Report from MWUG Meetup September 2012

For those interested, here are some brief notes from last night’s User session in the first half of the evening:

Security

One subject raised was security. I mentioned the following plugins:

Limit Login Attempts
Limit rate of login attempts, including by way of cookies, for each IP. Fully customizable.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/limit-login-attempts/

WordPress Firewall 2
This WordPress plugin monitors web requests to identify and stop the most obvious attacks.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-firewall-2/

Update Notifier
Sends email notifications if a new version of WordPress available. Notifications about updates for plugins and themes can also be sent.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/update-notifier/

There are many more, some with more in-depth analysis and tools.

I also mentioned LastPass (https://lastpass.com) (whilst not directly WordPress related it’s great for creating and managing very strong passwords.

Deployment from ‘Dev’ to ‘Live’

We talked a little about moving from a development environment to a production or live server. I mentioned the WordPress import tool (to use with a standard WordPress export):

WordPress Importer
Import posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, tags and more from a WordPress export file.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-importer/

And mentioned the Interconnect it search and replace tool
http://interconnectit.com/124/search-and-replace-for-wordpress-databases/

I also talked about using a backup and restore solution because the better ones seem to include a migrate option too. There are a good number out there, but almost all are commercial (note, unlike the security plugins I mention and recommend above, I haven’t used any of these):

Backup Buddy – http://ithemes.com/purchase/backupbuddy/
Blog Vault – http://blogvault.net/
and many more.

There are other free backup solutions in the WordPress plugin repository (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search.php?q=backup) but most only backup your database or your files, but not both. You can of course always use two — but I didn’t see any that also include the option to migrate or restore to a new URL.

Update: I found this plugin: Duplicator – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/duplicator/ which says it can “Duplicate, clone, backup, move and transfer an entire site from one location to another in 3 easy steps.”

One other tool I mentioned was ManageWP (http://managewp.com/) which is a commercial WordPress site management tool that also includes functionality to update many sites remotely as well as backup and restore/deploy functionality.

Getting Involved

When covering general WordPress news, I talked about the make.wordpress.org site (http://make.wordpress.org/) which is an umbrella site for several different streams of activity involved in making WordPress. It includes core WordPress, UI, Accessibility and more. It’s a great place to see what is happening in the WordPress world as well as to get involved.

If you have any questions, or I missed something out from the first half of the evening, please leave a comment below.

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