Careful When Downloading Themes
Warning for new and existing WordPress users: DO NOT download WordPress themes from 3rd party “galleries”. Identify the original source of the theme and download directly from the authors website.
This is an excerpt from Derek Punsulan’s website from an article any Wordpress user should read. This details the problems surrounding using third party themes for your website, or just as templates. Yes, this is where all of my original trouble came from. I used a third party theme that had that one suspicious line of code in it that turned out being a backdoor for evil doers.
Some of these 3rd party sites only include the code as a way to keep track of who is using their theme, sure, but at the same time it leave you susceptible to other people.
November 27th, 2007 at 6:58 pm
Holy moley, hacked again. Dang dude. That’s why you’ve gotta code your own templates!
More work, but it’s satisfying and (seemingly) more secure!
Anyways, the new template is pretty skookum, I shall check out your other sections and sign up for the gallery in a few minutes here. Once I get a few things off of my plate, would you mind if I took a crack at designing a forum theme? It’s something I’ve never done a lot of, and I have a few ideas swirlin’ already.
November 27th, 2007 at 7:07 pm
Aaaaactually… I was going to ask you to do just that!
I was going to make you an Admin and proposition Richie if he wanted to be a Moderator as well, since it was mostly us 3 that came up with the idea and know where it should head anyways.
I made the last theme for monkeyslunch all on me own in like a night, haha. I can’t believe how badly marked up it was. The theme that screwed everything over was just one that I wanted to check out and see how someone did something and as soon as I activated it… BAM, that’s when it all started. Funny, since I wasn’t even going to use it in the first place. My fault for even dipping into the 3rd party area though.
I snagged a template off of the wordpress site and started theming it out for this round though. So far I’m having fun figuring out how to widgetize things, and play with them even further. The search bar for instance is actually a part of my sidebar and I can turn it on and off, really neat!
November 27th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
Which version of WordPress are you using? I’ve heard of the widgets and that, but I’m not sure if I can actually use them in my version.. perhaps I need to upgrade.
November 27th, 2007 at 11:41 pm
Its the latest version that I’m runnin’. 2.3.1
without dealing with any code.
It’s incredibly easy to add widget capability to your theme too! I’d recommend doing it just because of the convenience of being able to toss things in and out