100 posts related to: WordPress and the Blank Target Vulnerability

HTML Abbreviations Cheat Sheet

Here is my custom list of abbreviations for commonly used terms, as written via HTML’s <abbr></abbr> tag. I’m posting this to make it available to anyone who finds it useful. Very handy when writing tutorials related to WordPress, web design and development. A quick copy/paste is much quicker than typing it all out. Without further ado, here is my “cheat sheet” of HTML abbreviations. Continue reading »

All the Hyphens & Dashes

Typography is inspiring :) I recently posted about all the different HTML “X” characters. Then a tweet from Helge Klein inspired me to write a follow-up post showing all the different ways to write a dash or hyphen – character in HTML. Like most online content creators, I knew about – and —. But I didn’t realize there were so many other hyphen and dash characters. Continue reading »

Disable Highlighting in Comments with Prismatic WordPress Plugin

Prismatic is a free WordPress plugin that adds syntax highlighting to code samples. You can use either Highlight.js or Prism.js to make your code snippets look amazing. By default, Prismatic highlights code snippets in both post content and post comments. This quick tutorial shows how to disable highlighting in post comments by adding a simple code snippet to your WordPress. Estimated time to complete ~2 minutes. Continue reading »

Filtered Language Menus with Prismatic WordPress Plugin

Prismatic is a free WordPress plugin that adds syntax highlighting to code samples. You can use either Highlight.js or Prism.js to make your code snippets look amazing. This quick tutorial shares a way to customize Prismatic to save time scrolling thru a bunch of language options. Huge time-saver and simple to implement in a few minutes. Continue reading »

All the X’s

This post explains all the different “x” characters currently available in HTML. It covers the various HTML entities and provides some examples and tips. Also explains the difference between the often confused “Multiplication X” and “Multiplication Sign”, and which is better for symmetrical buttons and links. Continue reading »

New Book: Wizard’s SQL Recipes for WordPress

I’m excited to launch my latest web-dev book, Wizard’s SQL Recipes for WordPress. I got the idea for this book way back when I was first learning how to build dynamic websites. I thought it would be useful to bring together all of the best SQL snippets in sort of a “spellbook” or “cookbook”. After all, SQL queries can seem like magic to the uninitiated. By entering concise, well-crafted commands, SQL enables anyone to interact with any relational database. It’s […] Continue reading »

Code Snippets to Customize WordPress Sitemaps (Complete Guide)

By now most have heard about the WP Sitemaps feature introduced in WordPress version 5.5. From what I’ve read most existing sites that needed a sitemap already had one via one of the many free sitemap plugins. But for new WordPress sites going forward, having all the sitemap code in the WordPress core now means that new sites have the option of rolling with the default WordPress sitemaps, or use a dedicated plugin to do the job. This post is […] Continue reading »

How to Fix _blank Target Vulnerability

In this article, I am reposting part of my recent tutorial, WordPress and the Blank Target Vulnerability. That post is aimed at WordPress specifically, however most of the article applies to HTML in general. So the tutorial below explains how to fix all “blank target” links, regardless of whether or not WordPress is involved. Continue reading »

X Theme Leftover Code Snippets

While working on the site’s 24th redesign, I ended up with about 10 code snippets that were awesome but ultimately not needed. So rather than just delete these tasty functions, I am posting them here for future reference. Who knows, during the next site update I may decide to implement or repurpose some of these techniques. And of course sharing is caring, so feel free to use any of these code snippets in your own projects. Check out the Table […] Continue reading »

WordPress Plugin: Blackhole Pro

Announcing the Pro version of my WordPress security plugin, Blackhole for Bad Bots. Like the free version, Blackhole Pro protects your site against bad bots, spammers, scrapers, scanners, and other automated threats. This increases site security and saves precious server resources for your legit visitors. It’s time to say “bye bye” to bad bots. Continue reading »

WordPress Plugin: Prismatic

I’ve been using other plugins to display my code at Perishable Press, Plugin Planet, DigWP, and WP-Mix for years now. The other plugins have done the job, but there are things that I’ve always wanted to change. For example, syntax highlighting. I use syntax highlighting for code snippets at WP-Mix, but not on any of my other sites. So I wanted to combine clean, time-tested code escaping with stylish syntax highlighting. After sharing well over 1,000 code snippets online, I […] Continue reading »

Lynda.com Course: Developing Secure WordPress Sites

[ WordPress: Developing Secure WordPress Sites ]

After months of preparation and production, my new video course on developing secure WordPress sites is now available at Lynda.com. This is my second video course on securing WordPress; the first one was originally launched in 2011 and remained in Lynda’s library for over five years. I received a lot of great feedback on the course, and so I jumped on the opportunity to do another one. If there is one thing that I enjoy doing, it’s helping people with […] Continue reading »

bbPress Theme Template Files

[ Screenshot of bbPress TwentyTen template-files ]

For those getting into bbPress for hosting your own forum, customizing your bbPress theme files can be difficult if you don’t know which page to load. Many of the bbPress theme template files contain enough clues to figure things out, but not every template file is used by default, or even at all depending on how you’ve configured bbPress. Themes may contain different template files, but the default “bbPress (Twenty Ten)” theme (included with version 2.1.1) may be considered a […] Continue reading »

Clean Markup Widget for WordPress

Squeaky clean. When adding content to your sidebar, it’s nice to be able to output clean, well-formatted markup. There are several ways to do this, including adding HTML directly in the theme template, installing a plugin, or simply using a widget. Widgets provide a great way of customizing sidebars and other widgetized areas, but as you may have seen in the source-code, the HTML is treated with all sorts of additional attributes, elements, and classes. Sometimes, you just need a […] Continue reading »

Encoding & Decoding PHP Code

There are many ways to encode and decode PHP code. From the perspective of site security, there are three PHP functions — str_rot13(), base64_encode(), and gzinflate — that are frequently used to obfuscate malicious strings of PHP code. For those involved in the securing of websites, understanding how these functions are used to encode and decode encrypted chunks of PHP data is critical to accurate monitoring and expedient attack recovery. Continue reading »

Category Functions for WordPress

My previous theme sports the now-infamous colorized categories, which aim to help visitors navigate featured content. In addition to the colors, featured categories display contextually relevant navigation, popular posts, and related tags. It’s a great way to improve organization and get more of your content in front of the visitor. To make it happen, a variety of tasty WordPress code snippets are used, including versatile theme functions that enable getting the first category link, displaying sub-categories of the current category, […] Continue reading »

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