WordPress is a cultural phenomenon when it comes to publishing online. What started as a simple blogging tool in 2003 has become the most popular open-source content management system (CMS) in the world powering WordPress.com and millions of sites worldwide. There are a number of alternatives including the very popular Joomla, but the difference with WordPress is the almost cult following that has resulted in some of the best plugins available for a blogging platform. When you first install WordPress it can be difficult to choose which plugins you install first. WordPress doesn’t come preinstalled with any real security or backup abilities, so it’s essential that you start of your…
This is how you stop Trackback and Pingback spam in WordPress
When blogging started to gather steam a decade ago, you had (and still have) three ways of receiving comments. The first still which still holds to today are traditional style commenting done by a person reading your article. Then came the bots and the comment spam which has today become a more manageable issue given several free and paid services available to a blog owner. However, even now, you will see tonnes of spam hits on very old posts, many of which don’t call for a comment! Two more methods of collecting comments was through trackbacks and pingbacks. Both trackbacks and pingbacks had a similar concept of notifying a linked…
5 Free WordPress plugins for handling Thumbnails
WordPress v2.9 introduced Post Thumbnails (now called Featured Images). Since then the WordPress plugin repository has seen a host of plugins that help you create thumbnails, import images, resize them and regenerate them. In this post, I’ll feature five plugins that I’ve come across and use that make your thumbnail experience a better one. Auto Post Thumbnail Auto post thumbnail is a plugin to generate post thumbnail from first image in post or any custom post type. If the first image doesn’t work it will automatically search for the next one and so on until the post thumbnail is inserted. The plugin also provides a Batch Processing capability to generate…
Google Publisher Plugin released: Supports Adsense and Webmaster Tools
WordPress powers 20% of the web. Which probably explains why Google has also jumped onto the WordPress plugin bandwagon. The Google team announced the beta version of Google Publisher WordPress plugin.
Best way to lazy load images on your WordPress blog
At Techtites, over the past several months, I've been trying to optimise the site to get the best load times. This is why you'd have seen several new themes being experimented upon. I also use Cloudflare to improve performance.
3 best Wibiya alternatives to aid Social Sharing
I've been running Wibiya on Techtites and a few other blogs for a long time. The Wibiya toolbar allows users to share your posts quickly and easily on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, via email, etc. Wibiya tracks statistics and gives you a decent idea of how successful this is.
[Infographic] WordPress Most Popular Security Plugins
WordPress powers 19% of the web. This means that hackers are even more interested in your blog today than a few years back. Back in April, WordPress blogs globally were under brute force attacks.
Best 5 Shopping Carts and E-Commerce Plugins for WordPress
An shopping cart plugin is very useful when it comes to set up a unique business online. Today there are more powerful and well designed e-commerce plugins for WordPress. Today every big or small business has an online presence.
How to Add Text before Post Content in WordPress
The benefit of using WordPress to power your blog is that you don't need to edit any PHP files and use thousands of ready themes available for free. If you're like me, you'd prefer to keep away from major editing of the theme files and prefer to use the right assortment of plugins to get the job done. If you're looking to add text before post content in WordPress, you can either edit your theme files or check out Add to All, a plugin I released a while back.
How to prevent CSRF vulnerability in WordPress plugins and themes
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.
