Plugins – The DIY Blog – Do It Yourself WordPress

Easy Privacy Policy WordPress Plugin is Spam

Bill Hutchison — Thu, 11 Jul 2013 15:28:43 +0000

Recently I installed Wordfence on a number of my WordPress web-sites to increase the security on it. While running a check on one of my sites if found that the Easy Privacy Plugin had been modified. The error that I got was:

Modified plugin file: wp-content/plugins/easy-privacy-policy/easy-privacy-policy.php

Filename: wp-content/plugins/easy-privacy-policy/easy-privacy-policy.php
File type: Plugin
Issue first detected: 4 mins ago.
Severity: Warning
Status: New

This file belongs to plugin “Easy Privacy Policy” version “1.02” and has been modified from the file that is distributed by WordPress.org for this version.

When I clicked through to view the file differences it pulled up the following line of code:

This policy was generated by Easy Privacy Policy Plugin bet365 poker for WordPress.

That was the original line of the code. The modified version of the code on my web-site was:

This policy was generated by Easy Privacy Policy Plugin swift cover car insurance for WordPress.

After coming across those lines of code I had another look at the plugin on WordPress.com and it seems that the plugin had been removed. The usual reasons for WordPress removing plugins from the plugin depository is because it contains Malware or Spam, which is certainly the case here.

Time to find another WordPress privacy plugin I guess.

One thing that this has highlighted to me is not only the need to keep up with plugin updates, but also to make sure that the plugins I am using are still “clean”. Wordfence is certainly going help me with that …

Image source: Sean MacEntee

Secure WordPress 2.0.7 Crashes WordPress Multisite

Bill Hutchison — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 15:44:03 +0000

I was following this guide to setting up a trial installation of WordPress Multisite. When I installed the third recommended plugin though, Secure WordPress, it crashed the site with this error …

Fatal error: Call to undefined function wp_get_current_user() in /home/imnet/public_html/wp-includes/capabilities.php on line 1451

Secure WordPress is a plugin that I use on many of my other sites, and is one of the plugins that I usually recommend for securing WordPress. It seems however that plugin is not compatible with WordPress Multisite.

Thankfully it is easy to fix this problem by logging onto your server using FTP or your hosts file manager and deleting the SecureWordpress folder in the /wp-content/plugins directory. After doing that I refreshed the admin area of the site and it had started working again.

Now that I have discovered that Secure WordPress is incompatible with WordPress Multisite I will be looking at other options to secure my Wodpress Multisite set-up…

Add a YouTube Gallery to WordPress

Bill Hutchison — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 11:26:27 +0000

Listening to a recent episode of Weekly Web Tools by Dave Jackson made me aware of a very cool WordPress plugin called TubePress. TubePress is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to add a custom YouTube or Vimeo video gallery to a WordPress page or post very easily. Until now I have always done it manually, but I love how this appears to work …

There are many different ways that you can customise the look and feel of your video gallery including customising:

How the video plays (embed, popup, etc.)
Where the video plays (on your site or the original)
How many thumbnails are displayed
Size of thumbnails and of video
much more …

You also have quite a few options for where the gallery is pulled from. Some of the source options that I could see being very useful are:

YouTube users “Favourites”
Videos from a YouTube playlist
Videos uploaded by a specific user

You can see this plugin in action on my test site, http://billhutchison.org/wptest/videos/, and find out more about it on the TubePress web-site.

As of writing this post TubePress I have been experimenting with Tubepress version 2.58. According to the TubePress web-site they have recently released the final release candidate of TubePress 3.0.0 and should be releasing the new version soon, which includes some great looking new options.

Best WordPress PayPal Donation Plugin

Bill Hutchison — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 08:56:55 +0000

After searching for a long time for a good WordPress PayPal Donation Plugin I finally found a great plugin that a friend of my wrote called the “Multi Currency PayPal Donations WP Plugin”.

Screenshot of the donation screen

We regularly receive donations from Canada, Australia and the USA, so having a plugin that automatically allows for multiple currency is a huge advantage. You can also allow for different PayPal accounts for each currency, which is a big help if you have your PayPal accounts linked to different bank accounts in the different countries.

One problem that I had with the previous version of the plugin was that if a currency was not selected PayPal would report an error. The latest update to the plugin allows for you to choose a default currency, which has completely fixed this error.

If you are looking for a PayPal donation plugin this is definitely the one that I would recommend. I use it on all my web-sites that I put a donation page on and have pointed quite a few friends in this direction.

Check out the plugin on my friends web-site, Make Some Code – Multi Currency PayPal Donations WP Plugin.