Softwired Blog

One of the things most often overlooked is how to set up your WordPress website for content management.  I've seen some "Frankensystems" where pages and posts are all mixed together.  If you have hundreds or even thousands of pages it can be a nightmare to manage.

One of the easiest ways to set up the admin is to create custom post types.  These are posts that don't fit into "posts" which are the blog and "pages" which comes with WordPress.  By setting up custom post types you are creating what is called a taxonomy which is a complicated term for categories.

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There are many concerned about WordPress security from hacking and other malicious activity.  This is a topic that is continually coming up and I'm constantly informing our customers.  Let's start with the basics.

Is WordPress secure?

Not unless you do some basic maintenance first.  This is the most common problem when developers without a lot of experience start working with it.  Out of the box we need to do some basic hardening, follow best practices, and perform on-going maintenance.

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There's so much out there in the world of website design and these standards are changing rapidly.  In the early days it took an expert programmer to create a website.  These days you can rapidly deploy sites in literally minutes without any programming knowledge.  This has diminished the value of the work to develop the software that is running your website.

This has been amplified with the huge surge of WordPress and all the free plugins that make a feature rich website.  More an more I'm finding over the years I don't really have to do much coding to get a site up and running with any feature I want.  I can simply cherry pick plugins that do most of the fuctionality I'm looking for.

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Recently our hosting servers were attacked by a botnet of hacker programs attempting to gain access to the WordPress admins via brute force attempts.  The programs run thousands of login attempts usually against the admin username to try and crack passwords.  The requests come so fast that the server eventually slows down trying to keep up with the requests and crashes.

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