Tag Archives | hacks

The Power of WordPress Themes

The Power of WordPress Themes Starting and maintaining a blog is not easy. One must think of ways to expose his blog in order to gain more audience and fan following. Aside from that, blogs usually contain articles, but articles are not enough to attract visitors. One must be able to have an interactive blog that keeps the visitor stay and read the blog. A blog that has lot of contents and eye catching designs are also one of the ways to keep the audience entertained and recommend the blog to other people. In order to do this, one must have such software that will manage his or her blog without delving into too much technicalities. A blog with a WordPress theme is very advantageous when it comes to its creation and management. WordPress is an open source CMS, content management system. What does this mean? This means that one, WordPress is free and will always be free. Second, a community of programmers, web developers, and enthusiast protects WordPress from any potential hacks and security lapses. Third, these people regularly try to develop WordPress and its plug-ins in order to improve its functions and features. A CMS is a content management system solely developed for websites, blogs and web pages so that they won’t have to hard code every aspect of their website. Why use a CMS? Better yet, why use WordPress among the other CMS? Here are some reasons:• It is free, has open -source licensing, has lots of WordPress themes available for download• It has lots of available plug-ins, widgets, and applications that can go with one’s web design• It is easy to use, outputs great end product, and gives you freedom in one’s design• Powered by PHP and MySql, WordPress has the ability to create and manage a website while at the same time, it has the ability to support and integrate a database to the website.• WordPress won the best open source CMS award on 2009 because of its excellence in the field of CMS and web development. Now, these are the reason why WordPress have an edge over other CMS. WordPress themes are available for download and it can be used in one’s web site, blog, or web page. This way, you will no longer worry about its core designs; WordPress themes would do it for the user. Of course, one would have the option to change or edit the WordPress them if it would not satisfy his tastes. By using WordPress one can hasten the design process while at the same time the quality of the site won’t be compromised. Web development takes a lot of time, WordPress however is a development tool made for blogs and websites that does not need too much abstraction but at the same time it has the elements of art and beauty. By using a CMS to manage one’s blog, it gives the user simple clicks here and there to update or change his blog without going into too much trouble. WordPress is here to make designing, creating, and maintaining a site easy. The Power of WordPress Themes

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WordPress Tutorial Deutsch Forum einbinden (Mingle Forum)

In diesen WordPress Tutorial zeige ich euch, wie Ihr ein Forum schnell und einfach in WordPress einbinden können. Forum Plugin: wordpress.org Alle WordPress Tutorials: www.youtube.com Homepage www.zuschauer99.de.vu zuschauer99 auf Facebook www.facebook.com Folgt mir auf Twitter twitter.com Audioboo audioboo.fm Ihr habt eine Frage? Dann stellt sie mir www.formspring.me

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How to Protect Your WordPress Website From Hackers

How to Protect Your WordPress Website From Hackers

It’s a nightmare scenario. You go to your website only to find a nasty message from a hacker bragging about hacking your site. And nothing else. As far as you can tell your content is gone and you can’t even find a way to log into your WordPress dashboard.

Would your business survive your website being shut down, even temporarily?

It Happens

That’s exactly the situation that my friend of mine found herself in recently.

Fortunately we were able to help her out, rescue (most of) her files and get her back up and running relatively quickly. But that isn’t always the case.

Turns out she could have done some things to better protect herself. Fortunately she learned her lesson well and she’s in much better shape today than she was before the attack.

Have You Really Been Hacked?

A lot of times people come to me saying, “”My site’s been hacked,”” when it really hasn’t. With WordPress sometimes plugin conflicts can cause issues that seem to the user like a hacker has messed with something. This is most common when upgrading to a new version of WordPress if a plugin hasn’t been made compatible with the new version yet.

While that can cause your site to crash, it’s not caused by hackers.

Not only that, but most of the sites I’ve seen that have been hacked weren’t just taken down by them. Most of the malicious hacks I’ve seen involved injecting some code into the site, usually with the end goal to redirect site traffic to some other website.

The Symptoms

Without going into the gory details, my friend’s case was a little different. Her site actually showed an all white screen with an error message along the lines that a plugin conflict might produce and the hacker just wanted to crash her site. Turns out he was into stealing something else.

When I did some troubleshooting I was able to get her site back up and running in fairly short order. In her words:

I must add here, that it only took Chris 45 minutes to decipher and fix what was a rather sophisticated hack!

While I’d never promise to be able to recover a hacked site that quickly, I do have a good track record recovering hacked WordPress sites.

Protecting Yourself

Here are some things you can do to minimize the chances you’ll end up getting hacked and maximize the chances to fully recover quickly should your site crash (for whatever reason).

1. Use Strong Passwords.

I honestly think this was my friend’s biggest mistake. Again in her words,

This is what got me – I just used numbers and letters and the password was – well – kinda obvious.

Make your passwords not only hard to guess, but make them more difficult for sophisticated hackers to break as well. Randomly mix in special characters (found on the number keys with the shift button) as well as numbers and upper and lower case letters. Strong passwords make a huge difference.

Both WordPress and cPanel will tell you how strong your password is. Stronger passwords offer better protection.

The trouble is, having strong passwords also makes them harder to type in. That’s why I use 1Password to manage my passwords on my Macs. I can use really strong passwords and I don’t have to remember them or type them in. 1Password will auto fill web forms for me. It’s the best of both worlds: good security & user friendly.

2. Keep Your WordPress Updated.

One of the most common ways WordPress websites get hacked is because their owners don’t keep their software up to date. What happens is that older versions of WordPress can have known security weaknesses. These weaknesses are fixed by newer releases of the software.

But if you don’t update your software, you leave yourself exposed.

This also holds true with plugins and themes. Besides, the newer versions of WordPress make keeping everything up to date remarkably easy. There’s not much of an excuse to keep you from updating things.

3. Backup Regularly and Often.

A good backup can cover for a ton of other issues by making it possible to revert back to how things were before your site crashed. When it comes to WordPress you need to back up your

Database
Theme Files
Plugins
Media Uploads

There are several different plugins and services to handle backups of your WordPress site.

But the point is backup early and backup often!

Bottom Line

I don’t believe any site is completely “”hack proof.”” A determined hacker with enough resources can break into most anything. Just watch an episode of NCIS!

But if you do these three things you will greatly reduce your risk of being hacked and make it much easier to recover if you do run into a problem.

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