Last month, a Finnish IT company by the name of Klikki Oy identified a critical vulnerability in WordPress – one which has been present in the platform for approximately four years. It allows attackers to enter comments which include malicious JavaScript. Once the script in these comments is executed, the attacker could then do anything from infecting the PCs of visitors to completely hijacking the website; locking the original administrator out of their account. Read more
Without a doubt, one of the most powerful elements of WordPress is its flexibility. This is thanks in large part to its thriving development community. By tapping into the diverse selection of plugins they’ve created, you can empower your WordPress-run website to do…well, just about anything, really.
It’s pretty incredible.
Unfortunately, with so many plugins to choose from, it can be somewhat difficult to figure out which ones are best-suited to your needs. That’s why this series exists – to let our clients know which add-ons are absolutely essential (and by implication, which ones they should probably stay away from). This time around, we’re going to take a look at a few plugins related to website monetization/membership services. There’s just one small difference between the plugins in this post and our regular fare – most of the plugins we’re going to go over today are premium.
Let’s get started. Read more
Let’s be honest – the world of web hosting can be incredibly confusing, especially if you’re a first timer. How do you know where you should start? More importantly, how can you avoid making the wrong choice?
Don’t worry – it’s not as overwhelming as you’d think. All that’s really required is a bit of research. Once you know what’s available to you, figuring out which package you should choose is actually pretty trivial – assuming you know what your business needs.
We’ll help you along in that. Read more
Concrete5 differs from many other content management systems on the web in that it lacks both a template engine and a theme compiler. Instead, all the core components of a site’s layouts are handled behind the scenes – meaning designers have an unprecedented degree of freedom when it comes to customizing how their site looks. As an added bonus, it also makes Concrete5 a fairly simple platform to learn from a development perspective – meaning a fledgling developer can get to work creating their own theme that much faster. Read more
Drupal is a powerful tool in the right hands, but like any content management system, it isn’t perfect. Regardless of whether you’re a seasoned veteran or a green newcomer to the platform, you’re bound to eventually run into a problem or two you can’t figure out on your own. Today, we’re going to go over a few of the most common issues you’re likely encounter with a Drupal installation.
More importantly, we’re going to explain how to fix them. Read more
WordPress may be one of the best blogging tools around, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a shoe-in for your website. There are plenty of things the competition simply does better; although WordPress is efficient, intuitive, and flexible, there’s something to be said for specialization – which, outside of blogging, is something WordPress lacks.
The open-source Joomla! is widely regarded as WordPress’s most formidable competitor, is among the most popular content management systems in the world, and it’s backed by a great development community. On top of that, it’s actually able to handle a larger volume of articles and pages than WordPress, owing to the fact that it was originally designed as an enterprise-level CMS. Read more
In a perfect world, you’d be able to upload ultra high-quality videos to your website without having to worry about how large they are. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world. As such, one of your jobs as a webmaster is to strike a balance between size and quality. You want your videos to be watchable without having to sacrifice a metric ton of bandwidth.
Here are a few space-saving tips that’ll help you to accomplish just that. Read more
The world of web design has changed a lot since the early days of the Internet. With the birth of social media, the user is more important than ever before. Perhaps as a direct result of platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, user-driven websites have never been more popular than they are today.
This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. After all, the modern web focuses almost exclusively on the user, particularly in light of Google’s recent efforts with its search engine. With that in mind, putting the user first during the design process seems like a rather obvious choice – as does focusing on user-generated content. Read more
Drupal is an incredibly powerful content management system, with a high degree of flexibility and customizability. At the same time, it tends to be a touch more resource-intensive than other content management systems — it’s a bit of a memory hog. If a Drupal installation isn’t properly optimized, it could very easily run into a whole host of performance problems as a website grows.
It goes without saying that this is something you want to avoid if at all possible. After all, a sluggish website makes for a poor user experience, a poor user experience makes for lower search rankings, and lower search rankings make for lower traffic. Not really a cycle any webmaster wants to find their site in, is it? Read more
Does your website need a content management system?
There’s a very good chance that the answer is an unequivocal “yes.” Although there’s certainly something to be said for building and maintaining one’s website the old-fashioned way(HTML and elbow grease), this is generally an impractical choice for anything other than a small website with a dedicated web designer (or a site without a regular update schedule). The fact is that most pages on the modern web are going to require a CMS of some sort in order to function. Read more
