WPcademy

October 17, 2019

How To Unblock Limit Login Attempts in WordPress

Limit Login Attempt may lock you out too, if you entered the wrong password a few times. In this article, we will show you how to unblock limit login attempts plugin in WordPress.

Delete via FTP or File Manager

The easiest solution for beginners is to delete Limit Login Attempts plugin using FTP and then re-install it later once you can login.

You need to login to your site via FTP and then go to /wp-content/plugins/.

=> Once you’re there, you can simply delete the limit-login-attempts plugin folder.

You can also do this using your web host’s cPanel File Manager.

=> Simply browse to /wp-content/plugins/ and delete the limit-login-attempts folder.

Limit WordPress Login MySQL Query via phpMyAdmin

unblock limit login attempts mysql query

For advanced users who are familiar with MySQL and phpMyAdmin, you can easily run the following SQL query, and it will clear all lockouts.

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = '' WHERE option_name = 'limit_login_lockouts' LIMIT 1;

If you want to unblock your specific IP e.g. 111.222.111.222, then run a query like this:

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = REPLACE(option_value, '111.222.111.222', '') WHERE option_name = 'limit_login_lockouts' LIMIT 1;

Make sure to update your IP address and also the database table prefix if you changed your database prefix.

We hope this article helped you unblock limit login attempts in WordPress.

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October 17, 2019

How to Limit Access by IP in WordPress

As a security measure, we decided to limit access by IP to our wp-login.php file in WordPress. We already have our WP Admin directory on limited access by IP. In this article, we will show you how to limit access by IP to your wp-login.php file in WordPress.

Note: This tutorial is for advance user.

Open your main .htaccess file and put this code towards the top of the file before everything else.

<Files wp-login.php>
        order deny,allow
        Deny from all
# whitelist the following IP address
allow from xx.xxx.xx.xx
#whitelist Gainesvile IP Address
allow from xx.xxx.xx.xx
</Files>

Don’t forget to replace the IP addresses with your own. The only real downside to this is if you have dynamic IPs, then it can be a problem. Otherwise, this works like charm. Also, the wp-login.php styling breaks, but that is not a priority at this moment. We just wanted to prevent the failed login attempts.

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October 17, 2019

How to Create Simple Login URL in WordPress

When working with a non-technical client, you often end up telling them well the login url is yourdomain.com/wp-login.php. Some folks suggest /wp-admin/ instead of the wp-login.php url. Wouldn’t it be so much better if you can just tell your clients to go to yoursite.com/login/. Well, in this article, we will show you how to create simpler login URL in WordPress for your clients.

Open the .htaccess file and paste the following code above the WordPress rewrite rule

 RewriteRule ^login$ http://yoursite.com/wp-login.php [NC,L]

Don’t forget to replace the domain name to your site’s domain. That’s it. Now you can suggest your clients to go to yourname.com/login/ rather than wp-login.php

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October 17, 2019October 17, 2019

How to Change the Login Logo URL in WordPress

By default the login logo url points to WordPress.org. If you have a custom WordPress login logo, or a completely custom WordPress login page design, then you should probably change the login logo url to your main site or anything that you think is more relevant.

All you have to do is simply paste the codes below in your theme’s functions.php file:

<?php
add_filter( 'login_headerurl', 'custom_loginlogo_url' );
function custom_loginlogo_url($url) {
    return 'http://www.yourdomain.com';
}
?>

Don’t forget to change the URL to your own site otherwise users will be directed to our site.

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Change the Login Logo in WordPress

October 17, 2019

How to Change the Login Logo in WordPress

why not give your wordpress website a custom login logo to match the branding and keep the users from feeling alienated. In this article, we will learn how to change the login logo in WordPress.

First you need to open your theme’s functions.php file and then paste the following code:

function custom_loginlogo() {
echo '&lt;style type="text/css"&gt;
h1 a {background-image: url('.get_bloginfo('template_directory').'/images/login_logo.png) !important; }
&lt;/style&gt;';
}
add_action('login_head', 'custom_loginlogo');

Don’t forget to keep a transparent logo file in your theme’s images folder either. It should be named login_logo.png or anything else if you decide to change the image path.

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October 17, 2019

Easy Guide to Disable Automatic Updates in WordPress

In this tutorial, we will learn how to disable automatic background updates in WordPress.

Configuring and Disabling Automatic WordPress Updates

The easiest way to do this is by installing and activating Disable Updates Manager plugin.

Go to Settings » Disable Updates Manager to configure your settings.

Alternatively, you can disable automatic updates in WordPress by adding this line of code in your wp-config.php file:

 define( 'WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE', false );

This will disable all automatic WordPress updates.

However if you want to receive minor core updates, but disable theme and plugin updates, then you can do so by adding the following filters in your theme’s functions.php file or in a site-specific plugin.

Disable automatic WordPress plugin updates:

 add_filter( 'auto_update_plugin', '__return_false' );

Disable automatic WordPress theme updates:

add_filter( 'auto_update_theme', '__return_false' );

Now that you know how to disable automatic updates in WordPress, the question is should you disable it?

On our sites, we have disabled automatic plugin and theme updates while keeping the minor core updates enabled.

We are listing the pros and cons of automatic updates below to help you make the decision that’s best for you.

Pros

You don’t have to worry about updating minor WordPress releases which are pushed out for maintenance and security purposes.

This is something that you only got if you paid for managed WordPress hosting, but now it’s available for everyone (at least for minor releases).

You also have the benefit of knowing that if there was a crucial security issue with WordPress or a popular plugin, then WordPress will automatically update even if you are on a vacation, so your site is secure.

Cons

There is a slight chance that automatic updates can break your site. In our experience, the minor releases haven’t broken any of our sites yet.

But that’s because we are following the best practices and not modifying any core files. If you modify WordPress core files, then these automatic updates can override them.

Although it hasn’t happened yet, but if WordPress ever felt necessary to push a security update for a theme you are using, then there is a chance that it will break your website specially if you have modified your theme files.

Similar to that, automatic plugin updates can break your site as well because there are just too many variables (different server environments, plugin combinations, etc).

Now it’s important to know that these updates will not break majority of websites, but considering WordPress powers millions of websites, a small percentage can still be a lot of sites.

The worst part about this update was that the core team did not communicate with site-owners. So there is a very good chance that some people haven’t even realized that their SEO is at risk because of a security update that possibly deactivated their main SEO plugin.

Conclusion

Normally when WordPress core updates, there is an announcement that follows with it.

However with the past two automatic plugin updates, we haven’t seen a blog post or an email from WordPress.

It would be nice to have the WordPress team send an email when they push out security updates to a plugin. Also there should be a way to notify the site owner if the update wasn’t successful, so they can fix the issues as soon as possible.

October 17, 2019

Easy Guide to Create a Wiki Knowledge Base Using WordPress

In this tutorial, we will learn how to create a wiki knowledge base in WordPress.

WordPress Wiki & Knowledge Base Plugin

If you want to add a wiki knowledge base to your existing WordPress site, then the easiest way to do it is by using a WordPress wiki knowledge base plugin. There are several plugins available, but we recommend Knowledge Base by PressApps.

All you have to do is install and activate the plugin. Once activated, it adds a Knowledge Base tab in your WordPress admin area.

Knowledge Base is it’s own custom post type with categories and tags which allows you to organize your documentation.

The best part about this is that you can add it on your main site, and it will match your brand style / formatting for the most part. It also comes with public / member only voting system, custom widgets, drag-drop functionality, etc. The downside is that it costs $20.

In our next method, we will show you how you can accomplish all of this for free, but it does involve code.

WordPress Wiki & Knowledge Base Code Snippet

Another way to add a wiki knowledge base to your existing WordPress site or even create a dedicated wiki site is to use the code snippet method.

The downside is that you have to copy/paste a little bit of code which can be scary for beginners. The upside is that it gives you more freedom, and it’s completely free unlike the first two options.

We will do our best to give step by step instructions.

Note: Before you start, please create a complete backup of your WordPress site.

First thing you need to do is install and activate the Knowledgebase CPT plugin. This simple plugin creates a custom post type called knowledge_baseand a taxonomy called section.

This allows you to easily add your wiki articles and organize them into sections.

Once you have a few articles and sections, you would need to display them on your website. This is where you need to deal with a little bit of code.

Start by adding this code snippet into your theme’s functions.php file or a site-specific plugin.

function wpb_knowledgebase() {
// Get Knowledge Base Sections
$kb_sections = get_terms('section','orderby=name&hide_empty=0');
// For each knowledge base section
foreach ($kb_sections as $section) :
$return .= '

This code lists all the knowledge base articles under the section they were filed in.

Next all you need to do is create a new WordPress page and add [knowledgebase] shortcode inside it. Save your page and preview it.

It looks very plain right now, but we can add some styling to it. You can use this CSS as starting point and then continue editing to match your own colors.

Paste the following code in your theme’s style.css file.

.kb_section {
float: left;
width: 280px;
max-width: 280px;
margin: 10px;
background-color: #f5f5f5;
border: 1px solid #eee;
}
h4.kb-section-name {
background-color: #eee;
margin: 0;
padding: 5px;
}
ul.kb-section-list {
list-style-type: none;
list-style: none;
display: inline;
}   
li.kb-section-name {
list-style-type: none;
display: inline;
}
ul.kb-article-list {
list-style-type: none;
list-style: none;
}   
li.kb-article-name {
list-style-type: none;
}
div.kb_section:nth-of-type(3n+1) {clear:left;}
div.kb_section:nth-of-type(3n+3) {}

This how it looked on our demo site where we are using Twenty Twelve theme.

By default, your sections will be displayed in alphabetical order. However if you want to change the order of sections, then you can do that by installing Custom Taxonomy Order NE plugin. This will allow you to drag-drop your sections in the right order.