Having spent most of my morning cleaning up a WordPress hack, the value of WordPress security is on my mind. Make no mistake, there are people out there, who, for whatever reason want to hijack your WordPress site. Being the most popular content management system and blogging platform out there has it’s disadvantages. It makes WordPress a target for hackers. There are a lot of things you can do to harden the security of your WordPress site. Rather than write my own article on the subject though, I’ll reference a good article written by Hawaii Web Group. Check out their Keeping Your WordPress Blog From Being Hacked article for changes you can make to make your site less attractive to hackers. There’s a lot of technical details but there’s also some simple advice that you can incorporate like deleting the admin user, using strong passwords as well as some security plugins to help monitor and secure your site.

WordPress Security Articles for Reference:

Keeping Your WordPress Blog From Being Hacked

10 Tips To Make WordPress Hack-Proof. The Ultimate Guide.

Hardening WordPress

10 Things to Know about WordPress Security

FAQ My site was hacked

11 Best Ways to Improve WordPress Security

WordPress Security – A Comprehensive Guide

WordPress Security Best Practices and Plug-ins

10 Useful WordPress Security Tweaks

A to Z of WordPress .htaccess Hacks

Most importantly, make sure you do regular backups of both your database content and your files. If your site gets hacked, you might be left with no other choice than to delete WordPress completely, re-install a fresh, clean version and use your backup to import your content. You’ll also need backups of your images other media you’ve uploaded as well so make sure to backup your files regularly as well.

There’s a new book out on WordPress security, WordPress 3 Ultimate Security by Olly Connelly, aka, the Guvnr who wrote the blog article, 10 Tips To Make WordPress Hack-Proof. The Ultimate Guide. I’m hoping to get ahold of a copy soon to review here.

Obviously I don’t expect anyone to be able the details of this. The detailed steps will be shown and discussed afterward. If you’re wondering, the site I’m setting up is a fictitious business site for my dog, Sookie. She’s going to have some schwag to sell (wag schwag?) like T-shirts and services as well. The capture and editing of this was done with Techsmith’s Camtasia, exported to .mov, then imported to iMovie, sped up, then exported again.

Every business needs a website. But historically, to build a website, you either needed to know how to code a website, or hire someone who did. But with the advent of free, open source internet publishing tools like WordPress, you don’t HAVE to know how to code. Though it started out as a blogging platform, WordPress is now a very capable online publishing tool and content management system that you can use to build your entire site with – not just a blog. So, why is this good news for you? You can create a website and update its content on your own without having to know HTML. You can easily create new pages or edit existing pages using a simple text editor.

As part of a series of workshops sponsored by High Tech Maui for the local Maui business community, I’ll be doing a workshop in May about setting up a website using WordPress. The date is tentatively set for Tuesday, May 25, 8:00 – noon. Seating will be limited to 20. Stay tuned for registration details.

I’ll also be posting much of the content of the workshop, as presentation or video, here on this site after the workshop. Peter Liu will be doing an introduction to blogging for business workshop on April 29 that might be a good prerequisite for mine. Registration is now open for that, but will likely fill up fast.

I’m still working on content and material for the workshop, here’s what I have so far. It will start with a conceptual overview of WordPress, followed by a presentation of screenshots and videos to show the basic process of setting up a web site from scratch in WordPress. After that, we’ll segue into a live demonstration and hands-on, interactive portion so that attendees can jump in and try it out in the workshop.

Subject matter I plan to cover:

1. Why use WordPress for your business website
2. What is WordPress
3. WordPress.com vs WordPress.org
4. Sign-up and activation for WordPress.com
5. Themes
6. Publishing Posts
7. Publishing Pages
8. Posts vs Pages
9. Managing media
10. Managing Comments
11. Managing Links
12. Basic settings
13. Site structure
14. Widgets
15. Signing up and installing WordPress.org
16. Plugins
17. Static home pages
18. Backups
19. Security

That’s a lot to cover in four hours, which is why I want to go through it all in increasing levels of detail, starting out at a high, conceptual level, then diving down a little deeper and showing the process of the items above, then, once through that, demonstrating it live and getting the participants hands dirty doing it themselves.

I’ve put together a quick overview video of the process of going from scratch to a basic structure to show people how simple it is and how there’s doesn’t need to be any coding done to get a basic site structure up and running. Check it out.

Think you might be interested? Stay tuned to this site and my Twitter feed, as well as the High Tech Maui site for more details on dates and registration.

For various reasons, the remainder of the two sites were custom-built using Coldfusion. But the news sections were implemented with WordPress in order to allow MEDB staff to update the news sections themselves. The WordPress implementation included creating two custom WordPress themes to match the new, branded look for each of the sites. While I wouldn’t recommend custom WordPress theme creation for anyone not familiar with HTML or CSS, if you have an intermediate level understanding of the two, chances are good that you can create your own WordPress theme. That’s a testament to how powerful and flexible WordPress is in my opinion. If you’re interested in learning how to create your own WordPress theme, check out the WordPress Theme Development page.

MEDB WordPress News Section

High Tech Maui WordPress News Section

NextGen Photo Gallery for WordPress from Jeff Bennett on Vimeo.

WordPress started out as a blogging platform but become a full blown Content Management System allowing you to create and publish your entire website with it. But, by default, WordPress home pages display your blog articles, and often times you might want something different for your home page, some static content perhaps.

There’s a pretty simple way to create static content on your WordPress site and the cool folks at WordPress.tv created a nice little screencast to show how to do it. Problem is, that, depending on the theme you use, there are some quirks with this method that put some oddities in your menu bar.

Well, it turns out there are work-arounds for this too. Here’s a quick little screencast I made to show how to make a static home page in WordPress and get around a couple of little issues.

WordPress Static Home Pages from Jeff Bennett on Vimeo.

To view a larger version, go to my Vimeo page.

Digital Photo Basics – Image Size & Resizing from Jeff Bennett on Vimeo.