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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If you’ve been running a multi-author blog like us, over a period of time, you’ll see your list of tags growing exponentially. When I reviewed the number of tags on Techtites today, I noticed that this was well over 1,100 tags! So, I went into the Tags interface and immediately realised that I’m going to spend an hour just deleting and cleaning up tags. There are a few WordPress plugins available that allow you to manage tags and categories, including Term Management Tools. However, there isn’t a good free plugin to delete and clean up tags. So, with a bit…

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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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Many weeks back after much deliberation, I decided to give CloudFlare a shot. As they describe themselves… CloudFlare protects and accelerates any website online. Once your website is a part of the CloudFlare community, its web traffic is routed through our intelligent global network. We automatically optimize the delivery of your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance. We also block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources. The result: CloudFlare-powered websites see a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks….

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Ever since I bought a Kindle around a year back, I’ve rediscovered my love for books. The various apps available for desktop and mobile make reading a breeze. However, I am yet to use the Kindle to browser websites, because the browser is just not built for this. In what looks like an attempt to tap this user base, Amazon has now added the Send to Kindle option to its arsenal. The Send to Kindle Button lets you easily send that content to your Kindle to read later, at your convenience. Just send once and read everywhere on any of…

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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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