Chris K Designs

Recently I’ve been seeing a trend in some WordPress sites that I happen to come upon, and it’s one that concerns me. People are giving a list of plugins they have installed on their WordPress sites. Even stating how many are active. A quick search over at WordPress.org/extend show there are plenty of plugins available to create a page on your WordPress site that shows a list of Active and Installed plugins you have. I understand the warm fuzzy feeling of giving credit where credit is due. The open source community is all about attribution, however there is one obvious security flaw in this practice. You are providing a list of possible attack surfaces a malicious user can exploit.
Continue reading “WordPress Security: Why you should not list what plugins you are using” »

I’ve put together a small update to the Updated Today Plugin. This updated includes the following:

• Added an option to link the banner to the most recently published post
• Cleaned up entries in options table to be one serialized array instead of separate entries for each option
• Added import of old settings into new version of options table

The update has been pushed to WordPress.org and should be available in your Updates section shortly.

In the age of Professional Blogging, there are many ways to make money with your words. The most common is through advertisements. Some of the easiest way to make money are through targeted ad networks such as Google’s AdSense and Adbrite. You can guess, with the advent of advertising, came WordPress advertising plugins. I’ve got a winning combination of plugins and networks that you can use to help fund your blogging habits.
Continue reading “Pro Blogging Tip: Advertising with WordPress” »

It’s not secret, I have Google’s AdSense on my site. What, a guy has gotta make a buck. The issue is, your stats will look really misleading in the AdSense interface because every time you view the site, you’ll get an impression logged of your ads. Currently I am using the ‘AdSense Manager‘ plugin by Mutube to manage and show my ads, as well as my ‘Better AdSense Targeting‘ plugin to help dial in the ad accuracy. With 2 lines of code, we can only show ads to non-logged in users. This means that you won’t be shown your own ads when logged in.
Continue reading “Plugin Hack: AdSense Manager – Hiding AdSense from logged in users” »

As I have mentioned before, one of my favorite plugins for a WordPress site is W3 Total Cache. This plugin offers you the ability to user a myriad of caching options to best suit your needs. Well with WordPress 3.1, the Admin Bar was introduced where logged in users (administrators) get a gray bar with options to manage commonly used areas of the WP-Admin interface. Well, W3 Total Cache updated to use this menu for clearing your cache at any time.

W3 Total Cache adding options to the Admin Bar, brilliant!

I love this idea and I’m going to explore using this menu as a quick admin bar so I never need to visit the wp-admin dashboard if I so desire. I’m going to write up a ‘hack’ or possibly a quick plugin that will let us use this menu for making our administrative life easier as an admin.

Cheers!