If you are a wordpress developer and would like to add an options page to your wordpress theme to allow users easy options to administer your theme then follow the steps below.

Option your functions.php file and add the following code (the code hightlighted in red is what you change to what you want).:

add_action(‘admin_menu’, ‘givenickname_menu’);
function givenickname_menu() {
  add_theme_page(‘Your Sites Name’, ‘Options Label’, 8, ‘theme-options’, ‘givenickname_options’);
}

function givenickname_options() {
  echo ‘<div><h2>Your Themes Options Title</h2>’;
  echo ‘<p>Then you simply add your option functions here what you want to be displayed on your themes page</p>’;
  echo ‘<h3></p>’;
  echo ‘</div>’;
}

If you now click on Appearance within your dashboard you will see the option page you just created with a blank page.  Now you simply add the function back to your funcations file of what you would like displayed on your newley created page.

Written by Andrew Fitzgerald - Websites For Sale | Make Money Online

We have just launched a new website called Bad Boy Themes which sell wordpress themes mainly premium themes, gallery themes, business themes, free wordpress themes

Each theme has been custom designed with advanced theme options within the wordpress dashboard to make it easier for the user to work their way around the website.  They are very easy to install, with one click install and can have your theme up and running within 10 minutes.

We also have a support forum and will soon be launching video tutorials on how to setup and use our wordpress themes

All our themes are setup so they will be fully optimised for search engines and also have social networking features intregated into the theme.  They will also be adsense friendly so you will be able to add google adsense to your theme to make money from.  You can also make money from a number of ways from our themes (e.g linking in clickbank products, selling advertisment space, affiliate products etc)

Written by Andrew Fitzgerald - Websites For Sale | Make Money Online

If you would like to change or add a new featured article to post to the featured gallery on your home page this is what you need to do:

1) login to your blog and you will see the default wordpress dashboard.  Down the left side are different options and at the bottom you will see “Gazette Edition Options“.  Click on this and under the “Front Page Layout” section change the number of “Featured Entries” to display how many articles you would like displayed in your featured gallery as shown in the pic below:

Then go to “Posts / Add New” and start writing out your article.  Make sure to place the article in the “Featured” category as this is where the main gallery picks up the articles from as shown below:

To add an image to be displayed in the gallery, simply upload a pic and make sure you copy the URL of where the image is and paste this into the following section at the bottom of the articles options as shown below. Also make sure the image dimensions are 595x270px

When your finished hit Publish and it should now be displayed.

Written by Andrew Fitzgerald - Websites For Sale | Make Money Online

 
Getting Started

First thing I recommend is that you login to your wordpress blog and upgrade to the latest version straight away via the dashboard as wordpress are always working on new patches that fix any known threats.

Then start upgrading all your plugins as there may also be new patches that the plugin developer may of fixed that are known threats to his/her plugin that could harm your blog.

Protecting Your Plugins 

With so many plugins available free on the Internet which most of us have installed, you may be open to an attack as some plugins may have flaws in them, which an attacker could use to alter your blog in some way.

All a hacker has to do is go to www.yourdomainname.com/wp-contents/plugins/ to find out what plugins your using.  Some clever hackers will have some sort of scanner software to scan your blog for any open backdoors to gain access to your plugins.

Solution

To prevent a hacker from accessing your plugins simply setup a index.html file and upload it to your plugins folder /wp-contents/plugins/

 

 

Password Security

This one is common sense, yet most of us use the same password for all of our website logins.  It’s wise to use a different password for all your logins and have a mixture of numbers and upper and lowercase characters.

If a hacker has managed to get your password and has hacked into your hosting server and finds all your other blogs, if your using the same password to log onto all your blogs, you’ve just given the hacker full access to your entire network of blogs.

You should also change the default admin username to a different name.  Because if the hacker knows your username then he’s halfway there to getting into your site.  To do this create a new username and give it admin privileges and delete the original admin username.

Protecting Your WP-Config.php File

 

Your wp-config.php file within the root of your wordpress blog contents information about your database.  For example the database name, username and password.  This is a file you should protect.

All you need to do is add the following code to your .htaccess file if you have one.  If you don’t have a .htaccess file setup at your root then open up notepad.exe and add the following text:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# protect the htaccess file
<files .htaccess>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</files>

# limit file uploads to 10mb
LimitRequestBody 10240000

# protect wpconfig.php
<files wp-config.php>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</files>

# disable directory browsing
Options All –Indexes

I put this text into a file I call htaccess.txt on my local drive, I upload it to the root of the host, and then I rename it on the host to .htaccess and then it immediately disappears because it acts like a system file

Login Limitations 

It’s a good idea to limit how many times a user can enter in a wrong password to get access to your blog.  There is a good plugin for this called “LockDown” which will lock out users if they enter their password wrong too many times.  You can choose how many times users enter their password and also how long they’re locked out for via the options page – Click Here To Download

Hiding Your Wp-Admin Login Page 

A great plugin called “Stealth Login” can hide your wordpress login page so if your password did leak out, a hacker would have a hard time trying to find your login page.  A good use for this plugin is to prevent any malicious bots from accessing your wp-login.php file and attempting to break in.

Click Here To Download Stealth Login  

Hiding Your WordPress Version 

By default, WordPress theme’s have a line in the header.php to display the current version of WordPress you use (can be found by viewing source).

Since anyone can find your WordPress version this way, your blog is prone to hackers until you upgrade to the latest version. To prevent displaying your WordPress version, just open your theme’s header.php file and look for the following line

<meta name=”generator” content=”WordPress <?php bloginfo(’version’); ?>” />

And replace it with <meta content=”WordPress” />

To access your header.php within your wordpress dashboard, click on Appearance / Editior and then click on the Header.php file as shown below:

Some themes might already have this done for you, but it’s worth taking a look.

Protecting Your Database 

Another great free plugin is called WP-DB-Backup, which makes backing up your databases very easy and automated.  You only need to set this up once and set it to run at regular intervals.

This plugin automates the backing up of your databases and can have it sent to your email inbox.  Other than the default table created by WordPress, you can also backup custom tables created by plugins.  In the event that your account crashes, you can easily import and restore the database with the backup.

Click Here To Download WP-DB-Backup

Change Database Table Prefix 

When installing wordpress, it uses the default “wp” prefix in your database tables which makes it easy for a hacker to hack your database tables if he managed to get in.  You can easily change the prefix to other terms that are difficult to guess using the wp-security-scan plugin.  Click Here to Download

WP-Security-Scan checks your WordPress for security vulnerabilities and suggests/provides corrective actions. The corrective actions include changing your database prefix, hiding the WordPress version number from the header and allows you to test out the strength of your password.

Once in a while, it is a good idea to run the inbuilt security scanner and check your blog for any security invulnerabilities.

Protect Your Blog From Comment Spam 

Spam can be a danger to your blog and its visitors. Comment spam can insert unwanted content onto your website. One way of protecting against spam is using plugins that track comments and trackbacks, running them through tests to check on whether they are spam and then refusing or approving based on the test results. Though its worth noting that this is not completely full proof and depending on the size of your blog you may even want to personally moderate commenting, or maybe even limit commenting to specific posts.

Anti-spam Plugins and additional resources on how to protect from comment spam:

Akismet

Codex on Combating Comment Spam

Codex listing of Spam Tools

Limit Self Registration Of Users 

WordPress supports the ability for users to create new accounts for the purpose of posting. Though this registration does allow them to subscribe as well, which gives them access to reading only. Turn self-registration off in

Settings:  uncheck anyone can register

or limit your readers to the subscribe role only.

Delete the Install.php from your root directory 

After you have installed wordpress make sure you have deleted the install.php from your root directory, as anyone could run this file and cause damage to your website.

Checking Your Theme For Harmful Links 

 

When you are installing a free wordpress theme you have found on the Internet you need to make sure the free theme doesn’t have any harmful links that could potentially ruin your rankings with Google.

Some designers will sell footer links on these themes, which is how they make money by allowing you to download them for free, but some designers will hide the footer links so you don’t see them, which is against Googles webmaster algorithm and will harm your rankings.  Also some of this links will link to what is known as a bad neighbourhood of websites which are currently blacklisted by Googles eyes and if your linking to them, your blog will loose its rankings.

Here is a typical themes footer with links you will find on a free theme

Now if I run my cursor over the bottom of my entire footer and highlight it, I might find some hidden links just like the following in red:

Now you can guess how bad this would look in Googles eyes and what affect this would have on your blog.

So when you download a free theme make sure to check the template files for any hidden links

You can do this from within the dashboard under Appearance / Editor / Footer.php

 

I highly recommend you get your wordpress themes from Woo Themes

Click Here To See Their Themes
Keeping Your Computer Clean

Its very important to make sure the computer your using to edit your wordpress blog is clean from any spyware, viruses, malware, adware, etc.  For example you could have an infection of keylogger on your pc, which will track all your passwords, and be able to hack into your wordpress blog and other websites you use.

Make sure you have an up to anti virus and firewall protection on your computer.  A very good application, which is free to use, is called “C Cleaner”, which will scan your computer for any spyware, adware and delete them. I recommend installing this and running this at least once a day if you use the Internet a lot as it will detect any infections you get from visiting websites that install applications in the background without you knowing.

Click Here To Download

 

 

Server Vulnerabilities 

The webserver running WordPress, the database with the WordPress data, PHP and any other scripting/programming language used for plugins or helper apps could have vulnerabilities. Therefore, make sure you are running secure, stable versions of your web server, database, scripting interpreter, or make sure you are using a trusted host that takes care of these things for you.

It should also be mentioned that if you’re on a shared server (one that hosts other people besides yourself) if someone else is compromised, then it’s very likely you could be compromised too even if you follow everything in this guide. Be sure to ask your web host what security precautions they take.

One Hosting Company I recommend is Hostgator –

Click Here To View Price Plans

Written by Andrew Fitzgerald - Websites For Sale | Make Money Online

First log into your website – usually its your domain name and /wp-admin at the end is the login page

Example – www.domain.com/wp-admin

Within your dashboard click on Posts on the lefthand side then on Add New to add a new article

Then give your article a title in the title field and write your article within the description box.

To add an image within the article simply press the add an image button as shown in the following pic.  This will allow you to upload an image from your computer.

If you are using the Gazette Theme that has a thumbnail image on the front of your blog for your articles you may also want an image for this location.  To do this you will need the URL of the image you want displayed at the front of the blog for this article.  Click the add image button again and upload an image.  You will now see the following screen.  Copy the Link URL

You then paste the link URL address into the Gazette Edition Custom Settings at the bottom of the article your publishing as shown below:

Once you have finished add the article to a category choosing one from the right or creating a new one.  Then simply press Publish to publish the article to your blog.

Written by Andrew Fitzgerald - Websites For Sale | Make Money Online

To use the WP 0 Matic plugin you will need to login to your website using Mozilla Firefox which you can download from:

http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/firefox/

Log into your wordpress blog and within the dashboard down the left hand side click on

Settings / WP – O – Matic

 

There you will see that i have set up some campaigns for you.

Click on Campaigns

Then click on FETCH

  

This will now start to pull articles of the news source i have set up for you on your website

Written by Andrew Fitzgerald - Websites For Sale | Make Money Online