Gary Eckstein | WordPress Specialist

Car Companies using WordPress

Gary Eckstein — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 01:01:43 +0000

WordPress is used to power all sorts of Websites and Blogs. In this Post I’ll show five car companies using WordPress (although there are many other new and used car companies using WordPress).

Ford

Ford Social is a Website with which the company aims to interact more with it’s customers. Choosing WordPress (WP) to power this Site is a great idea as WP has very strong capabilities where interaction and communication are required. The custom Theme used on this Site has a significant amount of the Site functionality inbuilt (removing the need to use many Plugins).

Volkswagen

Volkswagen use WordPress extensively to power their Blogs. VW Sites using WordPress include Think Blue, The Upcoming and Concept Cars Blog and the VW Jetta Blog. The Sites use custom Themes as well as some popular free Plugins such as WP-Polls and NextGEN Gallery.

Jeep

In many ways this Jeep Blog is quite simple; it uses a fairly wide sidebar widget area on the right and no footer widget area. The Site however is full of information and various media including text, video and a Twitter and Facebook widget. The Theme used is a standard premium Theme by WooThemes and, just like on the VW Blogs, the WP-Polls Plugin is used.

Citroen

Swiveling headlights as a safety feature on cars isn’t a new feature. Citroen popularized this means of having better visibility when turning way back in numerous car models in 1967. Audi now calls this Adaptive Light, Lexus calls it the Adaptive Front Lighting System and Mercedes the Cornering Light Function.

Citroen uses WordPress to power various Sites including their Italian Blog. Fewer Sites are using Adobe Flash nowadays but this Blog uses a Flash header very effectively. WP Super Cache is installed to speed up Page load times (but unfortunately isn’t working per the message flagged by the Plugin ‘WP Super Cache is installed but broken’). The Plugin WP Lightbox 2 adds lightbox effects.

Toyota

Toyota Europe, Toyota U.K. and other Toyota Blogs are powered by WordPress. Custom designed WP Themes are used as well as two free and very popular WordPress video related Plugins; TubePress and Viper’s Video Quicktags. The very good Google Analytics Plugin, Google Analytics for WordPress is also used.

Hacked WordPress with Popup Message

Gary Eckstein — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 20:25:18 +0000

I came across a hacked WordPress Site today that was different to others I’ve seen before. The Site is hosted with Crazydomains here in Australia and a popup would appear every time any page on the Site was accessed. The popup made it impossible to continue using the browser. I tried the Site using Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox and Safari and all became inoperable once the popup appeared. The popup stated ‘hacked by Hmei7′.

Hmei7 is described as an ethical hacker on various Websites as he/she apparently highlights vulnerabilities without causing massive harm. He/She is said to have hacked many major corporation Websites such as IBM, Siemens, Toyota and many more. What interests me is that there aren’t many reports of WordPress Sites being hacked by Hmei7. As mentioned previously however, often what is described as a WordPress hack is actually caused by hosting vulnerabilities such as old versions of PHP.

By the way, there’s a good reason that I don’t go into details of the specifics of any hacked Website.

Helping to recover from Hacked WordPress

Gary Eckstein — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 10:30:49 +0000

WordPress Websites and Blogs get hacked. All Content Management (CMS) and other Website software gets hacked and as WordPress is so incredibly popular it makes sense that WordPress Sites will be hacked. Fortunately WordPress is actually very secure against malware and hackers. I offer services where I assist people and organizations to recover from hacked WordPress Sites so have seen all sorts of ways that Sites get hacked. Today however I came acroess a hacked Site with a new ‘footprint’.
The client had received an email from Paypal saying that his Site had been compromised. The Website was now being used as a ‘phishing’ Site to get information from Website visitors and maliciously send that information to a 3rd party (the hacker). My clients Site had also been identified by Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox and others as a malware and phishing Site.
I’m not going into the various technical details of the compromise save to say that it had the hallmarks of a SQL-injection or some other Mysql database compromise. My suspicion is that the Webhost unwittingly allowed access to the hacker through, possibly, unpatched or not updating PHP.
I don’t believe that WordPress itself was the method used by the hacker to compromise the Site. Unfortunately sometimes Sites get hacked no matter what CMS or software used!

Posted from WordPress for Android

Solution – WordPress Image links not Saving

Gary Eckstein — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:00:49 +0000

Is the required hyperlink/URL not saving on your WordPress Blog or Website images? I recently saw this problem for the second time and have discovered a solution.

I’ve seen a few articles that recommend that the problem of image links not being saved on a Page or Post is related to either or all of Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Firefox or Internet Explorer however, where this error was occurring that I saw, all browsers were affected. This error is also a known WordPress problem.

Anyway, I don’t yet know what is causing the image hyperlinks to disappear but here is a solution that worked for me:

Go to ‘Edit Page’ or ‘Edit Post’ where you have the problem.
Click the image and then the ‘Edit Image’ icon
Click the ‘Advanced Settings’ tab
Under ‘Advanced Link Settings’ delete anything in the ‘CSS Class’ filed
Click Update.
Again, click the image and then the ‘Edit Image’ icon
On the ‘Edit Image’ tab enter the required link URL in the ‘Link URL’ field.
Click ‘Update’
Click Update to save your Page or Post.
Smile