SEM Wired

A news realase of WordPress has just been made available and is supposed to fix several security flaws, as explained here on the WP blog.

WordPress got so popular that any security update can actually be crucial, considering the amount of websites using it. Recently a well-known vulnerability allowed a worm to spread around affecting several blogs, according to this article. Still, there’s something more we can do to make our WordPress installation safer.

The WordPress Exploit Scanner extension can scan for well-known vulnerabilities and exploits which might affect your WordPress installation. In order to be used you just need to download, the extension, upload it on you server, active it by the extensions dashboard and a link will pop-up on your general dashboard.

Once you run the extension (it might need a few minutes to complete the task) the report you get is extensive. The plugin analyse in depth every single file, looking for malicious code embedded into standard file. It’s pretty useful, even if a standard report can require some programming knowledge to be fully understood. It’s a very neat tool, I guess it should be included in every WordPress standard setup.

I always loved WordPress for it’s ease to use, user friendly interface, ever growing library of add-ons. All these qualities have contributed through the years in making WordPress the latest CMS revolution for the masses, allowing anyone to set up his own little space on the net.

At first I used to copy and paste the analytics code into the footer. Kind of lame I must say. If you’re using a template with a auto-update feature be ready to copy and paste again your analytics code when the latest update comes out.

In order to avoid this are available two tools which might make life easier while working on Analytics and WordPress

Google Analytics for WordPress: it features Google Image tracking which means that traffic from Images would be considered as a proper source instead of just as a referrer. Quite of a bonus considering how much traffic might come from Image sometimes.

Google Analyticator: This one is good as well. The bonus comes with the chance to embed code directly into pages from wordpress front-end.

It’s not over yet… I’ll describe some nice trick to twek your analytics account and get even more data about your blog… stay tuned.