Great News: I’ve been meaning to add a general WordPress forum to this site for a while, but none of the options seemed to work well for what I wanted to do.
All I needed was a simple discussion forum, integrated into WordPress – I really didn’t want to mess around with phpBB or the likes. bbPress is in a constant state of beta and gives me a headache every time I want to make it work, SimplePress is ugly and basically all of the above are overcomplicated.
Enter Tal.ki – an embeddable forum solution that promises to give me a forum with only one line of code, or alternatively as a WordPress Plugin! It’s not live on this site – let’s test it out!
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I was working on a secure site with sensitive video material that we needed strict members access to. Even though many plugins can make sure your direct permalinks can only be seen by logged in members, direct links to files in your wp-content directory are still accessible to others. They can even be hotlinked from other sites.
One way around this is to move the wp-content directory outside the web visible portion of your directory on the server, but even so WordPress can always link to such files. A better way is to tell your server not to give access to certain files (say ending with mp4 or mp3) and only allow such access from your own domain.
We can use Apache Mod Rewrite for this – it’s a complex language that you can utilise in your .htaccess file within the wp-content folder.
Let me show you how to keep prying eyes out of your content.
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The path to PHP is
/usr/bin/php
This is good to know if you need to setup a cron job which triggers a PHP file. Calling it from a web browser directly is not a problem, but if you have to call it from the command line or as a scheduled task you need to call it with
/usr/bin/php yourfile.php
You can also use wget or cURL but that’s often not reliable.
If your PHP file gives you an output (usually to the browser screen), your server will send you an email. If you;d rather this didn’t happen, direct it to nowhere like so:
/usr/bin/php yourfile.php > /dev/null 2>&1
Dr. Web is a Russian anti-virus utility that comes bundles with Plesk. It’s good and it tries to keep the bad guys out.
To keep up with all the mutations out there it tries to update itself frequently but usually doesn’t succeed because the Dr. Web server is busy or down or somehow now working as it should be. Sadly this means that every time something goes wrong I get an email once every hour… imagine what this means when you have 11 servers to look after: an overflowing inbox.
Here’s the solution: tweak a system file and divert those emails to nowhere:
Show me how!
