Category: Wordpress

Source: 14 Vital Tips to Protect Your WordPress Admin Area (Updated)

 
I had a client ask how to remove the request for the ftp username and password each time an wordpress update was requested. To remove this, just add the following information to your wp-config.php


define('FTP_USER', 'username');
define('FTP_PASS', 'password');
define('FTP_HOST', 'ftp.example.org:21');

voila! No more asky 🙂

It appears that when a server is running DSO as the PHP handler and if a WordPress 3.5 update is needed, the maintenance file is written with ownership as user.user during the upgrade process. This may prevent the file from being removed correctly once the upgrade had completed.

The page will display:

Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.

In order to repair this, log on to the server, and go to the DocumentRoot:

cd /home/user/public_html
mv .maintenance file .maintenance.save


Clear your browsers cache and the site should then load correctly. After, there is a theme update for Twenty Twelve. Go ahead and run that.

From scrawlbug.com

I must be in a bit of a retrospective mood at the moment. Despite spending about six hours on a single piece of work yesterday, I found myself wandering back through some of my blog posts. Surprisingly, I rediscovered quite a few I had forgotten and several that were really quite good.

I then spent about an hour trying to figure out how to export all the posts from my blog into some kind of readable format, so that I could go through them without resorting to the unacceptably crap 3-items-per-page WordPress search.

Unfortunately, most of the applications that used to be able to read an entire blog and store it offline for ease of editing no longer have that ability: they’ve all been adjusted to edit a single existing entry at a time. Totally frickin’ useless.

And most of the responses I found through Google ran along the lines of “You can’t”.

But they’re wrong: there is a way!

Of course, WordPress has its own export facility (in the Tools on the Dashboard) but that’s as useful as the search: it vomits out some kind of bizarre, WP-specific XML file that’s about as readable as James Joyce’s Ulysses. Actually, it’s probably easier to understand the XML: at least that has some kind of structure.

Given that I’m unwilling to accept that such things are impossible (otherwise known as being a stubborn old bugger who won’t give up), I kept looking. It took quite a while to find a single response on a forum that explained how to do it.

The solution is a nice, geeky workaround that uses a free online tool and a converter. It only takes three steps to complete, so here’s the skinny:

1. Use the WordPress export tool to create a copy of Ulysses. Umm, no… I mean to create an XML file with everything in it. Your browser will dump this on your computer and give it a title like “wordpress.2011-06-05.xml”.

2. Now pop over to the absolutely funky-as-hell Blogbooker website. This truly awesome (and free) tool will convert the entire contents of your blog – including pictures, links and cat spit – into a PDF book in a couple of minutes. It’ll even handle multiple authors, different page sizes and all the other stuff that “professional” tools throw a total wobbler over!

3. You’ll need some kind of file converter to get the text out of the PDF file: Adobe’s ridiculously huge, unwieldy, use-a-particle-accelerator-to-crack-a-peanut application, Acrobat, will do it (File/Export). There are plenty of online apps that’ll do the same job, though they might struggle if it’s a really big file – just Google “convert PDF to xxx” where ‘xxx’ is the output format of your choice. You could even copy/paste each page individually if there aren’t too many.

And that’s it. Incredibly simple!

Admittedly, my PC spent about an hour trying to convert the 2.5Mb PDF file into the largest Word document ever seen on the face of the planet before I gave up, killed the process and went to bed… but hey, it should work quicker if your computer doesn’t suck as badly as mine.

From scrawlbug.com

From askwpgirl.com

Q. I’ve installed my website in a subdirectory of our domain, because I didn’t want visitors to see the site until I was finished with our development.
Now I want to have the site show up in the root directory (not in the http://mydomain.com/wordpress directory). How do I do this? I’ve read the information on moving WordPress, and it seems really complicated.

A. The good news is that you DO NOT need to MOVE WordPress in order to have your content display without the subdirectory name. You only need to move 1 file and change one line of code and make one modification to your General Settings, and you’re good to go (see instructions below).

Installing WordPress in a subdirectory is good idea because:

It keeps your root directory clean and tidy (in case you need to add any other PHP applications to your site).
It adds another layer of security by obscuring the location of your WordPress application files. Ideally, you want to name the subdirectory something not too obvious (ie don’t call it wp or WordPress).

It allows you to develop a new WordPress site while maintaining your current website in the root directory. Once you’re finished with your WordPress development, you can backup and then delete your current site’s files, and use the following instructions to display WordPress from the root directory of the site.

“Moving” WordPress from Subdirectory to the Site’s Root Directory

1. Install WordPress as you normally would, but instead of installing it in the root directory (ie in the www or public_html directory), install it in a subdirectory in the www or public_html folder.

2. Once you’ve completed your design work, adding pages to the site, etc., login to the WordPress Dashboard. From the Settings -> General tab, set your WordPress address URL to the subdirectory you installed WordPress in (without the trailing slash). Note: This will already be displayed in the WordPress address field, so you don’t have to change it. What you do need to change is the Site address URL. Set this to your site’s root address (without the trailing slash).

3. Next, MOVE (do not copy) the index.php file that is in the WordPress application directory to the root directory. You can usually do this in an FTP application by selecting the file and choosing Move. (Do not move the index.php file in the themes folder or any other folder.) (Note: If you have a site already in the root directory, such as an old static html site, then you should backup and delete those files first.)

4. In a text or HTML editor, open the index.php file that you just moved and change the location of your wp-blog-header.php to the new location.
Example: if your WordPress installation folder is ‘mywp’, you would change:
< ?php require('./wp-blog-header.php'); ?>
to
< ?php require('./mywp/wp-blog-header.php'); ?>

5. Visit the site and click an interior page to make sure it displays correctly. If it doesn’t, you may need to update your permalinks (Settings -> Permalinks and click Save Changes). If you still cannot access your interior pages, then the .htaccess may need to be moved to the same location as the index.php file (i.e. the root directory). This is not necessary on all web hosts. Be sure to update the permalinks again after you move the .htaccess file.

Remember that your login and registration links will still be
http://www.yoursite.com/mywp/wp-login.php.

Now, when people visit your site, they will see all the URLs of all the pages and posts as if you had installed WordPress in the root directory, and you will have a neat WordPress directory behind the scenes.

From askwpgirl.com