Prevent Password Reset is a very handy plugin from WordPress developer Justin Tadlock.

The settings for this plugin are under the “Personal Options” section of each user’s profile page. Simply use the checkbox to disable password reset for the user:

If used with the administrator user name, it can actually help to keep your WordPress site a little safer from hackers.

Download the Prevent Password Reset plugin for free from the repository.

Show your support for keeping the web free and open by installing this and other anti-censorship plugins:

7 WordPress Plugins to Fight SOPA / PIPA

Fight Internet Censorship by Turning Your WordPress Site Into a Proxy

Your participation in the protests is making a huge difference worldwide and has caused the SOPA / PIPA bills to be postponed indefinitely. Let’s make sure these bills get defeated the as soon lawmakers decide to sneak them off the shelf.

That was a good thing.

But the downside to this was that it caused “the footer” to disappear. By that I mean what we used to think of as footers – the very bottom of the page where often necessary but not immediately vital information was placed: copyright information, disclaimers, links to privacy policies, etc.

With new widgetized footers, this “necessary but not immediately vital information” now often gets placed on the same level as information that IS more vital, such as category links, sales messages, and recent posts.

Add a Sub Footer

The solution to this problem is to bring back the old-styled “footer,” and yet keep the new more useful footer at the same time. The way to do this is to add a footer below the footer – a kind of “sub-footer.”

This can be done with a plugin called BNS Add Widget. Although it bills itself as a “footer widget,” in truth it’s a “sub-footer widget.” It will automatically place a widget area at the very bottom of your site, even below your theme’s original footer.

The Plugin in Action

After activating your plugin, you will see a new widget area titled BNS Add Widget automatically appear on your widget page. (Appearance > Widgets)

You can then drop whatever widgets you like into it.

Styling the Widget Area

The one piece of “work” to this plugin is that you will most likely want to do is a little styling for it in your CSS file. If not, depending on what you put in the widget, your content may run well past the margins of the content area of your site.

For example, look at this text (placed in a text widget) before styling.

With a little bit of simple styling, however, you can fix that problem. Simply go to your stylesheet (Appearance > Editor > Stylesheet – style.css), and then add CSS styling.

There is a little more information about other options on the plugin page, but most likely, you won’t need much more than the following:

Add .bns-add-widget to your CSS file and then style it as you like.

For example, in order to get my widget to be centered and to make the content area 600 pixels wide, I put the following into my stylesheet.

.bns-add-widget
 {
 margin-left: auto;
 margin-right: auto;
 width: 600px;
 }

And here’s the result.

Bringing the Traditional Footer Back

As mentioned, this is an especially convenient plugin for sites that want to put “out of the way” content truly out of the way. It lets you keep your theme’s widgetized footer areas free from all that stuff that really should be there but feels like clutter when it is.

You can download the BNS Add Widget plugin here.

Photo: Feet And Orchid from BigStock

Here’s the RePress plugin in a nutshell:

This plugin allows you to circumvent internet censorship by proxying traffic to websites that have been blocked by repressive regimes.

After you add the plugin, your website will begin to function as a proxy to uncensor any blocked site that you specify. Here’s what the options page looks like:

Greenhost, a hosting provider in the Netherlands, decided to write this software after a court ruled in the Netherlands, requiring ISPs to block piratebay.org. They believe strongly in the free flow of information and are working to keep the web open and free. This plugin is part of that initiative. The aim is to uncensor websites for people in oppressive regimes like Iran, Syria or the USA if SOPA is passed.

The plugin offers you the ability to maintain a list of websites you’d like to keep open and freely available on the web. Users can pass freely through the links on your website to censored sites on the web:

View the RePress Examples page to see how the links work.

Be advised, as noted on the RePress website: This is EXPERIMENTAL ALPHA software which comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRENTY.

RePress will soon be in the WordPress plugin repository. For now you can download it from: https://all4xs.net. It’s one small, yet practical way that you can help to keep the web open and free. Many thanks to the folks at Greenhost for their time and effort in creating this plugin for WordPress.