If you’ve been to the WordPress Support Forum lately, you’ll see many complaints about 2.5.1 blogs being hacked. This is much ado about nothing and is caused by noobs (squab?) not realizing that when they upgrade a compromised blog, the bad stuff survives the upgrade unless specific steps are taken to remove it. Donncha, one of the WP devs, attempts to allay everyone’s fears with this post explaining how to spot a hack and a few common sense tips on how to keep your WordPress site secure.

Whoo (as she is known on the WP Forums) has a very handy little WordPress plugin that you should deploy on your WP site as soon as you can. If you run more than one WordPress blog or web site, then time’s wasting. Grab the VI-LOGGER plugin and install it on all your blogs, before hackers get in. If the unthinkable does happen, you’ll be better equipped to do damage control. Your web host will thank you, too. We plan to install this plugin on all our WordPress-driven sites and recommend it among our list of must-have WP Plugins.

Here are some links discussing ways to keep your web site in general, and your WordPress site in particular, safe from hackers.

1. WordPress Security Tips and Tricks
2. Lorelle on WordPress Security
3. WordPress Security Whitepaper
4. Matt Mullenweg on Recent SQL Injection Hacks
5. WTC’s Ten Security Plugins for WordPress
6. Preventing SQL Injection Attacks
7. Running a Secure Apache Server
8. PHP Shared Server Security

The bottom line is this: Upgrade WordPress when security patches are released. Don’t delay.

As 2007 comes to a close, it’s time to reflect on the past year’s accomplishments — and mistakes — and resolve not to make the same ones twice. Here’s my list of Top Ten Web Design Mistakes — mistakes I hope I’m never caught making.

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An old issue was raised on a forum recently and it caused me to go digging for more information. The question of who owns copyright for a web design. As a legal secretary AND a web designer, this is an issue near and dear to my cold little heart.

Work for Hire

Most employers, folks who retain our services to create web designs for them, prefer to view our products as works made for hire. And generally they are, if several criteria can be met. First, and most important, there MUST BE a work for hire agreement or an assignment of our copyrights to our creative works to that employer. Both bona fide employees and independent contractors (such as web design firms and free lance web designers) can usually be considered to be employees for the purposes of “works made for hire.”

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WordPress took the blogging world by storm just three years ago. The Movable Type licensing fiasco helped boost the then-fledgling CMS/blogging app’s popularity. And it’s held its ground, and in fact, overtaken MT as the premier blogging application. So .. WP is not just for blogs anymore. And I’ve chosen ten non-blog sites driven by WordPress to illustrate just how powerful this CMS can be. With plugin development continuing at its usual breakneck pace, you can be assured of useful and practical plugins to meet the needs of most small business owners and professionals who seek an easy way to create and update web content, and not just maintain a business blog.

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