Moonlight Blog » wordpress

WordPress 2.7 Released

William Long — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 09:47:16 +0000

WordPress 2.7 has been officially released and is available for download. There are many new features added in 2.7 and the first thing you will notice is the re-designed user interface and Dashboard.

Version 2.7 should be a major upgrade into the WordPress software. Here are some of the changes that it brings:

new interface to make it easier to perform the admin tasks
customization options on the admin screens
the ability to reply to comments from the dashboard
embed support for comments threading
drag and drop support on some sections

The most exciting stuff is the automatic upgrade. From now when new versions get released all you will have to do is one click, and the software will take care of the rest. I am sure this will make WordPress a much more secure software, too.

Top Ten WordPress Security Tips

William Long — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 09:29:16 +0000

Below are 10 security tips that you can easily implement on your WordPress blog. Please share one or more life-savers you use permanently to help protect yourself from WordPress security issues.

1. Upgrade WordPress – In general, keeping your WordPress installation up to date is a great way to avoid known problems. Do note that the lastest version, especially in the case of major upgrades, may cause more problems then it resolves.

2. WordPress Version – The tag in your header.php that displays your current version of wordpress. Since everyone knows your wordpress version this way, your blog is prone to hackers if you have not upgraded to the new version.

3. WordPress Username – Every hacker knows WordPress has a user “admin” with god-like administration privileges. Slow the hackers down by removing the “admin” user. Create a WordPress user with admin privileges using the administration interface. Log out of WordPress and log back in with the new user. Delete the admin user. The new admin user should be different than your normal post author.

4. WordPress Password – Are you still logging into your wp-admin page with the same default password that was emailed to you? If so, CHANGE IT! That password is only 6 characters and just numbers and letters. Make it complex and more than 10 characters if you can. Also, try not to use words, make it a nice jumble of letters, numbers, and symbols.

5. Prevent Directory Listing – In many WordPress installations it is possible to view a list of installed plugins by navigating to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory. This is not a good idea as known plugin vulnerabilities can than be easily exploited. Add an empty default index file, such as index.html, to the directory. You can also protect it using an .htaccess file assuming you’re using Apache.

6. Protect Your WP-Admin Folder – You can protect your WordPress admin folder by allowing access to it from a defined set of IP addresses. Everything else will bring up a Forbidden error message. So if you only access your blog from one or two places routinely, it’s worth implementing. Also, you’re supposed to create a new .htaccess file inside your wp-admin folder, not replace the one at the root of your blog.

7. Protect From Search Engines – There is no need to have all of your filesWordPress files indexed by Google, so it’s best to block them in your robots.txt file. Add the following line to your list:Disallow: /wp-*

8. Install Login Lockdown WordPress Plugin – This plugin records the IP address and timestamp of every failed WordPress login attempt. If more than a certain number of attempts are detected within a short period of time from the same IP range, then the login function is disabled for all requests from that range.

9. Install WordPress Database Backup Plugin – You always have to take regular backups of your file directories as well as the database. WordPress Database Backup plugin creates backups of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database.

10. Install WordPress Security Scan Plugin – The WP Security Scan plugin attempts to both to audit your blog security and to implement many of the suggestions mentioned above.

Disable WordPress Autosave Plugin

William Long — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 17:48:04 +0000

WordPress autosave is the best features which I hate in WordPress. AutoSave will auto save a copy of edited post or page every 60 seconds provided there is a change on the content in the editor. However, there is only ever a maximum of one AutoSave version for any given post. New AutoSaves created will overwrite old AutoSaves. Beside, AutoSaves are stored as a special type of revision so that the auto saved with a more recent version of data does not overwrite actual published content, and is used to restore unsaved work only when necessary.

While each Post Revisions is stored in its own database table, the auto-save is only stored once with previous versions being overwritten by the new auto-saved content. So, if you’re worried about your database growing to massive proportions because of auto-save, you can stop worrying.

These are methods that disable or delay the WordPress autosave functions. The Most easy way is using plugin. The disabling plugin works with versions 2.3 through 2.7 while the delay configuration works with 2.5 and later.

Copy this text to a text file, name it whatever you want (using the .php extension, of course) and upload it to your WordPress plugin directory. Activate it and it works immediately, but you need to clear your browser cache:

/* Plugin Name: Disable autosave */ add_action('admin_print_scripts', 'plugin_deregister_autosave'); function plugin_deregister_autosave() { wp_deregister_script('autosave'); } define('WP_POST_REVISIONS',false); ?>

Disable WordPress 2.6 Post Revisions

William Long — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 03:42:16 +0000

Post Revisions Tracking is a new features of WordPress 2.6, Which makes it a lot easier to share writing between people. Since you can save your copy, and the other person can see what you changed. Also you can revert to previous revisions of posts you’ve made.

But if there is only one author of WordPress blog, Post Revisions will taking too much space as every revision is a new row in wp_post table. It creates a alot of useless database-entries.

To disable Post Revisions, Add:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

into wp-config.php, the wordpress 2.6 Post Revisions now disabled.

In my little opinion, there should be an option in general or writing settings to enable/disable the post revision feature.

Install WordPress MU On IIS With Url Rewrite

William Long — Sun, 25 May 2008 00:40:17 +0000

I have successfully installed WordPress MU on my Windows Server 2003 running IIS 6. To be honest, I know that WPMU is not full compatible with IIS right out of the box. It relies heavily on apaches mod_rewrite, which IIS isn’t capable of. The only IIS fix for permalinks I’ve seen have either been via a special filter named ISAPI_Rewrite.

ISAPI_Rewrite is Apache mod_rewrite compatible URL rewriter for Microsoft IIS server. It is compatible with Apache mod_rewrite making it possible to move configurations from Apache to IIS and vice versa just by copying .htaccess files. I have tested with WordPress 2.x or WordPress MU 1.3.x, it’s work. This is also works in IIS Mod-Rewrite Pro, but IIS Mod-Rewrite Pro have no free version.

To enable Clean Permalinks on WordPress MU on IIS, follow these steps:

Install PHP and MySQL following the vendor’s instructions.
Install ISAPI_Rewrite.
Install WordPress according to the vendor’s instructions.
Open with a text editor the file wp-settings.php, located in WordPress root directory. Add the code line

$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] = $_SERVER['HTTP_X_ORIGINAL_URL'];

Log on to WordPress as administrator, go to admin panel, open the “Permalinks” settings page, and set the permalink structure of your choice. Apply your changes.
WordPress is supposed to automatically create a file with name “.htaccess” in its root directory. Open with a text editor the file .htaccess, copy it and paste into httpd.conf in ISAPI_Rewrite directory.

Now we have a WordPress MU with clean permalinks on Windows Server 2003 running IIS 6.

Disable Directory Listings in WordPress

William Long — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:12:36 +0000

By default when accessing any directory which does not contain an index file, a directory listing will be shown displaying a list of the files in that folder. Web servers can be configured to automatically display the listings of the contents of a web site’s file directory if no index file (i.e. index.html or index.php) is present. This can expose files and information to visitors.

Simply adding a blank/ 0 byte text file named “index.html” will prevent this directory list from being displayed, however another way to disable directory listing is by adding the following line to the .htaccess file in your public_html folder of your web hosting account :

Options -Indexes

That’s it, with this line in place, folders which do not contain index files will no longer show the default directory list.

Top Ten Best WordPress Plugins

William Long — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 04:27:41 +0000

WordPress is a simple to use blogging tool. The beauty of WordPress is that it can become so much more with the simple installation of plugins. With a few clicks, WordPress can become a full fledged Content Management System (CMS). Here is a rundown on the top 10 best plugins every blogger should have installed.

Here is a great list that I whipped together of some of the most useful and most popular WordPress plugins which every blogger should have installed. Enjoy the list.

Akismet – Simply the best Spam protection you can get for handling comments on your blog. Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they are spam or not, also checks the trackbacks for spam.

WP Super Cache – An extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make your site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests.

WP-PostViews – Enables you to display how many times a post/page had been viewed. It will not count registered member views, but that can be changed easily.

WP-PageNavi – A WordPress Plugin that adds more advanced page navigation to WordPress. It does this by adding page number links to your different pages. Using this plugin your readers will be able to jump from the first to the last page and other pages of your blog very easily.

Simple Tags – A plugin does everything related with tagging. With this plugin you can generates a list of related posts based on the text of blog entry. The tags can be used to search your blog and are picked up by blog search engines like Technorati and can bring in new users.

All in One SEO Pack – Automatic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) out of the box for your wordpress blog, everything you need to get your site optimized for search engines.

Google XML Sitemaps – Simple tool for auto generating sitemaps every time you make an update to your site. This plugin is the best tool to tell Google how it should crawl your blog and where to find everything you want found.

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.

FeedBurner Feedsmith – Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while creating a randomized feed for Feedburner to pull from.

WordPress Database Backup – Automated or on-demand backup solution for your wordpress database. Don’t leave home without it!

WordPress 2.5 Widescreen Version

William Long — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 13:40:37 +0000

I have discussed in an article under WordPress 2.5 in widescreen display abnormal. Almost all of the interface of WordPress 2.5 are directed at the design of the 1024 × 768. When I use my 1440 × 900 widescreen monitor will show only the left side of the body. I’ve finally managed to get my 1440×900 widescreen monitor working with the WordPress 2.5.

Open file wordpress\wp-admin\css\global.css, in line 159, replace:

max-width: 980px;

to:

max-width: 1400px;

In line 166, replace:

max-width: 950px;

to:

max-width: 1400px;

That’s it. Before the modification, we can see that the interface of WordPress 2.5 in 1440 × 900 like this:

After the modification, we can see that the interface of WordPress 2.5 in 1440 × 900 like that. It’s so cool, isn’t it.

If you are using the 1440 × 900 display resolution, you can changes the code and make a better look in WordPress 2.5 Widescreen Version.

WordPress 2.5 Released

William Long — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 04:12:57 +0000

WordPress 2.5 has been released and includes a huge number of changes over the WordPress 2.3 series. Rather than list the changes in detail which would probably take me some days to write out I offer the following statistics and information about the WordPress 2.5 release:

In development for 185 days (6 months 3 days to be precise).
Changes to 364 files with 54008 insertions, and 29136 deletions for more detail you can view the diffstat output.
Patches committed from over 110 different contributors.
Over 1300 individual changes made for more detail you can view a complete changelog.

As usual you can download wordpress at their site, http://wordpress.org/download/. Btw, check out their new interface. They also changed how the wordpress.org site works.

WordPress Excerpt Seo Tips

William Long — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 10:40:04 +0000

WordPress blogs have duplicate content issues, and one of them is allowing reading the same content on both the posts, index page, archives and categories pages. To avoid search engine penalty it is important to optimize your WordPress using WordPress excerpt so that duplication will be avoided.

Instead of duplicating the whole content, you may use just an excerpt in the index, archives and categories pages. The WordPress displays the excerpt of the current post with [...] at the end, which is not a “read more” link. If you do not provide an explicit excerpt to a post (in the post editor’s optional excerpt field), the first 55 words of the post’s content are used.

To use WordPress excerpt function, you may replace the_content() tag with the_excerpt() when on archive (tested by is_archive()) and category (is_category()) pages and index (is_home()) page in WordPress themes.

Now that you are in the correct section, locate the following piece of code:

You are going to replace that entire piece of code with the following:



 
  the_excerpt();

 } else {

  the_content('Read the rest of this entry »');

 } ?>

Of course, this example uses the WordPress default template, but the same code can be used on most any template if you find the index.php or main index page and the spot where is in the code.

Moonlight Blog » wordpress

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