14 Effective Practical Security Tips for WordPress

Wordpress is the most user friendly expandable blog platform around. "With power comes more responsibilities", says Spiderman’s uncle. So what if your valuable Wordpress blog get hacked? You will be literally devastated, violated and humiliated. Now you need to know how a attacker or cracker hack or exploit your site.

• They know about your security weakness points about your site
• They know about the important directories are open and accessible
• They know about the version of Wordpress has security issues
• They know what outdated unsecured plug-in you are using and they can take advantage of it
• They brute force attack your site login for random username and password
• They know Wordpress uses "Admin" as the administrator name, so they keep generating passwords and keep trying

So how do you overcome these situations? Well, you just need tighten up the security principal to avoid these problems. These are very practical options to protect yourself from getting hacked. In truth, every protection can be broken but the point is not to cure but to prevent.

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How to display the latest post from each category using wordpress query_posts

By default Wordpress presents all the posts in the blog sorted descending to post time at the home page. Well in some circumstances you might not want to have that layout on your home page. Lets say you have five categories and you want to pull the latest post from each of the categories and display it on your home page. Now that wont work out with the default Wordpress home page layout. Here is a simple tip to work around that situation. Wordpress has a function to filter out the posts depending on certain criteria, the function is known as query_post. The template function query_post has several parameters that enables you to filter the posts for the Wordpress post output Loop. Below is an example of pulling the latest post from a category and display it at the blog home page. The query_post function can be modified by many parameters. Here I’m displaying only few parameters in action.

Integrate social networking in wordpress using facebook connect api and wordpress plugin tutorial

Facebook connect is a Facebook API to integrate Facebook related social networking option to your website. It provides a secure layer of authentication mechanism to integrate partial Facebook features, user details for you. Today I’m going to show you a way to integrate Facebook authentication for your Wordpress blog. This article assumes that you are already running Wordpress 2.7 or above. It’s possible to make a Facebook connect plugin from the very scratch but here I’m covering the easy way to implement it. Alternatively because of some problems with this plugin, I’ve written another post for much more easier way to integrate facebook (Using Official Plugin). Now here are the steps to make you accomplish on this matter.

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How to use different header for different categories and pages in wordpress

Don’t you come across situations like you need to implement multiple header types for different categories? I’m sure you do. Here is a simple yet effective solution to work out the issue to implement multiple header types for different categories. For more conditional tags you can look up to Wordpress codex.

First of all create the header files for each categories. Also have one header file as the default one. These files will be included from the main header.php file. Consider the code below for the your Wordpress theme header.php file.

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RuhaniRabin.com now uses Facebook Connect social network api

What Is Facebook Connect?

Facebook Connect is the next evolution of Facebook Platform – enabling you to integrate the power of Facebook Platform into your own site. Enable your users to…

• Seamlessly “connect” their Facebook account and information with your site
• Connect and find their friends who also use your site
• Share information and actions on your site with their friends on Facebook
• Have Trusted secure authentication via Facebook
• Provide Real Identity
• Link their friends with your site
• Distribute your site throughout social networks

Yes, for all those who don’t know yet, Facebook has open up their Facebook Connect Social Networking API library which is similar to OpenID and OpenSocial platforms. After doing some research on the internet I manage to implement it at this site.

Try it out Today, you don’t need to register at my site, just use your existing facebook login.

Always use the Blue Color button to authenticate yourself via facebook.

For your information you login will be process will be processed via Facebook SSL secure protocol. This will enable you to post comments to my website without registering to my site. In addition to that your comments will be visible to facebook profile.

I’ve prepared a screencast tutorial on “How to Implement Facebook Connect in your Blog”. Leave your comments and thoughts about this.