How to recover a hacked WordPress website

Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Automattic and co-creator of WordPress, has garnered a reputation for erratic and often controversial business decisions. Over the years, Automattic has steadily acquired and absorbed popular plugins and services within the WordPress ecosystem, raising concerns about monopolistic control and the future of open-source contributions. From…

Code Audits for Jetpack: Why We’re Auditing Every Update As the WordPress community grapples with the recent fallout between Automattic, the parent company behind WordPress and Jetpack, and WP Engine, trust in Automattic has taken a significant hit. Allegations of unfair practices, trademark manipulation, and hostile business tactics have emerged,…

Without wading too much into the Automattic + WPEngine feud it has become evident that the availability of the Wordpress plugin repository that allows and facilitates plugin updates across the entire Wordpress ecosystem has become a vendetta tool. Being blocked by Wordpress likely means that their systems are checking the…

Customizing the appearance of embedded HubSpot forms on your WordPress website can be challenging, especially when dealing with cross-browser compatibility issues. In this guide, we’ll walk through the process of applying custom styles to HubSpot forms, overcoming common challenges, and ensuring your styles are loaded consistently across different browsers. 1.…

Website speed matters now more than ever. If you’re using WPBakery Visual Composer on WordPress, you know it’s a fantastic tool for creating stunning websites. But its impact on performance can’t be ignored. Bloated code and excessive requests slow things down, hurting both user experience and SEO. Let’s dive into…

Embarking on a transformative journey to strengthen your online presence involves more than just outsourcing WordPress development—it extends to the strategic outsourcing of ongoing site management to seasoned agencies, adding layers of value to your digital footprint. As we navigate this comprehensive guide, our focus broadens from the intricacies of…

In the realm of WordPress development, AJAX is a pivotal technology for creating dynamic and interactive web experiences. AJAX empowers websites to fetch and display content seamlessly without requiring a full page refresh. However, in certain scenarios, the URLs generated within these AJAX-fetched contents might necessitate modification for a variety…

In the dynamic economic landscape of Toronto, where businesses must contend with various economic climates, embarking on a web design or development project takes on heightened importance. The intersection of economic dynamics with the digital realm underscores the necessity of a strategic approach that caters to businesses’ unique needs across…

Well it happened to you. You receive an email from a customer, or perhaps your web host : Your Wordpress site is displaying an “unsafe website” browser error. Or maybe it is now showing some gambling advertisements. It clearly has been compromised. What do you do now? Based on over…

Increasing the revenue of an existing e-commerce business in Toronto can be a challenging task, as it involves competing with other businesses and attracting and retaining customers. However, there are several strategies that can help an e-commerce business in Toronto increase its revenue. Below are some steps to follow to…

Web design is an important aspect of a business’s online presence, as it can have a significant impact on the success of the business. Good web design involves a combination of factors, including a user-friendly interface, visually appealing graphics and layout, and easy navigation. It is also important for the…

Hello! In this post we will be walking through how to interact with the Wordpress Cron system. We will delve into how to establish your scheduled jobs properly using the built-in Wordpress cron system, with no other external interactions such as the OS cronjob system. This will be useful for…

Hello! After Working with Wordpress and Woocommerce for a while, watching it grow and evolve over time, there are some constraints that we have been encountered over the years in particular with larger enterprise projects. Wordpress appeals to a massive audience (43% market share to be exact). In this massive…

Hello! There is quite a bit of documentation with how to scale your Wordpress site for enterprise. Additionally there are quite a few enterprise Wordpress hosting solutions that allow you to “stage” your content on staging sites with automated methods to push or clone the staging site (once an internal…

Hello! Now, more than ever, companies businesses and individuals are leveraging web based collaborative tools like Zoom. Whether it be for company meetings, training sessions or sales seminars, the idea is to use video conferencing technology to replace in-person interactions. Zoom has emerged as a leading player, being positioned favourably…

Hello! It often becomes a requirement for certain levels of clients to ensure service level agreements for uptime and redundancy are kept. What does this mean? Well we want to ensure that a particular site can withstand a single point of failure, which usually means we would need to expand…

Hello! Sometimes its necessary to perform mass or automated actions against your Wordpress content. Reasons for this can vary, but in our scenario there was a bug in a plugin relating to translated content via WPML where afte a fix / plugin update was applied, resolving the content errors was…

Hello! What a topic : how speed up your Wordpress site. There are so many elements and factors that contribute to site speed, it is my intention to cover each area that contributes or affects overall site speed, specifically with a Wordpress site. Being the most popular CMS in the…

Hello! Without a doubt, the covid-19 pandemic has caused a massive disruption to the global economy including a fundamental shift to how small, medium and large enterprise businesses can conduct their day-to-day operations. The impact of social distancing and other quarantine strategies as dictated by the various health regulatory bodies…

Hello! There are several key best practices insofar as how to deal with security intrusions, including but not limited to restoring from backups on a clean server. In this article, I will be going over how to create an automated shell script that completes the following actions across multiple Wordpress…

Hello! Trends in web design have come and gone over the years, however there have been some recurring indicators that have manifested as good web design in different iterations as styles change, web development technologies change and the internet changes. CSS, HTML and Javascript frameworks have all come a long…

One of the biggest roadblocks to starting a new business in Toronto is the upfront costs involved with opening a store or even securing office space. With today’s online economy, though, those expenses can be eliminated by opening an E-Commerce Site. These online sites provide you with a great virtual…

Are you thinking about starting your own business in Toronto? There are a number of benefits to owning your own small business. You’re the boss, for one, and you get to make all of the decisions about the company, its products/services, and its direction. While starting a new business in…

Hello! If you are operating a local business in Toronto, one of the most important things you need to do is maintain a web presence. Whether your business is a startup, business services or restaurant : your web presence is key to the fundamental survival and operation of your business.…

Hello! Many years ago (2015 to be exact), we published an article on how to create self-populating dropdown forms using the Drupal 7 Webform API. Now that the year is 2019 and Drupal 8 has been “Released” for quite some time now, with 8.7.1 as of May 2019, we thought…

  Install our Free Wordpress CDN plugin by Register on our CDN dashboard and then install our wordpress pluginHello! Site speed has, for quite a while now, been a significant factor towards expectation of user experience as well as for things like organic Google ranking. When a website is slow…

Try out our Free CDN service by installing the Shift8 CDN Wordpress pluginHello! We thought it would be an interesting challenge both from a DevOPS perspective as well as a web development and integration perspective to create our own fully managed content delivery network. Utilization of the network is geared…

Hello! We are looking for a Full Stack PHP Developer to work on multiple projects for our clients. We are a digital agency located in Toronto Canada and work with small and large enterprise organizations across many sectors. We are looking for inspired and experienced people to help complement an…

Hello! Why bother writing a port scanner in Javascript you might ask? Well javascript is many things, however the majority of its use is based on its original design to be synchronously executed in-browser using a single thread. Because of this, it becomes a challenge to write code outside of…

Hello! First and foremost, why would you want to block WPScan from probing your site? Well we all know that security through obscurity is a bad practice. That said the risks of malicious activity on your site is undoubtedly heightened through many points of information disclosure that is freely available…

Hello! Yes of course WPBakery / Visual Composer is bloated. Absolutely correct its more ideal to simply create your own page template with a custom Wordpress query and design your own post grid from scratch. For smaller budget Wordpress projects where time is money, it is sometimes ideal to go…

Hello! Working with wordpress for a while now, we noticed that many actions, whether administrative in nature or building a Wordpress query on the front end, are dependent on the built-in admin-ajax.php or Wordpress AJAX API. Since many 3rd party plugins depend on this Ajax API to dynamically push and…

Hello! In the past we have written about how to protect your Wordpress media files. In the past exercises we utilized a strategy to set a session cookie with encrypted details that can be read and validated at the http service (i.e. nginx) as well as application (php/wordpress) level. Since…

  Need this implemented on your site? Click here and fill out our quote form!   Hello! There are many reasons why your Woocommerce store may need a system to accommodate verifying the identity of your customers. Depending on what your selling and the local or federal laws that are…

Hello! Sometimes its necessary to make site-wide changes to Wordpress posts in order to save time and programmatically propagate changes without having to edit each post one at a time. For bulk manipulation of Wordpress data, it is sometimes effective to write a command line PHP script to hook into…

* Update : Thank you Vice for writing an article about my script! Unfortunately it seems as though facebook is actually blocking the ability for anyone to share the article. I wonder why? * Update 2 : Facebook is now allowing the Vice article to be shared, only after about…

Hello! Being a Toronto based web design and development agency means that we interact with a significant number of Wordpress sites. This tends to happen when a project starts (obviously), but often continues after a site is launched. This is something that we offer along the lines of “post launch…

The method of designing a logo and formulating or refreshing a brand is a practice that I have become much more comfortable with over the years. The identity of a business and how that business is characterized by the world is, at first glance defined by their logo. I’ve put…

Hello! Recently we published guides how to push Wordpress sites with Jenkins or how to push Wordpress sites with a simple shell script. We thought it might be useful to give an overview of how to streamline your code integration process with Jenkins , GitHub and Bash shell scripting. The…

Hello! XSS (or cross site scripting) attacks are a common method to maliciously execute actions against a website installation. In particular this type of attack vector is useful when dealing with a CMS like Wordpress where you have administrative user accounts to target. This means that if you are able…

Hello! We recently had a requirement from a client to generate content on a page specifically based on the geolocation coordinates of the visitor’s IP address. Now this sort of mechanism isn’t totally new, however we decided to develop a Wordpress plugin called Shift8 GeoIP that would obtain this information…

Hello! Woocommerce is a great easy-to-implement and versatile e-commerce platform. With the robust development community, expanding the core functionality can be relatively straight forward with the availability of a wide assortment of 3rd party plugins for Woocommerce. One of the things that we felt was missing, but a simple requirement,…

Hello! Previously we gave an overview of our new Wordpress plugin to integrate your Jenkins build process within the Wordpress administration area. The previous post gave an overview of how to set up Jenkins as well as how to set up the Wordpress plugin. Where we stopped short is actually…

Hello! We love integrating Jenkins into development workflow. Typically Jenkins would be used for custom development projects to streamline the development “push” process in order to seamlessly integrate code changes from a testing / staging environment over to the live environment. For frameworks like Laravel or Django, this works very…

Hello! With Wordpress security, there are many methods for hardening and tightening controls, methods for preventing common attack vectors including best practices from a development, systems administration and even 3rd party plugin perspective. Since the rising popularity of “IP Reputation Intelligence” with Corporate networks and streaming services like Netflix, I…

Hello! One of the nice things about Woocommerce is that it is very easily customized. Actions can be removed and re-added in order to adjust the default behavior. Additionally you can override many of the default templates that come with Woocommerce and its many extensions to fine tune and adjust…

Hello! When designing and implementing Gravity forms there may be occasions where you would want to auto populate multiple fields based on a preceding field selection. This was the case in our scenario where we wanted to populate the selection of a drop-down box based on a Google Map location…

Hello! While the scenario may not necessarily be common in which you would want to encrypt your PHP code and execute it, it is something that I would consider an interesting discussion nonetheless. I fully support free and open source software, however if you are developing an application that manages…

Hello! Following with the theme of our last post, we thought it might be useful to demonstrate how to create a pure PHP based web service to backup your MySQL database to a remote destination (also with PHP) over a secure HTTPS connection. High level, all we will be doing…

Hello! There may be some scenarios where you might want to clone your site or push files to a remote location completely and 100% using PHP as a web service, without touching the command line. There are many console or command line utilities to help complete this type of job…

Hello! Recently we were tasked with finding ways to re-organize search results on a Drupal page in such a way that we could prioritize, group and sort the results in a coherent way. The simplest way to look at organizing in general, especially content that is dynamically generated, is to…

Hello! If you read our last post on us releasing a new Wordpress Plugin for Portfolio Galleries, you would have seen us touch a bit on creating custom fields / meta boxes for your post type. One of the bigger challenges when creating the Portfolio Grid plugin was implementing the…

Hello! We just released a Wordpress plugin, Shift8 Portfolio, to organize your portfolio in a grid using bootstrap scaffolding! This is a very straightforward plugin that we decided to write for our own portfolio page. After using it ourselves it was decided that we needed to share it with the…

Hello! One of the projects that we are currently working on is a Wordpress plugin that integrates with the Toronto Real Estate Board to pull new listings from their systems and import them into Wordpress as posts. The mechanics required to connect to TREB are very basic. One might call…

Hello! We are excited to announce that we have created a brand new website for ourselves! Sometimes its difficult to focus on ourselves when we are so often focused on our clients. With new and exciting projects on the horizon, we thought we would take the opportunity to chip away…

Hello! Creating a unique, original and flexible navigation menu in Wordpress can be challenging. There are many commercial and free plugins out there to establish navigation systems, however many of the commercial options seem to be “overkill” providing many bloated options with embedded CSS that can be difficult to adjust…

Hello! Recently we experienced a severe slowdown bottleneck with a Drupal site. After some debugging we decided to turn on mysql slow query logging. After watching the logs we noticed that while the content page was loading in Drupal’s administration back-end there was extremely long scrolling of encoded binary data…

Hello! On top of developing and designing websites for clients in and around Toronto, we also do managed and dedicated web hosting. This includes managing AWS Cloud infrastructure for our clients. When implementing infrastructure in general terms, it is generally accepted to take the approach to lock down as much…

Hello! We have created yet another Wordpress plugin! We are highly motivated to roll out any and all Wordpress custom development as a neatly packaged plugin for the general public to use. We have many more ideas and many more plugins in the works. Check out the plugin hereThis latest…

Hello! We have recently created & submitted our first official Wordpress plugin : Shift8 Modal. This is a relatively straightforward plugin that integrates the animatedModal jQuery library into Wordpress as an easy-to-use shortcode. Submitting our plugin to the Wordpress plugin directyl took roughly 7 days to complete. Wordpress has pretty…

Hello! There are many great tools out there that make importing and exporting content into Drupal nodes very easy. We deal with custom Drupal content often and have extensively used many of the (amazing) tools available, such as node export, views data export and feed import , specifically with the…

Hello! Occasionally it was necessary for us to lock down some or all of the Wordpress media library from public viewing, indexing. The reasons why this would be necessary can vary from sensitive information leakage to private user information protection (i.e. custom user media files uploaded on a per user…

Hello! There was a scenario not too long ago where we were required to create a heatmap layer on top of a Google map to plot latitude/longitude coordinates. I thought I’d share the process through which we pull the coordinate data from a MySQL database and plot it into the…

Hello! When designing websites, especially websites that have an active blog, it is often necessary to style, customize and design the Wordpress search results page. When styling the search results, we typically like to modify the way the results are presented as well as append a few custom CSS container…

Hello! In our many instances where we are developing, designing and deploying a Wordpress site for a client, it is a constant necessity to implement a mobile / tablet friendly dropdown menu. Because this happens often, we have developed a “starter” mobile menu for our Wordpress implementations. We prefer to…

Hello! At risk of making the title of this post a mouth full, I thought I’d share some of our experience with interacting with Drupal’s Form API (Specficially Drupal 7.x). There is a lot of documentation on different ways you can interact with the Form API to accomplish a wide…

Hello there! In the same vein as our previous post that shows how you could create your own shortcode to pull tweets from a user, we’ve decided to make a similar post that shows how you could pull content from a facebook page and integrate it into your Wordpress site.…

Hello! I’m of the opinion that it is better to code your own functions, shortcode and templates to accomplish even simple things within content management systems, as opposed to downloading a free plugin to accomplish the same task. You might be asking “Why not just download a plugin? Its much…

Hello! Through our own internal projects it has become a requirement in the past to implement a system that integrates with a mobile application. Specifically we have implemented systems that send out push notifications to iOS and Android based devices. The conditions through which we would be sending the notifications…

By : Suzanne Today marks a milestone in my journey to create a typeface that I can share with the world and can be my rough around the edges legacy long after I am gone 😉 . Creating your own typeface can be a time consuming but very rewarding experience.…

Hello! There is many strategies for securing your code against malicious user input. Some frameworks have checks and balances built in. There are simple standard PHP functions that are designed to strip tags and illegal characters from variables like strip_tags and filter_var. Filtering XSS in PHP Those standard functions are…

Hello! Some may argue that sticky navigation menus (menus that are fixed at the top or bottom of the page as you scroll) are a fashionable web design style. Whether or not its a “fad”, having a navigation bar that is fixed as you scroll throughout the the site is…

Hello! Whether your developing a mobile or web based application, keeping on top of constantly changing data is a challenge on its own. Sometimes its necessary to make repeated calls to your API to pull updates at regular intervals. We wrote a previous blog post describing how to use Ajax…

Hello! It is sometimes necessary to bridge different web applications together in order to transmit or receive information and process it. One scenario could be a mobile application that connects to a web service to pull or push data in order to update the app or provide “real time” services…

Security is a huge deal. Sometimes your at the mercy of the open source solution or content management system that you choose. There are occasions that even after ensuring your CMS and the subsidiary plugins are consistently up to date, you still fall mercy to a zero day exploit that…

Hello! Making mobile applications is much easier than it used to be. As with previous posts, we have been experimenting with Apache Cordova Framework for easily building mobile applications, leveraging web frameworks like AngularJS. Many mobile applications communicate with a centralized “server” or website that retains all the data that…

Hello! Creating mobile applications can be a grueling process. There are many factors that can complicate the process and it is very specialized. One thing we have been looking at recently is utilizing an AngularJS, Node.js based framework to utilize HTML5, javascript and jQuery based technology to implement mobile applications.…

Hello! A few weeks ago we wrote a post that detailed how you could leverage PHP, Javascript and jQuery to detect facial features in images. In this post we will detail how you can take the detection of facial features and modify the image in real time with CSS and…

Hello! In some scenarios with web application development it may be necessary to be able to detect the facial features of a photo. For example an application that detects how many people are in a picture, or perhaps an app that modifies the faces of the people in a photo.…

Hello! Occasionally in Wordpress it is necessary to push, what is primarily a blogging content management system, to its limits in order to create a dynamic website. The reason why it may be necessary to create a custom wordpress post type is in just that scenario where you need to…

Hello All, Happy 2015! Here’s to an excellent year to all of our friends, family and to all of our clients, from the past present and future! It’s been a very frigid couple of days in Toronto, we have been thinking back the the warmer months. This is especially true…

Hello! These days with so many (buzzword) cloud services, the standard vanilla LAMP stack is slowly becoming a thing of the past. Or at least more obfuscated / confusing. Its important when building your web application to consider things like analytics, metrics, reporting, capacity planning and scaling. You need to…

Hello! A while ago we released a Python based solution to connect to TREB, pull real estate listings and post it to Wordpress. We also posted a brief guide on how to use the Python script. With python, we are using the module wordpress_xmlrpc in order to connect to a…

Howdy! With the advent of responsive web design in recent years, developing “mobile only” websites has somewhat become a thing of the past. That is to say we no longer need to maintain a separate version of a website for mobile devices as we once did. All that said, it…

Hello There! Here is a collection of some of the most popular Social Media platform icons that we created using http://fontawesome.io/ You can download these icons and use them for whatever you please. They are .png files and each icon is 32px. These icons are using the colours from the…

Hello there! We love web development here at Shift8. We also love finding ways to automate and integrate different interfaces together. For example, we have written Python solutions to integrate TREB (Toronto Real Estate Board) listings into a Wordpress site. Finding a Python Library to work with Wordpress There are…

Hello! Working with frameworks like Django and with CMS’ like Drupal and Wordpress we come across a wide variety of requirements for manipulating, sanitizing and importing data from all different sources and formats. Recently we had the requirement to take a text field that was defined in a Django model…

Hello! Recently we had a tricky problem with Drupal 7 and manipulating content. Our content types and content in general for a particular Drupal site has grown significantly. Ajax queries in Drupal Adding and removing content such as images or gallery items requires an Ajax query that polls the database.…

Hello! Wordpress is a great entry level CMS that has a vibrant and extensive development community with many free plugins and offerings to help extend your web installation significantly. Once in a while , either with a significant Wordpress update or for other reasons, the default plugins wont cut it.…

Hello! Caching is invariably the wave of the future. We have worked with many different caching technologies to leverage a website to be able to handle more traffic as well as offering a low cost vector to scale a website without investing in expensive hardware. We occasionally offer web hosting…

Hello! Drupal is a fantastic content management system with an even more fantastic development community. Recently through our own Drupal development projects, we came across a scenario that required the processing of dynamic (i.e. “Wildcard”) page requests to the same drupal page template. If I’ve lost you already , don’t…

Hello! We have recently completely re-vamped our company website : www.shift8web.ca. We have decided to move away from a conventional CMS and towards a web framework called django. Some of the challenges encountered were from a systems administration perspective (nginx + varnish + php-fpm). Other challenges faced were migrating all…

TREB Wordpress Integration with our open source python solution We know that some of you are definitely looking forward to the release of this integrated system that has been promised quite a while ago. Well the time has come for us to release the open source Python code that seamlessly…

We are very proud to announce the complete ground-up redesign of our corporate website! We have completely redesigned all elements, layout and style from the ground up. We hope you like the new site (we do!). Its important to restructure and redesign your website regularly. By regularly I mean every…

Hello! I realize that its 2013 and the flash media debate is pretty much a peripheral debate at this point. Being in the web design industry, it is still a common occurrence to be presented with a job or project that requires migrating a corporate website away from the dependance…

Greetings! Are you a real estate agent, or a web designer working to develop a dynamic site that automatically pulls TREB (Toronto Real Estate Board) listings (or TREB IDX) from their database (with their permission of course) and import it dynamically into the site as a regular daily job? We…

Greetings! Occasionally it comes up in a project, for many different reasons, to utilize javascript or jquery in a user interaction or user interface design scenario. Usually, with javascript, this can be found in the form of an onmouseover() or onmouseclick() query. Sometimes logic has to be maintained where if…

Typically for each client we work with designing a website from the ground up, we find ourselves evaluating one of two options : using a web framework such as DJango or going with a Traditional content management system such as Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal. Although the needs and requirements of…

Maybe this will help you make your decision! Custom web design projects can be quite expensive, and we certainly recognize that. This is especially true for small businesses where their design budgets are smaller and more stringent than the bigger companies. Every dollar has to count and your return on…

In today’s world it is almost essential, in the web design world, for a designer to wear more hats than just graphic and web design. Many projects are likely to involve some sort of custom web programming in order to meet a clients (ever changing) needs and requirements. Because web…

Hello There! We are very excited about the launch of our newly minted, fresh off the presses, front facing company website! We thought we would post here about it as well to let you all know that the new site has been launched and you should definitely check it out!…

Complete top down Branding and Logo design for our affiliated Web Hosting Company.

We’ve been working with several Toronto Real Estate Agents on their websites to help incorporate a search page for potential buyers. We’ve connected with The Toronto Real Estate Board (TREB) using IDX http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Data_Exchange Here’s an example of how we utilized this technology for The Property Team in in Toronto, we…

Hello there! We at Shift8 Web Design have decided to create a blog! Here you will find new ideas, experiences and everything relating to the Toronto Web Design community.   Stay tuned!

We know that all great design starts out with a great idea. Like any creative practice. A website, a business card, a newsletter, or any piece of promotional material starts out with great branding. The branding is what will make your company stand out from your competitors. We have a…