WordPress Discovery, Attempt and Success!
Late last week, I was startled to find that people had been signing up as users on my WordPress site. This was about the same time that Tawnya Sutherland of VAnetworking discovered that one of her websites had been hacked due to a security breach in an older version of WordPress. Well, just before Tawnya made her announcement, I had posted my puzzling question on VAnetworking. The response that I received from member Crystal Pina was to go to my dashboard and then go to Settings>General there is a box there that was checked saying “Membership – Anyone can register.” I unchecked that box and deleted the two new users. Another change that I needed to make was under Settings>Discussion, to make sure the box is not checked that says, “Users must be registered and logged in to comment.” It was; I changed it. So far, so good. No one has signed up as a user since then but, was this my only problem or did I have a touch of Tawnya’s hack-attack?
I guess only time will tell, but I have also taken the necessary steps to avoid the hack-attack. I have performed my very first WordPress Upgrade! I followed the instructions found at WordPress.org to backup my files and my database. It really wasn’t that difficult. Then, since I was already using a newer version of WP, I had the button at the top of my admin screen to automatically upgrade to the latest version. Or, so I thought. Happily, I clicked the button and received the message: Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.8.4.zip. Well, this screen stayed static for a good two hours. No little circle wheeling about, no trackbar moving, no download status showing. It wasn’t going to be as easy as pushing a button. After posting my problem on the WordPress.org forum and not getting a response other than “install manually”, I dove in. I looked up the instructions which really were quite simple to follow:
- Deactivate all Plugins currently running on the site.
- Download and extract the new version of WordPress to your harddrive.
- Using your FTP, delete all the WordPress files on your host except for: wp-config.php file, wp-content folder, wp-images folder, wp-includes/languages/ folder, and the .htaccess file.
- Upload the extracted copy of WordPress using your FTP to your host site.
- Login to your WordPress Admin screen, click Upgrade
- Reactivate all the Plugins.
Piece of cake!
One more thing that I learned this past week is that people actually try to use ping-backs to get spam posted on your site. Despicable! Why would I approve a post that has nothing to do with my blog and has a ton of links in it back to some strange website selling telephone services?
Tags: Blog, Virtual Assistant, Wordpress
I had one site deliberately set up to allow people to register and guess what, I got nailed. (You can read more about that in my recent blog post.) Needless to say, I won’t be doing THAT again…
Good for you! WordPress can be scary, but it’s just a machine. We have total control over it. As long as you’re doing your backups regularly you can totally mess everything up and have it all back working properly in just a few hours.
You know what’s really cool? You’ll always know how to do this now. Your site will never be held hostage by some web designer with a maintenance package.
Crystal Pina
Looks like you’ve been on quite a journey and it’s been worthwhile.
Watch out – it does become addictive!
Excellent read! I’m just getting ready to start using WordPress, and this info should keep me fairly safe. Thank you for those direction!
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