I’ve been updating the WordPress plugins that Polizeros uses. One reason is to prepare for upgrading to WordPress 2.8.2, as there was a flurry of anguished posts on WordPress forums about how the upgrade bonked their blog.
Most of the time it was because of incompatible plugins or because they didn’t deactivate the plugins before upgrading. So, I’ve checked that all plugins work with 2.8.x and replaced some that didn’t.
Polizeros plugins
Akismet. Essential spam comment killer from WordPress. It’s killed over 1 million spams so far here on Polizeros. Yes, 1 million.
All in One SEO Pack. Genuinely improves your search engine rankings. Completely ethical in how it does it too.
FD Feedburner plugin. Maps all RSS feeds to the Feedburner feed.
Sociable. Those little icons at the end of each post that allow you to post anything here to social networking sites.
WordPress.com stats. Way useful information on web traffic.
WordPress database backup. It backs up the database every day.
WP Super Cache. This replaced my aging wp-cache. This site does seem faster now. It works by writing static pages out to disk, then feeding them to readers, rather than them having to regenerate the page all over again (if there have been no changes.)
The process of upgrading was a bit bouncy. Got several warnings about .htaccess, folder rights, and permalinks. At one point, my feeds stopped working because of this. This took about 30 minutes to track down and fix. Blog software needs to be way less geeky than this. Most folks would not have a clue what to do if told to chmod directory rights to 775. Nor should they need to know.
I don’t use autoupgrade because a) it stopped working on Polizeros, b) there are horror stories about it not working right, and c) manual upgrading is simple enough to do.
If you have a WordPress blog, what plugins do you use?
I wouldn’t want to run WP on a host that required me to give group-write permissions to my WP tree. Or read, for that matter. 775 should give you the willies.
Live Comment Preview is nice. Automatic upgrade is now built in to WP, and it’s worked pretty well for me, ditto automatic plugin upgrades.
FancyZoom is useful. Google Analytics saves having to edit my theme manually; that’s nice. Bad Behavior is a good backup for Akismet.
A WP guru tells me Apache runs as a group, so group is needed. Is there another way of doing it?
The ftp userid / password doesn’t work here for autoupgrades. Techs at the hosting company can’t figure out why either.
In a login-host environment, yes, Apache runs as itself, so you have to write-enable its group. However, there are ways around it. One is to find a host that supports fastcgi, which allows each virtual host to run with its own uid (yours, presumably). In my case I run a wrapper script via .htaccess which causes the php interpreter to run with me as the uid.
You might ask laughingsquid support about a cgi wrapper….
Is virtual host in the cloud? I don’t have a cloud account yet at Laughing Squid, but will probably transition to it soon. It’s better, cheaper, and offers more bandwidth and storage.
No. Roughly speaking, polizeros.com is configured (now) as an Apache virtual server (which I should have written instead of virtual host), along with the other web-host accounts running on the same machine. Apache allows a virtual server to run cgi stuff as the user who owns the virtual server (you): http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_suexec.html. This isn’t entirely straightforward (though it’s fairly standard stuff) because you then need to run PHP services like WP via mod_fcgi or the like (that is, not via mod_php).
I don’t know how LS’s cloud accounts are configured, but it may well do the trick for you. And better+cheaper can’t hurt….
BTW, I just ran across another useful WP plugin called Security Scan, which will do an audit of your site for problems with permissions and other vulnerabilities.
Akismet is great – if I mark a Troll as spam, they’ll never again post from that IP address, domain, or username to a wordpress, blogger, or movable type blog (plus who knows how many other subsribers).
I wrote (here, I think) recently that monkey-wrenching the system is a green sharpie in your pocket: writing NO WAR across GW’s face on a dollar bill before feeding it to the bus.
That commenter on your blog may actually be working for the Israeli government
If I mark a Troll as spam…