Making Word Press More Secure

UPDATED:  There is a new hacking effort taking place using bots to access Word Press sites.  Read more about it here.  Follow the below instructions and you’ll be fine…

There are several ways to make your Word Press site more secure and this is always a good idea.  Proper security can be a pain in the tush but also can save you a lot of time in the future…  Below are some options ranked minimal, better and best.  Take some time to read through these and decide which one you need to focus on.

If you do not feel comfortable doing these things yourself we would be happy to help.  Give us a call for a quote.

Most hacking takes place through the Word Press admin panel and so our first goal is to make this area safer.

Minimal

When Word Press is installed it creates a default user called “admin.”  The first step in securing Word Press is make sure the would be hacker not only has to guess your password, but also has to guess your username.  Here’s how we do this:

1.  Log into your site and go to USERS.
2.  Create a new user with a unique name that is NOT associated with your blog.  (i.e. If your name is “Bill” and you name is all over your website then “Bill” or even “William” is a very poor choice for a username.
3.  Fill out the information for Name, email, etc and then create a strong password.  This password should be at least 8 characters and be a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols.
4.  Log out of the admin panel.
5.  Log back into the admin panel using your newly created username and password.
6.  Again, go to USERS.
7.  Delete the admin username.
8.  IMPORTANT!  It will ask you if you want to delete the posts associated with this user or put those posts underneath your new user.  Put them under the new user….
9.  Look at your user profile and make sure your “display name” is your name and not your username.

Best

1.  Create custom login links by using the Stealth Login Plugin.
2.  Protect your admin area with a custom htaccess file.
3.  Hide your plugins directory.

*NOTE:  You should always be keeping your site and software up to date and you should always be backing up your site!

 

 

Kevin Lowry : A Grateful Convert

USRoute89.com

PatrickMadrid.com

Pan de Vida

GMac

Live Oak Acupuncture

The Roaming Boomers

Well Coffee

We worked for the Dallas firm Red to Green Design to create this hip new site for Well Coffee Roasters.

Using the Word Press Featured Image

If you have one of our sites that is built after March 2011 then we have more than likely incorporated Post Thumbnails into your theme.  This feature will allow you to choose pictures from your media library and designate them as “featured images” to be used throughout the site.  These featured images will automatically be cropped and re-sized to fit into certain areas within your site.   *This is different than using custom fields to provide your homepage thumbnails.  If your theme is using the new featured image designation you will no longer need to use custom fields.

Here’s how you use this new feature.

1.  Go to a post or create a new one.  Click on the little “add an image” icon (to the right of the words “upload/insert.”)  When you upload an image now you will see at the very bottom the words “Use as featured image.”  Click those.

2.  That’s it.  Easy!

David Thies

We met David through our friend and former client Adam at The Call to Serve and were immediately impressed by not only his music but him as an individual.  We were honored to provide him with a new website!

Matside Hawaii

Conversion Diary

Jennifer runs one of the most popular Catholic blogs on the net and her updates are insightful, truthful and just plain fun.  She called us for a new blog design and so far the reviews are raving!

St. Paul’s Outreach

St. Paul’s Outreach is a national ministry to college students that does a wonderful job!  Now they have a wonderful site to go along with that…

One Billion Stories

Approved in Home Care

U of M Campus Ministry

Putting in Content

For the most part this is pretty self explanatory however if you need a good run through on knowing what the different icons are and what they do then Simple WP Guide has an old yet excellent tutorial on this here: http://www.simplewpguide.com/working-with-content/formatting-text-content-in-wp/

How to Write Pages

Pages are primarily static information on your site.  They will not change a lot and will contain information that is relevant to your site but always needs to be there.  They are generally also written with a lot more care and significantly longer in scope and depth than your posts which are more like “updates.”

To write a page simply log into your admin panel and on the left hand side go to “Pages.”  Click on “Add New”  When the pages template opens up you will first one to write in a title. The first step is entering a title. Put something in that is descriptive and not too long. Directly underneath that you see the section where you enter content.

You can enter content in one of two ways, HTML or VISUAL. Select which way you want to use on the right hand side of the content box. You will more than likely always use visual unless you are pasting in You Tube video code or something like that in which case you will want to use the HTML Tab. Since You Tube uses iframes now for their videos you will want to put in all of your content first, format it, then switch to the HTML Tab and paste your video in. Do not return to the VISUAL Tab after pasting in iframe video code or it will disappear.

After you are finished writing your content move to the right hand side of the screen and look for “Page Attributes.”  First you should select the template you wish to use.  For the most part you will either use the “default” template which will give you content and a sidebar, or use the “full width” template which will allow your content to span the full width of the page.

You can also choose in this section whether you want your page to be a stand alone page or a sub page underneath a main page.  For example if on your site you have a page named “About Us” you may choose to have a subpage like “Mission Statement” or “Our Staff” underneath the main page of “About Us.”

Lastly you can choose to include or exclude the page from the navigation menu and choose the page order.  Please note, our newer sites use the Word Press Custom menu feature and so these last two items are obsolete.

Finally, just as we do with posts we need to return to the top of the page and on the right hand side find the “Publish” button and make our page live.

How to Write Posts

Posts are different than pages and are what makes up the part of your site which changes often.  These posts are put on pages in time and date stamped order and so when a new one is created it simply appears above the old ones pushing those farther down the page.

To write posts simply log into your admin panel and on the left side menus click on “posts.”  Next click on “Add New” and your post template comes up.  The first step is entering a title.  Put something in that is descriptive and not too long.  Directly underneath that you see the section where you enter content.

You can enter content in one of two ways, HTML or VISUAL.  Select which way you want to use on the right hand side of the content box.  You will more than likely always use visual unless you are pasting in You Tube video code or something like that in which case you will want to use the HTML Tab.  Since You Tube uses iframes now for their videos you will want to put in all of your content first, format it, then switch to the HTML Tab and paste your video in.  Do not return to the VISUAL Tab after pasting in iframe video code or it will disappear.

The next step is to choose a category.  All posts must go into at least one category.  If you need to create a category simply click on the blue link that says “Add  New Category.”  If you do not choose a category for your post it will automatically be put into your default category.

You can also choose to add custom fields, tags and SEO options to your post if you wish to do so, however there are other tutorials for those available.

When you are done move to the upper right hand side of the page and hit “Publish.”

Word Press Basics

New to Word Press?  We give all of our clients an in depth walk through of their specific theme in person or over the phone and then a ton of tutorials as well on this site.  However, if you need a primer on the basics of how Word Press works here is a great resource for you!  As always, you are free to take advantage of our lifetime free support by calling or emailing but if you just want some of the simple questions answered in writing then http://www.simplewpguide.com will be a great resource for you!

Here’s a video that is slightly outdated but gives a generally good tutorial on writing pages and posts in Word Press.

Here’s another video that does a good job at walking you through the dashboard…

Kate Wicker

Wilco Real Estate

Calvary Oxnard

Adding New Plugins to Your Site

As your site evolves you may want to add new plugins to it thereby increases the functionality.  This is a simple and painless process.  First, be sure and check out the ratings of the plugins you are considering adding.  If you add a plugin that is not well supported you take your chances on whether that plugin will continue to work well or not.

There are several ways to upload a plugin including ftp, cpanel and automatically through your dashboard.  I’m going to give you simple direction for the automatic way to do it.  If you need more in depth directions there are many tutorials out on the web for using ftp and/or cpanel.

The first step is to log into your Word Press back end.  Once you have done that click on the menu that says “Plugins” and it will drop down revealing the sub menu.  Look for the menu that says “Add New.”  Clicking on this will bring up the interface for adding a new plugin.

You have two choices at this point:

1.  Search for a plugin using Google or another search engine and download it to your computer.  Then go to the interface and upload the plugin.

2.  Search for the plugin using the WP interface and install it right there automatically.

Both of these work well and are very self explanatory once you have found the interface where you upload them.

Once you have uploaded the plugin you will look for the link that says “activate” and click on this.  That will activate the plugin and give you access to it.

Keep this in mind…in order for a plugin to work you need to follow three simple steps:

1.  Find the plugin.

2.  Upload the plugin.

3.  Activate the Plugin.

There is a well written and much more detailed tutorial here.

Creating Unique Page Sidebars

If you would like to create unique sidebars for some or all of your pages luckily there is an easy way to do it.  Here’s how you make that happen:

1.  Go to “Plugins” then go to “Add New.”

2.  Search the available plugins for “Per Page Sidebars.”

3.  Install and activate the plugin.

4.  Go to the page you want a unique page sidebar for and scroll to the bottom.  Look for the section that says “Custom Sidebar.”  Check the box to activate it and choose which sidebar you want to replace.  Update the page.

5.  Go to “Appearances” and then “Widgets” and look for your new sidebar and put whatever you want into it.

Weird Spacing When I Hit Enter…

Here’s a question I get a lot from folks who are new at entering info into their content management systems.  “When I am editing the page and I hit the ‘enter ‘ key I get large spaces and can’t get things lined up correctly.”

Luckily this is an easy fix.  On the web the “enter key” gives us a paragraph break which is two spaces.  if you simply want one space you are looking for what is called a “line break.”  To accomplish this simply hold down the “shift key” when you press the “enter key.”

Here’s an example of a paragraph break:
line one

line two

Here’s an example of line break:
line one
line two

How to Edit Your Post Order

In Word Press posts are time and date stamped and are ordered most commonly by latest date first and then older posts following.  To reorder these posts for any reason you need to simply change the published date.  Here’s how we do that…

1. Log into your WordPress account and go to your dashboard.
2. Click on “Posts” from the menu on the left hand side.
3. Select the post you want and edit it.
4. On the right hand side you should see a box called “Publish.”
4. Look for the published date and click on “edit” at the end of the date.
5. Change the date to reflect the date you want the post to have.
6. Click “ok” and then save the post by clicking on the “update” button.

Read more: How to Change the Date of a Blog Post in WordPress | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/how_2021571_blog-date-wordpress.html#ixzz187czOCKu

WordPress 3.0 Menu Addition

With the release of Word Press 3.0 you know have the option for custom menus added to the software. This will allow you to create custom menus of pages, categories or any other links you want and put them in your sidebar widget area.  Here’s a brief tutorial on how you access and use this new feature.

1.  Go to “Appearance” and then to “Menus.”
2.  Fill out the name of a menu where it says “Menu Name” (like “Quick Links” for example)
3.  Select “Create Menu.”
4.  Now, from the left hand side select the pages and categories that you want on this menu and click on “add to menu.”  Likewise configure external links the same way.

You can add these menus to widgets on any theme like this:
5. Go to “Appearance” and then “Widgets” and drag the available widget called “Custom Menus” over to the sidebar where you want it.  Drop it in and the box will open and ask you which menu you want.
6.  Select the menu you want and click on “Save”

On our newer sites you can add the menu directly to your navigation by by selecting it in the upper right hand corner under “Main Navigation.”

Here’s a good video tutorial which will give you some directions on cutom menus…

Baja Central

We were recently contracted by the tourism department in Baja California, Mexico to provide a site that would showcase the different regions in this beautiful area of Northern Mexico.  You can check out the progress here.

The Red Dog Company

KaitlynDunne.com

StudioPress Album Theme

Brian Gardner from Studio Press Fame called us and asked us to create a series of grunge templates for a photography Word Press theme.  We readily agreed and “Album” was born.  This theme has multiple background colors and images and can be changed with the click of a button.  It works extremely well as a showcase for photos or an artists portfolio.

Revolution Theme

The infamous Brian Gardner, creator of the Revolution (now “ Studio Press“) themes for Word Press, asked us to create a design for the theme that was a little bit “grungy and dirty.”  We think we obliged him pretty well and it’s had some good reviews.

We love Word Press and Revolution so this was an honor to work with Brian on this project.



The Sisters of Life

Rewind Memories

Northern Kentucky 411

Mercysong Ministries

Legatus Denver

Bentleaf Promotions

Quest Aquatics

JJ Weeks Band

We got a call from JJ Weeks, an up and coming Christian musician, wanting a new site. JJ had seen our work with Julian Drive and wanted something in that hip, grunge style. After coming up with some crazy grungy graphics, we built the site on a Word Press backend and utilized lots of different page templates and unique sidebars, and incorporated some sweet hover graphics and code to make everything look fly. JJ and the boys are happy than a pig in {bad word}…..