Recently the folks at Secunia contacted me regarding a vulnerability in my plugin Contextual Related Posts. Contextual Related Posts is a powerful plugin for WordPress that allows you to display a list of related posts on your website and in your feed. The plugin comes with a tonne of options and inbuilt caching that can possibly increase user retention. This vulnerability was on the settings page of the plugin and opened up the blog to a potential cross site request forgery (CSRF) The application allows users to perform certain actions via HTTP requests without performing proper validity checks to verify…

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We’ve rarely felt the need for charts here at Techtites. However, if you’re frequently running polls or displaying statistics or just simply trends, you’ll find a frequent need to display charts in your blog posts. Powered by HTML5 the Chart.js library allows you to add charts to your posts. If you pour over the documentation on Chart.js, you’ll see that integrating this on your blog does take a bit of work. WP Charts is a new WordPress plugin brings you this power with a simple use of WordPress shortcodes. WP Charts lets you create six different chart types including line…

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Everybody has heard of Contact Form 7 (we use it here on Techtites) as well as many of you might have got your hands on Gravity Forms. Besides these, there are several other lesser known contact form plugins that make it easy to collect information from your visitors. I’ve highlighted five of these below. Ninja Forms Create custom forms with a simple drag and drop interface. Contact forms, Email collection forms, or any other form you want on your WordPress site. Visit Ninja Forms homepage | Download Ninja Forms Breezing Forms Breezing Forms you can create simple and advanced desktop…

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I remember when I first started working with websites more than a decade ago, if you wanted a cool looking button in your form, you had to use images. Images still remain an option but with CSS this has is being gradually phased out. CSS3 completely eliminates the need for images for creating basic good looking designs. And, buttons are one such design that you can cleanly replace with CSS3. One definite plus for this is that you reduce the file size of your pages. If you’re looking to include CSS3 animated buttons in WordPress, look no further than All…

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Google Drive offers you up to 5Gb free space for storage. I currently have most of that vacant since I have my important files backed up on Dropbox and Mozy. Hence have been considering of using this free space to save remote backups of my sites. Thanks to the plug ‘n’ play power of WordPress, backing up your blog directly to Google Drive requires just one of these three plugins. UpdraftPlus Backup UpdraftPlus simplifies backups (and restoration). Backup into the cloud (Amazon S3, Google Drive, FTP, and email) and restore with a single click. Backups of files and database can…

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WordPress’ support for posts is phenomenal. However, when it comes to managing pages, this is very limited. This is possibly because pages are relatively static and are more to add on permanent sections to your site like Contact forms or download areas like we do here at Techtites. However, if you are using WordPress as a full fledged CMS, you might need more than just what WordPress has on offer. Enter Advanced Page Manager. Developed by Uncategorized Creations, the plugin adds a ton of features that help you manage your WordPress pages better.  Features include: Arrange pages into a tree…

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If you’re thinking of getting into WordPress plugin development, I suggest reading this article on webdesigner depot. It gives you a basic idea on creating the directory structure and adding in your first snippets of code. When you’re ready to take it to the next stage, you might want to consider Mario‘s DX Plugin Base. This is a sample skeleton base plugin for WordPress developers. The plugin includes the following code samples: defining custom post types and taxonomies creating admin pages sample code of the Settings API implementation for admin pages registration of activate/deactivate hooks adding metaboxes on pages creating…

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I’ve been using Contact Form 7 on all my WordPress blogs for a long time. Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on. I love the flexibility that Contact Form 7 offers in creating your own contact form. You can choose which form fields you want to add, which ones should be set to required. And, you can also allow your visitors to send you attachments. The spam filtering is pretty good and I’ve…

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Around 10% of the visitors across my various blogs are mobile users. The foray of smart phones has given just about anybody the ability to visit your site through their iPhone or Blackberry or Samsung or…[fill your favourite smart phone name here]. Hence, creating a comfortable experience for your mobile visitors should be considered an important priority, just as you would make your site look good in a desktop browser. If you’re running a WordPress blog, then WPtouch makes this easy for you. WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress website into an application-like theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects…

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Over a period of time your WordPress blog’s database will end up collecting a lot of clutter. This is especially prominent if you’ve been running your blog for a few years and if it has heavy activity. Clutter includes auto drafts, post revisions, spam, trash and useless tags. Cleaning all this manually is a painful effort. Which is where WP Database Cleaner does the trick. WP Database Cleaner is a easy to use WordPress plugin that allow users to cleanup and optimize the WordPress database by removing all spam comments, trash comments, unused tags, post revisions, auto drafts, and much…

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