Book Launch! My fourth book, WordPress Themes In Depth, focuses entirely on WordPress theme development. It goes in-depth on how to build, customize, and distribute your own WordPress themes. It’s 10+ years of experience with WordPress jam-packed into 450 pages of non-stop theme-building action. Continue reading »
In this tutorial I am going to show you how to build a pure CSS drop down menu in WordPress. I will walk you through the steps of creating a menu in WordPress, customizing it with CSS, and then printing the menu in your theme file. This tutorial requires that you have access to edit your WordPress theme files and also a basic understanding of HTML and CSS. I will walk through the process step-by-step so don’t worry if you […] Continue reading »
![[ Protect yourself ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2014/gas-mask-dog.jpg)
Whether you like it or not, there are scripts and bots out there hammering away at your sites with endless HTTP “POST” requests. POST requests are sort of the opposite of GET requests. Instead of getting some resource or file from the server, data is being posted or sent to it. To illustrate, normal surfing around the Web involves your browser making series of GET requests for all the resources required for each web page. HTML, JavaScript, CSS, images, et […] Continue reading »
![[ USP Pro ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2014/125x125-usp-pro.png)
After months of deleopment and a low-key “soft-launch”, I’m pleased to announce my first premium WordPress plugin, USP Pro, the supercharged version of my free WP plugin, User Submitted Posts. USP Pro enables you to create and customize infinitely many front-end forms and display them anywhere on your WordPress-powered site. Continue reading »
![[ 2014 Micro Blacklist ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2014/micro-blacklist.jpg)
Over the past several months, I’ve assembled a “micro” blacklist to keep some recent threats at bay. Eventually, this will be integrated into the next nG Blacklist, but for now I just wanted to post and share with anyone else who is actively monitoring their server logs and aware of the recent spike in malicious activity. Continue reading »
![[ 2013 User Agent Blacklist ]](/wp/wp-content/images/2013/user-agent-blacklist.png)
The 2013 User Agent Blacklist blocks hundreds of the worst bots while ensuring open-access for normal traffic, major search engines (Google, Bing, et al), good browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, et al), and everyone else. Compared to blocking threats by IP, blocking by user-agent is more effective as a general security strategy. Although it’s trivial to spoof any user agent, many bad requests continue to report user-agent strings that are known to be associated with malicious activity. For example, the notorious […] Continue reading »
![[ The Tao of WordPress ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2013/tao-of-wordpress.jpg)
It’s been quiet around here, but I have a good excuse. I spent the last six months writing, designing, and publishing my third book, The Tao of WordPress. This is an excellent book for beginners, students, designers, and basically anyone who wants to learn how to get the most from WordPress. The book “soft-launched” last week, and now I want to share the news with readers here at Perishable Press. Continue reading »
In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to install and run WordPress MultiSite on a MAMP webserver. Running multiple sites from a single installation simplifies and streamlines administration, and serving it all from a locally installed version of MAMP gives you everything you need to develop your network of sites for the Web. Continue reading »
![[ 5G (2013) ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2013/5G-Blacklist.png)
Following up on much feedback (and this post), here is an update for the 5G Blacklist for 2013. As explained in the 2012 article (and elsewhere), the 5G Blacklist helps reduce the number of malicious URL requests that hit your website. It’s one of many ways to improve the security of your site and protect against evil exploits, bad requests, and other nefarious garbage. If your site runs on Apache and you’re familiar with .htaccess, the 5G is an effective […] Continue reading »
![[ WordPress Plugin: Simple Basic Contact Form ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2012/sbcf-icon.png){kind=icon}
Simple Basic Contact Form is a clean, secure, plug-n-play contact form for WordPress. Minimal yet flexible, SBCF delivers clean code, solid performance, and ease of use. No frills, no gimmicks, just a straight-up contact form that’s easy to set up and style for any theme. For a contact form with more options and features, check out Contact Coldform, or continue reading to learn more about Simple Basic Contact Form. Either way, thanks for visiting. Continue reading »
![[ Simple Ajax Chat ]](https://perishablepress.com/wp/wp-content/images/2012/simple-ajax-chat.jpg)
Simple Ajax Chat displays a fully customizable Ajax-powered chat box anywhere on your site. SAC makes it easy for your visitors to chat with each other on your website. There already are a number of decent chat plugins, but I wanted one that is simple yet fully customizable with all the features AND outputs clean HTML markup for easy styling. Continue reading »
