Adopting a new WordPress theme

After a pointer from rc3, I read an interesting article earlier today:

• Why you should never search for free WordPress themes in Google

In short, 9 of the top 10 Google search results for free WordPress themes provide themes full of malware and spammy links. The one site that doesn’t is the official site. Unfortunately, I have to say from experience that the free themes on the official site are consistently poor in quality.

You can verify that your current theme is free of malware by using the Theme-Check and Theme Authenticity Checker plugins.

The theme I was using before was clean, but the design quality was low. I began to consider buying a quality theme somewhere, but the article did point out two decent sites that have some quality free themes:

• Graph Paper Press
• Woo Themes

I can’t vouch them, as all I have to go on is the word of that article. I did end up adopting the free TypeBased theme from the latter site, and I am very happy with it so far. It’s well-designed, polished, and it integrates nicely with WordPress 3.0.

Oddly, Theme-Check does flag TypeBased as using base64_encode() and base64_decode() functions, but from what I can tell it’s in the legitimate context of an FTP API.

Going to CloudCamp on Tuesday Oct 26

I’m heading to CloudCamp Toronto this Tuesday October 26 along with Antonio, Marius, and a few other people I know. Let me know if you are heading there too, so can  meet up and chat or maybe grab some food.

Cheers,

Leons Petrazickis

Blog dehacked

I apologize if you saw any strange malware warnings last Friday. Someone exploited a hole in my rather old installation of WordPress and added a nasty Javascript scriptlet to every post. They also published every one of my drafts and also truncated every post title to a single word.

Google Webmaster Tools alerted me to the situation with an email. They have since confirmed that all the malware has been removed.

This involved upgrading WordPress to 3.0 as well as going through every post to remove the payload and fix the title. I took the opportunity to purge many of the posts.

WordPress 3.x seems much nicer than my creaky old install of WordPress 2.x. The widgets are very handy, as is the integrated update functionality for both WordPress and WordPress plugins.