Author: Melissa

Previously I was using Ryan Duff’s anti-header injection WP-ContactForm, but this seems to have gone the way of the dodo – for the last few months there have been only blank pages where ryanduff.net used to be.

Those irrepressible spammers seemed to have worked their way around Ryan’s coding, creating the need for extra measures to counter the junk. I’ve noticed a couple of mods such as Douglas Karr’s which adds a challenge question to the form, and Blogging Expertise’s Akismet Edition.

In the middle of looking at all this I discovered an entirely different contact form which I immediately fell in love with, it is more configurable than WP-ContactForm and even includes a suite of different stylesheets based on the most popular WordPress themes. It was developed by Mike Cherim and Mike Jolley, and incorporates principles of web accessibility which make it very easy to use.

Go to Mike Cherim’s WordPress-Ready Contact Form v.2.0WP page to download the plugin. Thanks guys!

A Webpage Builder customer uses the password protect feature on their site to hide content intended for members only.

Recently the customer reported a lot of their members were unable to access this content; the password prompt was not appearing and access to the page was denied almost immediately.

Webpage Builder uses javascript to protect pages and the problem was tracked to the latest version of Internet Explorer blocking javascript pop-ups by default.

To correct this problem the security settings in Internet Explorer need to be altered as follows:

1. Open Internet Explorer window
2. Click TOOLS then INTERNET OPTIONS from menu at top
3. Click SECURITY from tabs along top of small window that appears
4. Highlight TRUSTED SITES zone and click “Sites” button
5. Where it says “Add this web site to the zone” type [the site url] and click “Add” (may need to remove tick from “Require server authentication (https:) for all sites in this zone”)
6. Click “Close”, then OK

A call from Melissa today, she told me she has decided to outsource technical support for the business to a company in Melbourne called Quicknowledge. Not sure yet when it will be happening, she said she has yet to finalise the deal – has to sort out precise figures and costings yet but it sounds a goer. Melissa still wants to keep me on the books for web hosting support work.

I’ve just discovered a useful WordPress tool from David Coppit – it is his Category Access plugin, which allows you to limit public access to post categories on your blog.

Since transferring my uni material here I’ve been looking for some way to hide it from public view – not that it is particularly sensitive stuff, it is just very boring to the casual observer, and there is quite a lot of it! At first I created a second blog which could only be accessed via htaccess login, but it was a pain to maintain two blog sites. David Coppit’s plugin is a much simpler and more elegant solution. Thanks David!