Archive for May, 2010

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WordPress security monitoring and diagnosis

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May 13th, 2010
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WordPress Plugins, WordPress Security

The three components of information security are: Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability (CIA). If you’ve followed the steps my previous tutorial, you’ll have come a long way towards ensuring all three. But you’ll always need to keep an eye on things – remember, no site is hack proof. Here are some tools to verify the integrity of your data. These plugins will not protect your site from attacks, they will only help you monitor your site and diagnose problems. I have not tested any of these with the latest WordPress 3.0 beta. Monitoring In my first article on WordPress security I mentioned Open Source Tripwire as an option for monitoring your WordPress install for unexpected changes. A reader pointed out that it wasn’t the best solution since it’s no longer maintained and suggested a couple other alternatives. Since then, I’ve discovered a much easier way of monitoring your WP install: WordPress […]

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Underrated WordPress plugin round-up

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May 9th, 2010
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Best of WordPress, WordPress Plugins

I’ve seen a lot of “Best WordPress Plugins” lists, and there’s usually a lot of overlap on them. You don’t need me to tell you about Platinum SEO Pack, Simple Tags, and WP Super Cache. Here are a few plugins that I think deserve more attention. These will probably be more useful to power-users who really want to tweak their WordPress site, but I encourage everyone to get their hands dirty every once and a while and get creative with their installs. Unless otherwise noted, these should work with with both WordPress 2.92 and WordPress 3.0. Widget Logic This gives every widget an extra field in which you can specify WP’s conditional tags. What this means is that you can have certain widgets appear on certain pages but not others. For example, I have my blogroll set to only appear on my front page. SEO Friendly Images This plugin can […]

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Adding Scripts Properly to WordPress Part 3 – Page Detection

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May 8th, 2010
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HOW-TO, WordPress FAQs

You might find yourself in the situation where you only want a script to run on a certain page. In fact, it’s good practice to only load your JavaScript files when absolutely necessary; loading the files on every single page is a big no-no (I’ve been chastised before for this). While on the blog’s front-end, WordPress makes it super-easy with its conditional tags. I’m not going to go over the conditional tags here, but here are a few you can take advantage of: is_home() is_front_page() is_single() is_page() And much more. While being selective on the front-end is relatively straightforward, the admin-panel is another monster. Sure, there’s the is_admin() conditional, but what if you only want to run a script in a certain section within the admin panel? One technique is to use the PHP reserved variable called $_GET. Say you have a plugin options page with a URL of: http://www.mydomain.com/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=my-plugin-file.php […]

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Adding Scripts Properly to WordPress Part 2 – JavaScript Localization

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May 7th, 2010
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HOW-TO, WordPress FAQs

When adding scripts to WordPress, you will inevitably run into a small, but painful, issue of localization. Localizing a plugin or theme is relatively straightforward, but JavaScript presents its own difficulties since we can’t easily call the PHP functions necessary (which is one reason authors embed JavaScript in PHP files). Since embedding JavaScript in PHP files is never a good technique, we use localization to save the day. With JavaScript localization, you can use PHP magic to build your localized strings, and then use JavaScript to read/parse those strings. What you do with them is only limited to your imagination. Furthermore, if you display anything with JavaScript, chances are your users will want the strings to be localized. Fortunately, WordPress provides the ultra-handy wp_localize_script function. wp_localize_script The wp_localize_script takes three arguments: handle object_name l10n Handle The handle argument will be the same handle you use for your script name. For […]

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Adding Scripts Properly to WordPress Part 1 – wp_enqueue_script

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May 6th, 2010
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HOW-TO, WordPress FAQs

Starting in WordPress 2.1 (if I remember correctly), the awesome folks at Automattic gave us the even awesomer function of wp_enqueue_script. Before that, it was every plugin or theme author for himself. If you wanted to add in a script, it was hard-coded in. As you might imagine, this presented a ton of problems. Scripts were loaded twice, out of order, or even when they weren’t needed at all. Furthermore, some themes and plugins had the JavaScript embedded within the plugin’s or theme’s PHP file just to capture a few PHP variables. Not good! In order to add scripts properly to JavaScript, you must always keep your PHP and JavaScript separate. And by separate, I mean separate files. There’s just no excuse anymore (I’ll get into this in Part 2 of this series). The wp_enqueue_script function is the first step in loading your scripts properly. Not only can you add […]

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WordPress Theme Releases for 05/01

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May 1st, 2010
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WordPress Templates WordPress Skins WordPress Themes

Desk Mess Mirrored Marble desktop covered with a mix of old and new items, such as some vintage papers, a stainless steel pen, and, a hot cup of coffee! Now with threaded comments and sticky posts! Ground Floor Richly toned wood floor background with bare-earth colored widgetized sidebar and footer (six widget areas in total, as shown on the included widget-map.png). A strong theme to begin with; grow into; and, build on. FNext Business & Finance Theme Stylish wordpress theme with three columns, widget-support, twitter support Straight Blue Clean Blue and white theme with pale shades of brown. Great for adsense ads and other easy customizations. Director Director includes threaded-comments, sticky-post, theme-options and a unique amazing design

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