There are 36 pages of plugins using the tag “revisions” in the WP Plugin Repository.  Better Delete Revision seems best suited to  catch up delayed maintenance; there are other plugins and WP solutions that ditch revisions at specified events (publication of post, after a certain number of days). But this works quite well; and taking a leaf from legal blogger Jeff Vail and medical writer/surgeon Atul Gawande²  I’m thinking about making a monthly or weekly maintenance checklist, and I think Better Delete Revision will be on that list.

Better Delete Revision comes from the site http://www.1e2.it – here’s the link to the plugin page – but be forewarned, it appears to be an Italian-only site.  The plugin, however, seems to work fine on English post drafts.

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1. Link to WordPress Plugin Repository.
2. See, e.g., A Lifesaving Checklist ; The Checklist, and  The Checklist Manifesto.

It’s hard for me to separate domain name registration from the other aspects – so I’m sticking with BlueHost.

Ben Merrill, I’ve discovered, is working on two new (or, at least, new to me) – EZSiteMove.com (painless site migration and related services) and Languit,

“A user submitted memory technique designed to help you remember a word in any language.”

EZSitveMove is, I’m betting, going to be as useful (and successful as SimpleScripts.  Languit, if it gets enough support, could be an enabler of person-to-person diplomacy, useful in conflict resolution, and in medical treatment. Software that can make a contribution to world peace and public health – it doesn’t get any cooler than that. So – if you’re multilingual – think about making a contribution to (they’re looking for knowledge and money, so you can even contribute both) – take a look at Languit.

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There’s been a big fuss lately over the latest WordPress hacks that have targetted older versions of WordPress.

And in my view, they show the less pretty side of WordPress and some people in the community… but not all of them.  The attitude has been a straight “upgrade your blog and you’ll be secure.”

Well, I have news for you.  They’re wrong.

You’re Never Secure

Even if you have the very latest version of everything there are, out there, what are known as zero day exploits.  These are vulnerabilities which are kept secret by the hackers who have found them.  They cease to be secret if they become widely used in a large scale attack.  Like the current one against WordPress.

Now, if there are vulnerabilities out there that nobody knows about then your high profile WordPress site or blog could be targetted in a way that you, I, or the (great and lovely) WordPress developers out there don’t know about.

Not Everyone Can Upgrade Immediately

Quite frankly, I find the glib assertion that staying up to date is all you need to be secure to be… terrifying.  It’s bad advice because it leaves people with the feeling that all they need to do is to stay up to date and all is well.  Not only that, but it sidesteps the whole issue that WordPress should really consider running security updates on older versions of WordPress – not all sites can quickly change from one version to another.  When WordPress 2.8 came out it broke multi-use widgets – you could recode them, but then settings could be lost.  There are sites out there that run hundreds of widgets, and re-configuring them will be a big job.  If a new vulnerability comes out in WordPress it may not even be relevant to some sites because they may be doing everything else correctly.

In fact, in a critical environment you absolutely do not update your software without running a full suite of tests to make sure the updates won’t bring down your site.  This is a major problem for sites which, in some cases, are turning over tens of thousands of pounds a month.  Yes, they can throw money at the problem, but it still takes time – and when there’s a vulnerability the one thing you don’t have is a lot of time.  So a site needs to rely on more than just WordPress for security.

Mr. Coveney clearly understands something about the phenomenology of risk, and he’s got some good practical advice. Perhaps we can persuade him to write something for Popular Logistics, our primary blog, which is about risk assessment, mitigation and control.

A Common-Sense WordPress Security Primer. By David Coveney at InterConnectit – or perhaps it’s pronounced “InterConnect IT.”

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I have only one thing to add to his advice, which includes using the excellent plugin WP-DBManager, by Lester Chan. Be careful that you don’t set the plugin to backup too often without removing older backups. The reason is that some web hosts, because of the way Unix works, are even more concerned about the number of files on their servers than they are about space. I ran afoul of my hosting company’s limits by being a little careless about the settings in WP-DBManager. It doesn’t take very long to generate a few hundred thousand files when you back up a WordPress installation.

The second is adding some great powerful functionality – e.g. the Insights plugin. Insights permits you, while you’re composing a post, and without leaving the editing window, to search your own blog (“didn’t we write something about this before that we should refer to here?”); open-license images (“wouldn’t a picture of, say, a cherry make this post perfect?”), videos, Wikipedia, news, blogs, and books, all of which permit you to very efficiently improve a post by making it more authoritative, more persuasive, clearer, and more entertaining.

Using Insights, I’m able to quickly retrieve earlier posts about Vladimir: Here’s our earlier post about Insights: Insights Plugin: finding images, citations, references while composing. This plugin’s so good that I don’t mind at all repeating myself.

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