In the past few weeks, I’ve come across more and more websites which are in clear violation of the WordPress trademark, namely the domain requirements as outlined here. The simple thing to do when creating a website centered around WordPress is not to have the full name as part of the domain name. For example, fanofwordpress.com. Instead, it should be fanofwp.com. That’s not all that’s trademarked though as the WordPress logo is also registered. The description of the visual trademark according to the United States Patent and Trademark Office is as follows: 26.01.17 – Circles, two concentric; Concentric circles, two; Two concentric circles 26.01.21 – Circles that are totally or partially shaded. 26.17.13 – Letters or words underlined and/or overlined by one or more strokes or lines; Overlined words or letters; Underlined words or letters If you need an official logo to use, this page on the WordPress.org website has […]

New Plugins Tweet retweet posts This plugin adds a button to your wordpress posts which helps the user to tweet and retweet wordpress blog posts which will attract more targeted potential users to your blog and gain popularity. All in One Webmaster All in One Webmaster allow you to add Google, Bing, Yahoo Webmaster Meta Tag into Header of your theme and also you can add Google Analytics into theme footer. Open Post Open post plugin allows anonymous unregistered users to comment on selected posts, when you have a register to comment blog. SuperSlider-Excerpt SuperSlider-Excerpts automatically adds thumbnails wherever you show excerpts Frontpage Manager Lets you customize how frontpage posts appear in a number of ways: limiting by category, number of posts, number of words/characters/paragraphs. Updated Plugins Table of Contents Creator Table of Contents Creator automatically generates a complete table of contents for your site, including pages, posts and forum […]

Journey Journey is a classic, three column theme with flexible width (800-1200px). With v1.1, Pings/Trackbacks are displayed separately and option pages. iTech iTech is high quality, low graphics, Lightweight, fast-rendering professional WordPress Theme, especially good for technology blogs. A tabbed block is added to sidebar for displaying Recent Posts, Popular Posts and Recent Comments. Built in control panel, you can set customized RSS feed, email subscription, twitter subscription and header logo. Blank Blank has no layout but every template is full of html comments to explain the php stuff if you know a bit of css and html Amazing Grace Crimson A simple, neat and clean looking 3 column, fixed width WordPress theme that would be appropriate for a church or Christian ministry website.

Bojan Zdrnja has published a post on the SANS Internet Storm Center blog today highlighting a distributed WordPress admin account cracking script. The script was discovered by one of the sites readers on a virtual private server (VPS). The acquired script is written in PHP and performs brute force cracking attempts to WordPress admin accounts. While this particular version is relatively simple, the power behind the script and the MySQL database allows the attacker to distribute the attacks not only by sites, but also by passwords tried as well. The article goes into detail explaining how the script works and suggests the typical security precautions such as using strong passwords, changing the admin username and limiting the admin login page to only your IP address. Brute force attacks on WordPress are nothing new but it’s interesting to see this approach using a distributed technique. Hat tip to WPVibe.

As a webmaster we are all concerned about the number of links that are coming into the blog and all the other stats that usually concern the traffic to the blog. However, another important thing we all miss to see is the number of outbound clicks from our blog to other websites.

Preface The act of adopting an abandoned plugin reminds me of adopting an orphaned child. On the one hand, the new parents are taking on someone who they didn’t help raise thus far, which forces them to “learn” the ways of the new child to communicate well with them. On the other hand, the new parent is left with the fear that there will come a day that the old parent will come to claim their rights on the child. The analogy I brought can go some way in building an intuition about the problem of orphaned plugins, but if we want to go beyond just intuition we need to take a more in-depth look at the subject. I hope such a look will inspire a discussion that will benefit us all. The chase for a faster plugin installation My prime example for an orphan plugin for this post will […]

If you are a Dreamhost or MediaTemple customer and I know that many WordPress users are, it’s probably been a rough week for you. Just before Thanksgiving, an exploit was used on a subset of MediaTemple grid servers to redirect websites to a 3rd-party advertising website. Also, some customers passwords were compromised as they were stored in the database via clear text. MediaTemple has since switched to an encryption method of storing passwords in databases. Over the holidays, Dreamhost encountered a fairly large network failure. This happened just before they conducted their largest data center move to date. The network failure caused a number of sites to go offline, including a number of Dreamhost official sites. However, as mentioned in a recent ZDNet article, the nightmare is still ongoing for a few customers, especially those running WordPress who are running into 500 errors. ZDNet published a list of directions from […]

If you’re a developer and need to know some of the geekier bits coming down the pipe in WordPress 2.9, Joost De Valks article should fit the bill. In it, he lists a number of things that developers should pay attention to such as enhancements to wp_query, upgraded TinyMCE editor, performance updates to the options table and much more. WordPress 2.9 is currently at beta 1 stage. If you are one of the beta testers for 2.9, let me know how it’s gone for you so far.