My posts on WordPress

Making your WordPress Dashboard and Logins go through SSL

SSL should be something everyone should be aware of on the internet. Even if you don’t know what it stands for (Secure Socket Layer by the way), everyone should at least recognise the basic icons like the green padlock or general padlock icon. You’ll often find it on online banking/e-commerce websites, your browser will be letting you know the website is genuine and your OK to punch your lovely personal details into it. Well WordPress has a dashboard and login system, which can go over SSL. Here’s a quick way of making that happen.

This guide assumes you have a valid SSL certificate already setup

In your wp-config.php file find the comment line:

/* That's all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */

Immediately before that line add the following:

/**
 * SSL for Login and Admin
 */

define('FORCE_SSL_ADMIN', true);

This will then force SSL on the dashboard and logins! You’ll find general port 80 requests to /wp-admin and /wp-login.php will get redirected automatically. Much more secure than your password going across in plain text. Because you know the NSA and PRISM probably have your connection to your ISP tapped… Woops probably said too much.

Quick Tip: Removing all your WordPress post thumbnails quickly

WordPress is a very database centric Content Management System, and like most systems the SQL database can be the best way to achieve a quick solution to an otherwise long and boring repetitive task. Here’s one of those tasks. I needed remove all the old thumbnails, due to bad sizing and thumbnail improvements. However I have over 100 posts, so I’ll be damned if I’m going to manually go through the WP dashboard and do it. Here’s a quick and easy way to kill all the thumbnails quickly via SQL

DELETE FROM wp_postmeta WHERE meta_key = '_thumbnail_id'

This will remove all thumbnail references on all posts and has_post_thumbnail() will return false.

If you needed to run this on a specific set of rows, you’d need to use an AND clause at the end of the above SQL

Note: Always run SQL commands like this on a testing server/localhost installation and have backups ready!

WordPress Worm attacking blogs

WordPress blogs are under attack after a old friend is back causing havoc. A worm is attacking WordPress blogs which are yet to be patched with the WordPress 2.8.4 release. This release, although contains minor changes is now probably one of the most important updates you will need to update to. This update fixes the security which this worm is using to exploit WordPress blogs, the worm is quite strong and therefore should not be taken lightly. Click for the full insight on the worm.

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Improving your WordPress posts and content

WordPress is a powerful platform which goes down a treat with bloggers and publishers, and thanks to it’s brilliant community, WordPress has something called plugins which can extend the functionality of a WordPress website. There are so many different plugins written by community members that perform unique tasks, whether it be to extend the functions of something that is already in place or to completely introduce a new function to a WordPress website. Here are a list of some WordPress plugins that could help improve your posts and content

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That smiley face on your WordPress Footer?

Recently I saw a unexpected visitor suddenly appearing on my footer. A unusual guest named smiley, yes really! As I was doing a regular check on browsershots.org to see how my website was displaying in all the main browsers I noticed a random gap after the footer with a small smiley face in the bottom left corner and sure enough I saw it for myself when I checked it out in my internet browser. What was causing the uninivited guest to appear? Read on to find our the cause of this weirdness!

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