Thanks to MJ Penner Consulting, Zack Design is pleased to announce the new plugin, MJP Security Tools, has been released on WordPress Extend finally!

Please be aware that while we are confident it fully works, we would welcome any negative or positive feeback. We also are working on ensuring it is compatible with WordPress 3.0 when that plugin is released.

This plugin is a no-frills approach to securing your WordPress install.

Features included in this plugin:

• Ability to scan the database for possible XSS issues.
• Limit login attempts to one per ten seconds per user.
• Check all file permissions.
• Check for presence of index.html files in all directories.
• Check if WordPress is up-to-date.
• Remove the version number from HTML source.
• Log all POST requests.
• Log all failed login attempts.
• Change the admin username.
• Randomize the database table prefix.
• Require stronger passwords.
• Detect SSH and provide ability to enforce it on wp-admin and login pages
• .htaccess password protection

This plugin operates based under the assumption that you are going to fully lock down your WordPress install to the extent that PHP can no longer move files around (0644 CHMOD). This means that once you install the plugin, automatic updates will no longer work. Then again, you don’t really want them to for a fully-protected, locked-down site.

I’ve yet to complete the front page which will have a slideshow of what I offer, as well as some quick links straight to the forum (among other things).

I’m not supporting IE 6 on purpose. I have made sure it degrades OK, but I’m not worried if the site doesn’t look quite the same (it doesn’t). If Google and Microsoft don’t feel they want to support IE6 anymore I don’t see any reason why I should either.

Not only that, over the last month IE6 counts for a fraction of the visits to my site – 0.7%. In total, IE browsers only account for 11.8% of total visits. Out of the IE browsers visiting my site, only 6% are IE6. Due to these statistics, I believe it is now no longer viable for me to support IE6 and will gradually phase such support out across all my projects (except of course in those rare cases where it is still necessary).

So here we are, a slightly complex one page site heavily optimised with W3 Total Cache and running two carousels and a Flash slideshow.

As usual I load the contact page and their catalogue link via Colorbox, an extremely versatile and good-looking jQuery modal window plugin which gives that extra impressive layer of content delivery that users expect these days.

You cannot activate the plugin? You are probably using PHP 4. If you are using PHP 4 simply because of your host then your host needs to change. In this day and age PHP 4 is archaic.

If you have been running versions of the menu prior to 3.x you will almost certainly receive the following error upon upgrading to versions prior to version 3.0.8 and after version 2.3.7:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function wp_css_dropdownmenu()

I’ve reintroduced wp_css_dropdownmenu as a function into version 3.0.8 with information on how to ensure that you do in fact upgrade correctly. I’ve also linked back to version 2.3.7 so that you can downgrade if needed. Hopefully this will fix a lot of the problems as I’ve noticed many, many websites are broken upon a quick Google search.

This is the text you will see if you have the old function still running as a menu:

Please visit the Installation guide to set up your menu properly as it has been changed (remember you can easily edit header.php).
If you can’t do it yourself visit Zack Design and contact us for help. Or, reinstall version 2.3.7

Lastly, my apologies for any inconvenience. I should have included the deprecated function from the start, but was hoping that the updated README information would suffice. Obviously, it didn’t, and I know what to watch out for in future. However, let me be by no means the last to say that automatic upgrades can be *extremely* dangerous and should only be undertaken with caution.

Note: If you’re upgrading and you made changes to the template I provided please note that the template is no longer in use. In that case maybe hold off upgrading if you’re not confident editing the actual plugin file. Let me know via comments.

I’ve removed dependency on the SimplePie plugins as WordPress now ships with SimplePie by default. I’ve also upgrade PHPThumb to use the latest version which is much better. Images are browser cacheable now due to automatically generated and saved files inside the wp-content/cache thanks to PHPThumb.

I’ve had the Cooliris plugin on the backburner for quite a while and finally decided to release it. The plugin supports shortcodes so you can embed it anywhere you like, and it also supports theming via a PHP function which you can call anywhere in your templates.

It’s quite heavily customisable for a .5 release and I’ve ensured that you can put multiple galleries in a page without HTML ID conflicts.

See my Plugin Showcase for an example of Cooliris in action!

Depending on demand and support version 1.0 may very well soon be in the pipeline with further Cooliris-specific options and any feature requests you can think of. As usual please remember to sponsor and support my plugins by donating!

However, it’s working just fine right now, and is ready for download!

You can see the new form in action at my new plugin showcase, and download the updated plugin from WordPress.org Extend.