Just a quick and easy one this month and being the month of Christmas I’d thought I’d go with the Christmas theme.

Xmas Snow adds a nice looking animated Christmas Snow to the top of your site.

Sorry for the delay in this one but here we are.

bbPress is a forum software designed to intergrate seemlessly into any wordpress website.

We’re keeping things as small and light as possible while still allowing for great add-on features through WordPress’s extensive plugin system. What does all that mean? bbPress is lean, mean, and ready to take on any job you throw at it.

bbPress has been downloaded well over 400,000 times and when im designing a site that needs tight integration with community focus i choose bbPress.

This month in our WordPress Plugin Spotlight we are looking a plugin developed by Securenext Softwares WP.

Google Drive for WordPress is a plugin designed to backup WordPress files and Databases to Google Drive.

This plugin used to Make backups of your WordPress files and Mysql DB with Google Drive. Google Drive for WordPress is a plugin that provides backup capabilities for WordPress. Backups are ‘zip’ archives created locally and uploaded to a folder of your choosing on Google Drive.

WPTH.NET have written up a lovely how-to to get it installed and running on a WordPress installation.

**NOTE: IF YOU ARE HAVING ISSUES WITH TELECOM DNS, PROPAGATION, EMAIL, OR WEBSITE ACCESS IN NZ PLEASE CONTACT US DIRECTLY ON INFO@DEVFX.CO.NZ  FOR SUPPORT**

What is DNS?

DNS is the fabric that joins the internet together. DNS is what tells a computer or server the location of the website or the email server.

Why is it so important?

When someone sends you an email or tries to access your website, their computer looks up your DNS records, then goes to the location it gives them.

Why should you consider how its done for company?

Do you have DNS redundancy…? if not, whats going to happen if your DNS fails – No email and no website?

Whats it got to do with DevFX?

Stable – reliable – redundant service! Originally DevFX was structured around providing web design services and hosting of websites. How? with a team and a dedicated web server. The more we host and the larger we became, we began to pickup more services as demanded by the clients.

We grew our services! Instead of providing only web design and hosting. We started to provide support and services for domain name services, and cloud-based email hosting solutions

What does this mean?

The more clients we worked with the more me noticed a lack of (industry) standard causing them email, hosting and DNS issues.What issues? DOS Attacks. Server demand and overloading. ISP issues. Email issues… and a lot of it going unnoticed.

What can this cause to your company?

Web services to fail, emails to bounce back, extremely slow website load times, it can even effect your ranking within Google.

What is DevFX doing about it to stay ahead of the game?

Providing a restructured hosting infrastructure to ensure all areas of service are market leading by:

• -Implementation of 4 segregated cloud-based name servers for NS and DNS hosting
• -Increased server space, including tripling processing power
• -Cloud based solutions for segregated email hosting with Google Apps – Unlimited users and domains

Where do you sign up?

Just contact us info@devfx.co.nz

So after seeing a recent increase in hacking attempts on WordPress sites I thought I would start a WordPress Plugin Spotlight and what better way to start this segment than with a security plugin.

Better WP Security

Currently at version 3.4.4 BWPS offers many features to make thing harder for hackers to attack your site. BWPS is very easy and friendly to use and can be setup in as little as 10min. Admittedly some parts do require knowledge of MySQL and how to edit .htaccess files, how to’s for these can be found online. Most WordPress attacks are a result of plugin vulnerabilities, weak passwords and obsolete software.

Some of the key features of BWPS include

• Change the urls for WordPress dashboard including login, admin and more
• Change the WordPress database table prefix
• Turn off the ability to login for a given time
• Scan your site to instantly tell where vulnerabilities are and fix them in seconds
• Detect and block numerous attacks to your filesystem and database
• Detect bots and other attempts to search for vulnerabilities
• Works on multi-site (network) and single site installations
• Plus many more

If you are worried about the security of your site or just want that extra protection then Better WP Security is the plugin for you.

Here at DevFX we love using wordpress. Its easy to install, easy to customise and does what its suppose to but in saying that it is the most widely used open-source platform for blogs, cms and any other custom solution.

1. This is most important – Stay up to date.

The wordpress team is constantly bringing out updates for security fixes all the time. When you log into the back end of your site up the top there will be a notification that will let you know if a new version is available.

2. Don’t use the standard prefix for your wordpress database.

Most of the setup stuff for a majority wordpress sites are the same, especially if you use a one step install setup with your webhost. This may make things easier but alot of the common setup processors and values are know to hackers like your database prefix(es). If they are not change then a hacker knows your database table names.

3. Protect your wp-config.php file

Your wp-config.php file holds all the key information about your website (especially database connection details). So protect it at all costs and an easy way to do this is with a .htaccess file. Place the following in your .htaccess file in your admin folder.

<Files .htaccess>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</Files>

4. Limit the number of failed login attempts

If someone is trying to guess your password manually or is using a robot then you can download a plugin to limit the number of failed login attempts.

You can download plugin from here.

5. And the last one is BACKUP!

It maybe the last but dont discourage it as unimportant. There are many plugins available to manage your wordpress backups

• Backup WordPress
• WP DB Backup

When submitting a form you should always check its submitted values even if its not effecting a database as it is good practice. Ive got simple PHP function that ive been using for the last 3 years and thought it was about time to post it up.

//Function to sanitize values received from the form. Prevents SQL injection
function cleanString($string) {
$strtags = strip_tags($string);
if(get_magic_quotes_gpc()) {
$stripped = stripslashes($strtags);
$passed = mysql_real_escape_string($stripped);
} else {
$passed = mysql_real_escape_string($strtags);
}
return $passed;
}

Media planning

www.DevFX.co.nz – Contact us today if you looking for a professional and affordable web design. Our development team can create CMS sites for content management, push more traffic to your site using SEO or redesign your current website.

If you need a new website design look no further. DevFX

After a long 10 years (or so) a new revision is becoming more mainstream. This is HTML5. HTML5 has been in the works since 2004 and has only became just mainstream due to support from major browsers and a controversial public letter from Steve Jobs titled “Thoughts on Flash” where he concludes Adobe Flash will no longer be required to watch video or consume any kind of web content.

HTML5 was first adopted as the starting point of the new HTML in 2007 by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). They published the first public working draft on January 22, 2008. The specification is expected to be marked as ongoing for many years although many parts of HTML5 are going to be finished and implemented in browsers before the final Recommendation status.

Next I will talk about “What’s New in HTML5, Markup, Tags”

Web Design, New Zealand – Web Design Pros is a directory of New Zealand Website Design and Development Professionals

Would you say “no thanks” if someone offered you an easy way to get 50% more visitors to your website? Probably not. However, that’s exactly what most webmasters are doing. There’s a simple thing that you can do to drive many more visitors to your site.



The Internet is not just Google
Last week, research company Experian Hitwise published the search engine market shares for March 2011. Google accounted for 64.42 percent of all U.S. searches, Bing-powered search comprised 30.01 percent of searches for the month. Most webmasters focus on Google and ignore all other search engines when it comes to search engine optimization. Ignoring Bing is a mistake. A market share of 30% is huge and there are several reasons why you should include Bing in your SEO activities.

Three reasons why it makes sense to optimize your website for Bing

1. There’s less competition on Bing
Most webmasters concentrate on Google. It is easier to get high rankings on Bing because fewer people compete aggressively for the same keywords.
2. Millions of searchers will find your site
As mentioned above, Bing currently has a market share of 30%. That’s just half of the market share that Google has but that’s still millions of people who might be interested in your website.
If you have just focused on Google then you can increase the number of website visitors by 50% just by adding Bing to your search engine optimization activities.
3. Bing searches deliver more click-throughs

According to the Hitwise data, Bing powered search engines achieved the highest success rate in March 2011. More than 80 percent of searches executed resulted in a visit to a website.
Google achieved a success rate of 66 percent. It might be that the search results snippets in Bing are more attractive or the results in Bing are simply more relevant.
How to optimize your website for Bing

Google and Bing return different websites for the same search query. That means that they use different ranking algorithms and that it is difficult to optimize the same page for both Google and Bing.
If you want to get the best possible results, optimize some pages of your website for Google and other pages of your website for Bing. The more pages of your website you optimize, the better.
Use IBP’s Top 10 Optimizer to get detailed instructions on how to optimize your web pages for Bing. IBP works with Bing.com, Bing.co.uk, Bing.com.au, Bing.de and many other local Bing variations. Of course, IBP also helps you to optimize your web pages for Google.com and many local Google variations.

Thanks to Axandra – Visit Axandra.com