As part of a new project I’m developing for Tea Trade, I found I needed a new way to shorten long URLs. I wanted a new way, that was specific to Tea Trade, but didn’t carry the Tea Trade branding with it. This brought the birth of Tea Trade’s new integrated URL shortener: teabre.ws.

Like the URL for Tea Trade itself, teabre.ws is a domain hack, which takes advantage of unique spellings for domain names. I think this one is really cool and I think it adds some cachet to Tea Trade and all of the sites on it. Yes, that is right – all of the websites hosted on Tea Trade now automatically, get their URLs shortened using our teabre.ws URL shortener. This includes both products and posts. Now any Tea Trade member with a website can share their posts and products without having to use the URL in Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, an email or any other place you share links.

What is a URL shortener?

A URL shortener creates a shorter, permanent link to URL address that makes it easier for sharing. For example, it takes this: http://teatra.de/tea-forums/topic/where-do-you-tea-socialize-most-online/ and shortens it to this: http://teabre.ws/129OilK. Nice, isn’t it?

Now, I understand that there is bit.ly and and Goo.gl available and that this is isn’t as short as those, but it is topical. It is about tea, and it is about your website, and your ability to promote it.

How do I get my short URL

The whole process is completely automated and I’ve integrated it with WordPress and Tea Trade’s internal shortlink process. When you are writing a post, the shortlink is created after you save it as a draft for the first time, or publish it. Once a post is saved the shortlink is created immediately. Your long URL is passed through our shortener a unique short URL is created for your post. To get it, simply click the Get Shortlink button which you will find on your post edit page in your dashboard, just beneath the area where you enter the title of your post.

Check out the image below for what it looks like:

The Get Shortlink button on the edit post page

When you click the button, a popup box will appear displaying your shortlink for you to copy and distribute however you like.

Get it working

It should be working with all the blogs and websites already. If it is not, the Get Shortlink button will not appear when you save a post, or you won’t see it on your older posts. If this happens to you, there is a simple step needed to get it working. You’ll need to rewrite your permalinks, but it is not as hard as it sounds. In your dashboard, go to Settings -> Permalinks and simply click save on the screen that appears. Clicking save re-saves the links on your website and in the process they get written again to the database.

Have questions?

This unique and topical, tea-related URL shortener is only available to Tea Trade members for their websites. There is no public place that can be used to shorten URLs using the teabre.ws domain name. This new feature gives us all a great new way to show off our tea enthusiasm in a way that no one else has access to! If you anyone has questions, thoughts or problems with this new feature, let me know in the comments below.

Source: Shorten your URLs with teabrews – our new URL shortener at Tea Trade

Customize distraction-free writing

Sometimes it is the little things that make something nice…

We’ve recently installed a new plugin to each website on Tea Trade that improves the writing experience. Distraction Free Writing mode was added to WordPress to improve the writing environment. Distraction-free writing programs remove the visual clutter from your screen, making it easier and comfortable to write. WordPress prides itself on being a writing program, so having a distraction-free environment was a very welcome addition.

If you’ve never used it when writing a post for your blog or website, try it next time you write. To activate it simply click the Fullscreen button in your editor’s toolbar.

How to activate Distraction Free Writing

Make it even more beautiful

The new plugin we’ve installed adds themes to the built-in distraction free writing environment. You can choose from a variety of themes that were inspired by the various distraction free writing programs that have produced over the years. These include, Writeroom, Q10 and others. Monokai (which is inspired by the theme of the same name often used for a popular piece of coding software) is will load by default now when you activate the distraction free editor.

The Nightsky theme was used while writing this post

Choose your theme

You can choose the theme you prefer by going to Settings -> DFWM Themes in the dashboard of your blog. There you will be preview and choose from the list of the currently available themes.

The current choices are:

• The default WordPress editor
• Matrix (inspired by the movie)
• Monokai
• Nightsky (show above)
• Paper (a background of lined notebook paper)
• Pearl
• Q10

If you are savvy with CSS, you can also choose to create your own theme to give your writing environment a perfectly fine-tuned look and feel just for you.

Source: Write Beautiful at Tea Trade

Perhaps the most important consideration about the above statement is that I like criticism. Sometimes I even thrive on it, but really that kind of description is unnecessary.

This week Jason Walker published a blog post that was very critical about Tea Trade and focused on our Marketplace. Here is a screenshot of what he wrote (it has since been edited, but the new version really isn’t an improvement):

Screenshot source: Jason Walker, walkerteareview.com

Not the kind of public language one expects from someone who tries to position himself as a leader in the online tea community. Certainly not the kind of language I’ve come to see and expect in that same community. I’ve seen many strong opinions, but rarely expressed with such vulgarity.

Is he right?

Yes, he is. Though I really don’t need him to tell me that, much less in the kind of language that makes him look like a really poor ambassador for the tea community. I’m fully aware of the deficiencies of our marketplace, just like everyone else is. Everyone’s opinions matter to me because Tea Trade matters to me, though the respect I had for Mr. Walker before his post has greatly diminished as has my thinking that he shows leadership and wisdom for tea lovers. While I find his criticism relevant, I find his language and manner repugnant.

There are a number of things that are well overdue for an overhaul, and I’ll go through them shortly. There are also some other things that exist as part of early decisions we made about setting up the Marketplace. Before I do that, I want to make one thing perfectly clear. The Tea Trade Marketplace is a ground-breaking piece of innovation, not only in the online tea world, but also in various web development circles – specifically, WordPress. To date, Tea Trade is the oldest WordPress multisite e-commerce network online today. We launched using a different e-commerce software in January 2010. Later, in the summer of that year, we transitioned to a newly released WordPress multisite e-commerce package that enabled us to convert ordinary blogs into full fledged stores. The added benefit was that we could display global products from across the network on the central Tea Trade main site. This display became the Tea Trade Marketplace.

We launched our new Marketplace using this new software only one month after it was released, complete with bugs and all. Since that time, we’ve maintained a close relationship with the developer of that software and have have contributed feedback and ideas for the improvement of it. Because of my experience with the software, I contribute regularly to help other users of it and have even been approached to develop other WordPress multisite networks in other commercial niches using the same program.

What is wrong with the Marketplace?

Here is a short list of some things I’ve identified as issues, click each heading to expand my explanation of it:

How did it get so bad?

It didn’t get bad, it’s just not developed. What you are actually seeing is the Marketplace with little enhancement since I set it up when we started. Did I make a mistake in not making the Marketplace a priority? Absolutely not. Tea Trade is a community. We host, maintain and provide support for a social network of nearly 100 websites (both blogs and stores). At any given time, a third of them are active and being used (even the inactive ones need maintenance). I respond to support inquiries 7 days a week and Jackie serves as an charming and intelligent host and is around here even more than I am. We prioritized the blogs, the forums and social networking aspects of Tea Trade in order to build a community. The actual Marketplace sat back and watched as dozens of independent blogs and tea websites were created over the last two years – all of them on our network, on Tea Trade – all connected together.

It was an operational decision that Jackie and I made together to focus on the community-building aspect instead of the Marketplace itself. The result has been fabulous, friendships and relationships have been formed even to the extent that members have enjoyed meeting each other in person in a series of international trips. We host the single most prolific tea review blog on the internet. We’ve enabled a homemaker a conduit to a startup tea business online (I’m proud of this one because I’ve seen at least a dozen online tea ventures start and fail since she started yet she still chugs along nicely). We also host six websites to channel to six different markets for an Australian tea seller. Not to mention the dozens of active blogs and forums that support.

Running a website network of this size requires a lot of work and expense. No, we’ve not focused on Marketplace because we were focused on other things. Perhaps this year, I’ll get some time out of our other projects to enhance the Marketplace, recruit some new sellers and help someone else get started in a business online.

I do agree that Tea Trade’s Marketplace is not perfect, but it is also not complete. Tea Trade itself is an ongoing project, something that I learn by doing.  The project is not over, and I have no intention of walking away. I think we all will enjoy a great 2013 and we will see what innovations I can come up with.

Thank you for reading this rather long-winded, first of 2013 post. If anything in this missive gave you anything to think about, please share your thoughts in the comments below. Remember, I love useful criticism!

Source: Interesting criticism: “Tea Trade is a clusterfuck” at Tea Trade

Several weeks ago we implemented the member Achievements (Rewards) system on Tea Trade. Most of you have seen the “So & So unlocked Achievement Level X ” popping up in the Activity stream. I know there has been some confusion along with the interest in what these achievement levels mean. There were quite a few kinks and bugs to be ironed out first before finally announcing their implementation. They’re still a work in progress but then everything always is. The main issue with the Achievements was that we couldn’t reward our regular super-bloggers with the high level they had earned. That’s because every achievement started on the day we put them in place. So @sororiteasisters who have written well over 2000 blog posts recently achieved Level 1 “Getting into blogging.” It was an awkward moment.

We’re still working on a solution to that particular problem – but blogging aside every other reward is working the way it should. You can check out the full range of achievements with their corresponding levels here or in the link below.

Achievements are awarded for:

Writing blog posts     

Commenting on posts, your own and others’  

Posting updates in the Activity Stream 

Replying to status updates in the Activity Stream 

There are currently five levels for each Achievement except for blogging which has six. Six is still not sufficient for some of you, so we will look into that. There are also currently five levels for sellers, however these are manually awarded so are handled differently. We do not have an achievement in place for forum posts and replies. This is only for technical reasons, we highly encourage forum participation and will find a way to acknowledge those who participate regularly.

The point of these Achievements? We implemented them to demonstrate how much we value and recognize all your contributions in these areas. Communicating with other Tea Traders is what makes this site truly social. Commenting on your favorite blog posts here is as much encouraged as blogging. Sharing some of your news and pics via Activity Stream update is much valued, as is replying to fellow Tea Trader’s updates.

A blog is as alive as the community of tea lovers that: reads its posts – adds value by commenting – and shares them on other social networks. 

If you’re interested in seeing a list of all the achievements you or another member has already earned, go to the member profile and click on Achievements. One tip: compare your levels, is there a big discrepancy between achievements, or are they fairly even? Did you unlock a high level in one area but are still on the lower levels in another? If you weren’t aware of that, maybe worth reflecting on.

We want to thank everyone for helping us to achieve our goal – which is to make Tea Trade the number one social site for Tea talk powered by curious minds.

Tea Trade Achievements

Source: The Mystery & Mastery of Member Achievements at Tea Trade

Adding pull quotes to your blog posts lets you highlight your phrases and adds visual interest. A pull quote is a quotation or excerpt from your post that is in a larger or offset typeface in the post. Pull quotes meant to entice your readers and to highlight a key topic. One way to add them is as a blockquote. Your Tea Trade, WordPress-powered, blog lets you do this by selecting the desired text and using the blockquote button your editor toolbar when writing a post.

Choose from thousands of backgrounds

That’s all very nice, but these days, a growing fad on Pinterest is to share images of beautifully presented quotations. Tea Trade bloggers now have available, with an upgraded website account, the ProQuoter plugin. ProQuoter lets you dynamically create awesome quotation-based images that are perfect for sharing on Pinterest, Twitter, or Facebook.

Creating an image is simple. After you’ve activated the plugin, the next time you go write a post you’ll have two new buttons in your editor’s toolbar. The buttons are to align the image left or right and clicking one brings up a dialog box. Simply highlight the text you want to use and click one of the toolbar buttons. You can then enter the author attribution and selection of images will be dynamically created for you. You can literally browse through thousands of possibilities that combine unique fonts, colors and background images.

The ProQuoter toolbar buttons

ProQuoter is a Premium Plugin available only for upgraded websites

To use ProQuote, upgrade your blog or website to a Tea Trader account, then activate it on your website’s Plugins page. Not only will your upgrade give you access to this cool plugin, but also several more that you can use to enhance to your website. Here are some of the other premium plugins we offer:

• Simple Lightbox, which automatically displays images on your website in beautiful overlay (click one of the images to see how a lightbox works.
• Custom CSS, if you know CSS, you can change the look of your theme to just what you want.
• WordPress SEO, perhaps one of the most powerful premium plugins we offer, it helps you optimize your website for search engines and Google to help you get found and achieve better search engine rankings.

A Premium Plugin

Use ProQuoter to add beautiful pull quotes and create unique quotation images. These can be shared on Pinterest or Twitter to help you create engaging links back to your blog or website.

Source: Add beautiful pull quotes to your blog at Tea Trade

One of the evil tricks that spammers get up to is to go into the older posts of your blog and spam the comments. In many cases, closing comments on these old posts will stop spammers from attacking your blog. Blog posts, like internet forum posts, have a life span. When you write a new post, it gets its most comments when you initially publish it. As time goes by, the legitimate comments just stop coming. While sometimes, you may written about a topic that just keeps the conversation going and going for months, chances are most of your posts have reached their conversational life span.

The spammers know this, so they dig back into your archives, leave spammy comments and hope you won’t notice. There is a setting in your blog’s dashboard that allows you to close the comments on older posts. You set in days, so you can decide how old you want posts to get before your blog automatically closes the comments form. You’ll find the place to do this in your dashboard under Settings -> Discussion. If you are getting hit hard with spammers on your older posts, turn this feature on and it will automatically reduce the number of places spammers can target you. Check out the setting in the image below, click to enlarge it to get a better view.

Don’t worry, closing the comments does not hide existing comments, it just closes the ability to add new ones. The great conversations that your readers had about your post will still be displayed. While when new, legitimate readers stumble upon your blog through one of your old blog posts they won’t be able to post comments, it is generally bad form to revive a dead topic. Besides, you should be wowing them with great, fresh content anyhow on your home page.

Source: Fight spam by closing comments on older posts at Tea Trade

Good shop owners know that sales don’t just happen unless you have a strategy. To improve sales, it is important to understand what your store already does. That means knowing where your sales are coming from, tracking the performance of products, knowing which ones to continue to push and which ones to remove and how well your pricing scheme is working. Knowing all that information is a matter of numbers and statistics. For our sellers, this has meant that you needed to get out the old spreadsheet, start punching in numbers and generating graphs and charts. This can be a pretty time-consuming process.

That’s about to change.

Now available to all Tea Trade sellers are detailed statistics about your sales performance. Using Google Charts, our new Sales Statistics plugin provides you with a wealth of valuable data about your tea store’s performance.

Here is a example of what you will see in using the sales statistics:

Sales statistics example – click to enlarge

The statistics reporting currently provides the following information:

• Total sales by month, 12 months
• Average revenue per sale, 12 months
• Product sales, 12 months
• Product sales average/order, 12 months
• Sales by product price
• Revenue by product price
• Top products (number of sales)
• Top products (revenue)
• Top clients

You can also view each month’s statistics and all-time totals for revenue, sales, products sold, average products per sale, and average revenue per sale.

This plugin has already been activated on the majority of our seller’s sites, just look in your Dashboard under Sales Statistics. There are no configuration settings, you’ll see that it just works and reports the information in a usable and easy-to-understand format. If you own a Tea Trade store and find that the plugin is not active on your site, just go to the Plugins page on your Dashboard, find Tea Trade Market Statistics in the list and click Activate.

Source: Understanding your sales performance at Tea Trade

This week, Tea Trade outgrew its previous home and needed a bigger house with more rooms. The server on which Tea Trade lived up until Monday morning was limited in both power and space. While we knew that we needed to move to a bigger server soon, Tea Trade’s growth in membership, and blogs in the last few weeks pushed us over the limit. So we needed to upgrade to a larger server. Over the last couple of days we have gone through several attempts to migrate Tea Trade to its new server. After various efforts by our hosting technicians, we were able to get control of things using our own backup to get things going.

This is what happened

The techs contacted us on Monday that we needed a bigger, more powerful server. So we purchased one, they set it up and assured us they would handle the migration. I know these guys are skilled and knowledgeable, because I’ve seen them work before, but for some reason every time they tried to move us, there were complications. After almost 3 days of trying to get it right, I took control of it and worked a restoration. Fortunately, it worked wonderfully and the result was a flawless restoration of Tea Trade and all its parts. Except for one thing…

Since the techs were working, our nightly backup system wasn’t running and some new posts (and one new blog) couldn’t be retrieved. Once we got Tea Trade working again, we quickly moved to restore those updates that were posted yesterday, (after our backup). Now, everything looks great and things are working as they should.

The server and the future

Our new server has some real juice to it. In fact, we could triple in size before we need to adjust it again. The better news is that, in tech speak, the server is scale-able. That means, when the time comes that we need more space or power, it’s a simple matter of adding it to make it that way–without any offline time. It is, however, expensive.

What you can do to help

In order to have this server, our hosting costs are now four times more expensive than they were previously. So this is where you come in. You can support Tea Trade by becoming a Tea Trader and selling some tea, we make money when you make money. You can simply sell it from your kitchen, or you can innovate and create an entirely new brand of teas usingTea Trade to get your start (we’re very much in support of tea entrepreneurs.) The tea you sell helps offset some of the operating costs.

Also, if you’re hankering after a blog, or online tea store that is more elaborate, you can hire us to design and build it for you. As a Tea Trade member, I will custom build you a website (blog or tea store) for hundreds of dollars less than you would pay a typical freelancer to custom build your own online store. You win by getting a custom-built site you can be proud of, we win because having you as a client helps support Tea Trade. In the end, everybody wins because Tea Trade continues to be a special place where tea lovers can learn, read, talk about and buy tea from people they care about in a community that matters. 

We thank everyone for their support, be it as bloggers, sellers, contributors, or readers.You all make Tea Trade the great site it is.

Source: Downtime, fixing it, and the future at Tea Trade

This post is part of a series on tea entrepreneurship for individuals seeking to start a business in the tea industry.

If you are looking to start an online tea company, the first place to look is inward. While there are a lot of articles on the internet about being a self-starter or keeping a cot in your office – there is a lot more that goes into understanding how you perceive yourself as an entrepreneur than your ability to indulge in your entrepreneurial desires.

There are a lot of criteria to think about when you sit down at your kitchen table with your favorite teacup and a notebook. These are things you should take seriously and ask yourself about, because in the long run they will impact your life, your relationships and your business.

Each of the major topics about personal analysis will get their own post, but they are summarized as personal issues (including job security, money, lifestyle, power, age, health, location, investment, and attitudes); family issues (includes balancing commitments and working with family members); risk issues; and business issues (size and growth, sources of money, your position in the system, ownership, control, legal strategy, compensation, and tax strategy).

In this post, we’ll be talking about the best place to start – the personal issues. If you see yourself as the owner of a tea company, then a little bit of self-assessment is required to see if you are really the right person for the job.

Job Security

Do you want your business to replace your day job, or should the income from it simply supplement your current income? Understanding your needs for employment and income early on is important to understanding what you want from Your Little Tea Company. There are so many levels to consider as you think about how much or how little influence your company has on your personal income level and your own employment.

Money

How much money are you expecting (hoping) to earn? As above, are we talking about job replacement or job supplement? Exactly how much money do you currently spend in your household or how much money do you need. Is money the most important issue for your business. If creating wealth is not your first goal, what is? Are you more interested in cultivating a novel brand of tea that breaks boundaries and finds its way into markets that have been hard to penetrate (something like that might make money for you naturally while still fulfilling your goals)? Perhaps you are motivated to sell tea that is socially- or environmentally-conscious. Give thought to where money sits on your list of priorities for your business and how much of it you need to bring in to meet your needs.

Lifestyle

Your business is going to have a significant impact on your life. Just like your day job or a passionate hobby, getting a grasp on the role it will have in life is important. Running even the smallest and simplest one-person operation can quickly become so overwhelming that it will impact your social life, your family life and even any job you may currently have. Knowing that you value your business to the extent that your free time will be impacted and understanding what that impact might be is crucial, sometimes though, working on a business is just a more productive way to spend an evening than sitting in front of the television.

Power and influence

The tea industry in America is evolving. Is your goal to eventually make an impact on that industry, or do you want to be a minor player happily working part-time from a spare room in your house? Are you desiring to be a subject matter expert invited to speak at the World Tea Expo? Remember that a desire for power is often driven by the ego, which can easily be a negative trait. As your company evolves and your influence grows, will you stop listening to your advisers and mentors and thinking that its all better done on your own? If power and influence is important to you, what checks and balances are you going to keep around as a safeguard to protect not only you, but also your relationships with your family, friends, and business associates from the impact of your ego?

Age

You would be wrong if you thought that age doesn’t matter as you approach this. You could be young or old, but your age talks about the stage of life you are in. Let’s look at Jesse Jacobs, the owner of Samovar Tea Lounge, who left his corporate job to start a tea company that was in line with his holistic way of thinking about life and human connection. Age informs viewpoint and need. A younger entrepreneur may be able to start selling tea from a tea trolley on a sidewalk so he can buy a new guitar or amp for her band, while an middle-aged entrepreneur may want to start a small shop in a downtown district so that he can feel he’s created an establishment similar to creating a home. An older entrepreneur may decide that a 5-year exit strategy is in order so that they can retire after the sale of their small company and he may plan it from that point of view.

Health

Starting a venture, no matter how small, is going to be stressful because there is always going to be something that you feel you have to do. Being in good health is important to get you through that stress. Fitness and health go hand and hand when dealing with stress.  Are you able to get enough exercise to keep yourself feeling energetic, robust and healthy. Are you going to have to close up shop or go offline for a month because of an illness, surgical operation or other treatment? Have you thought about what impact your health is going to have on your business and what impact your business stresses are going to have on your health?

Location

Do you live in a city like Chicago or Portland where there is an active and vibrant tea culture and market to enter into, or does your city not have a single tea shop in it and you will have to force your way into people’s kitchens? If you are only planning on selling tea online, perhaps it doesn’t matter very much where you live as long as you have reasonable shipping access to your chosen suppliers. However, if you plan to sell tea in a store, cart, trolley or mall – the city you live in and the existing tea culture may have a significant impact on how successful you are. Will you be jumping into an established market, or will you have to hammer away in a place where no market and desire exists for tea?

Investment

All businesses require money to start, no matter how small. How much money do you have to invest in it? How much money are you willing to take away from your household to pay for your business. In the best of all possible worlds your household money and your business money is separate, but for many entrepreneurs, that is simply not the case. Personal credit cards are used to finance many startup businesses. An advantage of paying for it all yourself is that you own the business and control it. Later on, when you need more money, banks and investors may look to see how much financial interest you have in the company as the entrepreneur. Your level of investment may payoff then, when they see that you have taken the initial risk yourself.

Attitudes

Your attitudes about certain things are going to have an impact on how you operate your business.

Use of debt – You may prefer to sell your car and finance the business with cash, or you may do it using credit cards or other forms of debt. Debt has different impacts on different people. If you are uncomfortable using debt, then perhaps you might want to sell that car, or find some wholesale customers and have them in-hand (having customers in-hand will be discussed in detail in a future post) and have them pay for your startup.

Values and beliefs – Your company may strongly reflect your religious, humanistic or moral values. Take again Jesse Jacobs whose stated company goal is not about selling tea, but creating a warm, comforting environment through which people can connect and enjoy their relationships over a cup of tea.

Employees and contractors – You may never want to hire part-time or full-time employees to help you package up tea. Having employees and managing people is a burden and business concern all its own. The same is dealing with contractors, these could include website developers, marketers or advertisers, packaging firms and so on. Your values about being a rugged individualist and going it alone or leveraging available help may have significant impact on your venture in the early days.

Are you ready?

Looking in the mirror at your life and your values is the first step to deciding how much and how far you are thinking about taking Your Little Tea Company. Taking the time to think about each of these topics as you dream about conquering the tea trade someday is an important step to understanding what your starting needs really are.

In the next post I’ll discuss an evaluation of family issues and the impact your venture might have on those closest to you.

Source: Are you ready to start a tea company? at Tea Trade

As many of you already know, over the weekend, Tea Trade was hacked. I am posting this to give you a better idea about what happened, what we did and what we are doing to prevent it happening again. First off, I want to let you know, that this attack did not compromise any passwords, personal information or blog posts. All of that was safe, and as soon as we saw what was going on, we took Tea Trade offline to prevent any further damage. While,  I recommend that you change your passwords,  the passwords in Tea Trade are all stored encrypted which makes them very safe.  That is, unless you are using one of the common passwords, like iloveyou, or (God forbid) password. Additionally, the information of any customers who have purchased products was also safe. All of this type of information is stored in the database, and the database was well protected.

Attacks are common

Generally speaking, hacker attacks are pretty common. We started documenting the number of threats back in September 2011. To date, our records show that our defenses have stopped 206,488 threatening attacks from ever reaching Tea Trade. This number includes the spammers and the hacking bots as well. Generally speaking, our security in the big picture is good. However…

Leaving the back door open

I know now exactly how the attack got in, and it didn’t get in over the weekend. It entered through a “back door” – a security hole in a piece of third party image resizing software.  It’s a popular piece of software that comes inbuilt with many WordPress themes. When the hole was discovered, a patch was pushed out by the developers, and I inspected over 300 themes with thousands of files and directories to apply the patch where necessary. However, six themes were not patched at that time. A hacker with a program to search the internet for such weaknesses, found one and infected it with a back door program. Then over the weekend, that harmless backdoor was exploited.

One of our members was using a popular theme, by a popular developer, which unfortunately was compromised by that initial security hole. Once that member’s blog started getting traction in the search engines, that backdoor was easier to find.

What it did

The malicious code was designed to replicate itself in a file called footer.php. Every theme has one of those files – I temporarily deleted over 250 themes while trying to track this down. The footer files are all written differently, and are used to build the very bottom section of your website each time a page loads. The bad code looked for a specific tag common in every footer file and injected itself. To make matters worse, the code was encrypted making it difficult to know what it does. Fortunately, on the majority of the sites, the code failed to execute resulting in an error that appeared at the bottom of the websites over the weekend. It was this error; visible on one of the blogs that prompted Jackie to tell me to have a look, and how I discovered the hacking.

Improving security

As a result of this, I’ve boosted our security measures to prevent this from happening again. Most of these steps are technical and involve protecting various file directories using a combination of special commands and permissions. As a result of this, for the next couple of days and weeks, if you find something not working properly (uploading images might be affected sightly) let me know as I work to fine tune these–its important to get the right balance of security and accessibility. In addition to this, I will be increasing  our backup schedule.

Furthermore, we’ve retained the internet security firm that helped us track this one down to continue monitoring Tea Trade for the next year. Given at how efficient they were in helping us out, I’m very pleased with their service, and we will renew with them next year to keep the protection in place.

Keeping Tea Trade safe

It’s important to remember that Tea Trade itself was not targeted. Tea Trade is built on WordPress, and WordPress is one of the most popular platforms on the internet for building a website. Due to this, WordPress was targeted, but more specifically; a weakness in a third-party script commonly associated with WordPress was. With popularity, one becomes a target. My job, and the job of the developers who build WordPress and the supporting software,  is to ensure that WordPress websites are hard to hack into. This incident has motivated me to ensure that Tea Trade is setup with the best practices in the industry, over the coming days, I’ll be double-checking the hardening of our WordPress installation and consulting with others about how to keep it safe in the future.

I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused by this. To help compensate for the confusion and frustration over the last 3 days, I’ll be extending all the paid Tea Trader accounts for one month free of charge. I want to encourage confidence that Tea Trade is a safe and secure place to host your tea blog or online tea store and show that Jackie and I are committed to making and keeping Tea Trade as the best tea community online.

Source: The Tea Trade hacking at Tea Trade