June, 2011 | Wordpress Feed

WordPress News June 2011

Filed Under (Light Reading, Weekly News) by Wpfeed on 22-06-2011

From time to time we gather some interesting headlines form the WordPress world for you.

WordPress 3.2 – soon to be released

Every WordPress new version is a reason to check things, upgrade, improve your website security and change the interface, in the new version to be released in the next few weeks there are some major changes. here is a list of the changes taken from the official WordPress website:

Performance improvements like you wouldn’t believe. What’s that mean? Things are faster!
Distraction-free Writing. The visual editor’s full-screen composing experience has gotten a major overhaul, and is now available from HTML mode, too. More than ever, WordPress allows you to focus on what matters most — your content.
Admin UI Refresh. The last major redesign of the WordPress admin was in 2008. This isn’t a major redesign, just a little facelift to keep us feeling young. WordPress turns 8 later this month, you know.
New Default Theme. Introducing Twenty Eleven, based on the popular Duster theme. Rotating header images, post format support, and more.
Browse Happy. WordPress is made to work with modern browsers. If you visit your Dashboard using an outdated web browser, we’ll let you know there’s a newer version available.
Admin Bar. We’ve added more links to the admin bar to make it even more useful.

Be Aware:

WordPress has new minimum system requirements: PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0.
Internet Explorer 6 will no longer be supported.
The favorites menu has been removed. If you’ve written any plugins that use this menu, it’s time to switch over to an admin bar placement.

Known Issues:

We haven’t updated the blue admin color scheme yet, so do your testing in the gray zone for best results.

- What is Distraction Free Writing? details here

- here are some screenshots of the new dashboard.

WPshower

A very unique and elegant themes websites that we really like is WPshower. Around ten themes, some of them free and the rest premium.

minimalism and modern styles. Compact, complete, trendy and free from unnecessary components. Only what you need, only themes th-at work.

Unspoken Theme Overview from Wpshower on Vimeo.

VideoZoom

A very popular theme which we like a lot is VideoZoom, a theme for your video website. with different options of layout, you can customize many things in this theme, such as color, menus and widgets.

take a look here

WordPress HTML5 Themes

a list of seomantic, css3 and html5 free themes for your websites.

http://wpbooks.net/list-of-wordpress-html5-themes/

Popularity: 2% [?]

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Top 5 WordPress Security Plugins for 2011

Filed Under (Plugins) by Wpfeed on 06-06-2011

WordPress is a popular blogging CMS software that is very secure when properly installed. Site owners can take security a step further by installing the following plugins, especially when running WordPress in a cheap hosting environment.

WordPress Security Scan
This basic security plugin will look at the database, passwords and permissions for files and alert the site owner to any needed changes. It also hides the version of WordPress and adds extra protection to the administrative area.

This plugin should be installed by all WordPress site owners. It’s simple and easy to understand.

DOWNLOAD

Secure WordPress
Going a few steps further than WordPress Security Scan, this add-on provides an index page for the plugin folder, does away with error messages on the login page and blocks any bad queries. It also hides version and plugin update information from everyone except admins.

Removing version information is crucial because hackers won’t know what they’re dealing with and will move on to less secure installs on free domain names.

DOWNLOAD

Invisible Defender
Forms are a favorite target by spambots. Invisible Defender protects forms by providing extra fields which are visible to spambots but hidden from the user by style code. When the fields are filled, indicating a bot, the plugin returns a 403 error, which blocks the bot and protects the blog.

This plugin keeps a tally of blocked bots in the admin area so site owners can see how effective it is.

Login Lockdown
Brute force password attempts are a big problem for any site, especially since many people don’t choose secure passwords. This plugin timestamps and records the IP address of any bad login attempt. When a certain number of attempts are reached, the IP string is blocked from the site. The default block time is one hour but this can be adjusted by the site owner. There is also a manual option for lifting the block.

DOWNLOAD

Theme Authenticity Checker (TAC)
TAC works by checking all installed WordPress themes for suspicious code, especially BASE 64, which can obfuscate the code’s intended purpose. When bad code is found, TAC will show the exact location in the theme files. The latest version of TAC also reveals static links within theme code. These are not always harmful but it is good to know about them.

And remember, the best way to avoid bad code is to not use free themes.

DOWNLOAD

Popularity: 3% [?]

2 Comments

Add Google +1 To Your WordPress Site

Filed Under (Customization And Themes, How To, Installation) by Wpfeed on 01-06-2011

Google is trying to compete with facebook’s like button. they released a social button called +1 (plus one), when you want to show that you loved the article (somebody said “like”), you press on the +1 button and the counter adds one.

Now you can add +1 button to your wordpress website, we suggest to wait a few weeks to see if it’s not just a “buzz” but if you want to add it here are the steps:

1) go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/index.html.

2) customize and choose the setting for your button.

3) copy the lines in the text area :

<!– Place this tag in your head or just before your close body tag –><script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js”></script>
<!– Place this tag where you want the +1 button to render –><g:plusone></g:plusone>

and add it to your post or insert to a page in your theme.

THAT’S IT!