Thursday 4 September 2014

4 Considerations to Keep in Mind While Developing Wordpress Plugins

Thanks to the massively growing popularity of Wordpress as the choicest content management system out there, it is also becoming increasingly prone to the hacking attacks from hackers across the web realm. The growing tapestry of this web hackers has always posed a threat to all things web, but since Wordpress powers millions of websites on this date, there is a growing need to deal with the threat with much potency and effect.



There are loopholes that may or may not be filled, but there are techniques that can still make the Wordpress powered web solutions impenetrable. While creating a WP theme or plugin, there have to be certain measures taken in order to ensure that there are no obvious backdoors left open for the malicious coders to make an unauthorized entry through. Following is a set of amazingly useful techniques that will help you secure your Wordpress website with a great degree of assurance:

Keep the Debugger ON

Granted, during the development process, the coders prefer to keep all the error notifications at bay so that they can create the codes in an uninterrupted manner. But by doing so, they unintentionally invite the hackers who might be prowling around. When you turn the debugger on, you are notified of the possible errors that might indicate someone trying to break in to your site, and that's something that should more than convince you to keep the debugger on. The errors can thus be seen and you can act accordingly.



And for enabling the debugging, you only need to add this small bit of code to your wp-config.php file

define( WP_DEBUG, true );
Don't access the Files on Site Directly

There is no need to do so, but sometimes, the default settings make it possible for you to access the files directly. Many files are pertaining to the plugins as well as to the themes, and this causes a serious nuisance that needs to be averted. If you are wondering why, the truth of the fact is that accessing the plugin files directly also gives out the installation path of Wordpress.

As iterated before, this error needs to be averted, and thus, we add the ASBPATH check. What it does is that it terminates the script as soon as it branches out of the Wordpress execution.

if ( ! defined( 'ABSPATH' ) ) exit; // Exit if accessed directly.

Prevent Unauthorized Access

This one happens to be the most important aspect of any website. Attempts for unauthorized access are experienced much too often on the websites. But it depends a lot on the webmasters on how they keep a check on these accesses and make their website inaccessible to those who aren't authorized.  The current_user_can() function can be used in order to determine if the particular user has the access to a functionality or not.

Avoid CURL While Posting from a Remote Location

When posting from a remote location, you should, against all advice, avoid CURL. And you can do so if you use the WordPress' WP_HTTP class and wrapper functions, wp_remote_get and wp_remote_post.

Thus, there are various tools and techniques that make the job of enhancing the overall feature-set of your website a breeze. If you happen to be a beginner, there is every chance that you may be missing out on one or more of these techniques. And there is no guarantee that even the experienced programmers have used all the afore-mentioned techniques. Regardless of your experience, the techniques come handy, and thus, they should occupy an an important part in your Wordpress development stratagem.

This article is shared and copyright by Wordprax Ltd.- a leading Wordpress service company committed to deliver all wordpress related services . This company deals in Wordpress custom plugin development service and Wordpress conversion services.