Fixing Wordpress Error : All the pages redirecting to the index.php

Wordpress Bug


fix wordpress bug in permalinks
As the title suggests, this is another error/bug you may come across while working with Wordpress. I recently found this error in one of the Wordpress websites and I was confused as I had no idea how it happened. All I could remember was the site was working properly few days / weeks back.  So as usual I checked to see if any newly installed plugins have caused this bug. But I couldn't find a proper solution. So I had to use Google to find any clues as to what might have caused this and I found one question at Stackoverflow. Luckily I found  a good hint there, but nobody had given a proper answer.

Following on that hint, I could solve my problem and I thought I should keep it written in my blog so that someday, somebody may find this  article useful :)  Please read below to understand the issue and how to fix it quickly.

What is the Error?
Well, it is not a kind of error that you may find usually in your wordpress website. But if you got hit, you may go crazy since this error (rather I would call it a bug, or whatever) doesn't stop running your wordpress website or does no harm except it will ruin your user's experience. What it does is, all your pages will be redirected to your homepage. What a disaster, yeah? Your visitors who are coming only to read your content will find a buggy site and leave it quickly without knowing that it is a bug. Besides, who would care about a bug in someone else's website? They will go to another one because there are plenty of websites delivering the same kind of information.

How to Identify the Error?
Check your website in regular time periods to know that it is working properly. (Open few common links and make sure that they open the correct page.). I am not saying you may definitely get this bug in your wordpress website, but who knows? 

What is the reason?
As I mentioned above, I still have no idea to confirm what exactly caused this bug. But most probably, it might be due to a malfunctioning plugin or a bug in your template. I am confident that this bug is not coming bundled with the Wordpress original download package. That is why you find this bug in your website after few weeks or months after the installation.




How to Fix this?
Here comes the most useful and the easiest part of this article :)

Whatever the reason it would be, you can fix this bug in less than 30 seconds.

Step 01 :
Log into your Wordpress admin area.
Step 02 : Hover your mouse over “Settings” in your admin dashboard menu bar.

worpdress permalinks bug

Step 03 : Click on “Permalinks” from the menu appeared after step 02.
Step 04 : Now, you will see the Permalinks options page, “Do not change anything”. Just Click on the “Save Changes” button.

worpdress template bug redirect to home page

Step 05 : Check whether your site is working fine now.


Additional Steps (Optional)
Step 06 :
If the above solution didn't work for you, leave a comment here. Sometimes we can discuss further.

OR


If it worked for you, as a way of showing you liked that, leave a comment here :)

That's it....you have fixed your Wordpress website's annoying Bug in less than 30 seconds...Just a click of a button. But you know? I had to dig much deeper in Google's search results to find this solution. If you think this will be useful to your friends you can share it over social network sites like Google+, Facebook or Twitter.

SEO has changed so much over the last few years. They need a lot of shares over social networks...That is why people say sharing is caring :)

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Joomla Datepicker : How to insert in components

Joomla Datepicker


joomla datepickerJoomla is a popular Content Management System which helps people to develop websites easily without the need of learning web development languages like html, css, php etc. Anybody who is having a basic understanding of using web based softwares can create and maintain a website using joomla as it is already equipped with many modules and components, backed and developed by its open source community. Joomla is Free, Open Source and more than everything, it is easy to use. Joomla was the most popular and the most used CMS for websites few years ago. The usage of Joomla was slightly gone down over the time with the growth of another elegant Open Source CMS, called “Wordpress”. Many web developers preferred Wordpress over the Joomla as it was simpler to use. But Joomla is still being used by many web developers and webmasters to create websites as it has more features than in Wordpress. In this article, I am going to show you how to insert a datepicker in your custom developed Joomla Component or a Module.

Joomla has its own datepicker built within the Joomla framework for you to use in your components. To insert the datepicker simply put the following code.

<?php
JHTML
::_('behavior.calendar');
?>


Then wherever you want to include the datepicker, you can call the following function

<?php 
echo JHtml::calendar('date''%Y-%m-%d');
?>


This will generate a datepicker textbox as below;



So that is how to insert a datepicker within your custom Joomla component or Module. See how easy it is. You can use this datepicker for any kind of a component related to the time and date. For an example, if you are developing a Hotel Reservation Component, you can simply integrate this datepicker for a availability checker or a check-in date selector. One thing I am not happy about this datepicker is that it is not that much beautiful. It will definitely not go with a modern template, so you will have to use some third party datepicker plugin for sure ;) This will be useful if you are not concerned much about the design of the datepicker. Anyway, the scope of this article was only to show the way of adding the built in Joomla datepicker in your custom components. The decision to use it or not will be always up to you :)

Please leave a comment if this post was useful to you.

MySql : How to copy records from one table to another

MySql : How to Copy records from one table to another


Mysql is one of the most used databases in the world. It is proved with the number of websites using MySql as their database system, and today, the most popular Content Management Systems including Worpdress, Joomla and many other Blogging Platforms are also using MySql. One reason for the popularity of Mysql is it is Free and Open Source. 

So if you are also working with MySql databases, this blog post will be there to help you someday.

Sometimes you may face instances where you want to copy an entire record of a database table to another table

What I am going to show you today is the way of copying a row of a database table to another using a single Mysql query. This is very useful in cases where you want to take a backup record of a row. If the application you are developing has an option to view the update history of a certain record, you can simply do it with this query by copying the whole row to another table.

Note : For this query to work, both the tables must have same fields. 

Example : 
Here We are considering two tables, 'JOBS' and 'JOBS_BACKUP'. Note that both the tables have the same fields and same properties. In this case, the user is updating the Job which has the ID : 8, and I wanted to take a snapshot of the Job details for the job id 8, as how it was before editing. So later if needed, I have the ability to compare the difference between the two versions, and also I will have all the information I need to check which user has made the update, and when the update was done etc. 

INSERT INTO jobs_backup (
job_id,   
cat_id,
user_id,
start_date,
description,
job_location,
date_created,
last_update,
last_editby,
verified
) SELECT
job_id,
cat_id,
user_id,
start_date,
description,
job_location,
date_created,
last_update,
last_editby,
verified
FROM
jobs 
WHERE
job_id = 8;

As a general query, We can rewrite the above again as :

INSERT INTO table_02 (
field_1,   
field_2,
field_3
) SELECT
field_1,
field_2,
field_3
FROM
table_01 
WHERE
field_1 = 'your value';

I hope this would be helpful to someone who is looking for a way to copy database records in between two tables. Please don't forget to share your comments on this post if this was useful to you :

String Length Calculator Online


String Length Calculator Online



Enter the string to calculate the length:



Thank you for using our free online string length calculator Tool.


What is String Length?

String is a general term used in computer / programming technology to represent a line of text, a word, or may be a several number of characters. We use strings very frequently in programming and other programming related stuff. And also, in day to day life there are many instances where we are using strings, but without much noticing. So as I have mentioned, the length of a string may be sometimes very important. What is meant by the term length here is exactly, the number of characters present in the string. It becomes very interesting when it comes to string lengths because usually as human beings we may only think about the number of readable characters available in a string (a word). But when dealing with a computer, the length of a string is not only the number of known characters, but everything the string is made up of including the punctuations, periods and any other special characters.

Is it important to know the string length?

Yes, many people face instances where they want to know the length of a string. Even in real life, you need to think about the string length since we are dealing with many computer related items. For example, when sending a sms you always think about the length of the message, yeah? like wise, we might face many similar instances in our day to day life.

Why using an online string length calculator?

It is not a mandatory thing for you to use a string length calculator online. But since most of us are using Internet very much, it is really easy and hassle free to use an online string length calculator. Besides, who will like to install a software and waste many minutes when you have the ability to get the string length in two seconds. It is easy as that, just copy, paste and our tool will tell you the length of the string in a second.

Why to use this online string length calculator?

One reason is that using this tool is really simple. All you have to do is copy and paste the string in the above textbox, and click on count button. Our calculator will respond to you with the string length in less than a second. No waiting times until the page submits and reloads, like in most other online string length calculate tools. Everything happens super fast. We use a client side Javascipt function to calculate the string length. This kind of a process is really simple to handle and it doesn't need to sent to a server to process and get the string length. There are many tools I have come across which submits the string to the server to calculate the length.

Is this a Javascript String Length Calculator?

This tool uses a simple client side code in Javascript to process the user input (i.e the string in this case) and give out the string length to the user. Since this tool is created using Javascript, both the user and the server end will have many advantages. The main thing is that it doesn't need to be submitted to the server, and hence the server load is not required. Also since there is no submission to the server, the time taken to submit and reload the page is not accountable to the user, so the user will get the output or the string length immediately.

What is the Javascript function used to calculate the string Length?

Here is the function I have used in this tool to calculate the string length. This is made for my own usage, to calculate the length of a string quickly for one of my recent projects. You can use it as you wish, or you may also create your own one. It is really simple to create a small function like this in Javascript :)



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How to disable Wordpress plugins manually using database

how to disable wordpress plugins manuallyIf you are working with a Wordpress website, you may always come up with new problems. There is a common problem for most of the wordpress users which is known as “white screen of death” or the blank screen error. When this kind of an error is occurred in a wordpress website, most of the website owners get panic because they don’t have any idea how it happened or how to fix it. So if you would have to face this kind of a scenario, all you have to do is be relaxed, and think how it would have happened. If everything was working fine before, and you suddenly faced this issue, probably it might be due to an error in one of your plugins. One thing you can try is disable all the plugins and try whether the site works normally. This is not the ultimate solution for the White Screen Error, but it may fix the issue most of the times.

Wordpress website owners face many other issues with their plugins. Plugins which were working properly may start to malfunction suddenly and sometimes when the problem becomes worst, the admin login will also be blocked due to the error. So in this article I am going to talk about how you can disable your plugins without accessing your worpdress admin area. I will show you how you can disable all the plugins at once with a simple query, like explained in this article (which inspired me to write this article.) and also I will show you how you can disable a single plugin. (This was not discussed in the above article). Since this single plugin disable method was not discussed in that article, I wanted to write my own and keep the Blog readers updated about the method.

You should keep this page bookmarked because I know you will definitely need this someday :) (If you are using wordpress, or intended to do so in future.)  So keep reading, and come back when you will have to face this issue: D

Let’s start...

What we are going to do here is enter into our Wordpress database, and delete the particular record for plugins so that all the plugins will be disabled. This can be done using any mysql management software, or simply by using the PhpMyAdmin which comes with your Cpanel installation.

First connect to your wordpress database using any of the methods above. Then you have to run the following query to select the plugins which are already installed in your wordpress website.


SELECT * FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = 'active_plugins';
The ‘active_plugins’ field may contain a large string similar to the below, depending on the plugins you have installed.

To make things easy, copy the whole string and paste into a text editor (notepad, notepad++ or whatever you like).

Now, if you want to disable all the plugins you have installed, simply make the ‘active_plugins’ field blank by deleting its content, and save it. 

You don’t need to be scared to delete this value, because deleting the value in this field doesn’t make your plugins disappear forever. They will only be deactivated, and you can re-activate them back by logging into the Wordpress admin area. 

By now, you have successfully deactivated all the plugins manually, and everything should be fine, and you should be able to login into the admin panel if the problem was with one of your plugins.

If you could log in, then it is clear that one or more of your plugins are not working properly, you can find the malfunctioned plugin by re enabling all the plugins one by one.

Now let’s see how you can disable a single plugin using the database. So as I explained above, I have run the query on my Wordpress website, and copied the content in the active_plugins field to here.

This is what I had in my ‘active_plugins’ field. 

a:9:{i:0;s:24:"blog-icons/blogicons.php";i:1;s:45:"bulletproof-security/bulletproof-security.php";i:2;s:23:"digg-digg/digg-digg.php";i:3;s:17:"kayako/kayako.php";i:4;s:19:"pictips/pictips.php";i:5;s:56:"slick-social-share-buttons/dcwp_slick_social_buttons.php";i:6;s:31:"what-the-file/what-the-file.php";i:7;s:41:"wordpress-importer/wordpress-importer.php";i:8;s:24:"wordpress-seo/wp-seo.php";}

To make it more clear, I have rewritten the same in new lines below;

a:9:{
i:0;s:24:"blog-icons/blogicons.php";
i:1;s:45:"bulletproof-security/bulletproof-security.php";
i:2;s:23:"digg-digg/digg-digg.php";
i:3;s:17:"kayako/kayako.php";
i:4;s:19:"pictips/pictips.php";
i:5;s:56:"slick-social-share-buttons/dcwp_slick_social_buttons.php";
i:6;s:31:"what-the-file/what-the-file.php";
i:7;s:41:"wordpress-importer/wordpress-importer.php";
i:8;s:24:"wordpress-seo/wp-seo.php";
}

If you read the above code carefully, you will notice that the number after the letter a:, is the number of plugins I have installed. It is 9 in this case. (You can count the number of lines.) And also, you can understand that each of the lines represents a plugin, and by the name mentioned in it, you can identify what plugin it is.

Suppose I wanted to disable the Worpress Seo plugin. It is the last one in my list. Now I will rewrite the list by removing the SEO plugin from the list as below.

a:8:{
i:0;s:24:"blog-icons/blogicons.php";
i:1;s:45:"bulletproof-security/bulletproof-security.php";
i:2;s:23:"digg-digg/digg-digg.php";
i:3;s:17:"kayako/kayako.php";
i:4;s:19:"pictips/pictips.php";
i:5;s:56:"slick-social-share-buttons/dcwp_slick_social_buttons.php";
i:6;s:31:"what-the-file/what-the-file.php";
i:7;s:41:"wordpress-importer/wordpress-importer.php";
}

I have deleted the last line, which was the line representing the SEO plugin, and also note that I have made the number in the first line to 8, which means one plugin is removed from the total number of plugins I had. Now I will paste this back into active_plugins field and I will save it.

That is it. Now you have learnt how to disable a plugin using the database. If I log back into the admin panel, I will see that the SEO plugin is disabled, and I can enable it anytime if I want. Also you do not need to worry about anything because all the data saved by the plugin will also be preserved.

Please leave your comment or idea about this article because it will be helpful for me to develop this blog.

This article is about how to

Disable Wordpress Plugins manually



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How to add breadcrumbs to a BlogSpot Blog

how to add breadcrumbs in blogger
Today I am going to share the way of adding breadcrumbs to your BlogSpot blog. Before we start, I should make it clear that what I am going to share in this article is not the way how you can add breadcrumb navigation to the blogger blog, but what I am talking about is how you can enable breadcrumbs in your BlogSpot blog, so that Google will show the Blog’s breadcrumbs in Google search results.




What is breadcrumb Navigation?

“Breadcrumbs“ is a special term used in web development to introduce a new type of a navigation method available in modern websites. We know how much it is important to have a well organized navigation system within a website for the usability. People like you and me are looking for fresh and new content all over the internet. Similarly, that is the common purpose of all the other internet users as well. Breadcrumb navigation is introduced as a solution for easy navigation, and also to make a website more structured, so that the visitors will easily understand the content of the website / blog.

As mentioned above, the purpose of the breadcrumb navigation is to categorize the content into general categories, so that each section will contain all the similar content, making it easy for the visitor to navigate in between categories or articles.

how to add breadcrumbs to blogspot

If you noticed the underlined urls in the above image, that is how the breadcrumb navigation appears in your BlogSpot blog.

Though I have specifically mentioned that what I am showing you in this article is not the way of adding the breadcrumb navigation to your BlogSpot blog, this method will automatically implement the navigation inside your blog as well. But then, if you wonder why I have mentioned like that, the reason is simply because it will depend on the template you are using, so I cannot guarantee that it will work as it is. But it should work without any problem unless your template designer has not omitted it from the template.

So coming back to the topic, we were discussing about what breadcrumbs navigation is and how it will appear in your BlogSpot blog. Moving a little further, if you think you should dig more about breadcrumbs navigation, here is the detailed article in Wikipedia for breadcrumbs. if you really want , You can read  it and come back :)

Now, the question,

How to add Breadcrumbs in Blogger?

There is no special option given for adding breadcrumbs navigation to your BlogSpot blog in the blogger’s blog management area. Also there is nothing mentioned about breadcrumbs in the blogger admin panel. Then how to do it? Don’t worry. It is really simple.

Enabling breadcrumbs in BlogSpot blog is not a difficult thing. As I have mentioned above, what breadcrumbs does is that, it categorizes the content of your blog.  If you still haven’t used categories for your blog posts, then you won’t be able to see breadcrumbs yet. So first of all, you have to decide how your blog articles can be categorized. It is very important that you categorize the blog posts in a way so that a category will have articles about that specific category only and nothing else. If you messed up the categories and put your articles here and there without any proper planning, your visitors will face difficulties in the navigation, and also the search engine bots. 

When you are done with the initial planning, you can start adding labels (categorize) to your articles as you selected. Also you should remember to add the proper label every time when adding a new blog post to your blog. (Forgetting to add a label by the time of posting the article doesn’t make any harm. You can always add or change the category by editing the article. )

Follow the steps given below to add / update the label of a blog post in blogger.

01. Go to ‘Posts’ (It is in the navigation bar to the right in the blogger admin area. The second option from top).
02. Then you will see a list of all the articles in your blog.
03. Select the article which you want to update the label / category, and hover the mouse over it. You will see a menu will appear just underneath the article name. Click on ‘edit’ option in the menu which appeared.
04. Then you will be redirected to the edit article page where you will have the options to update the article content.
05. On this screen, to your right hand side, you will see an options menu as in the image below.

how to add breadcrumbs in blogger to gain seo advantage

06. There, on very top of available options, you will see an item named as labels.
07. Click on it and it will open you a textbox to edit the label for the blog post you are editing at the moment. 
08. You can type the name of the label you want this article to be included in, and click on done button. Then click on Update / Save button to save the changes.

blogger breadcrumbs navigation

If you have successfully followed the above steps, you will be able to see the breadcrumbs navigation is appearing in your blog now (depending on the template you are using). 

Once you have enabled breadcrumbs navigation in your blog, Google will understand your blog’s navigation structure and it will naturally include the breadcrumbs in the search results. This may take up to a week, depending on the Google bot’s crawl rate of your blog.

And this is how the breadcrumbs appear in Google search results.

Google breadcrumbs in blogger

This is one of the many benefits you are getting by using blogger as your blogging platform, because if you wanted to implement this breadcrumbs search results for a custom website, you will have to do a lot of stuff with adding a whole lot of markup codes to your webpage. But in blogger, all you have to do is just adding a label to your article, and Google will automatically detect breadcrumbs. Even in Wordpress, you cannot implement breadcrumbs this much easier. But luckily, there are many plugins available to do this task without needing to open the scripts to include the codes by you. But still, there is some level of work you need to do in order to get the breadcrumbs to be appearing in Google for a Wordpress blog.

Further Note: If you are wondering why you should add breadcrumbs to your blog, here is my answer.  Having breadcrumbs enabled in your blog will not help you to rank higher in Search Engine Results. But again, in terms of usability, the breadcrumbs navigation makes it easier for visitors and search engine bots to move easily in between different sections of the blog. And as a result, the more and more visitors will come to your blog because they will feel comfortable using it over other blogs. So it is a good idea to add it as soon as possible :)

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Online URL Encode Decode

Online URL Encode Decode



Enter the URL to Encode / Decode:



Decode URL or text
Thank you for using our free Online URL Encode Decode Tool.

What is URL Encode?


URL encoding is a simple encryption method which converts the html characters into their special entity codes. Sometimes when you are copying a link from a website or a webpage source, the URLs may me encoded, and if you copy it directly, you may not be able to download a file or visit the URL. But with our new free Online URL Encode Decode Tool, you can easily encode / decode urls within a second.

Why to need to use this Online URL Encode Decode Tool?


There are many free tools there, and it is no special reason to use our URL encode Decode tool. But our encode and decode processes are super fast. You do not need to wait until the page loads to get the Encoded or the Decoded result. Just Copy the URL, Click on Encode Decode button, and you will get the result just in a click of a button.

How our Online URL Encode Decode Tool Works?

Our URL encode decode tool is pretty simple, and we use a client side Javascript Script file to execute your URL inserted, and convert it on the fly.

How to change Excerpt length in Wordpress

change excerpt length wordpressIf you are using Wordpress as your blogging platform, there may be a common and an annoying problem to you. It is the popular question “how to change excerpt length in wordpress”. Yes, that’s why you are reading this :) I have good news for you. You will not have to worry about how you can change the excerpt length in wordpress anymore. Here I have brought the solution. It is super easy. If you are in a hurry, and want the solution immediately, Click here to Jump direct to the solution! I know all my readers will not be the same. Some may be having the problem, and some may not. But all of them are reading this article. So I am writing for everyone. If you are just curious about this Wordpress issue, please keep on reading :) So as I said, sometimes you may never have had this problem before. And you may even have no idea about Wordpress. That’s not a problem. If you want to know what I am talking about, you are also welcome to keep reading.

So, what is Wordpress?


Ok, Wordpress is one of the most popular CMS (Content Management Systems) being used by many web developers to build blogs and websites. Wordpress is so user friendly, that even a person who has no knowledge in Web Development also can easily manage a website by himself / herself.


What is an excerpt? Where the excerpt is located?


Excerpt, by the meaning of the word itself, the excerpt means an extraction of a piece of text from your blog articles. Simply, it is a small selection of the content within your blog post. Excerpts are located in the Blogs page of your Wordpress blog. When you check the blog page of a website, you can see the titles and a small paragraph under each of the titles, with a link to the Full Blog Post. This small paragraph is called the excerpt.


Why you need an excerpt?


Personally I think it is very much important to set up a blog with excerpts. The reason as I am seeing is, a Blog is a place which gets updated frequently with fresh contents. Then it is obvious that many people are visiting the blog to read the articles. If you are displaying the whole article content without excerpts, and you are having 05 blog posts per page, the page is going to be very lengthy, causing the page to load very slower. Besides, the visitors may be interested in different topics, and they may be seeking the right article for them. If so, you are going to lose the readers. Nobody is going to read lengthy articles just to find whether it matches their interest or not. But simply by having a blog post page with excerpts, you can display many number of blog posts in a single page. Also it will reduce the page load time. And also it makes easier for people to find the right article by reading the title and the excerpt only.


What is the problem with the current excerpt length in Wordpress?


If you do not have any problem with the current excerpt length, then everything is OK. But the most common problem people having with the Wordpress excerpt is the length of it. By default, the Wordpress excerpt length is 55 words. Some people find this too lengthy and some finds it is very short. Whatever the condition you are in, you can change the excerpt length as you wish. Being too short, the excerpt makes the page looks emptier. On the other hand, being too lengthy will make it appear more crowded, and it will also make the content unclear for the visitors. So you must be careful when selecting the right excerpt length for your blogs. First experiment with few variant number of words and come to the final value. It will help you to increase your page views as well.


How to change the Wordpress excerpt length?


The only option available at the moment for this is through editing the source code. Wordpress development team has not included an option within the admin backend to change this value. But it is not a problem at all. You can do it yourself. Just Go to your template Options, and Click on Edit Files. Then under that, on the right hand side (most probably) you will see the list of files being used by the template. Scroll down and select “functions.php” file. Click on it so that it will be open in the text box for you to edit. Then simply paste the following code within the functions.php file. And you have done changing the Wordpress excerpt length.

function custom_excerpt_length( $length )
{
 return 20;


add_filter( 'excerpt_length', 'custom_excerpt_length', 999 ); 

Be sure to paste the code as it is, and
then change the values accordingly. All you need to do is change the above ‘20’ value to the number you want. Also make sure you are pasting the code within the php tags.
Warning: It is always advised to get a backup of the files you are editing so that you can replace it with the original file if anything went wrong. In the meantime, it is highly advised to always do the editing of files through FTP. In case you have made any code incorrect, there is a possibility to get the site to halt working. If you are unsure about what you are doing, please seek the advice of a person who knows about using FTP, coding etc. This is for your own good :)
I hope you enjoyed reading the article. Please leave your comments and ideas about this article, whether it was useful, or have you learnt anything from this. Also please add a comment if you need any help in changing the above codes.

The Best Social Sharing Plugin for Wordpress!

Best Wordpress Social Sharing Plugin
Wordpress....You Wanna be Social?
Today I am going to introduce you the Best Social Sharing Plugin for Wordpress. There is no doubt that Wordpress is the best Open Source Content Management System (CMS) available today. The main reason for its popularity is the ability to use Wordpress for any kind of a website. It can be used either as a simple Blog or as a complete Website. All you have to do is change few values in the admin area. This special ability has made many webmasters to shift from their old custom developed websites to Wordpress powered websites.  Wordpress gives you easy control of your website in a single place from creating pages, creating blog posts to managing the SEO tasks.

If you are using Wordpress, you may want to read this article which I wrote about a security measure in Wordpress titled Wordpress Hacking.

OK. Enough talk about Wordpress? Yes, let’s jump to our topic.

So today I’m going to share one of my experiences with an awesome Wordpress plugin, which will be really helpful to make your Social Presence Strong. Social Media Marketing or promoting your content over the Social Media is an essential task today when it comes to SEO. That is because our big brother Google has fallen in love with Social Networks a few years back and they wants us to engage more in social media :) So I am here today to introduce you a nice plugin for that.

I guess you may have already tried several plugins to insert a Social Sharing Widget in your blog / Website to increase Social Media Shares and end up with finding a bug or some mistakes in the plugin. That was the same scenario for me as well. I did a lot of research to find out the best plugin that will fit my requirement, which was really simple. I just wanted to insert a social share buttons in my Posts and the Pages with the exact Shares, Likes, Tweets or whatever the counts. Most of the Plugins failed to accomplish this simple task.

But, at last I found this awesome plugin called Dig Dig. It was really good that I could remove all the other plugins I already had for Social Sharing.

Dig Dig plugin is absolutely a nice plugin, but nobody is perfect yeah? I found a few bugs in it too. Actually they were not accountable when compared with its nice appearance and the user friendliness. Actually the fault was with my template. Dig Dig was not working smoothly with my template, but still it was quite good though I had several problems with alignments.

The plugin provides two main alignment options as in the other plugins, basically as floating menu, or as a Horizontal bar. When compared to other plugins I have used, Did Dig gave me the actual counts as soon as my likes got increased. The other plugins that I have been using were not updating or not showing the real Shared count. So as a whole, I think Dig Dig is a nice plugin, and that has made me write a good review about it.

If you came here looking for a Wordpress plugin for Social Sharing, I recommend Dig Dig for you. You can install it and try whether it matches your requirements. Why we really drop many great plugins is that the requirements of each of us are different. The main idea is to add a Plugin to display some Social Sharing buttons in our Wordpress website along with the Social Sharing counts. The developers may have already done it. But they are not targeting the usability. If the Dig Dig developers also can target more on usability of the plugin with some major Wordpress templates at least, it will reach to the number 01 plugin for social sharing in no time.

I would really appreciate if you could share your experiences with the other readers because that will be helpful for all. Sometimes I may be wrong. You may have found many mistakes in the same plugin which I have discussed here, or you may know some other great plugin than what I have mentioned. So you have a whole lot of things to Say...I am very happy to hear from you :)

Happy Wordpressing :D

This post is about

Social Sharing Plugin for Wordpress

Wordpress Latest 2013 Hack vulnerability!

wordpress hack 2013This is 2013, and it is Wordpress 3.6 by the time I am writing this..So, do you really need to care about this topic??

If you are using Wordpress, yes you should…

I wanted to write this and share one of my bad experiences with Wordpress, and this time it was really touching me.

This happened to me in the last week. I had to use Wordpress to create a web site for one of my friends and together we uploaded wordpress and setup everything nicely. Within less than an hour, we had a fully functional website with all the content management requirements he needed. That is all because of this powerful and elegant CMS, Wordpress. I knew that wordpress is the best option to select when I heard my friends requirements. But we never thought about the vulnerabilities in wordpress. (Though I had some previous bad experiences). It was because I thought that all the bugs would have fixed since this is the latest release of Wordpress. Let’s see what happened :)

So, by this time we had a nice Wordpress website, and we wanted to give it some more attractiveness, and my friend decided to buy a template from a popular Worpress template seller. It cost him just only less than USD 10. It was a very nice template and it had many useful options to edit and customize the template and to manage the content.

He was really happy about the final result he got, and the rest of the day we worked on adding content and planning on optimizing the pages and content.

On the next day, while we were cross checking the site, we noticed some unusual thing on the site. Some pages appeared to be hacked. And no sooner, the other pages was also got hacked. The only text on the page was “Hacked by {some hacker guy’s name}”. We were shocked, but acted very fast and put the site offline immediately. I should mention that my friend’s website was already a popular one, it’s PR was 04. He had some good traffic by that time as well. So we had no much time to keep it offline, since it doesn’t make any good.

I took a backup of the hacked Wordpress website to analyze later, and I restored the original files into the server. The site was setup back to its original status. But still the threat was there. Hence I started to work on finding a solution for this.

What I initially did was I went through all the hacked files looking for a clue for the backdoor. When I opened the templates folder, I realized that all the template files have been hacked. The hacker has edited the files and put his phrase in each of the files.

I was wondering how it happened……..

Then I opened the wp-config.php file, and it was the spot which I noticed how the hacker has got in. Somehow, this hacker has got access to the Wordpress config file and edited it, so that he could get the database details from it.

Then using those details, he changed the admin password and logged into the admin panel, and has changed / edited all the template files.  That was so tricky. Anyway I couldn’t figure it out how the hack was done, and I neither cared about it. All I did was blocking the hacker from accessing our important Wordpress files.  

Once I realized that it was done through the wp-config file, I blocked direct access to that file using .htaccess. and it protected the site from that hacker. We looked for another few days whether the hacker will come and hack it again. But it didn’t happen again. So we decided we are safe.

I learnt a very good and a very important lesson after this incident. Wordpress is really nice because it has all these content management ability and the vast amount of useful plugins. But still, Wordpress is so vulnerable to hacks. As I noticed, it was not a direct fault of Wordpress. The backdoor was opened as a result of the template which my friend used. So it is very important to think before you install any third party template or plugins in your Wordpress website or the blog. Use plugins which you can trust. And always read the good and bad reviews about it. It will save you from unexpected hacks or attacks.

Finally, If your Wordpress website got hacked, never get panic! It is so important that you keep calm and work on a solution to fix it. Also do not trust on Wordpress very much. Always apply your own ways of protection to it. Specially protect your wp-config.php file using a htaccess.

Thank you for reading my article. Please do not forget to share your thoughts on this. I know you definitely have something to say about wordpress :)

Happy and safe Wordpressing :D


Wordpress hacked fixing