There’s a set of requirements called the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (or “PCI DSS”) and it was developed by the PCISSC – (the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council)

These requirements are designed to provide a standardized set of consistent security measures for merchants to follow that are handling credit card transactions.

The standard includes 12 requirements for maintaining a secure operation:

Build and Maintain a Secure Network  Read the full post.

• Requirement 1: Install and maintain a firewall configuration to protect cardholder data
• Requirement 2: Do not use vendor-supplied defaults for system passwords and other security parameters

Tip on some steps: Before creating or editing files such as abspath.php or cforms.js, change your local directory to a folder named after the site you’re working on. This will help prevent accidental uploading of these edited files for one site onto another, which will cause the forms to stop working. Having these for backup for each site worked on also comes in handy.

1. Before beginning, be sure you have the latest cForms downloaded and unzipped from Delicious Days.

2. FTP to the plugins directory of the site, download a full backup copy of cForms.  Read the full post.

If you blog is installed in a sub-directory rather than the root, here is a list of common errors being seen when attempting wordpress upgrades or installation, upgrade, or removing plugins in wordpress versions 2.8+:

Unable to locate WordPress Plugin directory.

Warning: unlink(/tmp….

Unable to locate WordPress Content directory (wp-content)

How to fix:

The best solution is to create a new ftp login that goes directly to the sub-directory rather than to the root. This usually takes care of the problem right away. When you upgrade in the admin area, it normally asks you for this information before continuing.  Read the full post.

It may be common knowledge or common sense, but here’s a quick Q & A on the new built-in upgrade feature of Word Press 2.7 and up.

Starting with 2.7 I typically deactivate and delete the automatic upgrade plugin after upgrade. But mostly of curiosity I left one on when upgrading to 2.7.1.

Question:
Should I definitely deactivate and delete the automatic upgrade plugin once upgrading to 2.7? Will it make a difference leaving it on?  Read the full post.

We are happy users of the WP e-commerce shoppping cart not only for our own site but we use it often for clients as well.

Recently, one of our customers told us that they were being required by their credit card company to pass a certification test verifying that their website was PCI compliant and wanted us to attend to it.

The company doing the compliance check was called Trustkeeper, and I’m very proud to report that right out of the box, with no changes on our part related to their cart, WP e-commerce passed the PCI compliance test with flying colors.  Read the full post.

WordPress H1 Hack -
This allows you to change the H1 tag of the page without affecting the page name, title, and menu title of the page.

This has most commonly been used in the page.php file of the WordPress themes only, but can certainly be applied to any page that you would like the ability to set the h1 tag (or some cases, if you prefer, the h2 tag). Remember, it is recommended to set the default theme h2 tags displaying the header of the pages to H1 for an SEO advantage.  Read the full post.

There’s a really great plug-in that was made that allows the authors to have a profile page. One huge problem with it though, is that if the author has a long biography, it all runs together in one paragraph.

We’ve been using it in several places for quite awhile now and although it recognizes standard .html for making links, nothing we did would force manual linebreaks. It was REALLY irritating and quite unprofessional looking.

Over on Lorele’s blog I found a suggestion but I couldn’t get that working either so I posted on the actual plug-in page. Finally, things slowed down enough that I asked Heather, our #1 programmer to try and figure it out and she was able to.  Read the full post.

This website was for a collection agency based in Tukwila Washington that wanted to be able to easily edit their entire site, that had been designed several years ago.

Their 25+ page site previously required Front Page to edit, or another .html editor, and there was very little graphic appeal. It was all Times New Roman font on a white page, with the company logo in the upper left corner.

The design they chose (from Template Monster) was actually a Joomla template that we then converted to a 100% WordPress 2.5 compatible theme, including fully widgetized sidebars.  Read the full post.

There’s a very good roundup of what’s changing in the new WordPress version here, and after reading it, we’re making a formal decision NOT to upgrade this blog when it comes out, or use the new version for any projects currently under development.

This goes against our usual practice of upgrading immediately every time a new version is released, and but the changes are just too major to have to deal with until we know more about how it affects plug-ins that we use.  Read the full post.

The process of upgrading your WordPress used to be a tedious one. You had to manually backup all of your files, download them deactivate all your plug-ins upload the new version run the upgrade

Assuming that everything went okay, you then had to manually reactivate all of your plug-ins. I went through the step by step WordPress upgrade using a video on my main blog, and even though it was fairly straightforward it still took up too much of my time.

Thanks to a plug-in that was released last summer the process is now seamless and can be completed in under 60 seconds.  Read the full post.