[Charmian Stewart]

Hi all, I am a newbie to WordPress. I downloaded a theme called praseodymiumic (you can view it at: http://www.paddsolutions.com/wpmag/praseodymiumic/. How do I get my site to look like it does on the above url. My site is http://www.in8designs.com. Are there widgets or plugins that I need to activate?

[Steve]

Most theme demos showcase a bunch of features, widgets, etc. that may not be active by default. I suggest you copy them for some guidance.

[Charmian Stewart]

I think it is the widgets, it offers archives, links, social network badges, calendar, meta, recent comments, search, categories, pages, recent posts, tag cloud, custom menu, feedburner subscription, RSS and text. I don’t know which I need to activate to me it look like the original demo. On the right where it says I should drag widgets to activate has areas labeled Home 1, Home 2, Home 3, Sidebar, Footer 1, Footer 2, Footer. I will try to view in browser to figure out these different areas of the web page.

[James P]

I noticed on the theme page there were specific installation instructions that might relate to your issues:

http://www.paddsolutions.com/wordpress-theme-praseodymiumic/

Scroll till you see ‘Installation’.

It specifically mentions a couple of plugins you need to activate, how to access the Praseodynmiumic Options, and how to customize the front page to have things like the slide show.

[D.K. Smith]

This theme has a serious security issue. There appears to be a hidden backdoor coded into one of the files, through which someone (a hacker) will be able to enter your site without permission.

I HIGHLY recommend you not use this theme. You get what you pay for, and these types of issues are fairly frequent on free theme sites.

See this post, http://www.wpsecurity.com/safe-wordpress-themes.htm

[Charmian Stewart]

I took that theme off. I a newbie to WordPress but could you explain how you know there is a security issue with this theme?

[D.K. Smith]

I’ll break this down as best I can:

The prelude.php file in the includes folder contains hashed code (encoded, unable to read by normal methods). There’s an “eval(base64” executable (it makes something happen) hidden in that file.

I haven’t decoded it however; the only reason to have a hashed file in a theme is to hide something, and base64 is a common hacker footprint

It may be a simple backdoor, which is bad enough however; lately we’ve been seeing some very sophisticated encoded hacks.

Whatever flavor this may be… bottom line is that they all compromise your site’s security.

[Author]

Posts