A while ago I thought about writing a simple cheat sheet for WordPress, mainly because I find myself looking for the same template tags over and over again.

Few days ago I stumbled on a couple of very well done WordPress cheat sheets that I’d like to share with you:

Liquidicity WordPress Help Sheet

Ekin Ertaç WordPress Cheat Sheet

Designing a WordPress theme for a friend, I had to design some icons for linking to the different social networks.

I’m usually pretty lazy as far as social media for my own projects (the one on this very same blog are a free set I found online), but this time, considering the social networks and services I had to add I decided that it was faster design them myself than look for them. And I had a chance to create one for my favorite photo sharing service: Pikchur.com.

If you like them, you can download them for free here: download icons.

Tweetmeme is a great plugin that makes it easier for your reader to retweet your posts. But, if you don’t have a high number of retweets, especially in the beginning, it might look a little sad seeing all those zeros on your page.

While working on a friend’s WordPress blog, I was asked to remove the number from the Tweetmeme button (in the compact version). Of course this can’t be accomplished from the settings page, so it required little bit of CSS work.

Here’s the code generated by the Tweetmeme WordPress plugin in your post:

<div class="tweetmeme_button" style="float: left; margin-right: 0;"><iframe src="http://api.tweetmeme.com/button.js?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fdavidedicillo.com%2F%3Fp%3D1160&source=
DavideDiCillo&style=compact" height="20" width="90" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe></div>

And here’s the code you need to add to your stylesheet in order to remove the number from the Tweetmeme button:

.tweetmeme_button { overflow: hidden; width: 70px; }
.tweetmeme_button iframe { position: relative; left: -10px; }

For those of you not familiar with CSS, what we’re doing is simply telling the container of the IFRAME (which contains the actual button) to hide everything that goes beyond its borders. We then forced the IFRAME to move 10px to the left, pushing the number outside the container’s borders.

A couple of days ago, I decided to add a small javascript in the footer of my blog and by accident I found out that there was a hidden div with hundreds of links. Obviously someone hacked into my blog, and added those links to increase their Page Rank at my expense.

After few minutes of panic and desperation, I decided it was time to start securing my blog (something I’ve honestly been overlooking for a long time). Luckily, there are a lot of cool plugins that can help with this, and I’d like to share them with you.

First of all, it’s important to have periodical backups of both your files and your WordPress database. To accomplish this, you can use the very creatively named plugin called WordPress Backup. It performs regular backups of your uploads (images included), current theme, and plugin directories. Backup files are available for download and can also be e-mailed to a specified address.

To backup my WordPress database I’m using WP DBManager, this plugin not only lets you backup, but it also allows you to optimize, repair, restore and delete your database, and manage your tables. This plugin, like the one previously mentioned, automatically schedules database backups and optimizations.

Now it’s time to check your blog for security vulnerabilities and take corrective actions. A very comprehensive tool is a plugin called WP Security Scan.

Here’s few things I learned from this experience:

• Always update your blog to the latest version as soon as possible. If the WordPress folks found out about an exploit, be sure hackers did too.
• When you setup your database, change the prefix of your wordpress tables to something different than the default “wp_”
• Make sure your WordPress version is hidden (some plugins, like Secure WordPress), can do this for you.
• Check that your database errors are turned off (WP Security Scan will check that for you). If not, ask your hosting company to turn them off for you.
• Get rid of the Admin user. Just create a new one with admin privileges and use that to delete the Admin user.
• In the wp-config.php file of your blog there are three KEY phrases that can be changed. You won’t have to remember the phrases later, so make them long and complicated.
• Make sure you have granted the right permissions to your WordPress folders (WP Security Scan will check that for you as well).
• If you’ve already been attacked, make sure you check for any suspicious files or scripts (in my case, there was a file called wp-atom2.php) that can be used as a backdoor, and change your passwords.

There are a lot more steps that could be taken, like protecting your admin area via .htaccess or using plugins like Login Lockdown to limit the number of login attempts by a particular IP adress.

Is your blog secure? Is there anything in particular that you have done to protect it from hackers?

Finally my blog is using a WordPress theme I created myself.

The previous theme was done by a German designer, and even if I really liked it, it had a few problems:

1. It wasn’t “mine.” My job is designing user interfaces, it would make sense to design the one of my blog.
2. It had rounded corners. Don’t get me wrong, I love rounded corners, but, if they are done by javascript, when you try to customize, it might be a pain, mainly because of some cross-browser issue.
3. The automatic icons and other things in the sidebars were annoying me.

On top of that, I really wanted to try a few new things:

1. CSS3. Not really a lot so far, but if you are using Safari, you can appreciate a little effect on the top navigation.
2. Cufón. This is definitely the most noticeable feature. It replaces fonts on-the-fly using canvas and VML. If you are wondering what font I’m using for the headers, it’s called Museo, and you can find it here.
3. 960.gs. I’ve never used CSS frameworks before, so I thought my blog could have been a good test field. For sure, for quick projects, I may use it again.
4. I also wanted to create a theme simple and easy to use for testing plugins and other things I might work on.

Well, after a weekend of work, here’s the result. Of course I will work on it more in the next few days to smooth out the rough edges.

I hope you guys like it. If not, I guess I’ll live with it.
But, if you feel like dropping a comment, I’d really appreciate it.