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Monthly archives: February 2010

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WordPress Defender: 30 Ways to Secure Your Website

WordPress Defender: 30 Ways to Secure Your Website

Looking for a good book on WordPress security? If so, we’ve got great news! John Hoff’s new security e-book WordPress Defender provides 30 practical ways to secure your website from the evil forces of spam, bad bots, and malicious hackers. The book is packed with practical, common-sense security techniques that virtually any WordPress user can use to protect their site from malicious threats.

Use BuddyPress, Keep your Theme

If you want to use BuddyPress (a massive plugin that basically adds a social networking layer to WordPress sites, think, forums, profiles, user blogs, etc) but you’ve been hesitant to try it, now is a better time than ever.

BuddyPress 1.2 now works with stand-alone WordPress installs (before you had to use MU) and you can even keep your existing theme.

Rockin’ out WordPress custom loops

kristarella has a nice article on writing your own custom loops.

Using HTML5 elements in WordPress post content

Nicolas Gallagher:

Here are two ways to include HTML5 elements in your WordPress post content without WordPress’ wpautop function wrapping them in p tags or littering your code with line breaks…. Both ways rely on hand-coding the HTML5 markup in the WordPress editor’s HTML view.

Custom Comments HTML Output

Custom Comments HTML Output

With WordPress, displaying all the comments on a Post or Page is incredibly easy. In your theme’s single.php file you probably have a line like this:

Display Separate Counts for Comments, Pingbacks and Trackbacks

Display Separate Counts for Comments, Pingbacks and Trackbacks

In WordPress, there are three ways to respond to a post: you can leave a comment, leave a trackback, or just link to the post to create a pingback. When displaying all of the responses to your posts, it’s a good idea to separate the comments from the pingbacks and trackbacks. Uninterrupted comment threads are a pleasure to read, as are well-styled lists of pingbacks. This is an excellent way to improve the usability and stylishness of your comment areas.

Which Template File does WordPress Use to Render Different Pages?

Which Template File does WordPress Use to Render Different Pages?

This page in the codex has a particularly interesting infographic that shows a flowchart of how WordPress chooses which template file it is going to use to render the page. For example, did you know if you have a published page with “contact” as the slug, it will look for and use page-contact.php automatically?

Illustrated Article on Theme Building

Great crash course article on theme building from Chris Spooner.

WooNav will be integrated in WordPress core

This is absolutely needed and will be an awesome upgrade for WordPress version 3.0. Also watch the video.

BLANK WordPress Theme

BLANK WordPress Theme

There are many like it, but this one is mine.

I have a “blank” WordPress theme for myself, because I make a lot of WordPress themes. Starting from Kubrick, or any other pre-made theme, would be absurd. There is to much stuff there that would to be stripped out or fought against to be useful.

So, I have my own starter theme. It’s been in a folder called BLANK-theme on my computer for a while, so I’m going to call it BLANK. And now I’m making it available for you. Read on to find out the scoop on it and you can decide if it would be of any use to you.

Stop Spammers with a Custom Comment Blacklist

Stop Spammers with a Custom Comment Blacklist

I usually reserve most of my blacklisting content for Perishable Press, but after posting about using WordPress’ built-in tools to stop comment spam, several DiW readers have asked about a good custom blacklist that may be used for the “Comment Moderation” and/or “Comment Blacklist” features in the WordPress “Discussion Settings” screen. Over the years, I have built up an extensive custom blacklist of terms that has proven quite effective at keeping spam and other garbage out of the comments section, even without using any anti-spam plugins such as Akismet. It’s strictly plug-n-play, and should help protect your site (and reputation) against all sorts of malicious nonsense.

How to Widgetize Your WordPress Theme in 2 Steps

How to Widgetize Your WordPress Theme in 2 Steps

Working on a new theme for the next Digging into WordPress book update, I found myself really getting into the whole “widgetizing” thing. Widgets enable non-technical users to customize your theme according to their specific layout needs, and with so many different widgets available, the possibilities are endless. You may have thought about widgets as something you do in the sidebar, but there is no reason to stop there. You can widgetize just about every part of your theme. In this post, we’ll show you how to do widgetize your theme in two easy steps. Once we get the basics down, we’ll dig into some sweet tips and tricks.

Custom CSS Per Post

Custom CSS Per Post

I’ve long been a fan of “art directing” posts. That is, to apply unique CSS styling to an individual page of content when the situation calls for it. In the past, I’ve used the Art Direction plugin and I even created a screencast on using it.

As it turns out, there is a major problem with the art direction plugin. Using it with any caching plugin will result in a crazy epic meltdown of your site. Without too much gory detail, in trying to cache my blog CSS-Tricks, I tried all the major caching plugins (DB Cache, WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache) and ultimately it would trash my WordPress database and serve up white pages. Very not good.

Default Configuration Settings Via Plugin

One of the things I hear people desiring from WordPress is some kind of system for customized installations. So when you go to install a fresh copy, all the settings are how you like them (among other things).

Thomas Scholz has a sweet solution here to get us nearly there. It’s a plugin that you install, activate, and delete. All it does is reset your settings how you like them (you customize it), and delete the “dummy” post and comment.

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