1. Thousands of 3rd party plugins – majority of which are free
   See the official plugin directory
2. Thousands of 3rd party themes – mainly free, but for a small cost you can by some amazing premium designs
   See the official theme directory
   
3. WordPress is written in php with MySQL database back end meaning you can host your blog on 99% of the webservers in the world.
   php is a dynamic web language
   MySQL is a fast full featured database
4. Easy to use well thought out admin interface
   WP-admin dashboard screen shot
5. Constant development cycle
   Download the latest build from wordpress.org

PART ONE: wp-security-scan plugin

Download: WP Security Scan

Author: Semper Fi Web design

Cost: Free

Once you have downloaded and unzipped the plugin upload it to you plugins fold and activate it in your plugins menu in the admin area of your blog.

When the plugin is active you will get a new tab in the top menu like this:

Here is what each tab will tell you

Security Tab

This tab is a ‘dashboard’ for the plugin, it reports to you all of its findings. One of the plugins features is to help you rename the ‘admin’ user and it will report to you here in red if the admin user exists. The way to rename this user is listed on a page called Change WordPress Admin Username. The other items it reports on are:

• WordPress version: 2.6.2 You have the latest stable version of WordPress.
• Your table prefix is not wp_. Your WordPress version is successfully hidden.
• WordPress DB Errors turned off.
• WP ID META tag removed form WordPress core
• “admin” user exists.
• The file .htaccess does not exist in wp-admin/.

Further down the page is a table reporting more system level information which includes:

• Operating System
• Server
• Memory usage
• MYSQL Version
• SQL Mode
• PHP Version
• PHP Safe Mode
• PHP Allow URL fopen
• PHP Memory Limit
• PHP Max Upload Size
• PHP Max Post Size
• PHP Max Script Execute Time
• PHP Exif support
• PHP IPTC support
• PHP XML support

Scanner Tab

Clicking on this tab brings up a list of files and directories which it checks that they all have the correct permissions state. If it’s correct the line is highlighted in green – if it’s incorrect then it is highlighted in red. The correct permission status is displayed so you can change the permissions accordingly.

Password Tool Tab

This is a neat facility which it gives you the ability to check the strength of your passwords. A field is displayed on screen and you are invited to type in a password, a graphical bar indicator progresses as you type, alongside words telling you the strength of the password.

Another nice touch is it automatically generates a random strong password which you can just copy and use.

Database Tab

It seems there are two major vulnerabilities in WordPress the first is the auto-generated ‘admin’ user – this is a security issue because every WordPress blog will probably have this user, therefore a potential hacker already knows half of a Username and Password pair. The second issue is the name of your tables in your database. By default when you install WordPress it auto prompts you with a table prefix of ‘WP_’ if you leave it as this then a hacker also now knows all your table names. This is a simple one to combat because all you need to do when you install is change the prefix to something else then install. This won’t prevent a hacker from getting in but it will make it more difficult.

If you have already installed your blog the Database Tab has the answer. Clicking on the tab presents you with a field populated with your current table prefix. Here you can now change it to something else, but as the big, bold, italic letters say:

Make a backup of your database before using this tool

Support Tab

The support tab is under construction but is a place where you can link back to the publishers changelog and documentation.

Conclusion

My conclusion of this plugin is it highlights the two most over looked vulnerabilities in WordPress – the admin username and the table prefix. Both vulnerabilities are fixable and this plugin shows you how to do it. What’s more having these highlighted to you will teach you to install more securely in the future. Some of the info that the plugin reports will go right over most bloggers heads but so long as you don’t get bogged down with the unimportant stuff you should be OK.

[rating:3.5]

Overall I would give this plugin 3.5/5

Killer feature: the ability to change the table prefix in one go.

1. Write at least two posts

Promoting your site is a given, no promotion, no traffic. But the traffic will only flow one way and never return if all your readers see is stale content. You need to write at least two articles a week, more if you can (if you can’t try and get guest articles from your peers) and post them a day or so apart. TIP: better traffic spikes will come from posts that appear at the beginning of the week – there is an assumption that news is ‘freshest’ at the start of the week. A great resource of tips and how to’s to help you improve your writing is www.copyblogger.com

2. Check for broken links

Links that end in a 404 page will lose you traffic so fix any incoming or internal links that are broken. A good plugin for checking your posts is Broken Link Checker. An awesome plugin for managing incoming broken links is Redirection it allows you to take an incoming URL and map it to a new post via 301 redirects. It’s the only way to preserve traffic to your posts when you change a site structure.

3. Check your Webstats

You know in the movies where you see the big macho hero choosing his weapons before he goes off and does something amazing, and he picks up a big gun, looks at it lovingly… then puts it back and picks up an enormous gun, snorts a laugh and nods his head in approval? Well your website statistics are that enormous gun. Your site stats are where you find out who is linking to you, how much traffic you are getting and what pages your visitors are looking at. The stats can tell you your most popular pages and therefore you will know what kind of content your audience is hungry for. There are many stats packages around, your hosting will come with some and there is of course Google Analytics. I’m currently using WordPress.com Stats which is a great plugin because it causes no extra load on your server and hey, who else but WP knows enough about WordPress to produce good accurate stats? A word of warning: only check your stats once a week, checking stats is like weighing yourself when you are on a diet, check to often and you don’t see any progression. Check once on a regular basis and you get to see the movement.

4. Plan future posts

Doing step three will make this step a breeze. While you are checking your stats, look out for your busiest pages or notice when your busiest times are (and note what you did to produce the extra traffic) and plan your next posts to extend your popular content. If you find your popular posts aren’t really where you thought your blog was going, don’t dismiss them and blindly push on, be sensible about it and let the market lead you, as they are the only experts in all this.

5. Don’t give up!

In every bloggers life there are moments of despair, moments where you think “Argh F**k It! This is going nowhere” if you are like this then you are probably checking your stats too often! Everyone is in the same boat here, don’t assume that others are getting more success than you, some might be, but others definitely won’t be. Just keep going and don’t give up. If you feel isolated then join a community, I’m in the Blog MasterMind coaching program and there are forums and communities to help keep me going – you can join too and I strongly recommend that you check it out.

6. Do Back up!

I will continue to harp on about this for probably the life of this blog, and even beyond, I might even have it etched on my Tomb Stone:

RIP
Ian Blackford
Blogging Rocket Webmaster
(*Snigger* I can RIP – I backed up!)

Get a back-up plugin, set it on a schedule to back up at least once a week and then forget it – job done. A great plugin for this is WordPress Database Backup

7. Take a break!

There is a lot to blogging, a lot more than people realise and if you do all the above every week along with your blog promotion and digesting information from others you are going to need a break. So don’t beat yourself up for a taking a little time off, switch off your computer turn on the TV – go on, I bet there is a good film on!

Plugin Master

I first came across Pawan and his plugins when I needed to prevent my blog from becoming a victim of Ping spam, and his MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer plugin was just the job. I then went on to use many of his other WordPress plugins almost too numerous to mention. Pawan just keeps coming out with great plugin after great plugin, so he was a natural choice for my now (getting famous) 5 Q Interview.

MaxBlogPress and Pawan’s plugins can be found here:

MaxBlogPress.com

1. Who is MaxBlogPress and what is www.maxblogpress.com all about?

MaxBlogPress is a team which focus on creating software/plugins for bloggers for helping them better monetize their blog as well as attract lots of traffic to it. Currently, MaxBlogPress.com offers many free wordpress plugins for helping bloggers use wordpress in more effective way.

2. When and why did you start blogging?

I think I dived into blogging around the early 2005. That time blogging started getting quite popular and was the latest buzz. I tried wordpress for my test blog to have personal experience with it. That’s from where i hooked and started using it for most of my projects.

3. Is your blog also your day job?

Yes, I spend full time for MaxBlogPress.

4. What challenges did you face and overcome when you set up MaxBlogPress ?

The challenge which I’m facing from startup to even today is keeping up with so many feature requests/bug fixes for our plugins. WordPress constantly come up with new version and each new version might break our plugin. Also, we face unforeseen problem like conflict with other plugins, different configuration of wordpress and webhost etc…

We spend most of our time helping other bloggers run our plugin smoothly and adding new features for existing plugins.

To overcome this problem, I’ll be hiring more developers for making time for new innovations. But these challenges will still stay as the part of our daily work due to the nature of our work.

5. What is your one killer piece of advice for a new blogger?

The one advice I’ll give to all bloggers is same old “Write killer content” for your blog. This is the base of your blog and you must make it strong. If you don’t then whatever latest tricks you apply, ultimately you’ll fail.

Instead of writing lots of low quality content, focus on few good content. Ask yourself, would you read a blog with 90 posts of which 75 are simply useless? OR would you read a blog which have got only 15 blog posts but all of them are hard hitting valuable post?

Also, make sure to spend majority of your time in promoting your blog so that your content get good exposure and can have many regular readers for your blog. One mistake most bloggers do is they simply keep on writing new blog posts but never ever think of getting more exposure to their blog.

WordPress now has a delete feature but to be able to delete the plugin you have to first deactivate it. This is the correct procedure, deactivate then delete, don’t be tempted to FTP into your plugins folder and just delete an active plugin. It might leave a load of settings behind that can cause the site to become unstable.

Well… when I say ‘I’ back up, I really mean I have bought some software, a second drive and I have configured it on a schedule to back up every day, so in reality I don’t actually do anything but my data is backed up nonetheless.

Well that’s fine for my local data, but what about my beloved blog and those MySQL tables with their ‘Bits’ all exposed? Well that’s a little more tricky because you don’t have full control of a remote computer.

Help is at hand I have found with a great plugin called wp-db-backup it’s really easy to use and offers multiple back up options like:

• additional tables (core tables included by default)
• back up and saved to a folder on your server
• back up and download the SQL file
• back up and email the SQL file to yourself
• schedule a backup with four time options (hourly, daily etc)

I would recommend everybody get this plugin, your blog should become one of your treasured possessions and you need to look after it.

Another excellent source of back up advice is of course WordPress.org themselves here is a backup article from their codex

Antonie loves coding almost as much as he loves food!

Antonie Potgieter is a plugin developer living in South Africa with his finger on the world WordPress pulse. He already has over nine plugins under his belt each one being refined and tweaked with each new version. I managed to catch him today and was able to fire 5 questions his way about who he is and what he does, following is a transcript of the interview.

His software company is called:

Tribulant Software

1. Who is Antonie Porgieter and what is your website URL?

I am a rather young and enthusiastic software engineer focussed on web development specifically. I work as a full-time developer and marketer as the founder of Tribulant Software, a small yet rapidly growing web software provider. The URL of my company website is : http://tribulant.com

2. When and why did you start working with blogs?

My first encounter with blogging software was about a year ago when WordPress gained popularity because of its incredibly powerful plugin application interface. WordPress was still in its earlier stages, probably around version 1.5. The main reason why I started using WordPress was simply due to the opportunity of exploiting the tools of the framework to build useful extensions for other bloggers to use. In addition to that, I used it personally for jotting down ideas and writing journal entries.

3. What are your blogging specialties?

With all honesty, I’m not much of a blogger. At least not in comparison to most of you out there. My specialties lie in the development side of things, specifically focussed on WordPress blogging software. When I do blog, my entries are mostly either news or guidance articles. So the content I write tends to be very rich and useful, though it remains factual and most likely not very creative. So I guess my specialty is in coding and developing plugins, I have recently updated my Mailing list plugin and have just completed a plugin commissioned by a client. Previously I have written a shopping cart plugin, a banner rotator and an FAQ plugin amongst many others, all my work is viewable on my WordPress plugins page.

4. What challenges have you faced and how did you overcome them?

Challenges directly related to blogging in my opinion would be obstacles preventing you (as a blogger) from getting your content out there the way you intend to. These days, with the vast number of powerful and flexible plugins/extensions for blogging software, it is relatively easy to achieve anything you could possibly imagine. A search on your favorite search engine will most likely provide you with a list of plugins to help you do the job you want, the way you want.

5. What is your one killer piece of advice for working with blogs?

Every blogger wants as much traffic as they can possibly get. Whether it is from search engines or referring sites, traffic is as good as gold. Always write rich, useful and clear content. Put yourself in the readers’ position and write informative posts that will make as much sense as possible to anyone whom might read it. After all, the more informative and appealing your readers find your content, the more reason they have to either link back to you or tell their friends about it. Additionally, you’ll need to promote your content which you’ve written by focussing on search engine optimization. Do some reading on SEO in order to get a better grasp of what it takes for search engines to recognize you and remember to submit XML sitemaps to search engines.