by Arlan Nugara | Feb 26, 2018 | Azure, WordPress
Another post in our series on Creating Azure (hosted) WordPress Websites without knowing php or MySql!
Problem:
An update of a WordPress plugin or theme for our Azure hosted WordPress website(s) fails to load. This causes an immediate problem because the old version of the plugin or theme was already deleted from the website in the update process! This is a ‘scary’ one – especially if it is the theme that is deleted from the website. Time is of the essence to get the website fixed and secured with the latest updates.
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by Arlan Nugara | Feb 15, 2018 | Azure, WordPress
Read all of the other posts in our series on Creating Azure (hosted) WordPress Websites without knowing php or MySql!
All of the back-end infrastructure files of a WordPress website hosted on Azure Web App Service, are exposed via its Azure source control management site. You may need to make changes to the Azure hosted WordPress site’s web.config, wp-config.php, functions.php etc.
Every Azure App Service (website) has an associated ‘scm’ service website or a Site Extension named Kudu. It is accessed by using the Source Control Management entry point https://<site-name>.scm.azurewebsites.net. NOTE: A custom domain name will not resolve with the scm modification to its URL – you must use the original *.azurewebsites.net DNS name to access Kudu.
Kudu can also be accessed via the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) for your Azure website under Settings > Development Tools > Advanced Tools > Go > Read more about Kudu here.
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by Arlan Nugara | Feb 14, 2018 | WordPress
Within a month of building our first WordPress blog from the Azure Marketplace, we discovered that the website had been hacked. It had been injected with code we couldn’t find how to access and showed more than 20 additional blog posts pointing to random software download pages, all running from our custom domain with SSL!
We were fortunate to have noticed those extra posts as soon as we did – and before the domain’s reputation was compromised. We immediately deleted the hacked posts, and exported an xml file of our website contents for importing into a newly built ‘clean’ website infrastructure if necessary – which it was. Turned out to be faster and safer to rebuild the website than to discover exactly how and where ‘they’ had gotten in and the extent of the back-end infrastructure infiltration. Time was better spent learning how to secure and harden our WordPress website!
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by Arlan Nugara | Feb 14, 2018 | WordPress
Another post in our series on Creating Azure (hosted) WordPress Websites without knowing PHP or MySql!
Intro – Choosing WordPress Plugins
This is the current list of plugins that we have tested and use together successfully on our current WordPress (v4.8 at the time of this writing) websites hosted on Azure Platform as a Service (PaaS). Certainly there are a number of other variations of each of these plugins to be found, both free and premium, that will work together for your various website functionality – but these are what we’ve chosen and know are reliable for what we require. (Disclaimer – we have NO affiliation with any of these plugin products, except that we use them!)
- SMTP Mailer
- iThemes Security Pro
- Customize WordPress Login Page
- All-In-One-Intranet
- Advanced Sidebar Menu and Advanced Sidebar Menu Pro
- Breadcrumb
- Comet Cache
- Swifty Page Manager
- Advanced Access Manager
- Google Analytics Dashboard for WP
- Smooth Scroll Page Up/Down Buttons
- Page-List
- WP Edit
- Enlighter – Customizable Syntax Highlighter
- Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions
- Akismet Anti-Spam
- WP Security Audit Log
- Remove Dashboard Access
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by Arlan Nugara | Feb 13, 2018 | WordPress
Another post in our series on Creating Azure (hosted) WordPress Websites without knowing PHP or MySql!
Plugins are PHP scripts or small software apps that can be uploaded and installed on a WordPress website to extend and expand the functionality of the WordPress site, without having to know how to change the core code and learn PHP. WordPress was designed to be extended by plugins – modular programs that add functionality to a WordPress website. There are more than 40,000 free Plugins available on WordPress.org and thousands of Premium (not free) plugins that will deliver just about anything you want to add to your website.
For us, that means that we don’t have to learn PHP to add the specific functionality that we need on our custom websites – we just need to find the ‘right’ plugins. The caution in using plugins, is that they must be updated and tested for the latest WordPress platform version, play well with your website’s theme and other plugins you’re using, not slow down your website, nor contain ‘infecting’ code to cause security breaches.
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