WordPress Plugin: Revision Control

May 13, 2009 — Mrs. Mecomber

WordPress 2.7 is great– so many new functionalities! BUT please– why oh why did they not revise the “revision” capability?! WordPress’ existing Revision feature is like an auto-save feature– it will automatically save your posts as you write them, so that should your computer or software crash, you have a current copy of what you’re writing. It’s a very nice feature, except for these reasons:

  • It saves every minute or so, making a new copy (not over-writing the old copy).
  • It creates a huge post database which makes your blog work harder to load your posts.
  • It has no delete capability, so these revisions sit in your database, unused.

Yeah yeah, there are ways to tinker with your wp-config.php file and disable the revision feature. But the ability to delete and/or disable and/or control the revision feature SHOULD BE built-in. It’s ridiculous not to have it!

So, anyway, I’ve found a very good plugin for revision control, called, not surprisingly, Revision Control. I’ve tried it an all my blogs, and it works perfectly. I have mine set to auto-save only TWO posts (you can choose to save more). It also gives you the ability to disable revisions completely, and to delete existing revisions. Kind of like virtual wrinkle creams for all the excess baggage you want to smooth out of your databases! (How’s that for fitting it in, huh?) :-p

My only complaint with Revision Control would be that I wish it had a checklist where I could tick off radio buttons and delete the revisions all at once. As it is now, I have to click “Delete” for each revision that exists, which is tedious, because a lot of my old posts have a dozen or more revisions sitting in my database! But that’s a small complaint.

Check out the plugin, it works well for all my 2.7 blogs (and I hear it is compatible for 2.6 WP blogs as well).

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Posted in blogs, Wordpress. Tags: , , , , . 1 Comment »

Bad Behavior is a GO!!

April 19, 2009 — Mrs. Mecomber

To the non-blogger, that title may look strange indeed…

I’m referring to Bad Behavior, the WordPress plugin. I installed it. Remember how I lamented my spam problems? How I was inundated with hundreds of spam comments per day? Well, I installed the plugin called Bad Behavior, and LOOK at my spam count for the past two days!

Photobucket

I am impressed, indeed. Thumbs up for Bad Behavior!

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Posted in blogs, Wordpress. Tags: , , , . 1 Comment »

Spam and More Spam

April 16, 2009 — Mrs. Mecomber

Wow. In FOUR DAYS, this is how much comment spam I’ve gotten for this blog. And I’m only halfway through the fourth day!

spam

Unbelievable, really. There were 57 pages of comment spam! There is no way I could have time to go through them all. I really wish these bots could be destroyed. Askimet grabs the spam so the comments are not automatically published, but I still have them in my comment admin page, where I have to delete them… wow. Disgusting.

I installed the plugin Bad Behavior, to reduce some of this clutter. I hope it works. Comment spam can bring a blog down by overloading it with too many requests, causing the server to crash. Jerks.

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Posted in blogs, Wordpress. Tags: , , , . 9 Comments »

Fixing the Updated Content Gallery Plugin

February 17, 2009 — Mrs. Mecomber

The illustrious Content Gallery Plugin for WordPress blogs has recently issued an update. The plugin is now named Featured Content Gallery Plugin. That’s a very nice name, but with the name change comes a little scare if you are unprepared– updating to the new name knocks out the plugin’s effectiveness on your blog. In other words, after you update, the plugin won’t work right away. There’s something else you have to do after you update this plugin, before it can get going again: you have to go into your Theme Editor and rename the code– you must tell the theme to point to the Featured Content Gallery plugin, not the Content Gallery plugin. Here’s the quick and easy way to do this:

>> Update plugin.
>> Go to your Theme Editor.
>> Find the code for the Content Gallery plugin (it’s usually in the “home.php” file but your location may vary depending upon where you have the plugin inserted).
>> Find the code that says:

<?php include (ABSPATH . ‘/wp-content/plugins/content-gallery/gallery.php’); ?>

>> Replace it with this:

<?php include (ABSPATH . ‘/wp-content/plugins/featured-content-gallery/gallery.php’); ?>

>> Save.
>> Check your website and refresh. You may need to clear your cache to see the change.

I don’t know why these instructions were not clear on the WordPress plugin gallery site, nor the plugin homepage. I had no idea you had to change the code– I merely updated the plugin, only. So I freaked out after updating the plugin, because when people viewed my home page, all they saw was a bunch of scrambled code nonsense where the Gallery should be.

Hopefully, this will spare plugin users the agony of an ugly home page and the scrambling for a fix. Hope this helps.

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Posted in how to, html coding, Wordpress. Tags: . Comments Off »

Fluency Admin Plugin for WordPress

February 5, 2009 — Mrs. Mecomber

This is a wonderful plugin for WordPress users, the Fluency 2.0 Admin plugin. Designed by Dean Robinson, it changes your blog’s admin interface. This is much, much more attractive than the generic (bland blue/gray) admin panels that come with the WordPress software. I am not much of a plugin user (I prefer to keep my blogs lean and mean), but Fluency is so attractive and functional that I am ditching my policy of plugin thrift and going with it.

You can see in the screenshot below, what an improvement it is, both aethestically and organizationally.

The plugin allows custom “flyout” menus, but maintains the original WordPress menu choices. For example, with “Posts” the menu choices are still “Edit,” “Add New,” “Tags,” and “Categories.” But Fluency 2.0 organizes the menus better and much more attractively. I love it!

Unfortunately, Fluency does not seem compatible with the Opera browser (my default browser). The plugin works well on my blogs and Fluency does appear normally with the flyout menus using Opera, but the flyout menu choices are blank white and I cannot read them (They look something akin to a fence installation– I see the border lines around the menus but cannot see what’s there). So… either I use Firefox for my blog writing (which I loathe to do; and Firefox will not work on my laptop’s wireless system despite all my tries), or I ditch Fluency until the author updates the plugin. Right now, I like Fluency so much that I am using Firefox on my desktop PC for it… but I doubt I’ll be able to stay away from Opera for very long.

It’s a great plugin, I hope the updates come soon. Fluency 2.0 is compatible ONLY for WordPress 2.7. There is an older Fluency version for older WordPress versions. However, I recommend you upgrade your WordPress blog to the more secure WordPress 2.7, as previous versions have been hacked .

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Posted in browsers, Wordpress. Tags: . Comments Off »

How To Prevent Your WordPress From Being Hacked

January 27, 2009 — Mrs. Mecomber

There’s a very good post I found by Ruhani Rabin about How To Prevent Your WordPress From Being Hacked. It’s got excellent information that every blog writer should know. Here are a few relevant things:

  • Rename the administrative account: You can do this in the MySQL command-line client with a command like

    View Code SQLupdate tableprefix_users
    set user_login=’anothername’
    where
    user_login=’admin’;

    or by using a MySQL frontend like phpMyAdmin.

  • Use strong password: Creating a strong password that is also memorable is one of the easiest defenses against being hacked. There are a lot of online password strength checker that you could check. Here is Lorelle’s article on blog herald called Protect Your Blog With a Solid Password, offering tips and tricks to help create a strong password that is also memorable.
  • Disable directory browsing: An attacker can reveal your files because they have been indexed by search engines, so you can use a simple one line code inside your .htaccess file

    also use a robots.txt file to disallow the search engine robots to index the subfolder contents. Here is an example of a robots.txt file
    View Code TEXT User-agent: *
    Disallow: /cgi-bin/
    Disallow: /wp-content/
    Disallow: /wp-admin/
    Disallow: /wp-includes/

A lot of the process involves changing the default settings and removing your directly files and such from search engines, bots, and curious nosy people. I wrote a post about hiding your plugins directory here. It’s another easy way to conceal your directory data but still enable your blog to function flawlessly.

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Posted in blogs, security how-to, Wordpress. Tags: , , . Comments Off »
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