cms

content management systems

Sucuri SiteCheck – Free Website Malware Scanner

Jonathan cms, malware, web, wordpress

securi-malware-scanner

If you run a WordPress website and want a quick and FREE scan to see if you have picked up any malware, pop over to sucuri.

These guys specialise in malware scanning and cleaning services for all websites. They also have some interesting articles in their blog – for example “how to create a website backup strategy” – which is a good read for anyone.

When your site is attacked, Google may notice and then your site will be effectively taken off-line until you have fixed and submitted to Google that it is fixed, they will check the site again and report back. This can all take some time – so it’s far better to have some sort of security already setup to ensure that your site is nice and secure!

Other WordPress tools to use:

Anti-Malware and Brute-Force Security by ELI. Provides a free plugin that will scan your installation for malware and identify potential threats. FREE Registration to automatically download the latest definitions and signatures.

Wordfence Security. A very popular (over 1900 5*’s at last count) plugin. You can also see ‘real time’ traffic on your website with this plugin.

Rename WP-LOGIN.php. This is a very lightweight plugin that will intercept and stop people accessing your login page (standard login page from wordpress). It’s non-destructive, which means that you can uninstall the plugin and everything will be back to how it was – lightweight as well – only 6k in size, so will have a minimal impact on your website.

Other Articles worth Reading:

Elegant Themes article about what to do after being attacked by malware.

Elegant Themes article about security with your WordPress website.

Keeping wordpress secure, from the guys at wpmudev – always a wonderful read… and http://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/keeping-wordpress-secure-the-ultimate-guide/

via Sucuri SiteCheck – Free Website Malware Scanner.

Installing WordPress 3.x.x

Jonathan cms, tips & tricks

Google reader shortcuts

Jonathan cms

Really just for my own use! Google RSS reader shortcuts – just because I use it and can never remember them! One interesting way of organising the feeds is to add ‘tags’ to the entries. This way you can quickly find them again just using your tags – a bit like delicious and other social media systems online.

j/k item down/up selects the next/previous item in the list
space/shift-space page down/up moves the page down/up
n/p scan down/up in list view, selects the next item without opening it
o open/close item in list view, expands or collapses the selected item
enter open/close item in list view, expands or collapses the selected item
s toggle star stars the selected item
shift-s toggle share shares the selected item
m mark as read/unread switches the read state of the selected item
t tag an item opens the tagging field for the selected item
v view original opens the original source for this article in a new window
shift-a mark all as read marks all items in the current view as read
1 expanded view displays the subscription as expanded items
2 list view displays the subscription as a list of headlines
r refresh refreshes the unread counts in the navigation
shift-n/p navigation down/up selects the next/previous subscription or folder in the navigation
shift-x navigation expand/collapse expand or collapse a folder selected in the navigation
shift-o navigation open subscription opens the item currently selected in the navigation
gh go to home goes to the Google Reader homepage
ga go to all items goes to the “All items” view
gs go to starred items goes to the “Starred items” view
gt go to tag allows you to navigate to a tag by entering the tag name
gu go to subscription allows you to navigate to a subscription by entering the subscription name
u toggle full screen mode hides and shows the list of subscriptions
? keyboard shortcuts help displays a quick guide to all of Reader’s shortcuts

Convert WordPress to a full CMS system

Jonathan cms

There’s an interesting article on the ONLamp.Com web site describing how John McCreesh used the wordpress blogging software to create and maintain a CMS based site. The site was originally using phpWebSite; which is an opensource community-driven CMS system based around php.

It seems to me that this should be very simple as there are loads of plugins for wordpress and the basic CMS system straight out of the box is more than adequate with its customised page templates and multiple ‘page’ capabilities. Really all it needs is some styling and layout changes to make the system into a very useable day to day web based CMS system – all for free!

Many people are now concentrating on the ‘content’ of a web site rather than the look and feel. The layout is of course important, especially if you are looking for brand image, but underneath all the show, there has to be good content. A content management system (CMS) is the ideal way to breach the gap between the two. By using the power of wordpress and the plethora of add-ons and support in the community plus an adequate content management system to bring it all together you have the best of both worlds.

A friend of mine (Les Edgecumbe) runs a wordpress site for the community highlighting the outrageous monstrosity that is the CLS Laundry based in Newton Abbot. Originally Les used a web based commercial CMS system, some things were not easy and he relied on my help. I converted him to wordpress and now he maintains the site without my assistance and gets a good number of hits. He can concentrate on the content and not worry about the underlying technology that runs his site; it’s maintained by 1000’s of developers out there all the time!

I suggest you use wordpress and once your up and running, pop over to the wordpress ThemeViewer to choose a suitable style for your web, create a few pages and articles and your running. If your interested in CMS systems themselves, go to opensourcecms. This web site does a really good job of comparing CMS systems, and lets you ‘try’ different cms based systems online to help you decide which one is best. It has the usual popular systems such as joomla, drupal, typo3, php-nuke and mambo plus some other systems that you may not of heard about.

DotNetNuke Opensource web portal

Jonathan cms , , ,

SourceForge.net: Software Map: “DotNetNuke – An open source Web Portal Framework / Content Management System application written in ASP.NET / VB.NET for the Windows OS platform.”