While WordPress is typically a secure and stable platform, it can fall victim to hackers when not maintained, or when poorly developed or outdated plugins are used.

One of the more common methods for hackers to hide the malicious PHP code inserted in to WordPress is to base64 encode the hacked code, and then use base64 decoding and eval() to execute the code at runtime. (If this has already exceeded your level of knowledge in PHP or WordPress, consult a qualified website developer or WordPress expert for assistance.)

Fortunately for WordPress users, base64 code is relatively easy to spot in PHP code, and looks similar to the following:

Since base64 encoding appears as a long string of random alphanumeric characters, it stands out within the PHP code. Typically, this encoding is used by a hacker to embed PHP code within WordPress to output links, redirect users to specific sites, and is worse cases, allow unauthorized access to the WordPress system and database.

While it is possible to manually search your WordPress theme code for base64 code, there are some plugins available that help scan and detect potentially malicious code for you. One of the more popular plugins is BulletProof Security, which is designed to protect a WordPress website against XSS, RFI, CRLF, CSRF, Base64, Code Injection and SQL Injection hacking attempts.

While using a plugin such as this is more effective at securing a WordPress site than relying on manual inspection, it is critically important to review your WordPress theme and WordPress installation on a recurring basis. Understanding how your WordPress site is designed and configured will help you to more readily identity situations in which the site is not functioning normally. It will also become easier for you to spot changes in code structure that may indicate that malicious code has been injected in to the WordPress theme.

If you operate a WordPress site as part of a small business, or depend on site traffic as part of your ongoing web marketing campaign or membership drive, consider retaining a professional web consultant with WordPress security experience to review your WordPress installation. One malicious plugin can ruin the hard-earned reputation of a WordPress website, and cause membership levels to plummet. An experienced WordPress security consultant can quickly and easily locate, remove, and repair the damage caused by malicious PHP or JavaScript code, and help to prevent such issues from reoccurring in the future.

ExpertLanding.com is a collection of technical articles and tutorials, covering topics such as website design and development, database integration, and Internet security.

Please visit http://www.ExpertLanding.com for more information

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=M_Dailey
http://EzineArticles.com/?How-To-Identify-Potential-WordPress-Hacks&id=6835743

There are those of you who have started their blogs quite some time ago and have accumulated a sizeable contingent of regular visitors or even those who have become immensely popular on the web in a relatively short time. It is difficult for such people to build, maintain, and oversee all the technical aspects that are needed to support their websites which are growing at a tremendous pace. VIP WordPress hosting is a god sent for such businesses.

VIP WordPress hosting provides the answer to the toughest challenges for a growing site. VIP WordPress hosting servers are equipped to handle millions of page views every hour, being featured on a top websites homepage, linking to a facebook/twitter page which have gone viral, and all this at the same time. Not to mention the numerous hardware upgrades, expansions, and seamless maintenance. VIP WordPress hosting also handles databases, domain name systems, as well as PHP services quite beautifully, addressing troubleshoots and error handling issues round the clock. It also provides continuous backups and an excellent upload time that is sure to keep a system administrator extremely happy. And all this is done on CDN servers which makes your site blazing fast.

For anyone who is looking to get to that next level with their blogs, VIP WordPress hosting is a viable option. Especially if your site has to handle millions of viewers at the same time, it makes sense to go for a VIP treatment!

Statistics will reflect the fact that after spending loads of time and money, WordPress has indeed achieved what it had set out to achieve – provide a top notch hosting platform to the best websites on the Internet. They are definitely the quickest and perhaps the most efficient web hosts at the present time. Some of the most popular websites are run on VIP WordPress hosting program. These are official blogs for BBC Top Gear, Flickr, and sites such as the Official NFL blog, People Magazine’s Style Watch, Dow Jones’ All things D and many other top notch websites.

The VIP WordPress hosting program is a dream for website owners as well as developers. As VIP members, you will be able to customize your background, edit themes, introduce plug-ins, put up your own ads as well as insert Javascript. The VIP team at WordPress will take care of the security of the code and optimize it for you in collaboration with your own development team.

However, this service as of now is not open to all as WordPress is aiming for customers whose websites get a million page views a month. WordPress is on the lookout for high end publishers and proprietors at the moment.

The pricing as a result of this is quite high at the moment with a flat rate of $2,500 a month for five sites and then $500 a month for additional sites for the same customer. There is also a onetime setup fee of $1500 per site. The other downside is the fact that as a website owner, you must also signup all your developers to the VIP support program – something a developer does not fancy too much.

VIP WordPress hosting

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Calvin_K
http://EzineArticles.com/?Optimize-Your-Blog-With-VIP-WordPress-Hosting&id=6409403

WordPress is very popular with the majority of Internet users – from novices to advanced programmers – as it is extremely flexible and can be customized manually by editing the code. WordPress is extremely customizable and that’s one of the beauties of it. When you are able to master customizing blog themes for WordPress, you can turn the platform into almost anything. There are lots of developers today that create incredible themes so WordPress blogs, so it can be used as e-commerce sites, an affiliate site or just a simple blog. That’s why, WordPress is widely used today, not only by bloggers, but also by internet marketers. Now, it’s time to power it up, lock it down, and make your blog completely yours.

1. Theme

WordPress comes with two themes, Default (also known as Kubrick) and Classic. Installing a good theme is the primary step towards making your blog look like a professional and dynamic website.

WordPress is popular for the wide range of themes available for it. Find a theme you want to base your new theme off of. A good place to start is the default theme, but you may also want to just tweak another theme that’s closer to the look/feel you are going for. On the Themes tab you see the current theme information and you can browse the available themes. You want to find the theme that presents the blog to match your personality and the image you wish to project. If the Theme preview is blank, do not activate the new Theme without investigating further. Your site may not be displayed correctly, otherwise.

2. Plugin

Just like you can extend Firefox with feature-adding extensions, WordPress also has a pluggable architecture and a whole world of plug-ins that can soup up your blog. A plugin is a small program written by a third party that can be integrated into an application for increased functionality. In a nutshell: plugins turn your blog from something ordinary into something sophisticated and optimized for maximum traffic. Do a complete search from among thousands of plug-ins. There are chances that you may be able to find all the plug-ins your need in your WordPress dashboard itself, that too free of cost

3. Sidebars

WordPress’ sidebar and widgets feature is very powerful and customizable; in fact, you can create and customize multiple sidebars or site zones to show up on different pages. The sidebar may contain your primary navigation, text links to various pages, an email sign up form, or just about anything. You feel that you need the sidebar on homepage a little different from the sidebar on article pages. What are you going to do about it? Most of the time, we simply move on and let the sidebar be same through out the blog.

There are more useful ways to customize wordpress blog. Watch simple video guides reveal exactly how to set up wordpress 3.x websites on WordPress Genius Today!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Melody_Priscila
http://EzineArticles.com/?Customize-WordPress-Blog-With-3-Simple-Tips&id=6778998

WordPress is a the perfect tool to create a website for you band. It’s easy to use, looks great and offers a range of features that can be especially useful if you’re into music.

This are my tips on what features to look out for when choosing a WordPress theme for your new band website.

Gig Management or Calendar

As your a band you’ll probably be doing some gigs and shows. Well hopefully you are. Some band themes include a built in event template making it easy to clearly show your upcoming gigs. From these calendar pages you should also check if it’s easy to include “book tickets” buttons if required.

Photo Gallery

Your probably going to want to post all of those cool photos your have of the band playing and looking good. If that’s the case then make sure you choose a theme with a built in photo gallery template to show them off in the best possible way.

Built in Music Player

MySpace is dying a painfully, slow death. Therefore ideally you’ll want to be able to upload your own songs to your website and include them in the sidebar, blog posts and pages.

Social Media Features

Social media like Facebook, Twitter and flickr are a great way of promoting your band and keeping in touch with your fans. You’ll want to check what social media features the theme has like integrated twitter feed or an easy way to embed YouTube videos.

Integrated E-mail Newsletter

Along side social media, e-mail is an essential way to keep in touch with your fans. Make sure you get a WordPress theme that includes an integrated way of capturing e-mail addresses.

How easy is the theme to work on?

Some WordPress themes make it really easy to customise them and make them your own. When buying a theme you’ll want to check what features are included to make your life easy when working on your website.

WordPress is relatively easy to work with out of the box however theme designers can make it even easier by providing easy to use option panels for theme specific functions. Other things to check for are widgets, support for the WordPress menu system and integrated SEO options.

Don’t panic too much if your chosen favourite theme doesn’t tick all the boxes as some of the above features can be added by using plugins.

I hope you’ve found this article useful. Happy gigging!

Ready to start your search for the perfect WordPress Band Theme? Take a look at my list of WordPress Themes for Bands on my best WordPress themes blog

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=James_A_Cooper
http://EzineArticles.com/?Choosing-a-Band-WordPress-Theme&id=6798550

Today we will talk about high load websites: especially about high load start-up planning with WordPress CMS (Content Management System). Questions that I plan to cover in this article are the following:

• Can WordPress be used for high load websites or not?
• What are pros and cons for choosing WordPress?
• What are the potential problems that I will likely face when my traffic hit the ceiling?

Can WordPress be used for high load websites or not?

Currently WordPress is the most popular free content management system available on the Internet. As builtwith.com states there are 4,488,777 websites using WordPress. 317,253 websites are within the most visited sites on the Internet.

If you look at the statistics carefully you will find that business and entertainment websites have the biggest share. This means that there are lots of successful websites running on WordPress and for sure huge part of them have high traffic and high load.

Most amazing example for me is CNN Political Ticker. But there are more.

So the answer to the first question is pretty clear. Yes, WordPress can be used for building high load websites!

What are pros and cons for choosing WordPress?

…advantages and bottlenecks of this decision

Pros. It’s free! It’s easy customizable, and there are armies of freelance WordPress programmers that will help you in customizing or adding a new feature to your website.

It has very big community that performs bug tracking and periodically updates the core of WordPress, which is again free and you can update your website core free of charge.

There are plenty of free and non-free plug-ins written for WordPress. The most important plug-in for non-English websites I assume is a multilingual plug-in. I’ve personally faced this problem many times with other CMS systems. Currently none of the free CMS systems have good and stable multilingual support except for WordPress. Plug-in is called WPML. I personally bought this plug-in for two of my clients that asked for a multilingual website.

To say the truth, this was the only determining factor, for me to choose WordPress for these websites. Because I wanted something lite and stable. So that I can setup this kind of website in couple of days. For a small, non demanding website this is really important.

Cons: WordPress is open source CMS, which means that every one can view PHP codes of the system. From time to time people find bugs in the system and publish these bugs in public forums and bug-tracks. Later WordPress team fixes the bug and releases update that will fix it. And if for some reason you have missed a critical update your website becomes vulnerable to attacks.

So, you or your webmaster should always follow bug-track and make updates on time to keep your website up-to date and secure. As I mentioned updates are free. But! Not all updates can be installed without additional headache and pain. Some updates need to be planned thoroughly and tested in a testing environment. Some plug-ins can brake because of the update of the WordPress core. Some updates could not be applied automatically and you need a smart guy to hack the code and make manual update and big fix.

All the other cons I will list under the second section: potential problems.

What are the potential problems that I will likely face when my traffic hit the ceiling?

First: Default WordPress setup is not optimized for high load. There are several reasons for this. By default nobody knows what plug-ins you are going to have in your website. This means you should manually perform optimizations tasks like combining CSS, JavaScript files, serving zipped content with caching of static objects.

Second: Nobody knows how many different blocks of content you want to use in your website. Which means that may be you need three and sometimes four different sizes of the same photo to display in different blocks. This means that you should either have the same photo scaled and distorted for different blocks or you should upload the same photo with three, four different sizes. or… you gonna hack the core of WordPress and make this scaling process pragmatically. So in either case you have to do a lot of task to achieve this.

Third: Nobody guarantees that your WordPress will still serve pages when your traffic hits 200 or 300 visits per second, even if you have bought a dedicated server. WordPress core needs a serious optimization tasks to be performed in order to be abel to survive under high load.

Conclusion

I don’t want to scare you. You can go for WordPress, but just remember to hire a good consultant that will understand your future needs and can define the action plan or a change list that needs to be implemented on your website to ensure that at least in nearest future you will not have performance problems.

Read about optimisation in general. And if you have more specific questions, just ask me in comments. Thank you for your attention.

Article is written by website development expert Edgar Marukyan, who runs newly created blog “Smart Website Tips” about website performance, optimization and social media integration.
More articles for website owners can be found in http://smartwebsitetips.com/

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Edgar_Marukyan
http://EzineArticles.com/?WordPress-for-High-Load-Websites?&id=6790843

Social Media was (and sometimes still is) a total mystery to me. I started using it very cautiously and timidly and am just getting my feet on the ground with it so – if you have shied away from it, too -  I understand.  Even though I have The Self Improvement Blog it doesn’t mean I’m a computer/software guru. Trust me, I’m not.

To be honest, for a long time I thought Twitter was something for the teens who giggle and tweet. I was wrong. It’s great for businesses who want to build contacts and sales and for those who have valuable information to share. There are some other tools, as well as Twitter that you need to know about in relation to social media.

While I realized the every growing importance of social media, I have not been as fully engaged in it because I didn’t know how. There are some great tools to help you utilize social media sites and Lynn Serafinn has graciously rated and described them for those of us who need that extra boost.

Lynn Serafhinn, was our guest on Thursday’s Self Improvement Show and author of the smashing book “The 7 Graces of Marketing.” She has made an offer you should not refuse if you want to learn more about these tools.

She has just published an eBook which you can read on Kindle. Oh, don’t panic. I don’t have a Kindle either – yet. You can download the Kindle software for your PC for FREE (yes, FREE) from Amazon,com;

Then for two days you can download Lynn’s book  Social Media on Autopilot: Nice, Necessary or Nightmare? 5 Product Reviews PLUS Social Media Tips for Business Owners: Ping, TweetDeck, Twaitter, HootSuite & TweetAdder for FREE. If you miss this special, pay the $2.99 and get this book – it’s worth so much more than that teeny price.

Take your time when you read it. If you aren’t familiar with the program she’s discussing, go to the software site and look it over before you go on to the next item. By the time you finish reading her book, you will have a clear idea about what will work best for you and how you can get the most from using it. Reading about software is sometimes as exciting as watching pant dry, but Lynn has kept it short and clear and the proof of its effectiveness will come in the doing.

I have been using a couple of these programs for quite some time but I certainly wasn’t utilizing their power to the fullest. With Lynn’s tips it is like switching from a horse and buggy to a Ferrari! I intend to burn up the social media road, so to speak so more people visit this blog.

Lynn is a “heavy duty user” of the social media tools and as and expert user so she knows what she’s talking about in her evaluations.  She has also given some great tips  on how to get the most out of the tool while  you’re saving time and energy.

How can you refuse FREE?  It’s only FREE today and morrow (Saturday, January 7 and Sunday, January so act now. Go to Amazon.com now and get it. FREE? Absolutely!

A premium WordPress shopping cart plugin distinguishes itself from other forms of WordPress e-commerce plugins and themes alike in an array of key ways such as design, display, ease-of-use, and fineness. And naturally, there is going to be cases where some WordPress theme and plugin makers label their work as premium, when, actually, it isn’t of premium standards. Premium WordPress themes and plugins as in the one we’ll go on to speak about later on in this post, are constructed to meet the requirements of the foremost demanding entrepreneur. The most demanding entrepreneur requires only the very best in the way of an online shop. They demand an internet shop that looks sophisticated, a store that appears professional, a store that’s uncomplicated to navigate, a shopfront that is SEO friendly and easy to search for over the net. And, in the end, a shop that looks the part giving your presence on the net the credibility and the confidence within its users to ensure that the site is a success.

Several entrepreneurs go to radical lengths to make sure that their via the web stores look the part, often parting with huge amounts of money in the process. They enlist the support of web designers who charge significant amounts of cash for their labor, and in all fairness, a lot of these designers do their work skillfully. That having been said, I do believe that it can be fair to mention that there are not many of us out there, in the world at the moment, who can afford to fork out substantial amounts of cash for an online store. Times are undeniably challenging, you only have to switch your TV on for 2 minutes to learn about the problems in economies globally. The proper management of our money is utterly crucial, and is integral to our ability to withstand the economic slump. In acknowledgment of the need to be diligent in monetary terms, every day individuals and entrepreneurs alike have recognised the need to cut back on expenditure, to manage their income better, to only pay out for things that they can afford. For the entrepreneur who wants to setup an online business, this is where WordPress steps in.

Premium WordPress plugins and themes alike are affordable. They’re an affordable solution for every day individuals to build a web based store. Their relative inexpensiveness stems from the little fact they are created for WordPress. And WordPress, as many people will know, is free to use. Ecommerce web-designers use WordPress’ worldwide recognition and pleasant, easy-going interface, on which to construct fantastic, great looking web based stores for the public. And are able to do so at an inexpensive price which makes it viable to start your own business on the cheap. And starting businesses new is what plenty of people are doing today. Creating your very own business on the web, with minimum costs, with low overheads, is viewed by plenty of people as a sound route to combat these titanically tough financial times. There is nothing after all stopping you from doing alike. A Premium WordPress theme makes it all possible, and manages to do so at an ludicrously low price.

If you’re considering a WordPress e-commerce theme, then you definitely need not look any further than ShopperPress. ShopperPress can be described as a premium WordPress shopping cart. You’d be hard pushed to find a more attractive wordpress ecommerce plugin anywhere else.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Derick_Alexander_Charles_Mason
http://EzineArticles.com/?Premium-WordPress-Shopping-Carts—Online-Stores-On-Small-Budgets&id=6734165

Templates for WordPress are actually the files that help in controlling the manner in which the WordPress site will appear on the internet. These help to draw the codes from the database and generate these codes in the correct format to the browser. The system is specifically designed to provide a strong feature of selecting the number of files one wishes to have under a single theme. Each and every template can be conveniently configured so as to be useful pertaining to certain situations. Themes can be developed and tips on doing the same can be taken from the development section.

The theme development section helps in knowing how one can design and develop a theme. Templates for WordPress can be understood in detail with the help of articles relating to the same. These help in knowing how some template files can be included in others. Apart from this, they can also consist of the basic fundamentals dealing with templates. The preference of such templates can also be known. If one goes through such articles, it is easy to know the order in which WordPress requires the various files to be in order to be displayed on the blog.

WordPress templates also include template tags that are used in such files. These tags are the core of any file. These are the functions that help in drawing the correct piece of information and displaying it. In order to have accurate template files, it is necessary to understand the importance, structure and usage of such tags. It is possible to refer to pages designed specifically for usage of such tags. The templates help to change the look of the site by changing the skin or the theme. This is because these templates are the files that help to control the overall look of the website.

WordPress templates are very commonly used as this is widely used software meant for blogging. The process of using these templates is to download the file and unzip and then upload it. This can be done only by the administration of the website through the designing tab. Before final application, it is possible to get a preview of the template that is selected. If the selected template is not intended to be applied, it can be changed easily. This is a very simple process and the download does not take too much of time or memory space.

Iwebshop designed and implemented a custom templates for WordPress and templates for the Walby Farm Park website. Here you will find more attractive WordPress templates and wordpress templates. For more info please visit our website.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Robert_Vicky
http://EzineArticles.com/?Professional-Templates-For-WordPress&id=6779910

WordPress is very popular with the majority of Internet users – from novices to advanced programmers – as it is extremely flexible and can be customized manually by editing the code. WordPress is extremely customizable and that’s one of the beauties of it. When you are able to master customizing blog themes for WordPress, you can turn the platform into almost anything. There are lots of developers today that create incredible themes so WordPress blogs, so it can be used as e-commerce sites, an affiliate site or just a simple blog. That’s why, WordPress is widely used today, not only by bloggers, but also by internet marketers. Now, it’s time to power it up, lock it down, and make your blog completely yours.

1. Theme

WordPress comes with two themes, Default (also known as Kubrick) and Classic. Installing a good theme is the primary step towards making your blog look like a professional and dynamic website.

WordPress is popular for the wide range of themes available for it. Find a theme you want to base your new theme off of. A good place to start is the default theme, but you may also want to just tweak another theme that’s closer to the look/feel you are going for. On the Themes tab you see the current theme information and you can browse the available themes. You want to find the theme that presents the blog to match your personality and the image you wish to project. If the Theme preview is blank, do not activate the new Theme without investigating further. Your site may not be displayed correctly, otherwise.

2. Plugin

Just like you can extend Firefox with feature-adding extensions, WordPress also has a pluggable architecture and a whole world of plug-ins that can soup up your blog. A plugin is a small program written by a third party that can be integrated into an application for increased functionality. In a nutshell: plugins turn your blog from something ordinary into something sophisticated and optimized for maximum traffic. Do a complete search from among thousands of plug-ins. There are chances that you may be able to find all the plug-ins your need in your WordPress dashboard itself, that too free of cost

3. Sidebars

WordPress’ sidebar and widgets feature is very powerful and customizable; in fact, you can create and customize multiple sidebars or site zones to show up on different pages. The sidebar may contain your primary navigation, text links to various pages, an email sign up form, or just about anything. You feel that you need the sidebar on homepage a little different from the sidebar on article pages. What are you going to do about it? Most of the time, we simply move on and let the sidebar be same through out the blog.

There are more useful ways to customize wordpress blog. Watch simple video guides reveal exactly how to set up wordpress 3.x websites on WordPress Genius Today!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Melody_Priscila
http://EzineArticles.com/?Customize-WordPress-Blog-With-3-Simple-Tips&id=6778998

Are you a person who manage several blogs on WordPress and is always on the go for business trips or leisure? Or perhaps you are a successful businessman who’s having problems with maintaining numerous websites and domains for your internet businesses using WordPress as a platform. If you fall under any of these categories, I’m pretty sure that somewhere along the way, you are looking for an automated solution or a program that can help you in managing all of those blogs. Luckily, there is such a program and that is what’s called a WordPress Manager.

A WordPress manager is basically a program that allows you to have access and manage multiple blogs or even the entire blog networks through a single central location. Using this kind of program, there are a lot of advantages and the possibilities to what you can do is plentiful. Another important thing why WordPress manager can be useful is that it improves your level of productivity in organizing and maintaining your blog sites. We’ll be talking more about that in this article.

Here Are 3 Different Ways How A WordPress Manager Can Greatly Improve Your Productivity Level.

1. Easy Access to Your Blogs – As mentioned earlier, this program allows you to easily access all of the blogs that you’ve set up. It doesn’t matter how many blogs you have, you’ll be able to access all of them right away without worrying about the usernames and passwords that you have to remember if you had to set up all of those sites individually. Also, navigating through a WordPress manager is very easy since most of them are programmed to look like the dashboards of a WordPress site. In a way, this program becomes your dashboard for all of your blogs’ dashboards.

2. Centralized and Organized Management - Managing your blogs becomes a whole lot easier since you have access to all of them through the program. You’ll be able to set up a new blog and even do some minor or major tweaks to your already up and running blogs while within a WordPress manager. So, that basically makes it easier to manage your domain names, the IP addresses you’re using and all of the themes and plug-ins that you’ve set for your blogs. Some WordPress managers like xMarkPro even allow you to set up profiles for the particular blogs you’ll be creating. This can help in reducing the amount of time and all the hassle that you need to put into managing your blog sites one by one.

3. Improved Content Posting Ability – The last, but certainly most important way how a WordPress manager can improve your productivity is that it allows you to post all of the content for all of your blogs through the program. You can check if you have any pending articles or posts that you have to publish and even manage all of the published posts that you have on your blogs at the moment.

And so, if you’re looking for a way to really help you in managing your WordPress blogs, why not go and try a WordPress manager out. You’ll definitely be amazed with the benefits that you’ll get from using it.

If You’d Like To Learn More About WordPress Manager, Then Please Read Below:

FREE REPORT! Here’s A Little Known, Yet Extremely Powerful Blog Management System That’ll Help You To Get Rid Of The Pain Of Managing Multiple Blogs, Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible!

That’s Right — This Secret You’re About To Discover Inside Works So Well, You May NEVER Have To Worry About Managing Multiple Blogs Ever Again! In This FREE Special Report You’ll See How Just About ANYONE Can Manage A Blog Network Without A Problem!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Elmar_Sandyck
http://EzineArticles.com/?3-Ways-A-WordPress-Manager-Can-Help-Improve-Your-Online-Productivity&id=6589076