Tag Archives: wordpress

Technical

Testing 2 new WP plugins and pondering the mobile web

After a shocking discovery that my site’s feed was still live, I resolved to put an end to it by installing the “Disabler“. I decided to go with a plugin because I experienced some difficulty modifying the Atahualpa’s functions.php file. I hope Restricted Site Access will consider putting in an option for restricting access, if not, disabling feeds, since I think it would be an appropriate function.

I also implemented Print Friendly and PDF, to make it easier to print out posts and pages. It’s quite handy when I want to print out a wishlist or recipe, and I’ve been looking for an easy way to add a print button to my WordPress sites.

There is a growing number of hits on the sites that I manage by mobile handsets. I am considering “mobile-izing” my sites to become more accessible to the huge market of smartphone users. I have two options to modify existing WordPress sites: via theme and via plugin. Of course, creating a mobile theme for each site will be time-consuming, while using a plugin means certain restrictions on format and creativity. I plan on researching this more, but for now, I need to experience the various browser-agents on the 3 hottest smartphone platforms: Blackberry, iPhone and Android.

Technical

Disabling directory browsing

I had created a subdomain to route to the WordPress login on one of my sites, in order to make it easier to find the login page later on after I removed the link from the home page. However, created the subdomain created two things: a subdirectory within the WordPress install directory, and made it browsable. So if I plugged in www.mydomain.com/login, a browsable index page came up. Since this sort of behavior opens up the website to malicious visitors, I had to find a way to plug up the hole.

Fortunately, there was already an answer out there to the solution. Because I installed WordPress into its own directory, and not the root, I merely had to make some adjustments to the .htaccess files.

For both files located at the WordPress root and the login folder root, I just needed to add the following lines at the end of each file:

# BEGIN Disable Dir Browsing
Options All -Indexes
# END Disable Dir Browsing

I believe this code can be applied to any directory that needs its contents hidden from browsing, as long as an .htaccess file exists.

Email Posts

Postie redux

Strangely, my last Postie attempt posted as a comment and not a regular post. I fiddled with the cron-less options several times to see if this was just an error or something that Postie is reading in the subject line. In any case I will try regular posting to see if it works. Currently Postie is set to retrieve emails every 10 minutes.

Technical

Demoing Drupal

I’ve noticed a posting on a job site recently advertising for Drupal experience. This motivated me to setup a Drupal install on the server to play around with it for a bit. Something that caught my eye in the documentation on Drupal was the intention to make Drupal server-independent. So I am looking forward to testing Drupal in an IIS setting, something that WordPress isn’t fully integrated with yet.

Of course, this argument is nullified by IIS7’s use of Web App Gallery, which I had managed to test on Server 2008. My understanding is that WPI easily installs most of the common web application packages available today, including WordPress, Drupal and Joomla.

I am curious to learn which setup will ultimately lead to the best CMS. There are many arguments currently out on the web extolling the virtues of Drupal, WordPress and Joomla; but it takes time to experience each of them.