It’s sad yes, I know, I should have properly secured my site years ago. I assume one of the reasons my site was hacked was due to a large portion of my print design portfolio containing Pharmaceutical Ad Campaigns. The hack was spotted by a good friend @mozami who noticed my google listing had loads of Pharma keywords which had nothing to do with my site.

This hack has cost me dearly with regard to my site’s SEO health which dropped dramatically as soon as it hit. I haven’t been taking care of this site much for some time though so I only noticed it way later which is even worse for the SEO ranking points I’ve lost over an extended period of time.

I reported the incident to Google via their webmaster tools but it took quite some time after they acknowledged my report until the Pharma keyword listings were finally removed. The Pharma hack is one of those which are particularly nasty in many cases is hidden files many times undetectable at a glance are added which means your entire WordPress installation needs to be cleaned out and restored with a fresh copy. This includes your theme’s files, plugins, the works.

Security Plugins are Dime a Dozen

I’ve since tested and implemented quite a range of plugins, some extremely simple but hardly effective at all and other’s extremely complicated and sensitive to the extent that I even managed to block myself from access my dashboard.

Secure WordPress with Website Defender

One of the plugins which seems to work really well currently is Secure WordPress, which applies a few initial fixes and then linked to a Website Defender account tracks additional vulnerabilities and hack attempts and reports them via a highly intuitive dashboard. The system even tracks when your site goes down and reports it to you as soon as it detects downtime.

In the dashboard you’ll see possible vulnerabilities listed according to their urgency level, and clicking on each one gives much mroe detail of what the problem could be, how it may affect your site and how to resolve this issue. Of course not all the files and problems detected are “real” threats, so you have the option of setting the issue as resolved or to ignore. This allows you to keep a realistic view of what remains to be fixed and what the threat level of your site currently is.

The plugin also provides the solution, with additional links to external sites which discuss the particular security threat posed by the issue being viewed.

After applying some of the fixes and marking them as completed the Website defender Dashboard reflects the current updated threat level so I always have a good idea of the security health of my site. When new issues are detected I get emails notifying me of these new possible threats and my security level changes accordingly.

These fixes are by no means exhaustive and there are many ways of hardening the security level of your WordPress site.

A few simple security tips include:

• Use a non-standard database table prefix when setting up your site in the beginning. wp_ is the standard one
• Don’t use “admin” as your default admin username, choose something unique
• Keep your WordPress updated to the latest version. This should include plugins as well. Hackers can exploit vulnerabilities in older versions of WordPress to get into your  site.

John Hoff at securemyblog.com has some excellent advice, video tutorials as well as an E-Book covering the topic of website security.

Custom Post Types

Though Custom Post Type’s existed pre-3.0, it’s only really been fully embraced now that people have started writing tutorials and guides on how to make use of these sometimes difficult to explain new content types. A Custom Post Type(CPT) is basically a unique type of content which can be given it’s own definition, it’s own Taxonomy(ie. basically a labelling system) and it’s own set of templates to govern how these content types are used and displayed.

Custom Post type: Unique Data type like Subject, Product, Book, Movie, Software etc

Taxonomy: Subject Label, Product Label, Book Tag, Movie Genre, Software Type etc

Write Panel/Meta Boxes: Interface to insert the various custom data via custom form fields other than the standard post or page editor

I’m not about to rehash another tutorial on how these new beauties work as many have already done the job way better than I could, though I just wanted to mention a few ideas and thoughts and how I think this new feature changes the way we use WordPress.

Below are a few excellent tutorials covering what Custom Post Types are:

• Straight from the WP Codex Documentation
• One of the first by Justin Tadlock
• A How to by WPbeginner.com

And some plugins which make creation and management of these super easy:

Recently I’ve been fiddling around with various ways of using CPTs in order to streamline the way different types of content snippets are displayed as well as to simplify how the site administrator manages these content snippets. Alongside CPTs is another widely used feature allowing the ability to add Custom Write Panels. You starting to wonder what’s with the use of the word “Custom” now I can imagine.

Custom Write Panels

Custom Write Panels allow for setting up of special(customised/customisable) editor forms, to make adding and managing content which may be made up of connected bits of data much easier. Plugins like Flutter & PodsCMS have been around for a while allowing WordPress users to build their own write panels. Recently I had a situation where a client website which was making use of the Flutter plugin was upgraded to WordPress 3.0, rendering the flutter write panels inactive as the Flutter plugin is no longer under active development. This forced me to start taking a look at building write panels into the Theme’s Template files itself.

Here are a few tutorials covering how to setup built in write panels into your theme using functions.php

• Write Panels guide by Sitepoint.com
• Step By Step tutorial on Setting up Meta Boxes(Write Panels)
• Your First Custom Post Type with Write Panel by ThinkVitamin(excellent visual guide)
• WordPress Codex Add Meta Box Function
• A Two Part tutorial on creating Custom Write Panel meta boxes

Taking it Further

The next step in my exploration of these newer features is to allow site users, meaning those visiting the (front end)website, to interact with these custom content types by submitting their own content and updating the site via front end forms. There are a few plugins which cover user submitted content but the main contender here is Gravity Forms. It’s a paid for plugin but notwithout reason. This plugin has a wide range of advanced features. Unlike other forms plugins it allows complete control over the markup of the HTML form elements, backend functions and styling of the forms.

Forms can be built for mere feedback submission or more advanced functionality. I’m looking at using this to build in user submitted content for a Business Listing website as well as a questions and answers website. The plugin also has add-on integration with 3rd party services including Mailchimp( email newsletter management), Campaign Monitor (email campaign management) & Freshbooks(Online invoicing service).

The plugin also supports inclusion of additional HTML content into forms, conditional form fields which can be activated depending on which other form fields are selected, Advanced email notifications, Dynamic form field population and a whole range of other customized features not found in most other form building plugins.

Want a $80 Off Gravity Forms Developer License?

If you’re interested in purchasing the Gravity Forms Developer License which I highly recommend, you can get a discount of up to $80 by using these 2 discount codes when purchasing:

• Gfdev50 – $50 off
• Seodenver – 20% further off

So after that shameless promotion, lets continue. A quick search through the wordpress plugin directory will reveal just how many Custom Post Type related plugins are currently in circulation, making this one of the favourite current features for customizing wordpress display and functional characteristics.

GD Taxonomies Tool

GD Custom Posts And Taxonomies Tools is a plugin that can be used to expand custom taxonomies and custom post types support. Plugin adds many tools including custom post types and taxonomies management and widget for taxonomies terms cloud.

Post Type Switcher

A simple way to change a post type in WordPress.

This plugin lets you take advantage of the WordPress 3.0 custom post type feature, and create your own post type. The plugin allows you to add a set of fields attached to your new post type, so that in the edit and add new windows a new box will show with the fields defined. Each field added will be saved in the WordPress Database as a custom field, so that you can take advantage of the standard WordPress query rules to list your content on the page template.

Custom Post Type UI

Last but most certainly not least in Custom Post Type Management is the “go to” plugin for easy creation and management of Custom Post Types and their associated Taxonomies.

This plugin provides an easy to use interface to create and administer custom post types and taxonomies in WordPress.

It’s compatible with wordpress 3.0.1 and includes settings for controlling the finer details associated with each post type.

Verve Meta Boxes (custom write panel builder plugin)

Once you’ve got your post types created you’ll need a tool to manage custom data fields. As mentioned previously Custom Write Panels can be built into your theme but they’re notoriously hard for the newbie and can be really time consuming to setup. I prefer the quick fix in most cases and Verve Meta Boxes provides a clean and simple solution for building Meta Write Panels and associating them with Custom Post Types.

Now go change the Web the easy way

So what are you waiting for, go on and dive into Custom Post Types and change the way WordPress can be used. We’ve seen people make some really crazy things with WordPress in the past and the potential for experimentation has increased so much more now.

Take a quick look Design and I’ll explain a bit about what’s under the hood of this one.

Homepage of the fani.am fan accommodation site

I really enjoyed designing this one and also trying out a few CSS3 features like rounded corners & Text Shadows. IE6 users, there’s a special treat for you as well.

Custom Fields

The most hectic part of this site by far was the wordpress wrangling which takes place in the background. Using loads of WordPress custom fields, some for data and some for associating certain post types like matches, with accommodations and with the teams playing the matches, we were able to weave separate categories of posts into an intuitive mixture of information. Custom field have been managed entirely by the flutter plugin’s write panels, which helped make this site extremely easy for novice user to populate with content.

Fan i am Team Facts sidebar widget

Conditional Statements

Using WordPress conditional statements, as well as some conditional Custom field statements we were able to easily pull the correct set of posts for each team, venue or accommodation. The sidebar also gets populated with related widgets displaying content for each type of page you arrive on.

Associated Matches, accommodations & attractions

Dealing with images

I was a little disappointed about the current state of the built-in WordPress gallery system. You’re still not able to easily pull individual images based on their order in the gallery and can only really pull an entire gallery. The attached image plugin helped pull the first gallery image which was great. Flutter’s image management and upload functionality was ok but could do with the auto generation of thumbs & other sizes which the built in WordPress image uploading performs. Flutter’s image crop & resize functionality just doesn’t work at the moment, though the rest of it’s functionality, mainly write panels played a hige role in this website’s configuration.

This site relies heavily on plugins for various features, which is one of the great things about WordPress. I know some geeky developers who swear they never use plugins, and that’s fine with me, though I or one love the fact that so much freely available functionality is just lying around ready to take advantage of.

Plugins I’ve used & abused Include:

• Flutter – custom write panels
• Live Coundown Timer – counting down time to the Kickoff
• My Favourite Posts – allows user to add their favourite accommodations to a sidebar bucket
• Send to a Friend
• Tweet News – Footer feed of tweets about FIFA
• Google News – feed of news about the world cup from google
• Twitter Widget Pro – Worked better than Twitter Tools
• IE PNG fix – no need to fiddle with code
• Sidebar Login – check the login panel top right
• Cforms II – contact & booking forms
• DISQUS – Advanced commenting system
• WP Table Reloaded – Check the Match Schedule (quick & easy manageable tables)

So far it’s been a really great project and Phase 2 promises to include some even more exciting social media additions. What do you think of this one?

Firebug

- ranks as my favourite add-on for FF. It makes my task of web dev so much easier, helps find problems and teaches me a few things about where I’ve gone wrong in my code.

Fireftp

- Helps you upload to your sites from your browser in 2 ticks. It’s all right in front of you and makes for a nice seemless testing routine.

TwitterFox

- I did find tweeting a hassle without this add-on and now I find keeping track of my tweets & tweeple a breeze.

GTD inbox

It takes your regular gmail & jacks it up for super web GTD. Projects, next actions and the works to keep you productive.

Fireshot

I take a fair amount of screenshots & Fireshot makes it so easy to grab a screen, edit it and then do with it what you like.

Scribefire

I just started using it & it already looks like a Windows Live Writer replacement. Faster & more convenient, I now blog and surf at the same time.

So, What do you add to your firefox?

After some trouble with my comments going walkies, it seems all is well again in nomad-one land. Turns out the problem was caused by some quota limit which caused some plugin problems and not the plugins themselves so WP Super Cache and friends, my apologies. Donncha was kind enough to point out that the WP Super Cache plugin doesn’t have any code which can access the categories db at all. The WP-DBManager plugin by Lester Chan came in handy and allows you to repair damaged database tables, back-up and restore your database and generally manage and keep your wordpress db in tip-top shape. I recommend it highly as it helped me restore some data which seemed to have been lost.

I’m at a loss for words right now and am hoping and praying that I will find a solution other than having to re-categorize my entire sites posts. Something randomly went wonky with my WP Super Cache Plugin which forced me to disable and then delete it. The result was total loss of post categorization, tagging references as well as loss of my entire blogroll.

If anyone has a solution out there please let me know, I might even reward you if I can manage it. Be very very careful with plugins and remember to keep a regular backup, my last backup is more than a month old. Also export your blog content to an xml file regularly which will allow you to import it all into a new installation should you need to do so.

YOU’VE BEEN WARNED!

No payments necessary this time as the venue is being Sponsored by Jayz.co.za. So you’re interested in wordpress, you want to learn something or have some crazy wordpress skills and experience to share with others,head on over to the second WordPress Meetup in Cape Town on 26th March 2008.

The Details

Date: Wednesday 26 March 2008

Time: 4pm – 7pm

Location: Bandwidth Barn, 125 Buitengracht Street, Cape Town (map)

What’s The meetup all about?

Basically it takes on the style of an (un)conference and is very informal. We get together, bring some ideas,questions, problems, cool wordpressy stuff and share, present, ask and generally try to progress in our understandings of the platform.

Branding the Meetup

I’ve been working on giving the meetup a bit of a face and was wondering what you think of it. We’re hoping to turn this event in something of a feature and one which will build in momentum. I’m also looking to form a proper network of WordPress enthusiasts. The designs below are inspired by some designs developed for a previous wordpress based project.

So let me know what you guys think of the logos and hopefully see those of you who can make it there. Please register by posting a comment on this post.

See a few of Daniel’s shots below:

A quick Flickr search could yield exactly what you were looking for an you might be able to get away with paying flickr photographers much less than you’d be spending at stock photography sites.

Using Creative Commons images on your blog

I’ve also installed a cool wordpress plugin called Photo Dropper which allows you to search appropriate creative commons flickr images and drop them from flickr into your posts via your wordpress admin panel. I think this is a great way for both amateur photographers and bloggers to share the value. The plugin also drops in this nice little credit automatically. photo credit: Millzero Photography ( 99% low fat photography)

After struggling to prevent a few business people from hijacking the session with their own off topic focus, not mentioning any names, we managed to get stuck in talking about a few pertinent issues.

Those who attended were:

• Organiser, Callum Macdonald – Nomadic entrepreneur & web developer/blog master from Scotland
• Marc Pelteret – Business Science / Computer Science Graduate with an interest in open source development
• Christina de Silva, Online marketing strategist and wordpress enthusiast – AlterSage.com
• Nada Jones, sales & biz development executive – Work Online Interactive
• Chris – iMod
• Rob Wilkonson – Butlers Pizza (Energy Crisis Maniac)
• Will – 2oceansvibe.com
• Grant – mobi me
• Jamaal – Web Strategist at Jayz

What was spoken about?

After wrestling the party crashers out into their own business session outside we discussed migrating 2oceansvibe.com onto the wordpress platform.

We started discussing data migration and mobile publishing as a few of the challenges faced by migrating a static html site with huge amounts of existing content onto the wordpress platform and keeping it maintained on the fly.

Developing a Theme Framework

I shared the basics of my WordPress Theme Framework idea with the guys and we discussed the merits of using themes like K2 and sandbox as a platform for developing wordpress themes. These themes are well known for their solid html structure and their dynamically generated classes. One of the key issues I highlighted facing non design or tech savvy wordpress users is customisation of the look & layout. As a result way too many blogs out there are looking exactly the same which robs.

Content Syndication

Chris from iMod shared a few ideas about content syndication and we discussed the merits of using plugins like “feed wordpress“, to find and post content of interest automatically. The idea is that plugins of this nature read your RSS feeds and can be set to automatically post content from selected sources at chosen intervals with a few other settings.

Why we blog

We also debated the topic of the monetisation of blogging and the reasons many decide to go into blogging from building a personal profile, racking up subscribers, becoming an authority to purely blogging for the sake money.

We also discussed content writing and planning in advance for the month by posting before hand and setting posts to display at different point in the month. This is something I still need to get the hang of but I can see the value of it in keeping a consistent flow of posts going.

SEO

Christine then gave us the lowdown on why wordpress is the platform of choice when it comes to having an SEO friendly website, one of the reasons many web publishers and companies are now either switching to wordpress or adding blogs to their main websites.

Crazy Ideas

I threw in a theoretical data modelling idea which would use WordPress as the basis and a combination of data modelling techniques to display content in a more abstract manner similar to the way tag clouds are used. This idea stems from my thought universe idea which is the creation of a space where thoughts, media and content can be browsed in an abstract 3D space to allow for a more lateral flow of ideas. I hope to get a model going in the future to showcase this idea but would need to find the right development partner to get something workable going.

Dinner

The dinner afterwards was very interesting to say the least where discussions ranged from economics to the current SA Crisis (energy, political, racial etc). We spoke about what can be done to improve things in our troubled country and whether it’s possible at all. As an outsider Callum posed a few challenging questions concerning racial issues. I appreciated the fact that everyone kept an alcohol free day and dinner and all in all it was an inspiring day.

Future Meetups and the challenges going forward

One of the greatest challenges for our gather was the planning, and unlike other (un)conference events recently held in Cape Town this one was on a little short notice. The turnout was not great and I was disappointed not to see the likes of Adii and Rafiq and a few other names who might have added some further value to the conversation.

Jamaal has offered to sponsor the next meetup which we hope to get going soon at the bandwidth barn. Ideas on the agenda is the setting up of a more formal wordpress group to run with future events and also a possible wordpress online community site where we could discuss these the topics from our meeting further and in more detail as well as a space to share resources.

I know Adii has had something like this on the cards for a while and hope his wordpress magazine will fill this gap but we might need to get something going sooner rather than later so anyone interested in being a part of an online focus group, whether blog or wiki style should sign up on the blog or the google group.

We need to think about how we’re going to promote the next event and I hope to be chatting with Jamaal and the guys from AlterSage a little further about doing a more vigorous marketing effort for session 2.

Firstly on www.adii.co.za I’ve won a copy of adii’s new premium magazine style wordpress theme which is one of the best magazine style themes I’ve come across so far. The competition entailed commenting on some preliminary designs and giving adii some constructive criticism on how he could improve certain areas. So myself and another person were tied first place and have both been awarded a copy of this excellent Premium News theme. I’m hoping to use this theme which I’m going to modify graphically for my www.one-project.org site.

The second prize i was just notified of is from Cerebra.co.za “South Africa’s leading dedicated social and mobile media company” who ran a comments competition toget some constructive criticism on their website which was recently redesigned. Guess what, I’ve won an iPod Nano Woohoo!!! I’ve wanted one of these for ages but just couldn’t afford to spend money on some thing like this. Thanks cerebra, you guys rock.

I’m gonna try to track down my comments which won me these 2 cool prizes and post them here for your viewing pleasure.

Constructive Criticism

The name of the game is constructive criticism and in many cases your viewers are the best source of advice for what you may be doing right or wrong as they’re the people you’re trying to please. Many times there are things we miss because we are caught seeing things from only our own perspective so asking others is a great way to get good feedback. The trick however is to know what is good feedback and what is not. The way these 2 competitions were structured is they rewarded readers for the best, most constructive feedback and because of this incentive the comments were purposely written to be as thoughtful as possible.

It gives me some great insight into my first competition I’ve just launched last night in my Logo Design Q & A section. The basic principle is, you need something others have and you reward them for giving it to you, their clicks, their feedback, their thoughts are valuable to them so if they’re not getting anything from giving these to you they won’t offer what is valuable to them.

Commenting is one of the areas of web 2.0 which has really changed the dynamic completely. If you don’t get it right you could be in for some heavy criticism, if you don’t allow comments you’re cutting off an important aspect of your interaction with your site visitors, but get the recipe right and your site could experience phenomenal growth and popularity. A plugin release recently by Web Addi(CT)s rewards readers for commenting by displaying commenters names in a commenters cloud with the names weighted according to number of comments. It’s an interesting way to stimulate a mutually beneficial relationship between blogger & commenter.

Engage your readers and the general community and you’ll have valuable partners and business supporters by default.

I think it started when I first installed the stats plugin in my wordpress and started noticing some activity based on my posting. It was all pretty tame and just a few trickles of curious onlookers. When I decided to become a true nomad and take the plunge into solo uncertainty I knew I had to start doing something more serious with my site and had to start getting serious about networking as well. That was just less than 2 months ago, so I started clicking & reading, adding plugins, modding my blog, adding facebook friends, signing up for linked in & my genius, started linking all my social networks to each other, subscribed to a whole batch of RSS Feeds, set up my own feed, wrote more content for my site, designed my new logo … Wow. I can’t actually believe I did all this stuff in such a short space of time.

In the last 9 years of my design & new media career I don’t think I have done as many significant things to get myself out there. I suppose the necessity was the mother of all these “inventions” and with my 2nd little bambino approaching I gotta get myself earning a steady income, which has been one of the low points of this whole experiment.

So I have made quite a few extremely valuable connections in the last few weeks just by commenting on blogs, networking online and basically being a digital nomad, traveling around and interacting with others who are wondering the digital spaces out there. Some interesting & intelligent people I have met along the digital way include: Dave Duarte, Adii Pienaar, Maximillian Kaizen, Rafiq Phillips, Vincent Maher, Matthew Buckland(ex college re-united), Small Potato to namebut a few. This proves to me that with just a little effort and the determination to get something done one can achieve alot in a short space of time.

I’ve started using bookmarking sites like amatomu, afrigator, muti and signed up for social networks like mybloglogs. Why am i telling you all of this and what importance could it have for you and your cause? I’ve been noticed now in ways like never before, I’m getting messages from people interested in meeting and chatting, people interested in sending business my way. I’ve gotten project offers sent to me via facebook, my sites traffic is up and some of my posts are making it onto first pages for some of these sites which is bring more traffic and interest. This means I’m slowing finding my way onto the map and all this in a very short space of time. You can do the same, but there’s a little learning curve, not a huge one, and it takes a little bit of time and effort.

Building relationships is one of the key factors in finding your way to the surface of the digital ocean out there. Doing so means engaging and offering something meaningful, adding value to people’s lives, being interesting and offering assistance. At the end of the day its people on the other end of the connection, people who choose whether to give you their time or not. They decide whether what you’re saying is meaningful, whether what you’re offering is valuable, whether the way you look is acceptable. What’s most interesting to me is that the majority of this activity I’m talking about is happening within local networks, South Africans interacting, making a noise, linking and collaborating, sharing ideas and sharing successes. The web is coming alive in SA and the growth of web users is increasing dramatically. Just recently stats have shown that the South African facebook network has doubled in the last few weeks, doubled.

Only a few days ago I received a project  request from someone who randomly bumped into me on linked in and then sent me a facebook message asking me to design some logos.

If you were wondering how to get in touch with people, how to send a message out, how to make more connections and network better, how to  sell your products and services and make youself known, the web is definitely by far one of the easiest and most cost effective ways, but you need a digital nomad to guide you along a little. I’m shaping myself into one of them and I’ll be glad to show you a thing or 2 if ur looking to step into the web age.

Get yourself out there, there’s a whole new world waiting to meet you.

When I started investigating adding the South African variants I came across a few plugins but struggled a little adding some of these onto my blog easily enough. When I noticed that Rafiq Phillips had added muti to the sociable plugin, one which I hated using myself I decided to see if I could do the same with share-this by Alex King. I’ve never edited a plugin before but this was extremely easy. I just poked around in some code in some other plugins and checked out some of the syntax, repeated it for this one, tested and Wallaaah! It’s “MUTIFIED”.

Download the mutified share-this here.

You can thank me by reading my posts and mutiying them one at a time .

PS: I’m no php developer so cannot offer any support for this plugin modification, use it at your own risk. Ive tested it on my own site and it works fine. If you do find any problems let me know and I’ll see if I can find someone who can sort you out.

There was a small Problem with the upload of 24/10/07 which has now been fixed.