Intro

Over the yearsI have had a lot of new website enquiries that I couldn’t build because the budget was almost zero. To those people I have passed on the following advice as an option that will cost less than $30 in total  to do. Now I would like to show you how to do it too.

Get a domain name

Ok this will cost you money but not much, about $8-15/year.

Anywhere in the world:  www.hover.com is a very good hosting company with high ethics and a far less push approach than other domain hosting companies. FYI the parent company is TUCOWS Inc 

Australian residents: I suggest using crazydomains.com.au if you live in Australia

(Happy to add other good domain companies for Europe etc if you would like to tell me via the comments area).

WARNING: do not get any additional extras during this process, they will try and sell you upgrades and web hosting, don’t buy any of them just get the domain name.

Create a ‘blog’ on WordPress.

You need to create an account with WordPress.com which is free if you use their web address eg myname.wordpress.com

Select the free address option

Divert you real web address to the WordPress.com site

This is done by paying $13/year to WordPress.com to allow you to use your own domain name.

Its called domain mapping and there is a full page of information and links about that process here. Domain mapping on WordPress.com

Then some settings need to be changed where you purchased your web address. Either Crazy Domains or godaddy as I suggested earlier. The nameservers need to setup as follows.

NS1.WORDPRESS.COM
NS2.WORDPRESS.COM
NS3.WORDPRESS.COM

How to update nameservers from hover.com.

How to update nameservers on crazydomains.com.au

Enter the web address into you WordPress.com account

Once the namerserver settings have taken effect (can take up to 48 hours) you can now add your real web address to the

Email

If you want to send and receive email using your web address you will need to setup a free google apps account and update some settings in your wordpress.com account.

This is a great option because if/when you move you website to its own web hosting down the track google apps will continue to handle your email and there will be no dramas with moving email hosting around.

The setup process is explained really well here

http://en.support.wordpress.com/domain-mapping/google-apps-email/

Most of the instructions are about setting up a free google apps account which you will need to follow closely.

Link for free google apps account: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html

Once done you will still need to update some settings on your WordPress.com account. Here they are which are step 8 and 9 of the instructions from the email setup link.

Now get going

Now you can select a simple theme add some content pages etc and start using your website as a powerful online tool.

Questions

If you have any further questions, thoughts, suggestions please leave a comment below and I will answer them as best I can and add them to the post if they will help others to get started faster.

Mediatemples’s new email client setup tool system take the agony out of setting up your email software when you get new web hosting.

Use this link to set up your email client: http://mediatemple.net/help/mail/mailconfig/

After adding your email address its simple a matter of selecting your email client to install the settings.

To change the theme to just show a short summary as per the screenshot below read on….

Go to the Dashboard -> Appearance -> Editor

Now edit the file called content.php by selecting it from selection on the right

Search for the term ‘the_content’ using ‘Ctrl + F’ on a Windows PC or ‘command + F’  on a Mac

Now replace the word ‘content’ with ‘excerpt’ and click on update file.

All done, now post pages with have the excerpt.

Update available notice in plugin area

Locate Gold Cart API key

First you need to know the API key before you can download the update. To get the API key go to Dashboard -> Store Upgrades

Then you will be able to see the API key. You can use the API key for the next step.

Go to to Premium Upgrades link to enter API Key and download the update

This is the link to get update from http://getshopped.org/extend/premium-upgrades-files/

Download zip file once API Key is verified

Deactivate Gold Cart plugin

Delete Gold Cart for WP e-Commerce

Install updated version of WP e-Commerce Gold Cart

Activate Plugin

Plugin activated message

Check Gold Cart has really been re-activated

Dashboard -> StoreUpgrades

Enjoy – comments welcome

Introduction

This is a very useful feature to have on your website as it save the visitor time allowing direct access to the section they want.

Plugins to use

Better Anchor Links is the tool of choice at the moment. It is a fork of Auto Anchor Links which became stopped working correctly recently.

Setup

You can adjust the settings via Dashboard -> Left Menus -> Settings -> B. Anchor Linnks

Then its simply  matter of selecting where you would like the table of contents to appear.

I prefer to only use it on single posts so that it doesn’t interfere with the formatting of regular pages.

You can also specify a heading range to use for content items. You can select what you would like the time of the contents to be. In this case I have used Table of Contents.

Conclusion

This is a really useful tool and you may have to experiment with the setting to make it work for you. It may get in the way of some of your layouts with the default settings but worth exploring as it make like easy for people trying to get through a post quickly and effectively.

Akismet

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.

All in One SEO Pack

Automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).

Contact Form 7

Just another contact form plugin. Simple but flexible.

WPtouch

WPtouch: A simple, powerful and elegant mobile theme for your website. WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress website into an application-li

WordPress SEO by Yoast

Improve your WordPress SEO: Write better content and have a fully optimized WordPress site using the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast.

Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines to better index your blog.

Really Simple CAPTCHA

Really Simple CAPTCHA is a CAPTCHA module intended to be called from other plugins. It is originally created for my Contact Form 7 plugin.

NextGEN Gallery

NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with dozens of options and features.

WordPress Importer

Import posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, tags and more from a WordPress export file.

WP Super Cache

A very fast caching engine for WordPress that produces static html files.

Jetpack by WordPress.com

Supercharge your WordPress site with powerful features previously only available to WordPress.com users.

gtrans

GTranslate: Google Translate for your website

WP to Twitter

Posts a Twitter update when you update your WordPress blog or post to your blogroll, using your chosen URL shortening service. Requires PHP 5 and cURL

Page Links To

Lets you make a WordPress page (or other content type) link to an external URL of your choosing, instead of its WordPress URL.

WP e-Commerce

WP e-Commerce is a free WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin that lets customers buy your products, services and digital downloads online.

WP-PageNavi

Adds a more advanced paging navigation interface.

Google Analytics for WordPress

Track your WordPress site easily and with lots of metadata: views per author & category, automatic tracking of outbound clicks and pageviews.

TinyMCE Advanced

Enables the advanced features of TinyMCE, the WordPress WYSIWYG editor.

Add Link to Facebook

Automatically add links to published posts or pages to your Facebook wall, pages or groups and more

Disqus Comment System

The Disqus comment system replaces your WordPress comment system with your comments hosted and powered by Disqus.

WP-Table Reloaded

WP-Table Reloaded enables you to create and manage tables, without having to write HTML code, and it adds valuable functions for your visitors.

Fast Secure Contact Form

A super customizable contact form that lets your visitors send you email. Blocks all automated spammers. No templates to mess with.

Viper’s Video Quicktags

Allows easy and XHTML valid posting of videos from various websites such as YouTube, DailyMotion, Vimeo, and more.

BuddyPress

Social networking in a box. Build a social network for your company, school, sports team or niche community.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Display a list of related entries on your site and feeds based on a unique algorithm. Templating allows customization of the display.

SexyBookmarks | email, bookmark, and share buttons

Adds an attractive social bookmarking menu to your posts, pages, index, or any combination of the three.

Breadcrumb NavXT

Adds breadcrumb navigation showing the visitor’s path to their current location.

Xhanch – My Twitter

The best plugin to display your latest tweets, replies, direct messages, retweets, auto and manual tweet and lots more. Support multiple accounts

W3 Total Cache

Improve site performance and user experience via caching: browser, page, object, database, minify and content delivery network support.

SEO Ultimate

This all-in-one SEO plugin gives you control over title tags, noindex, meta tags, slugs, canonical, autolinks, 404 errors, rich snippets, and more.

qTranslate

Adds userfriendly multilingual content management and translation support into WordPress.

Pretty Link Lite

Shrink, beautify, track, manage and share any URL on or off of your WordPress website. Create links that look however you want using your own domain n

Lightbox Plus

Lightbox Plus permits users to view larger versions of images, simple slide shows, videos and content all in an overlay.

Simple Tags

Add some tools for taxonomies : Terms suggestion, Mass Edit Terms, Auto link Terms, Ajax Autocompletion, Click Terms, Auto terms, Advanced manage term

WP-Stats-Dashboard

WordPress.com Statistics Dashboard Widgets. Social metrics monitoring.

WP Security Scan

Scans your WordPress installation for security vulnerabilities.

BackUpWordPress

Simple automated back ups of your WordPress powered website.

SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam

Adds CAPTCHA anti-spam methods to WordPress on the forms for comments, registration, lost password, login, or all. For WP, WPMU, and BuddyPress.

WP-Optimize

This simple but effective plugin allows you to clean up your WordPress database and optimize it without phpMyAdmin.

Events Manager

Fully featured event registration management including recurring events, locations management, calendar, Google map integration, booking management

Captcha

This plugin allows you to implement super security captcha form into web forms.

Sociable

Automatically add links on your posts, pages and RSS feed to your favorite social bookmarking sites.

Widget Logic

Widget Logic lets you control on which pages widgets appear using WP’s conditional tags. It also adds a ‘widget_content’ filter.

Exclude Pages

This plugin adds a checkbox, “include this page in menus”, uncheck this to exclude pages from the page navigation that users see on your site.

User Role Editor

User Role Editor WordPress plugin makes the role capabilities changing easy. You can change any standard WordPress user role (except administrator).

Secure WordPress

WordPress Security Plugin

WP-DB-Backup

On-demand backup of your WordPress database.

Broken Link Checker

This plugin will check your posts, comments and other content for broken links and missing images, and notify you if any are found.

Exploit Scanner

Search the files and database of your WordPress install for signs that may indicate that it has fallen victim to malicious hackers.

Duplicate Post

Clone posts and pages.

Regenerate Thumbnails

Allows you to regenerate your thumbnails after changing the thumbnail sizes.

WordPress.com Stats

Simple, concise stats with no additional load on your server. Plug into WordPress.com’s stats system with this plugin or use Jetpack to bring eve

GRAND FlAGallery – Best Photo Gallery

GRAND FlAGallery is a Photo Gallery, Video Gallery, Music Album & Banner Rotator plugin with powerfull admin to manage your media content

Polldaddy Polls & Ratings

Create and manage Polldaddy polls and ratings from within WordPress.

Print Friendly and PDF Button

The #1 Print and PDF button for your WordPress site. Printer Friendly pages without coding, css, or print.css. Fast, easy, and professional.

WP Photo Album Plus

This plugin is designed to easily manage and display your photo albums and slideshows in a single as well as in a network WordPress site. Additionall

Smart YouTube PRO

Smart Youtube is a professional WordPress Video plugin that allows you to easily insert videos/playlists into your post, comments and in your RSS feed

IntenseDebate Comments

IntenseDebate comments enhance and encourage conversation on your blog. Build your reader community, increase your comments, & boost pageviews.

bbPress

bbPress is forum software with a twist from the creators of WordPress

BulletProof Security

WordPress Website Security Protection. Website security protection against: XSS, RFI, CRLF, CSRF, Base64, Code Injection and SQL Injection hacking attack

Custom Contact Forms

Gauranteed to be the most customizable and intuitive contact form plugin for WordPress.

Google Analyticator

Adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics. Includes widgets for Analytics data display.

Simple Facebook Connect

Makes it easy for your site to use Facebook Connect, in a wholly modular way.

Contact Form

Add Contact Form to your WordPress website.

Image Widget

Simple image widget that uses native WordPress upload thickbox to add image widgets to your site.

Lightbox Gallery

This plugin changes the view of galleries to the lightbox.

Redirection

Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections and keep track of 404 errors without requiring knowledge of Apache .htaccess files.

AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Buttons

Help people share, bookmark, and email your posts & pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, StumbleUpon, Digg and many more.

Ultimate TinyMCE

Description: Beef up your visual tinymce editor with a plethora of advanced options.

FancyBox for WordPress

Seamlessly integrates FancyBox into your blog: Upload, activate, and you’re done. No further configuration needed. However, you can customize it

Twitter Widget Pro

A widget that properly handles twitter feeds, including parsing @username, #hashtags, and URLs into links.

WP Multibyte Patch

Multibyte functionality enhancement for the WordPress Japanese package.

WP-Polls

Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can also easily add a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page.

WP Maintenance Mode

Adds a splash page to your site that lets visitors know your site is down for maintenance. Full access to the back- & front-end is optional. Works

ShareThis: Share, Email, Tweet, Like, +1 Made Simple

The ShareThis plugin seamlessly enables users to share your content through Email,Facebook,Twitter, Google +1, Like, Send and many more.

Add Movie Trailers and Games Trailers to your site

Add Movie Trailers and Game Trailers to your site or create your own IMDB site

WP Google Fonts

The WP Google Fonts plugin allows you to easily add fonts from the Google Font Directory to your WordPress theme.

Social Media Widget

Adds links to all of your social media and sharing site profiles. Icons come in 3 sizes, 4 icon styles, and 4 animations.

MediaElement.js – HTML5 Video & Audio Player

Audio Player is an HTML5 video and audio player with Flash fallback and captions. Supports IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome and iPhone, iPad, And Video and audio plugin for WordPress built on the MediaElement.js HTML5 media player library. Provides Flash or Silverlight fallback players for non-HTML5 browsers. Supports iPhone, iPad, and Andriod. Supports MP4, OGG, WebM, WMV, MP3, WAV, WMA files as well as captions with WebSRT files.

GD Star Rating

Plugin allows you to set up advanced rating and review system for post types and comments in your blog using single, multi and thumbs ratings.

Sidebar Login

Easily add an ajax-enhanced login widget to your site’s sidebar.

The Events Calendar

The Events Calendar is a fully featured event management system with multiple views, 3rd party integrations, and a slew of premium add-ons.

Subscribe2

Sends a list of subscribers an email notification when new posts are published to your blog

podPress

A plugin for Podcasters using WordPress.

VideoPress

Manage and embed videos hosted on VideoPress. Requires a WordPress.com blog with the VideoPress premium upgrade.

WP-DBManager

Manages your WordPress database.

JW Player for WordPress – Flash & HTML5 Video Player

This video plugin is provided by LongTail Video Inc. It enables you to embed Flash and HTML5 video using the JW Player on your WordPress website.

Quick Cache ( Speed Without Compromise )

Speed up your site ~ BIG Time! – If you care about the speed of your site, Quick Cache is a plugin that you absolutely MUST have installed.

SEO Friendly Images

SEO Friendly Images automatically adds alt and title attributes to all your images. Improves traffic from search engines and makes the image tags W3C/

AntiVirus

Useful plugin that will scan your theme templates for malicious injections. Automatically. Every day. For more blog security.

AddThis

The AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget allows any visitor to bookmark and share your site easily with over 330 popular services.

WP-reCAPTCHA

Integrates reCAPTCHA anti-spam methods with WordPress including comment, registration, and email spam protection. WPMU Compatible.

ManageWP Worker

ManageWP Worker plugin allows you to remotely manage your blogs from one dashboard.

Platinum SEO Pack

Platinum SEO Plugin offers Complete onsite SEO solution for your WordPress blog.Platinum SEO Plugin offers all the functionalities of All In One SEO p

PayPal Donations

Easy, simple setup to add a PayPal Donation button as a Widget or with a shortcode.

Editorial Calendar

The Editorial Calendar makes it possible to see all your posts and drag and drop them to manage your blog.

SEO Smart Links

SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more.

Antispam Bee

Anonymous and independent antispam solution. Detect comment and trackback spam. Includes statistics and notifications.

List category posts

List Category Posts allows you to list posts from a category into a post/page using the [catlist] shortcode. This shortcode accepts a category name or

Peter’s Login Redirect

Redirect users to different locations after logging in and logging out.

WP jQuery Lightbox

A drop-in replacement for Lightbox 2 and similar plugins, shedding the bulk of Prototype and Scriptaculous. Improved for mobile devices.

Maintenance Mode

Adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance.

Google Analytics

Enables google analytics on all pages.

Slick Social Share Buttons

Slick social share buttons adds facebook, twitter, google +1, linkedin, digg, delicious, stumbleupon and pinterest pin it social media buttons in a fl

My Calendar

Accessible WordPress event calendar plugin. Show events from multiple calendars on pages, in posts, or in widgets.

Facebook Comments for WordPress

Allows your visitors to comment on posts using their Facebook profile. Supports custom styles, notifications, combined comment counts, recent comments

WordPress Popular Posts

With WordPress Popular Posts, you can show your visitors what are the most popular entries on your blog.

WP Complete Backup

WP Backup Complete is a complete backup solution for WordPress. The plugin will backup the WordPress database as well as the file system.

Easing Slider

The Easing Slider is an image slider plugin for WordPress which uses the jQuery Easing plugin.

Google Doc Embedder

Lets you embed MS Office, PDF, and many other file types in a web page using the Google Docs Viewer (no Flash or PDF browser plug-ins required).

Social Slider

This plugin adds links to your social networking sites’ profiles in a box floating at the left side of the screen.

Facebook Like Box Widget

Facebook Like Box Widget is a social plugin that enables Facebook Page owners to attract and gain Likes from their own website. The Like Box enables u

eShop

An accessible Shopping Cart plugin.

Advanced Custom Fields

Completely Customise your edit pages with an assortment of field types: Wysiwyg, Repeater, text, image, select, checkbox, page link, post object and m

OptionTree

Extremely customizable Theme Options interface for WordPress.

nrelate Related Content

The best way to display related content: Thumbnails or Text, on all your pages.

NextGEN Scroll Gallery

Awesome free JavaScript gallery. BMo-Design’s Mootools Javascript ScrollGallery as a Plugin for the WordPress NextGEN Gallery.

All-in-One Event Calendar

An event calendar system with month, week, agenda views, upcoming events widget, color-coded categories, recurrence, and import/export of .ics feeds.

Comprehensive Google Map Plugin

A simple and intuitive, yet elegant and fully documented Google map plugin that installs as a widget and a short code.

WP-PostViews

Enables you to display how many times a post/page had been viewed.

Audio Player

Audio Player is a highly configurable but simple mp3 player for all your audio needs. You can customise the player’s colour scheme to match your blog

Slick Contact Forms

Slick contact forms allows you quickly and easily create contact forms for any area on your WordPress site using widgets

WP-Statistics

Summary statistics of blog.

Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu

All admin links available in a neat horizontal drop down menu. Saves lots of screen real estate!

WP-PostRatings

Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page.

BackWPup

WordPress Backup and more…

Shortcodes Ultimate

Provides support for multiple useful shortcodes

Link Library

The purpose of this plugin is to add the ability to output a list of link categories and a complete list of links with notes and descriptions.

Dynamic Widgets

Dynamic Widgets gives you full control on which pages your widgets will appear. It lets you dynamicly show or hide widgets on WordPress pages.

WordPress Backup to Dropbox

Keep your valuable WordPress website, its media and database backed up to Dropbox in minutes with this sleek, easy to use plugin.

Really simple Facebook Twitter share buttons

Puts Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google “+1″ and other share buttons of your choice above or below your posts.

Formidable Forms

Quickly and easily build forms with a simple drag-and-drop interface and in-place editing.

WP Autoresponder And Newsletter Plugin

Gather subscribers in newsletters, follow up with automated e-mails, provide subscription to all posts in your blog or individual categories.

Digg Digg

All-in-One Social Vote Buttons.

WP-Piwik

This plugin adds a Piwik stats site to your WordPress or WordPress multisite dashboard

WordPress Mobile Pack

The WordPress Mobile Pack is a complete toolkit to help mobilize your WordPress site. It has a mobile switcher, themes, widgets, and mobile admin pane

Awesome Flickr Gallery

Create a photo gallery of your Flickr photos on your WordPress enabled WebSite enabling you to customize it the way you like it.

Simple Google Analytics

A simple Plugin to add Analytics code on your pages. You simply enter your ID, you choose if you are on a sub-domain and add your domain name.

WP-Hashcash

Client-side javascript blocks all spam bots. XHTML 1.1 compliant.

FeedWordPress

FeedWordPress is an Atom/RSS aggregator for WordPress. It syndicates content from feeds that you choose into your WordPress weblog; the content it syn

flickrRSS

Allows you to integrate Flickr photos into your site. It supports user, set, favorite, group and community photostreams.

SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2

Multiply blog traffic by strengthening on page SEO, increasing the number of indexed pages, auto convert search terms into post tags, and more.

Newsletter

Add a real newsletter service to your blog. In seconds. For free.

Search and Replace

A simple search for find strings in your database and replace the string.

Onswipe

Onswipe: Make your blog look beautiful on tablet web browsers in under 3 minutes.

underConstruction

Creates a ‘Coming Soon’ page that will show for all users who are not logged in

Visual Form Builder

Dynamically build forms using a simple interface. Forms include jQuery validation, a basic logic-based verification system, and entry tracking.

WP-Members

WP-Members™ is a free membership management system for WordPress® that restricts content to registered users.

Adminimize

Adminimize is a WordPress plugin that lets you hide ‘unnecessary’ items from the WordPress backend and many many more …

WooCommerce

An e-commerce toolkit that helps you sell anything. Beautifully.

Step 1 – install

Dashboard -> Left menus -> Plugins -> Add new

Put bbPress in search  and  it was the first result ( Author should be ‘The bbPress Community’ )

Clicked install plugin and activated.

Step 2 – membership setup

Dashboard -> Left menu -> Settings -> General and set Membership to ‘Anyone can register’ & New User Default Role to ‘Forum Participant’

Step 3 – create registration page

I created a page called Forum registration and added a shortcode I found on the bbPress.org site.

Here is the link to all of the shortcodes http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/bbpress-20-shortcodes

Step 4 – create login page

Created a page called Forum Login and added a shortcode for logon and one for lost password

Step 5 – add new pages to menu

Then put those pages under the forum menu.

To get the forum listing address I used as the top menu item go here

Dashboard -> Left menus -> Settings -> Forums

and in the setting there is a heading called ‘Archive slugs’ and the first entry is what you add to your domain name with a / in between.

For example my slug is bbp so the link to the forum listing is http://wphow.org/how/bbp

If you are not sure how to create a custom menu item watch the video on post how to use the WordPress 3.0 menu system . Custom menu items are mentions at the 1 minute mark of the video.

Step 6 – resave forum settings

I also had to go to Dashboard -> Left menus -> Settings -> Forums and just do a ‘Save changes’ as there can be a glitch sometimes (which I had) and users can’t post and this clears it.

Step 7 – create forums

Created a few new forums

Dashboard -> Left menus -> Settings -> Forums -> New forum

and put links to them in the dropdown menu under forum. The forums can be created as menu links straight from

Dashboard -> Left menus -> Appearance menus if your theme supports the menu system introduced in vers 3.0 of WordPres

Step 8 – create welcome message with rego and login links

I then created a forum entry with a welcome and links to those registration and login pages.

http://wphow.org/how/bbp/topic/welcome/

Step 9 – redirect directly to forums after login

I installed this plugin to redirect after someone logs in back to the forum listing.
Login redirect

Link to the free plugin: http://premium.wpmudev.org/project/login-redirect

To setup up the redirect you need to go to Settings -> General and right at the bottom you put the link to the main forum page

Feedback & Questions

If you have any questions please feel free to add a comment or even better use the forum where it will be easier to find later and may help more people.

http://wphow.org/how/bbp/

Watch this space

A collection of SEO tools and tips I plan to continue to add to as I find more information.

The Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors

Great tool to explain to clients in a visual manner the factor affecting SEO for websites.

http://searchengineland.com/seotable/ you can download the PDF here

Google keyword tool

Use this tool to work out how many searches certain terms are getting and also how much competition there is for that term. It also gives you similar search terms to think about too.

Link for tool

Opensite Explorer

Use this tools to see who links to you and how strong your site is. Also great to compare with other sites to see where you can improve your ranking.

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

Firstly check your website for malware now

http://sitecheck.sucuri.net/scanner/
If you have malware stay on the website that scanned your site and use their solution as nothing on this page will fix your issue this post is about prevention before the hackers arrive. Once they are in the back door closing the door is too late. Your site will then be compromised and will need some serious effort to clean up.

What the threat means:

John Ford of Vaultpress / Automattic explains the issue and options here – http://blog.vaultpress.com/2011/08/02/vulnerability-found-in-timthumb/. John describes the potential risk as follows:

It allows third parties to upload and execute arbitrary PHP code in the TimThumb cache directory.

They tried to hack my website:

Even though I don’t even have timthumbs on my website they came looking for it. A great example of why a plugin called WordPress Firewal 2 is worth having. It blocked the hacker before they could try anything and emailed me the above message.

What is affected:

WordPress Themes:
Elegantthemes.com (older versions only) – location: themename/timthumb.php and also in epanel/timthumb.php
Woothemes.com – location themename/timbthumb.php or themename/thumb.php – there are a few great posts just for woothemes
1. www.woothemes.com/2011/08/timthumb-security-flaw-patch/
2. http://wptheming.com/2011/08/cleaning-up-the-timthumb-hack/

aqua-blue
backstage
bueno
busybee
canvas
cinch
cityguide
coffeebreak
dailyedition
deep-blue
delegate
delicate
digitalfarm
ElegantEstate
flashnews
freshnews
gazette
headlines
magazinum
Magnificent
mymag
mystream
nomadic
object
openair
optimize
overeasy
premiumnews
retreat
royalle
slanted
sophisticatedfolio
sportpress
thejournal
thestation
TheStyle
wp-creativix

WordPress Plugins:
YD recent posts widget – location: timthumb/timthumb.php
Event espresso – location: includes/functions/timthumb.php
WPTap – location: include/timthumb.php
WordPress popular posts – location: scripts/timthumb.php

a-gallery
dukapress
front-slider
geotag
highlighter
igit-posts-slider-widget
igit-related-posts-with-thumb-images-after-posts
islidex
jquery-slider-for-featured-content
kc-related-posts-by-category
lisl-last-image-slider
meenews
meenews-newsletter
mobile-smart
seo-image-galleries
shortcodes-ultimate
smart-related-posts-thumbnails
webphysiology-portfolio
wordpress-gallery-plugin
wp-mobile-detector
wp-slick-slider
shortcodes-ultimate
social-profiles-widget
woo-tumblog

There are others but I haven’t examined them first hand as yet

What to do if you haven’t been hacked yet :

Act quickly as more sites are being hacked every day and its far easier to do this process than get your site back online after being hacked and your hosting company disables the website until its cleaned.

Option 1 (one plugin does all the work for you)

Install plugin called  Timthumb Vulnerability Scanner .

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/timthumb-vulnerability-scanner/

Go to the left hand side of your admin area -> Tools -> Timthumb Scanner ->

Click on scan button to run a scan, it takes under a minute or less usually depending on the size of your website.

Then it will show where any copies of the files exist and if they need updating.

Click Fix button to replace them with the latest safer version.

Option 2 (manual version)

Step 1: download the latest version of timthumb.php here – http://code.google.com/p/timthumb/

Step 2:

Add this line if it is not already there

define( 'ALLOW_EXTERNAL', false );

Step 3: Change this code by removing the external links

$allowedSites = array (
	'flickr.com',
	'picasa.com',
	'img.youtube.com',
	'upload.wikimedia.org',
);

To look like this ( removes all links to external sites )

$allowedSites = array();

Step 4

Save the new version and upload via ftp to replace old version in theme or plugin.

What to do if your website has already been hacked:

Pay $90 for a 1 year subscription to http://sitecheck.sucuri.net/ and get them to clean the website. And you get protected for another year as a bonus.

Items worth considering:
- great looking pre-made themes using this plugin let you launch a shopping site very quickly. One example is Storefrontthemes.com this theme is a great example: Storefrontthemes theme called edge
- payment gateways like eWay make it possible to accept payements other than paypal and if you are based in Australia you can get local support from eWay when you need it.
- preview music files when selling audio downloads with jPlayer add-on
- backed by a pretty cool person Dan Milward who supports the WordPress community by helping organise and support WordCamp events.