WordPress as awesome as it is, is also one of the most popular open source CMS scripts that is out there – and we all know being that kind of popular carries the increased risk for devious hackers to find new ways to break into your site. In many cases the hackers break in only to spam your blog with tons and tons of links to less than desirable sites. Other times they can install redirects to other sites or even install malware/spyware. Regardless of the severity of the hack, we as WP users always need to be diligent about doing everything we can to protect our sites, and our customers/readers from potential security risks.
Our friends over at MasterSiteManager.com (an awesome stats, rankings and SEO tracking service that we use and highly recommend) have tested and put together a great “must have” list of plugins to help protect your blogs from hackers. If you use some of these really great (and FREE) plugins, along with working with your hosting company or server admins to make sure your server is as secure as possible, you will see your vulnerability to these attacks drop significantly.
1. Restrict Login By IP – lets you specify IP addresses or hosts that users are allowed to login from. Only users that have the exact IP will be able to access the dashboard. Everyone else will get a “Forbidden” error when trying to log in or access an admin page directly. However, normal visitors won’t be affected – everyone will still be able to read your posts browse the site.
2. AskApache Password Protect – it utilizes fast, tried-and-true built-in Security features to add multiple layers of security to your blog. This plugin is specifically designed and regularly updated specifically to stop automated and unskilled attackers attempts to exploit vulnerabilities on your blog resulting in a hacked site.
3. WP-Ban – It will display a custom ban message when the banned IP, IP range, host name or referer url trys to visit you blog. You can also exclude certain IPs from being banned.
4. WP System Health – This plugin provides a new Dashboard Widget (limit to administrators) that displays information provided by 4 different categories: system, php, wordpress, database.
5. WP-DB-Backup – WP-DB-Backup allows you easily to backup your core WordPress database tables.
6. Exploit Scanner – This plugin searches the files on your website, and the posts and comments tables of your database for anything suspicious. It also examines your list of active plugins for unusual filenames.
7. WP Security Scan – Scans your WordPress installation for security vulnerabilities and suggests corrective actions.
Of course, you should always make sure you are running the most recent version of WordPress and that you take regular (nightly) backups of your site so that if you are hacked, you can quickly revert to a saved version, or do a file comparison to find the injected code.
Drop us a note below if you have any other tips or suggestions!
We like to think of WP Now as a boutique themes site, focusing on quality over quantity. Therefore when we begin development on a new theme, we strive to build highly-functional themes that maximize the capabilities of WordPress, transforming it into the flexible CMS we know it can be.
Here’s where we need your opinion. We’d like to know what types of sites and functionalities you would find most useful in your business or use of WordPress. You can select as many as you like from the list below and if you have something in mind that’s not on the list, simply enter it into the field at the bottom or leave a comment. Help us help you!
How do we measure success? Can a person have too much success?
A little story about a Mexican fisherman illustrates success in a simple life, well lived.
The businessman was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The businessman complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them. The Mexican replied only a little while.
The businessman then asked why he didn’t stay out longer and catch more fish? The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs.
The businessman then asked, but what do you do with the rest of your time? The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take a siesta with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos; I have a full and busy life, señor.”
The businessman scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and I could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats; eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman, you would sell directly to the processor and eventually open your own cannery. You would control the product, processing and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually New York City where you would run your expanding enterprise.”
The Mexican fisherman asked, “But señor, how long will this all take?”
To which the businessman replied, “15-20 years.” “But what then, señor?” The businessman laughed and said, “That’s the best part! When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions.” “Millions, señor? Then what?”
The businessman said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take a siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”
The fisherman, still smiling, looked up and said, “Isn’t that what I’m doing right now?”
We are often asked, “I really love your _______ functionality, what software is that?” Or “your __________ section is outta this world, is that a plugin?” Since we are all about making the WPNow community even better, we thought we’d lay it all out there for you guys in case any of these software tools might help you with your own business. (We’ll be adding more to this list as software is added).
Primary CMS
WORDPRESS, of course!! Would we even think of building a site selling WordPress themes, on anything other than WordPress?? This ain’t your grandmother’s CMS…
Membership Management
aMember Pro – an awesome script that manages our content, our theme club members and their subscriptions. Offers content protection, integrates with just about every payment gateway out there, folder protection and more. It provides you with a signup, login, and management system, that can then be integrated with WordPress or other CMS’s. Basically what makes things super cool for our Theme Club Members.
Affiliate Management
iDevAffiliate – an excellent tracking system for affiliates, running commission reports, tiered commissions and more. Fantastic program for a very, reasonable cost.
Forum Software
BBPress – A great fast, light easy to use forum script that integrates easily into WordPress working off of the same plugin system for easy functionality add-ons.
Email Management
Gmail – Since we are for the most part, a virtual company with developers and support staff all over the country and the world, we needed an email system that we could all access at any point in time, via the web. Gmail works fantastically for managing the many emails we get on a daily basis.
Newsletter Management
Aweber – after trying out a number of different newsletter services, we found the best deliverability rate and easiest management platform to be Aweber. Their opt in’s integrate well with WordPress and Amember.
Hosting and Server Admin Support
Liquidweb – Having gone through pretty much every hosting solution in the book, we can say hands down, LiquidWeb offers the highest level of support, knowledge and capacity of any host we have found. Problems are fixes within minutes (literally) and their server and security technology is top in the business. Couldn’t give anyone a more hearty recommendation than these guys.
Video Hosting
Amazon S3 – Sure we could host with Youtube or vimeo for free, but we opted to use a paid hosting service where we could host our videos for surprisingly low rates, and we still own the content (without all the little annoying ads)
WP Coupon is the premier script for managing coupons and turning a free wordpress blog into an affiliate money making machine. WP Coupon turns WordPress into a powerful coupon site, allowing you to easily create user-submitted coupon sites on virtually any niche – books, travel, hosting, and more! Use it to run a complete affiliate coupon site, or add coupons to your existing website or blog. Bundled with a complete affiliate link management system!
Some of the great features of WP Coupon:
Fully Optimized
WP Coupon is optimized for search engines and third party advertisements like Google Adwords, Yahoo, BidVertiser and more. Each theme provided by WP Coupon is search engine friendly and completely optimized for maximum search engine exposure. This will help you get ranked higher in search engines. So rest assured, you will not have to spend countless hours on search engine optimization.
Different Coupon Types
Not just offer your visitors coupons, but also provide shopping tips and printable coupons! Visitors submitting coupons can choose between three different coupon types; coupon code, printable coupon, and shopping tip. When logged into WordPress as admin you will have the option when submitting coupons to have the coupon be featured and even enter a custom url for each coupon. This allows you to have a different landing page for a coupon. Useful for coupons only activated by a unique link.
Store Subscriptions
Offer your visitors different ways for them to receive alerts whenever a new coupon is added. Visitors can receive email alerts of new coupons, subscribe to the stores coupon rss feed and comment rss feed, or use AddToAny widget options.
Automatic Coupon Update
Easily keep your coupon site updated with the latest coupons. Connect with various coupon feeds or use WP Coupon’s Coupon Feed* to have your coupon site updated automatically.
Complete Affiliate Link Management System
Fully integrated with Manage Affiliate Links to provide your coupon site with the best link management system. Manage Affiliate Links allows you to redirect dead, expired, or broken links to another link of your choice. This is important because you do not want your visitors leave your site because of broken links or an expired campaign link. Manage Affiliate Links protects your sites image and reputation while providing a backup system to your links. You will receive an email notification of dead links allowing you to update the down link. Manage Affiliate Links will increase your conversion ratio and allow you to build a large coupon network without having to check your links every day.
Sponsored Categories
Offer companies an opportunity to sponsor categories. With WP AD you can sell ad space with an unlimited number of ad placements. WP AD features email notification of expiring ads, default ad, email templates, ad stats, and so much more.
Special Tools
WP Coupon comes with special tools to help you add stores to your coupon web site. Using the Quick Summary and Tag Finder will save you time writing the a summary of the store and adding tags. When adding a special offer for the store you can use the SEO Images for Special Offer tool generate a search engine optimized html code automatically. This gives you the maximum SEO advantage.
Online Community
WP Coupon allows user to join and create an account. Registered users can choose an avatar and create a profile that will be visible to other users online. Each comment or coupon submitted by the user will display a quick summary of their profile as well as their chosen avatar when you hover over their username. Users can also manage their email subscriptions from their account.
Totally Integrated With WordPress
WP Coupon integrates with your WP Admin area, allowing you to configure the plugin through the settings panel. Each theme provided by WP Coupon comes with a special themes panel with lots of options to customize your coupon web site without ever having to edit the html code.
Auto-Sizing Thumbnails
An image resizer script built into the WP Coupon theme automatically scales your store thumbnails (Snapshots) for pixel perfect display in our templates. No need to upload new cropped images when switching themes or using your own.
WP Coupon Framework
All WP Coupon themes and plugins are built on the same stable WP Coupon framework. Making modifications are a breeze, with notes in the code to help assist you in making changes and allow further software development. Over 90% of the code is unencrypted!
Custom Printable Coupon
Now offer merchants a chance to create their very own printable coupons. Features include; set number of coupons to be printed, control how many times a user may print a coupon, custom coupon templates, multiple bar code format support, coupon tracking and fraud protection, easy interface, and so much more!
Single domain licenses are available for $199 or for $499 you will receive a single domain license and all 4 available themes
WordPress AutoBlogged plugin is one of the top wordpress plugins that can be used to transform your blog into a content generating, money making machine. Within a few minutes you can turn an empty blog, into an auto populating content machine.
Autoblogged is a robust autoblogging WordPress plugin that can allow users to automatically create blog posts from any Atom or RSS feed. This plugin offers a number of useful features to automate WordPress blog content and provides pre-defined searches to allow easy searching of news articles, auto post filtering and RSS autodiscovery, and allows users to assign categories and subcategories to organise content more efficiently.
There are three different Autoblogged licenses available, single ($59.95), multi-site ($129.95) and developer ($389). All licenses includ free support services, updates and sublicensing (with the developer license).
After nearly 11 million downloads of WordPress 3.0 in just 42 days, time to release WordPress 3.0.1. The requisite haiku:
Three dot oh dot one
Bug fixes to make you smile
Update your WordPress
This maintenance release addresses about 50 minor issues. The testing many of you contributed prior to the release of 3.0 helped make it one of the best and most stable releases they’ve had.
Download 3.0.1 or update automatically from the Dashboard > Updates menu in your site’s admin area.
At this exact moment, WordPress has been downloaded a total of 10,718,399 times according to the official WordPress Download Counter. This number increases by the second, spreading like wildfire across the world’s community of web designers, programmers, business owners…. down to the individual blogger. WordPress is great, not just because of its intuitive design, elegant coding and the fact that it’s free, WordPress is amazing because of the tremendous community that continues to grow around it.
So many people to acknowledge… first and foremost, the team over at Automattic – the engine that keeps the ship moving. How about the contributing coders and beta testers who bring a whole new meaning to the term “think tank.” And a huge shout out to the plugin developers who make our lives oh so much sweeter and more functional.
As theme developers, we have the fun job. We get to dress up the beast and make it pretty. But with thousands of themes out there, we are reliant on the unofficial WordPress “press core” to bring meaning, cohesion and order to it all. Here at WP Now, we would like to acknowledge a few of these bloggers and thank them for their commitment to our community:
Another great autoblog wordpress plugin is WP Robot. WP Robot is a powerful and easy to use autoblogging plugin for WordPress weblogs allowing you to turn your blog on complete auto-pilot and drip-feed it with fresh content in regular intervals you specify. And the best part: The posts created will be targeted to any keyword you enter and any topic you could ever think of!
There are many possible ways to use WP Robot, let us outline a few below:
Create an armada of automatic weblogs. Since you don’t have to create the posts yourself nothing prevents your from creating a massive network of so-called autoblogs in order to earn advertising money from them or promote your existing websites.
Earn more money from your existing weblogs. Several of the modules available for WP Robot allow you to earn affiliate commission for any sale referred by your blog’s posts through the eBay, Amazon and Clickbank affiliate programs. Since all posts created by WP Robot are targeted to your weblog’s topic conversions are generally very good and so this is an easy way to improve the revenue of your weblogs without any work!
Add targeted and helpful content to your already established websites. Let’s say you are running a website about golf. By using WP Robot you could add a weblog to your existing site filled with relevant questions and answers on how to play golf or videos teaching golf or reviews of the newest golf equipment and so on. The possibilities are endless and as I said – no work involved on your part.
Modesto is an elegant premium portfolio theme, designed for WordPress. Made with cool colors and top notch graphics, this theme will attractively show off your corporate personal portfolio.
Features:
Custom portfolio templates
Blog format option
Integrated banner advertising
Widget ready
Theme Options Panel
and much much more!!!
For the first 50 downloads of Modesto through the end of July, we are offering a 50% off coupon
The businessman was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The businessman complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them. The Mexican replied only a little while.
with the proceeds buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats; eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman, you would sell directly to the processor and eventually open your own cannery. You would control the product, processing and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually New York City where you would run your expanding enterprise.”
