Tips Tuesday – WP Security, Plugins for Videos, Contact Form 7, Musicians, and MailChimp, Plus the Browser War Winner

Summary: Hello Happy Site Owners! This week’s tips include a Site Security Audit special, what’s broken with the Broken Link Checker plugin, the WordPress SEO plugin going premium, two video related plugins, a nice new feature for the Contact Form 7 plugin, a new Rich Snippet Site Report plugin, a plugin for gigging musicians, and a new MailChimp Form Plugin. Plus, who’s winning the browser wars, and how to setup a video studio for under $90 bucks. So let’s get started. Listen to the podcast. Featured Hey, I want to send a shout out and thank you to Ana Hoffman for including BlogAid in her Traffic Generation Cafe weekly round up on July 6th and to Vernessa Taylor for including BlogAid in the inaugural round up post on Famous Bloggers that will introduce bloggers to more of their peers in the blogosphere. It's very encouraging when your work is shared like that. WordPress Security I want to invite you to go have a look at this post on Moz.com. And you don't have to do anything with it, just look. It's The Denfinitive Guide to WordPress Security. It's an excellent post and a glimpse of what it takes to make your site secure. If you don't know if all these things are being done on your site, then they probably aren't. Because of all the recent security breaches, I've decided to run my annual Site Security Audit special a little early this year. I generally only offer this once a year during the week between Christmas and New Years. And it books solid within a couple of days. So, this time I've decided to extend my availability to two weeks at the discounted price so I can help more folks. Now, I've already put this out to my newsletter subscribers and slots have already started filling up. And now I'm making it available to my loyal Tips Tuesday followers. Tomorrow I'll put out a blog post on it to everybody. So, get your preferred slot saved now. WordPress Plugins Some of the links below are to the plugin developer’s page, but you can find most if not all of these plugins in the WordPress plugins repository. The Broken Link Checker plugin had a serious security issue reported by WPSecurityLock.com on Sunday. Deactivate now, and you can keep it that way for a while. I want to thank my buddy Cyndi Papia at Office To-Go for alerting me to this. As she says, it takes a village to keep us all safe. I went to the support forum for the plugin and saw that the malware is reported to be in the translation files. I didn't see any response from the developer there, but that doesn't mean that it's not being worked on it. There is something else you may want to consider about this plugin while you have it deactivated. WPEngine is one of the managed host providers that actually disallows it simply because it puts too much load on the server. I don't use it for that reason and because I found that it triggered too many false positives, which was a waste of my time. If you know of a better plugin for checking broken links, or if you have an opinion about the SEO effect of broken links, along with some data to back it up, please share that in the comments. As Cyndi said, it takes a village and I encourage you to participate in a conversation about it. - - - - - - - - I want to send a shout out to Jason Bradley over at WP Daily for the tireless job he does on the daily plugin updates. The list actually broke 100 recently. Yep, over 100 plugins added or updated that day. I only report on the ones here that I know my clients use or I think they may want to know about. But, you should jump on over to WPDaily and see these reports for yourself too. You'd be amazed at what's available. - - - - - - - - I'm wondering why this took so long to happen. Yoast is finally making a premium version of his WordPress SEO plugin, and rightfully so. I appreciate the way he explained why in his recent post about it. Most plugin developers spend an enormous amount of time on support, both on the coding side and in the plugin forums. So,