing Magazine

Smashing WordPress shows you how to utilize the power of the WordPress platform, and provides a creative spark to help you build WordPress-powered sites that go beyond the obvious. You will learn the core concepts used to build just about anything in WordPress, resulting in fast deployments and greater design flexibility. The book was published by Smashing Magazine, one of the most popular design blogs on the internet and their 200,000+ subscribers prove that too! Smashing Magazine is powered by WordPress and as they learnt about the power of WordPress, they decided to pen down its power and flexibility in a book. Smashing WordPress talks about how one can utilize WordPress as CMS by building themes & plug-ins.

5. Professional WordPress: Design and Development – Hal Stern, David Damstra & Brad Williams

As the most popular blogging and content management platform available today, WordPress is a powerful tool. This exciting book goes beyond the basics and delves into the heart of the WordPress system, offering overviews of the functional aspects of WordPress as well as plug-in and theme development. This book provides in-depth look at the design and development of WordPress as CMS. It’s distributed by Wrox and probably one the reasons to go for the book. Wrox has always been pretty impressive with their collection of books and this book is no exception.

6. WordPress Theme Design – Tessa Blakeley Silver

It seems like WordPress developers have aspirations to promote it to a full Content Management System. The book relates how WordPress grew out of a means of easily customising a blogging system. To a large extent, Silver indeed persuasively demonstrates that it can function as CMS. The reviews of the book are impressive although one of the reviewer has mentioned that this book explains CSS in better way than XHTML & PHP.

7. A Brain-Friendly Guide to Creating Your Own Custom WordPress Blog – Jeff Siatro

With this book you’ll learn how to move beyond the standard WordPress look and feel by customizing your blog with your own URL, templates, plugin functionality, and more. As you learn, you’ll be working with real WordPress files. The book’s website provides pre-fab WordPress themes to download and work with as you follow along with the text. The book focus on extending WordPress with themes & plugins and teaches that how one can convert HTML & CSS based templates into functional WordPress themes! O’Reilly Media is the publisher of this book and have put it in their Head-First series of books.

8. WordPress 3 Site Blueprints – Heather R Wallace

This book isn’t designed for beginners, those with even an intermediate knowledge of WordPress will be able to get these sites up and running in no time. Also, since each chapter is devoted to the design of a different site, there’s no need to read the book in any particular order. Instead, you can pick and choose the blueprints that are of the most interest to you and dive right in. Heather R. Wallace, author of this book suggests that if readers will have knowledge of HTML & CSS then it’ll be beneficial for them, although knowledge of PHP isn’t required.

9. BuddyPress For Dummies – Lisa Sabin Wilson

Got a cause, a hobby, or some other obsession you can’t wait to share with a like-minded community? BuddyPress is the buddy you need to get that community started. Here’s how to get BuddyPress up and running on your WordPress Web site and use its free tools and themes to host a social network devoted to your pet projects, right on your site. Lisa Sabin Wilson’s name in WordPress community is not new. She wrote the first and very popular book for beginners of WordPress, WordPress for Dummies! If you are new to WordPress & want to extend it to a level where it can compete with Facebook – errmm, that’ll be like exaggerating; lets rephrase the last sentence – “If you are new to WordPress & want to extend it to a level where it’ll be better than Orkut, then you’ll need to learn about BuddyPress.” This will add new dimensions in your WordPress design & development!

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

Google Font Directory

Not long ago, I wrote a post about how one can utilize font web services like Typekit & Fontmeup to improve the typography of the webpages. Although, in order to utilize the actual power of these services one needs to shell out money from their pockets. Well, in order to fight the issues of improving the typography of the web pages, Google has come up with Google Font Directory. This is made possible with the help of CSS3 that allows web designers to use fonts that are stored on the web.

Prior to this, we were using WP Cufón, a WordPress plugin that lets you use the Cufon technique to display various fonts on the web page with the help of javascript. If you are interested in knowing the working behind Cufon then check out this link. However, with the launch of Google Font API, one can easily use the fonts available in the Google Font Directory. Thanks to Adrian, who has created WP Google Fonts, a WordPress plugin already using the Font API. We are currently running this plugin to improve the headings [h1, h2, h3....] of our posts and pages.

WordPress 3.0 RC1 is out! Expect the final version soon

WordPress 3.0 - The Ultimate One!

Last week, WordPress 3.0 RC1 was released. RC1 is supposed to be almost the final product where the bugs are generally not available. You can take version RC1 as the last step towards releasing the stable version. Well, it stable enough that it may get released as the final version, however with more than 20 million people using WordPress, it is a possibility that there may be more bugs that can be reported. We’ve already discussed about the upcoming and much awaited features like Custom Menus, improved custom post types, merger of WordPress MU as mult-site in WordPress 3.0, so I wonder if its necessary to talk about it again?

Although, If you are testing the RC and come across a bug, you can:

• Report it on the wp-testers mailing list
• Join the dev chat and tell us live at irc.freenode.net #wordpress-dev
• File a bug ticket on the WordPress Trac.

Happy BirthDay WordPress!

Cake with WordPress Logo

On 27th May, WordPress turned 7! I’ve been late in wishing WordPress a happy birthday! Although, I did read somewhere – Its Better to be late than never! And I’m still wondering that what would be the apt gift for this occasion, may be you can suggest me something!

Its been 7 years and WordPress has grown from  b2/cafelog fork into a powerful CMS that is competing with the likes of Drupal, Joomla and other established content management systems. I’m sure writing this blog post would have been nostalgic for Matt. He shared that there are more than 1500 developers who are actively contributing in the development of WordPress and I must say that its an achievement! Motivating people to contribute together and to build a master piece like WordPress is really a commendable job and they all deserve millions of thanks from every WordPress user.

I remember that how I liked Blogger over WordPress in its early days, however as it was embraced by developers and I learnt new stuff, I realized that if I want to be a professional blogger, then it has to be WordPress and nothing else! Aha! not only for Matt, its kinda nostalgic for me too :)

I would like to once again wish Matt, team Automattic, those 1500 developers, plugin developers, theme developers [;)], those who use WordPress, those who spread the word about WordPress, in fact anyone who loves WordPress for making this a success!

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

Some of you will be surprised that why exactly is the post not about the linux web server setup for WordPress blogs. The reason is that one of my very good friend Shridhar Pare, owner of Xisto Network gave me a visit. As you can imagine we had long discussions about web, web hosting and forums where the knowledge lives. This is one of the reason that why I’m writing about Forums and not writing about hosting.

In my earlier post, I’ve discussed that how bbPress should be a plugin for WordPress. While going through my Google Reader, I came across a post by Dougal Campbell where he asks the question that if users like the idea of using WordPress itself as forum! Even Justin Tadlock has dwelled upon this idea before and has created a mockup about his idea [via Patrick Daly]-

I’d thought about this before and I completely believe that it would be fantastic to use WordPress as the forum. It is easily possible to create a theme for WordPress that looks like a forum, P2 Theme is a great example where the full editor is made available directly in the theme, which is one of the major features of forums. Lets see that how WordPress can provide the major features and where it lacks -

Forum Features that WordPress can provide

1. Forums post can be made through WordPress posts.
2. Categories can be the Forum sections.
3. Comments can be the forum replies.
4. Member profiles is part of WordPress by default.
5. Fantastic editor that lets users easily share photos and embed videos [remember: WordPress 2.9.2 has oEmbed support]

Of course, there are other features that you can have with the help of plugins that are available for WordPress and here are some of them that will always be useful in case you decide to use WordPress as forum -

1. Akismet can help protect you from Spam posts.
2. W3 Total Cache can ensure that there will be less burden on server.
3. Gravatar can be used in place of Avatars.
4. All in one seo pack can take care of the SEO of the forums.
5. Then there are plethora of plugins related to social media that can help you in building forums.

Forum features where WordPress lacks

1. There aren’t possibilities of creating private forums.
2. Membership level management is not as powerful as one would like
3. Private messaging systems

Well these are some of those features that aren’t in WordPress and the trouble of all this will only be experienced by those forum administrators who have larger forums otherwise major features are already covered by WordPress. There are plugins like SimplePress and BuddyPress that can give you more advanced forum features, in fact SimplePress is a plugin that converts WordPress into a good forum system. I haven’t played around with it so I wouldn’t be in a position to comment on the performance of it however, with the long list of features, I was certainly impressed.

What do you think about using WordPress as forums? Will you prefer your favorite CMS for running forums or will you prefer to use commercial solutions like Invision Power Board, vbulletin etc or will you be interested in using an open source solution for the forums?

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

Video for the Lazy Fellows!

Highlight Features of WordPress 3.0

• New menu management feature – This feature will let users to build custom menus with ease. This feature was released as a plugin by WooThemes guys for their own framework, however after Automattic approached them, they allowed them to integrate this feature in WordPress 3.0. Isn’t that generous?
• Improved custom post types, custom taxonomies including hierarchical support – As WordPress becomes the top choice in CMSes, it is getting lot of features that are focused towards easier and better management of content. Custom Post types and custom taxonomies will make things easier for WordPress consultants to customize the websites easily. Learn more about Custom Post Types in WordPress 3.0 over here.
• Focus on Themes – New theme “Twenty Ten” will be the only default theme in WordPress. Kubrick & Classic themes will be removed although they’ll be available in the WordPress themes extend. Other than the shuffle of the themes, coders can also rejoice as they’ll get improved child theme support and a feature where bloggers and web admins will be able to update all the themes in one go. We
• Standalone WordPress and WPMU code merged – So if you want multiple blogs on a single WordPress installation then it surely won’t be problem. You can configure WordPress 3.0 to host multiple blogs as sub-directory or sub-domain. If you are interested in using multiple domains on single WordPress installation then don’t forget to check out Domain Mapping Plugin by Donncha, lead WPMU developer. There is much more comprehensive guide on how to create blog network with WordPress 3.0 over here.

I’m sure now you’ll be convinced that you’d want to upgrade to WordPress 3.0 right away, however it won’t be available till next month i.e. May 2010. Although there are few other things that have changed in WordPress 3.0 and lets have a look at them -

Other Important Features in WordPress 3.0

1. Choose username & password at installation – As we have already discussed that keeping “admin” as the username is not cool but it makes life easier for hackers. To avoid this, WordPress 3.0 will let you choose your desired username during installation itself! Thanks WP Cookies for the image.

2. Custom Backgrounds made easy – WordPress 3.0 will support custom background for themes. By adding only 1 line of code in functions.php of the theme, users will be able to change the background of the blog with lot of ease! This means that any user will be able to literally change the look of their blog in couple of clicks.

3. Introducing Super Admin – Till now, “Administrator” role was the top user and it was able to do all the tasks. However, now there is a new user role i.e. “Super Administrator”. This new user role will be able to manage everything from individual blog features to multi-site features.

Well, there are hell lot of new additions or changes that anyone would love to list in a blog post, however its practically impossible to do so. Some are even way too difficult to explain – however those who are interested in the nitty gritty of the development can head over here and check out the current development process.

I must say that I’m UBER EXCITED about the release of WordPress 3.0. One of the key reason is that WordPress 3.0 will help theme & plugin developers a lot. Its shaping up as a mature CMS and it certainly helps us in faster development. You won’t believe, I literally wish every day that it gets released ASAP! What are your thoughts about WordPress 3.0? Will it be able to compete with Drupal anytime in near future?

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

In last post, I told you about Content Delivery Networks and how to use them along with WordPress. Although, now I can suggest that one should certainly use Content Delivery Network as I’ve experienced the change in speed myself! Yesterday, I implemented CDN on this blog and the notice is considerable. The pages that used to take around 9 seconds to load are now loading in about 5 seconds. That’s a decent amount of difference! Now, I would tell you some of the questions that I had in my mind and I’m sure that you will be having them too -

Is it a costly affair?

Content delivery networks are considered to be costly, however surprisingly they are not. Most of the CDN providers run on Pay as you go pricing model and that lets you take control of things. In order to run the test, I signed up with MaxCDN, they have a fantastic offer – they are giving away 1 TB for $ 10. Of course, this is a trial run and a customer will be charged near about $100 for the next 1 Tb. Anyway, I’m not trying to promote any CDN provider, I went for MaxCDN for couple of reasons -

1. It was cheaper than other CDN providers.
2. It has been referred by Mashable, Joost de Valk, W3 Total Cache and I think that was more than enough for me.
3. 1 TB will run for months, there is no monthly payment, so I don’t have anything to lose.

Is it really hard to setup the CDN?

I wasn’t sure about this answer because there wasn’t anyone to tell me that how should I go about it. However, while playing with it – I realized that it is way to simple to setup the CDN. Of course, it would have been a nightmare without the W3 Total Cache. I just don’t have enough words for the praise of this plugin, still I would try to sum up in 2 words – Simply Marvelous!

So what’s the procedure?

I did the setup on MaxCDN and therefore, I would mention the steps for MaxCDN and W3 Total Cache settings only. If you plan to use any other CDN then you may have to refer to their support. I’m assuming that most of the CDN providers will have similar options only. Anyway, here’s how I completed the task -

1. Create a Pull Zone on CDN provider. In this (screenshot) most of the settings are generic, the only place where I got confused was Origin Server URL section. Anyway, I used the following settings and created the pull zone.

2. Asked WPWebhost to change the CName record as asked by MaxCDN. In many cases, Cname can be changed by you only, however WPWebhost doesn’t give the direct option to its users. However, support team was pretty quick in making the change. After the change, I waited for about 10-12 hrs for propagation. I tried to check http://cdn.blogdesignstudio.com and once I saw the whole website load without issues, I thought that it must be the right time to make changes in W3 Total Cache settings.

3. In the General Tab of W3 Total Cache, make sure that CDN should be enabled and the type should be selected as Origin Pull (mirror) [as shown in the screenshot]

4. In the CDN Settings tab of W3 Total Cache, you can configure various options related to what you want to use through CDN and what exactly you want to serve using your own web host. What I changed was just one value; ensure that you need to just put the value of Custom CDN Domain (of the first screenshot) in “Replace Default Hostname With”. Here’s the screenshot of what I have -

That’s it! I just saved the settings and everything was working neatly for me. If you get decent traffic and want to ensure that your blog loads faster than others, then you should surely use a CDN. In the end, I can say that I’m happy with what I’ve achieved – I’ll be posting more optimization techniques to ensure that we also contribute in making the web faster!

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a system of computers containing copies of data, placed at various points in a network so as to maximize bandwidth for access to the data from clients throughout the network. A client accesses a copy of the data near to the client, as opposed to all clients accessing the same central server, so as to avoid bottleneck near that server. Content types include web objects, downloadable objects (media files, software, documents), applications, real time media streams, and other components of internet delivery (DNS, routes, and database queries). [via Wikipedia]

Well, I’m sure it sounds alien to some of you. However, I can try and simplify this for you. Let’s take an example – You upload a 2 Mb file on a server that is located in United States, one of your visitor comes to the website from UK and at the same time another from US only. Who’ll get the faster download speed of that file? Of course, it’ll be the US guy. That is how a normal scenario runs. In CDN, a normal file is replicated on multiple servers (shown as middle servers in the image below) placed across the world. So, if a UK guy will be trying to access the same MP3 file, then he’ll get it delivery through UK server only and that will considerably reduce the page load speed.

[Image credit - netdna]

Should we use CDN for a blog?

As we found out that CDN helps in reducing the speed. However, the question is that is the speed difference considerable enough? There have been many bloggers who have done their tests and found huge difference in the speed. Joost de Valk found out that his blog pages started loading in 2 sec. as compared to 7 seconds prior CDN’s application.

Well, that certainly sounds effective! Other than that, Dave Ward gives us a tip where we should use Google’s CDN based hosted javascript libraries to improve the blog page load speed. Other than that, Yahoo also suggests website owners to use CDN to improve the page load speed. Well, this only means that it makes sense to use CDN. Now, the big question arises -

How to use CDN with WordPress?

Of course, if you just want use the Google’s CDN based Javascript library then Dave Ward’s link will be more than enough for your help. However, if you want to make proper use of CDN, you’ll have to shell out some money from your pocket. Thankfully established companies like Amazon, MaxCDN, RackSpace and various others offer CDN services, you can always choose the one that suits your pocket.

Once you’ve decided the CDN provider, then you can use its power with the help of W3 Total Cache -

W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your blog by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download time of your theme and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.

[Click the image for bigger version]

So, as you can see with the help of W3 Total Cache you can easily make use of power of CDN’s and it should certainly help in improving the page load speed. Are you going to apply CDN on your WordPress blog?

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

Since few months, I’ve been hearing lot of horror stories regarding the security compromises that bloggers have to deal with. It’s open source nature, what has been the boon for WordPress, is now standing against it (For Hardcore Open-source lovers – I am in favor of Open-source all the way and that statement of mine should not be taken as personal attack). There have been many blogs that weren’t using the latest version of WordPress are now infected with some sort of worm or some hacker gets access to the web server and misuses your precious resources. There are cases where they even harm the website by effecting its search engine rankings.

It’s always a nightmare when it comes to cleaning up the WordPress installation that has been compromised with some or the other warm, however few precautionary steps will always ensure some level of security that’ll keep “stupid hack scripts” away from your precious blog. Just follow these steps and you won’t have to shell out hundreds of dollars to make WordPress secure -

Here are some of the steps that one can take to keep the WordPress installation secure -

1. Keep your blog software up to date – WordPress has been very quick in taking actions against security attacks and generally its the older versions that become the target. WordPress now has automatic upgrade feature and with touch of a button, you’d be able to upgrade WordPress. You can read more about upgrading WordPress over here.

2. Keep strong password – It’s always advisable that one should keep a secure password. A good password is always combination of alpha-numeric characters. I’m sure these 16 firefox extensions will surely help you generate stronger password and will keep it safe for you too!

3. Use Secret key for WordPress – Some time back, I’d written the use of Secret key feature of WordPress. It’s a default feature of WordPress and one should definitely use it. Definitely, its not the only solution, however it makes sense to implement it as well. Small precautions like these will only make your WordPress more secure!

4. Set proper file directory permissions – One of the biggest loop hole starts from here itself. It’s important for every blogger to ensure that they keep proper file directory permission that is recommended for WordPress. This way, no unauthorized scripts will be able to gain access to the folder structure of your web hosting account.

5. Table prefix can be a weak point too – Table Prefix is one of the important part of WordPress’ database (in fact any database) and it is recommended that one shouldn’t use the default prefix as the default prefix is known to everyone and hackers tend to misuse that information for their evil intentions. I’d written a guide on how to change the table prefix that one can follow to strengthen the security.

6. You thought only passwords should be secure, What about the username? – I believe that these are few points that WordPress community can always do to ensure that the bloggers get safe at the time of installation, I just hope someone works on this point at least. By default, WordPress makes a default user by the name of “admin”. Most of the users keep it the same and unfortunately, that is exactly what we don’t want to do. Here’s the post that talks about securing WordPress by not displaying your actual username.

7. Make important folders inaccessible – If you thought that just setting up directory permissions is more than enough then I would say that it’s just not that simple mate! I would suggest that one should drop an empty html file (ensure that the name should be index.html) in wp-content/themes/ & wp-content/plugins/ folder. This way whenever some one will try to see the content of those folder, they’ll be presented with a blank page and nothing else. Isn’t that a smart move?

8. Keep your own computer free from viruses & malware – Lets say that you got a pen drive from your friend to copy some document and a while later you realize that your computer is infected from virus because that pen drive was full of viruses. Will you blame your own computer for that mishap? Similarly, if your computer is infected with malware and while you upload files on your blog it can get transfered to the servers too. I would suggest that one should use a good anti-virus and anti-malware scanner to avoid such kind of things.

9. Use of SSH instead of FTP – Most of the FTP software support SSH, a protocol that acts like FTP. The good thing about this protocol is that it has encryption and thus all the activity that you perform on the server is done under secure environment. Here are some tutorials that you can go through to get better understanding of SSH -

1. SSH Tutorial for Linux.
2. Getting Started with SSH.

10. Up to date server environment – Alright, this is not in your hands, but in the hands of web host. It’s always advisable that while choosing your web host, you should confirm from them that which version of MySQL, Apache & PHP are they using. Match it with the latest version mentioned on their respective websites and if they are out dated, you should ask them to update them (very unlikely) or change the web host asap – Here’s the guide to help you do that quickly.

11. Use Robots.txt to deny access to robots at important areas – There are various important folders like wp-content or wp-admin, wp-includes that don’t need to be indexed in search engines. So, its better to deny robots to let them crawl their content. Here’s this quick tutorial that’ll educate you about the use of Robots.txt.

Other important reads that’ll enhance your knowledge about WordPress security

1. Securing your WordPress install the foolproof way.
2. Hardening WordPress.
3. 11 ways to secure your WordPress blog.
4. WordPress security whitepaper.
5. 16 WordPress plugins to secure WordPress.

If you have written articles on WordPress security feel free to share it with us and we’d love to include it on our blog.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

Many of the WordPress themes promoted are described as being widget-ready. Widget-ready WordPress theme is a theme that has widgetized areas which allows you to dynamically manipulate these areas in a simple drag-and-drop fashion. Widgetized sidebar is another way to describe the same thing because most of the widgets are used in the sidebars of the themes. However, sometimes you find a WordPress theme that you really like, but discover that it’s not widgets ready. Don’t give up just yet, making themes widget-ready really isn’t as difficult as you might think. Follow the steps in this article and we will teach you how to Widgetize a WordPress theme making it a drag-drop widget theme.

1. Make the changes in functions.php

Open your functions.php file and insert the following code into it, save and close. (Don’t touch anything else there because incorrectly modifying your theme’s functions.php can stop your admin pages from appearing. It’s a good idea to make a backup of your functions.php or even better to backup the whole theme before modifying it) :

<?php
if ( function_exists(’register_sidebar’) )
register_sidebar();
?>

2. Make the changes in sidebar.php

Now open your sidebar.php file and check if the sidebar is widget friendly i.e. if your sidebar uses unordered lists. If not then fix it by formatting the HTML. Here is an example of a typical sidebar:

<div id=”rightcolumn”>
<ul class=”sidebar”>
<li class=”widget”>
<h2>HTML</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href=”#”>HTML</a></li>
<li><a href=”#”>HTML</a></li>
<li><a href=”#”>HTML</a></li>
<li><a href=”#”>HTML</a></li>
<li><a href=”#”>HTML</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li class=”widget”>
<h2>HTML</h2>
<h3>HTML…</h3>
<p>HTML HTML HTML HTML</p>
</li>
</ul>
<div class=”clear”></div>
</div>

Just add this template tag in the code directly below the <ul class=”sidebar”> tag:

<?php
if ( function_exists(’register_sidebar’) )
register_sidebar();
?>

3. You are almost there!

And close it by adding the <?php endif; ?> directly above the </ul> tag. That is it. Now go mad with your widgets!

© Igor for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink