Summary: Hacking the Flash game 'Clicker Heroes', creating a Ruby tool to apply the game's algorithm.
Summary: How to make Ruby on Rails CookieStore more secure and sessions expirable.
Summary: An example of how to hack iPhone game savegames, exemplified with the game 'Game Dev Story'.
PHP is a fast scripted language, but when you build any reasonably sized website there are always optimizations and tricks you can do to make it go faster. Wordpress is no exception, and sometimes the extensibility, ease of customization and plugin framework it provides add overhead to the page loading time (and internal use of resources).
Also, Wordpress has a certain fame of not being too secure, having security bugs from time to time, so reinforcing the blog security is never a bad idea.
With this post I will provide a few points to improve both areas. Some like disabling login errors come from google searches and I can't remember the source (there are many results), others are my personal findings and Wordpress Codex readings.
All of this changes can be easily done either to the functions.php file of your theme. If the file doesn't exists feel free to create it, Wordpress will always check for it and parse it before rendering the page, or to the theme files in the case of literal substitutions and similar modifications.
On the security side:
ini_set('display_errors', 0);
ini_set('error_reporting', 0);
function CheckLoginIP($user, $username, $password) {
return $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] == '192.168.1.1' ? get_userdatabylogin($username) : null;
}
add_filter('authenticate', 'CheckLoginIP', 10, 3);
On the performance side:
function remove_dashboard_widgets(){
global $wp_meta_boxes;
unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['normal']['core']['dashboard_incoming_links']);
unset($wp_meta_boxes['dashboard']['side']['core']['dashboard_recent_drafts']);
}
add_action('wp_dashboard_setup', 'remove_dashboard_widgets');
Summary: A story of how to bypass a demo timer in a game by finding that the counter stored in a texture file.