inspired2write

Do you have BadBehavior installed? You can find it in the extend/plugin directory, or from your ‘add plugin’ area of your admin dashboard. BadBehavior will help stop malicious activities, but it’s not for like if you want to ban someone due to improper language etc. Not sure what you were referring to when you said, ‘ban misbehaving users’.

IP blocking is otherwise what you’ll want to do, or also add IP’s as a result of reading the BadBehavior logs.

/wp-content/themes/[theme used]

As Matt mentioned, it looks like it came from your theme. There are lots of themes that may seem legit, but if you scan themes before activating you may find encrypted codes, which may contain malicious codes causing a security concern, or at the very least containing links to bad sites.

As for the plugin – thanks Matt! I know it’s working because it sent an email after I did an upgrade of another plugin. 🙂

Hi Sue,
There is a ton to learn, but hang in there and if you’re willing to do quite a bit of reading you should be able to get going.

I’d like to put navigation tabs in my header but can’t find out how.

That’s a possibility if you do a hack to your theme’s header, or better yet, go through the WP theme directory and find a theme that already has that feature available.

I’d like to add a different opt in box and images here and there but don’t know how.

Not sure what you mean by an opt in box, unless you’re speaking of an opt in for emails. But, images can be added into posts and pages from the ‘post’ and ‘page’ area in your dashboard. You can also use the media library from your admin panel for images, like if you wanted to add images into a sidebar widget etc. you can upload an image and then get the url path to add them into the widget.

I don’t know HTML yet. I was told not to mess around with anything regarding the theme in the dashboard or it would permanently ruin the original work that was done.

You can modify themes to your liking, however you need to leave the credits to the theme creator in the theme (footer is generally where it is). Unless you paid for a theme with the understanding that you can remove it.

There are lots of sites online that have html tutorials, but much of what you would use with WP is also php and css.

I didn’t think wordpress was this shoddy.

Out of frustration, I can understand how you feel. It isn’t a WP issue, but rather a potential problematic plugin, and/or possibly a conflict with the plugin and the configuration of your hosts server (assuming you’re plugin is a security one that may require some configuration settings.

Brekat23,
phpMyAdmin is accessible through your host’s cpanel.
Also, you didn’t specify which security plugin you activated, but if is something like an Apache password protect etc., you may also be experiencing a challenge due to settings with your host. You could send them a support ticket and ask them what they see causing the 500 error.

ramonb,

Passwords for your database must match your wp-config.php file, otherwise you won’t be able to login to your admin area. Did you change or check those?

Are you uploading them into the proper file? ‘uploads’? Also, did you change themes, or add any plugins, which could possibly be problematic. Disable those to test if it resolves your problem, and revert back to the default wp template for your version. That also brings to mind the question to be sure the templates you’re using are for your version of wp, which you should consider upgrading soon.