Wordpress Plugins

Getting Rid of Spam in Your Contact Forms

If you have a contact form on your lawyer web site or legal blog, then odds are you have gotten your share of spam contact form emails. If you dont have proper CAPTCHA Security, then you might get 1000’s of spammer contact form emails, which are really irritating. You can beat the spammers easily by making sure you have the latest wordpress contact form plugin with captcha security. WHAT IS CAPTCHA? A CAPTCHA is a program that protects websites against bots by generating and grading tests that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot. For example, humans can read distorted text as the one shown below, but current computer programs can’t: The term CAPTCHA (for Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford of Carnegie Mellon University. So the bottom line is that you want to have the Captcha security feature on your contact form. If you have a WordPress site, then it can be much easier to set this feature up.  Most of the contact form plugins today have some sort of Captcha security you can setup that forces the user who filles out the form, to have to put in the 4 digit code before hitting submit. CONTACT FORM 7 – Download it here Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on. This is a pretty simple form and one that Ive used in the past but sometimes I have found that if you dont update the plugin or the Captcha plugin, spam can sometimes still get through or an error message will come up on the captcha portion of the form. SO I would now recommend using the contact form plugin below, the Fast Secure Contact Form. FAST SECURE CONTACT FORM – Download it here This plugin allows a webmaster to easily create and add contact forms to WordPress. The contact form will let the user send emails to a site’s admin. An administration panel is present, where the webmaster can create and preview unlimited forms. Features a super easy admin panel, multi-form feature, autoresponder, no templates to mess with, and an option to redirect visitors to any URL after the message is sent. Includes CAPTCHA and Akismet support to block all common spammer tactics. Spam is no longer a problem. This is a VERY GOOD contact form solution.  You can create multiple forms, you can add them to pages and to your sidebar easily as a widget.   You can setup a confirmation page that the user is taken to after filling out the form, this is a good idea for multiple reasons. Once this is setup, you can then setup a Google performance goal in Google analytics or a conversion in Google adwords. If your site is not in WordPress, then there are other ways to add the Captcha security feature.  Don’t let the spammers win! Upgrade your site today, and as long as you have this form, you wont get many spams via the contact form, its a great solution. CAPTCHA: Telling Humans and Computers Apart Automatically A CAPTCHA is a program that protects websites against bots by generating and grading tests that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot. For example, humans can read distorted text as the one shown below, but current computer programs can’t:

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WordPress Plugins for Lawyers – WordPress Automatic Upgrade

It is very important that WordPress is upgraded regularly as old versions can leave you prone to attack.  A lot of people will just never upgrade and this can leave some security holes, so its key to upgrade your legal WordPress site or blog on a regular basis. Its pretty easy to upgrade WordPress by just downloading the software and then following the basic instructions, but it’s even easier with this auto upgrade plugin! WordPress Automatic Upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions. WordPress automatic upgrade upgrades your wordpress installation by doing the following steps. Backs up the files and makes available a link to download it. Backs up the database and makes available a link to download it. Downloads the latest files from http://wordpress.org/latest.zip and unzips it. Puts the site in maintenance mode. De-activates all active plugins and remembers it. Upgrades wordpress files. Gives you a link that will open in a new window to upgrade installation. Re-activates the plugins. The plugin can also can be run in a automated mode where in you do not have to click on any links to go to the next step. Go here to download this plugin now

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Backing Up Your WordPress Site

Your WordPress database contains every post, every comment and every link you have on your blog. If your database gets erased or corrupted, you stand to lose everything you have written. There are many reasons why this could happen and not all are things you can control. But what you can do is back up your data. After all, it is important. Right? Some people might not even realize they need to backup the site or that its even possible. Usually you can do it from the web hosting control panel, but its somewhat complex and technical.  Yet like most things in WordPress, theres an easier way to get it done using a plugin. WordPress has plenty of information on how to backup your WordPress site and how important it is here. There are plenty of free plugins available to backup your wordpress sites but I am using one that is a paid plugin called Backup Buddy and its very easy to use and works well.  Hopefully you will never need to know if it works but it’s important to have this done. Also when you backup your files, you should have them on a different server then your site is on, in case something bad happens to your existing web server. BACKUP BUDDY PLUGIN FOR WORDPRESS: BackupBuddy is an all-in-one solution for backups, restoration, and migration. The single backup file created by the plugin can be used with the importer script to quickly and easily restore your site on the same server or even migrate to a new server with a different domain and database. Whether you’re an end user or a developer, this plugin is sure to bring you peace of mind and added safety in the event of data loss. Our goal is to keep the backup, restoration, and migration processes easy, fast, and reliable. You can find more about it here

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WordPress Plugins for Legal Sites – Get Rid of Spammer Comments

One of the great things about using WordPress is that you can add "plug-ins" which are programs that add functionality to your wordpress blog/site. There are 1000's of different wordpress plug ins and they are free and usually very easy to install and setup. You can goto the WordPress plugin directory to find all the different plugins that are available.One of the first plugins you should have is the Akismet anti spam plugin. Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog's "Comments" admin screen. This plugin really works great once installed because it captures all the spammer comments and if you don't have this in place, you will get bombarded with spammer comments that you will have to weed through in order to get to the regular non spam comments. Download this plugin now. You'll need a WordPress.com API key to use it.

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