wordpress

Qualys: Open Source Web Apps Called Often Insecure

By CMS Report - Posted on 01 August 2010

PCWorld: "Seventy-seven percent of sites running the blogging tool Movable Type showed critical vulnerabilities, somewhat better than the 91 percent of sites using the Joomla! content management system, the 95 percent running Mediawiki, and the 78 percent using phpMyAdmin database management software."

"WordPress reduced critical vulnerabilities to the low level of 4 percent, something Qualys puts down to that application’s easy, reliable updating design, while the latest version of phpBB, version 3.x, showed zero percent vulnerabilities. [40% of administrators have not updated to the patched versions of phpBB3.]"

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WordPress 2.8 themes design cookbook review

By ramoonus - Posted on 19 July 2010

Review by Ramon “Ramoonus” van Belzen
Book Written by Lee Jordan & Nick Ohrn

When you look for a WordPress theme design books, there isn't much choice. I looked at the country's best book store and found nine books when I search for “WordPress themes”. Five of them are published by Packt Publishing. Some of these books only feature a chapter about WordPress theme design or studies, only some are actually interesting.

Packt Publishing offered me the chance to review “WordPress 2.8 Themes Cookbook”. And that's what you're reading right now!

The WordPress 2.8 themes design cookbook is one of Packt Publishings cookbook series meaning it contains loads of recipes. Each recipe is a small articles/paragraphs with an idea and how to work it out. Just like a regular cookbook. I haven't got compression material to compare the book with others of the same topic.

The book is called “WordPress 2.8 themes design cookbook”, which means it's all about WordPress 2.9 theme designing. After reading the book you should be able to create and modify WordPress themes.

Understanding Taxonomy for WordPress Video

By CMS Report - Posted on 15 July 2010

What does an orange have to do with WordPress? Michael Fields uses the metaphor to explain how taxonomies work in WordPress and what that means for your site. Video via WordPress.TV.

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Picture CAPTCHA Available for Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress

By CTI - Posted on 01 July 2010

Confident Technologies, Inc. today announced that its image-based verification solution, Confident CAPTCHA is now available as a Wordpress plugin, a Joomla extension and a Drupal module.

Confident CAPTCHA™ is a unique, image-based CAPTCHA solution that stops spam and bots in a way that is easy and intuitive for your website visitors. Rather than forcing people to decipher warped and distorted characters or words, Confident CAPTCHA presents the visitor with a grid of randomly-generated pictures and simply asks them to click on specific pictures to verify that they are human and not a bot.

Text-based CAPTCHAs have become so difficult to read that visitors become frustrated and abandon the action or the website completely. Confident CAPTCHA is easy on people while being tough on bots. It improves the user experience, helping increase conversion rates and user interactions on your site.

Use Confident CAPTCHA to stop spam and bots on Web forms, comment posts, new account registrations, polls and surveys, and many other areas of your website.

Confident CAPTCHA is very configurable. You can choose:

The number of images to display
The number of images that the visitor must click
Order of category selection
Background color
Optional audio verification for the visually impaired

For more information, please visit www.ConfidentTechnologies.com.

Follow Confident Technologies on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ConfidentTech

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The release of WordPress 3.0

By Bryan - Posted on 22 June 2010

In case you haven't heard, WordPress 3.0 was released last week. This is probably the first time I've been behind in blogging about the official release of a new major version of WordPress. However, since I told you all about WordPress 3.0 coming soon a couple weeks ago, I felt there wasn't a need to rush and tell you to go get WordPress 3.0 and try out all it's new features including taxonomy and multiuser integration. Instead, I spent this past week seeing how others reacted to WordPress 3.0.

As a fan of open source content management systems, its been rather pleasing to see some of the larger technology publications spend more time talking about applications like Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress. For the tech press, WordPress 3.0 was no exception with some of the major players such as Computerworld, PCWorld, and TechCrunch all making sure they spin out an article reviewing this latest version of WordPress.

What may surprise you though, is that open source CMS is just not an interest of computer geeks. Slowly but surely, open source CMS is the talk of business folks too. For example, both Fast Company and BusinessWeek made sure that they included articles this past week on WordPress 3.0. In the Fast Company article, Francine Hardaway writes some classic things to why business should pay attention to WordPress. Some of my favorite lines from her article, "6 Reasons Small Businesses need WordPress":

"WordPress can do anything you need it to do, and for a small business, that's a gift usually reserved for expensive sites."
"Plug-ins for WordPress are the business-to-business version of apps for the iPhone."
"WordPress no longer looks like a blog. For small businesses who wouldn't know a blog from a bag of potato chips, WordPress is a website, otherwise known as a content management system."

These are all some fantastic words from Hardaway and I think they show that applications such as WordPress are making a significant impact in the business world. I wouldn't call WordPress an ECM, but it most definately walks and talks like a CMS for the small business folks. If you haven't taken a look at WordPress in quite awhile, I'd encourage you to take a new look at this application.

Below is the summary video from the WordPress folks introducing you to WordPress 3.0. Enjoy.

WordPress 3.0 nears completion

By Bryan - Posted on 01 June 2010

During the final days of May, the first release candidate for WordPress 3.0 was released to the public. In the world of WordPress, when a version of the popular blogging application becomes a release candidates it means that the official version of WordPress isn't too far behind.

What’s an RC? An RC comes after beta and before the final launch. It means we think we’ve got everything done: all features finished, all bugs squashed, and all potential issues addressed. But, then, with over 20 million people using WordPress with a wide variety of configurations and hosting setups, it’s entirely possible that we’ve missed something.

WordPress logo So what are the new features that will be included in WordPress 3.0. Personally, I'm excited about improvements in custom taxonomy and the merging of standalone WordPress with WordPress Multi-User code which WordPress is calling Multisite. Some of the highlights of WordPress 3.0 include:

New menu management feature
New theme "Twenty Ten" is the only theme in the WordPress distribution.
Improved child theme support; child theme use is highly encouraged and as described in the Child Themes article, very simple to accomplish
New comment_form() that outputs a complete commenting form for use within a theme template
Expanded contextual help
All importers moved to the plugin repository (e.g. WordPress Importer)
Custom backgrounds for themes
The Default (Kubrick), and Classic themes, are no longer included in the WordPress distribution, but are available in the Theme repository
Bulk theme update ability
Improved custom post types (try the Custom Post Type UI or GD Custom Posts And Taxonomies Tools plugins to see the possibilities)
Improved custom taxonomies including hierarchical (category-style) support (again, try the Custom Post Type UI or GD Custom Posts And Taxonomies Tools plugins)
Standalone WordPress and WPMU code merged and is called Multisite (Note: extra domain stuff remains plugin territory for this version)
Multisite requires wp-config.php file changes to institute