Every so often I have to clean out my Opera tabs… I tend to leave a tab open if I find a useful page. Here are the latest things I’ve been looking at:

• How to Diagnose and Remove the WordPress Pharma Hack from Pearsonified
• WordPress Site Hacked at WordPress.org forums
• What to do if your WordPress site is hacked at WordPress.org
• Hardening WordPress at WordPress.org
• The Perfect 3 Column Liquid Layout from Matthew James Taylor
• Redirect index.html to index.php from Convoluted Brian
• WordPress Mailing List Plugin from Tribulant
• Making Comments Stand Out by Tamba2

In the past few days, some web hosts have been experiencing targeted attacks. A lot of WordPress sites have been hacked, and some regular web sites, too. Here’s the story:

Large-scale WordPress Attacks – from the H Security site

Apparently it’s not too difficult to get rid of the hack, so it should not be a disaster if you get hacked. The big question is how are the hackers getting in. Nobody is quite sure yet. My guess is user names and passwords are being stolen by malware on people’s computers. So… the lesson here is always keep your anti-virus software up-to-date and have a good backup of your web site.

Lately I’ve been experimenting with WordPress galleries, for managing pictures. It’s a bit limited in terms of formatting the output of the gallery, but it’s simple enough for everyday usage. One of the minor bugs is that you can’t have the image not linked. Sators to the rescue! Here’s a little hack to fix that:

WordPress Gallery Shortcode with No Image Link

Unfortunately, this involves modifying one of the core files of WordPress, so you will lose the change every time you update to a new version. Maybe we’ll get lucky and future versions of WordPress will include this feature!

Also, here is the documentation page for using gallery shortcodes:

Gallery Shortcode

These shortcodes allow you to display a gallery in a page or post. The trick to setting up a gallery is to go into Media, Library and attach photos to a post or page. The shortcode will display all of the photos (or other media) that are attached.

Today I was pasting in some articles in a blog, and some of the numbered lists were getting entry #8 turned into a image! So of course Google helped me figure out where to turn that off…

Using Smilies in WordPress

I never knew you could put so many different smilies into a post!

A customer asked me to make a bunch of changes to the theme of a very active web site. Since I couldn’t risk breaking the site or having it look strange for any amount of time, I had to find a way to work on a new set of header and footer files without disrupting the active theme. I found the simple answer here:

WordPress support – How to swap a theme

Basically you’re just adding a test to the page template which tests what page you’re on, and shows a different header and footer for that page. Here’s the little code snippet from the page:

<?php
if(is_page('somepagename')) {
get_header('test'); // Looks for a file called header-test.php
}
else {
get_header(); // Looks for regular header - header.php
}
?>

If you wanted to make the home page have different header and footer files, you could use the is_home() function instead of is_page.

Recently I set up a blog which has a bunch of users who will be posting articles, and I wanted the page which lists the author’s posts to have the author’s name in the link. The solution is to Add User Profile Fields and substitute user_nicename for twitter in the code. Thanks to Change the WordPress Author Archive Permalink by Kyle Eslick for the idea of getting it fixed up!

Sometimes people ask for more information to be stored about their WordPress users. Today I found a very nice solution!! I used this technique on the Career Thought Leaders Blog, for storing author bios.

Justin Tadlock on Adding User Profile Fields

It’s as simple as adding two things into your functions.php theme file. Then you have access to that info in your theme. Sweet!

I just signed up with Contextual Partnership, a site which offers a WordPress plugin to link your blog to thousands of others, automatically. You set up keyword phrases and landing pages, and the plugin does the rest. I’m currently waiting for the account to be approved. I’ll post again about it when I have some results to report. Should be interesting!

One of the great improvements in the new version of WordPress is the handling of pictures and other files… it’s pretty easy to insert a picture or link to a document into a post or page. One feature that’s lacking (for now) is the ability to overwrite an existing file with a new version, like if you want to replace a picture. And of course, ta daaaa! A plugin to the rescue.

WordPress Attachment Extender Plugin from Benjamin Sterling

The plugin adds a file upload field to the media editing page. I wonder if they’ll integrate it into the next version of WordPress?

Here’s a series of great video tutorials from Yaro Starak which shows you why and how to start your own blog.

Become a Blogger

In 10 short videos, they’ve outlined the steps you need to take to get started with your own WordPress blog, and I highly recommend giving these videos a look. And of course, if you need any help implementing any of these ideas, we’re here to help.