WordPress – Keep Up With The Web

Choosing WordPress Themes: Security Risks, Code Bloat and Other Issues

Years ago in the early days of WordPress, everything was free. You either chose a boring default theme, picked one someone else had created or wrote your own theme. Then two things happened: 1) people realized they need to make money and 2) hackers discovered themes are a way to create security holes.

Unfortunately, since one can get website code easily, it is easy for a hacker to use a particular theme to hack your website. Also, there is the do-it-yourself trend, in which someone who knows no coding wants to set up a whole WordPress site with only a click here and there.

However, if one also wants a complex theme or lots of choices, this can bring about what is called “code bloat” – lots of calls to the database that slows down your site or lots of short codes that make theme switching difficult. In this post we will discuss two issues: theme security and code bloat. Then the post will suggest a few ways to make good theme choices.

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How to Secure Your WordPress Site and Add Functionality #FridayFinds

Have you heard about the most recent brute force attack on WordPress websites? Is your site protected against XMLRPC pingbacks? Do you have a security plugin installed and a system for creating unique secure passwords? Do you add increased functionality to your WordPress website using code snippets or use HTML code in text widgets? Find the answers to these questions in this week’s #FridayFinds.

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What is Your Favorite WordPress Plugin? #FridayFinds

Plugins are programs (written in the PHP scripting language) that can add additional functionality to your WordPress website. Some plugins perform functions such as backups, caching and security. Others add special features like forms, image galleries, displaying related posts etc. Since plugins are basically a way of adding more code to your site, it’s understandable that a plugin can impact your site performance. In this week’s #FridayFinds, let’s take a look at why some WordPress plugins slow down your website, some highly recommended plugins and a simple alternative to adding a plugin for your social media follow buttons.

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How to Change a WordPress Theme and Keep your SEO Meta Tag Data

Meta tags are used to embed data into your website page. Examples of this are titles, descriptions, alternate text and keywords. There’s always a healthy debate going on among SEO (search engine optimization) specialists on how important meta tags are to your search rankings (in search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo). Bottom line, the general consensus is that meta tag data helps both the search engines and users to determine what your site is about. So, what happens to this data if you change your WordPress theme?

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Top 5 Reasons to Buy the CommentLuv Premium This Week

The CommentLuv Premium WordPress Plugin For those of you who haven’t heard yet, Andy Bailey is having a special 75% off anniversary sale on CommentLuv Premium (CLP). If you don’t already have a copy, you may want to hop over and take advantage of this sale while it lasts. (My affiliate link is below.) The regular price is $97 and the price right now is about $24. In this kind of sale, the price goes up after every 5 sales and this sale will only last for about 5 more days.

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The Powerful WordPress Text Widget

Add functionality to your WordPress website using text widgets and the widget logic plugin. Embed a different YouTube video on each page of your website.

What is a widget anyway? Well, the simple explanation is that it’s a mini-app of sorts. You can use it to do something as simple as run a line of HTML code that displays a follow button in the sidebar of your WordPress blog or it can be a companion piece to a plugin. There are also several widgets that are part of the standard WordPress installation like a calendar, tag cloud and a search button. If you’re looking for a simple way to add functionality to your WordPress website, you may need to look no further than the simple text widget.

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WordPress OpenHook 3 Plugin Broke my Thesis Theme

Recently the OpenHook plugin for the Thesis theme was totally rewritten as the OpenHook Customizations Manager plugin. Since then, many people are reporting issues. Part of it may be a learning curve on our part. In some cases, there are incompatibilities that are difficult to identify and resolve. This is a great plugin that makes it easy to add HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and even PHP code into your Thesis theme without having to manually edit your custom.css or custom_functions.php files. If you’re about to upgrade from a version 2.x OpenHook to a version 3.x (or if you’ve upgraded and run into issues), you may want to read this first.

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