Creating a magazine: General advice?

  • ak

    (@sublime-oblivion)


    10 years, 11 months ago

    Dear all,

    Since I got pharma hacked two years ago, I migrated my blogs to wordpress.com. Now, however, I am starting up a new project – a magazine dedicated to English language translations from the European media – so catching up with what WP.org has become in the past few years has become a must. Since this seems to be the “general” forum here, I’m posting it here, and will appreciate feedback.

    (1) Now obviously following my experience I’m rather paranoid about security. I have read many tips about how to harden a WP blog against attacks, but I’m not sure which ones have the best/most reliably returns on effort.

    Is it worth paying for something like VaultPress? Or is it more effective to get security solutions from my hosting provider (Bluehost?). Or maybe just switch hosts to a specialized WordPress hoster like Synthesis?

    (2) I will be needed multiple taxonomies, i.e. beyond just Categories and tags (e.g. news/open/interview/etc; politics/economy/fashion/etc; language its translated from; publication name; name of original author(s); name of translator(s). I see there are many multiple taxonomies plugins as well as a method to hardcode it yourself, so what is the most reliable/appropriate course of action here?

    (3) Will need a good plugin for glossary (i.e. there are some foreign words that can’t adequately be translated into English, so you leave the original and get the glossary definition to hover over it when gliding your cursor across it).

    (4) Something that I have found very useful (not from WP experience, but from managing a forum) is a plugin/add-on from where you can make modifications to the template files without altering them directly (so you don’t have to redo changes when you upgrade). Is there an equivalent for WordPress?

    (5) Themes… Unless someone has a better solution, I’m going to keep it brief: Get the Genesis theme and buy/tweak a magazine child theme for it, or just buy some ready made magazine theme from someplace like Theme Forest?

    Thanks in advance for any tips, suggestions, and updates on what I missed in the past 2 years.

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  • wensco

    (@wendola)

    10 years, 11 months ago

    Hello!

    My site was hacked a couple of years ago, so I understand what a pain is it to deal with that. Regarding your first question, I would recommend taking some basic measures to harden your site against attack, with probably the easiest and most important being to get rid of the “Admin” username. Use a strong password and avoid using the same password for your host or FTP login. You can also consider using two-factor authentication.

    There are many plugins available that can help secure your site without too much effort on your part, such as those that lock users out after x number of unsuccessful login attempts (Login Lockdown is one). You can also find plugins that monitor your site such as WordFence. There are also third party sites and other services that provide a total solution. VaultPress is a great option since it’s made and supported by WordPress users for WordPress users.

    What’s best for you depends on how comfortable you are with implementing some of the more technical aspects of securing your site, whether or not you want to be responsible for backing up and restoring your site in case of attack, and how much you want to spend to not have to worry about it. Although with hosting, you generally get what you pay for, just switching hosts is not going to fully secure your site unless they specifically claim to do so.

    Regarding question #4, you could consider creating your own child theme. There are tons of tutorials online that will give you step-by-step directions, but basically, you create a child theme in which you modify only parts of your theme, such as applying different styling in the CSS. You can then safely update your parent theme without overwriting the few custom changes you have in your child theme. The Codex is a good place to start: http://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes

    Hope that helps! Also hoping some other users will chime in on your other questions. Good luck!

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
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