What is WordPress?

WordPress is a well known PHP based CMS with MySQL back-end, mostly used to build blogs. In addition to develop blogs, WordPress is commonly used to develop websites as well. Even though the WordPress is build as a blog software, it is very flexible and we can develop beautiful websites with it. There are millions of WordPress powered websites run in Internet now. It built in plug-in architecture and a template system.

Features

1. Customization :- As WordPress is built and operates based on a template system, it provides lots of opening to customize your web pages.

2. Dashboard :- The dashboard of WordPress is quiet nice and very user friendly. Among the other CMSes available in the market, it is very simple but powerful and can be managed even by a newbie easily.

3. Themes :- We can easily switch WordPress themes. There are thousands of themes available in the market; both free and paid versions. As it is a very popular application, your search for good theme will end up in a good result.

4. Plugins :- Plugin support is another big advantage of WordPress. You can find almost all types of your plugin needs with WordPress. Due to its wide range of user-base, plugin development and maintenance is very active in the community.

5. Multi-user and multi-blogging :- Yes, WordPress supports MU. From version 3.x, WordPress MU has merged to WordPress and its MUI can be controlled by editing the wp-config.php file.

6. SEO :- We can manage URLs search engine friendly and there are bunch of plugins available to tune SEO of your website.

7. Mobile access :- WordPress support mobile access and there are apps available for most of the platform through which we can do basic management of WordPress.

8. Caching :- Couple of very useful plugins available to boost the performance by enabling caching.

There are few more feature available ; please visit http://wordpress.org for a complete read.

WordPress Security

That said, as WordPress is the most popular CMS for blogs and websites , it is “hotspot” of hackers! WordPress built not good in terms of security and it often falls to many exploits. Out of 10 hacked websites we meet a day, 5 are WordPress driven. There are more danger hidden, when we use third-party themes and plugins, which may not be maintained properly. So the best security practice to keep away hackers is to keep WordPress , themes and plugins up-to-date. There are couple of plugins available for check for the installation security, which you may find useful.

WordPress + NixTree?

As I said before, we often see Wordpres exploits. The root cause of most of the hack are outdated installations. We cannot run an update from our end, as it may break the customizations of the website. So best way is to notify the client about the outdated installation in his website.

To minimize the effort to find outdated WordPress version on a Linux-cPanel server, we have developed a plugin for WHM named ntVersionCheck which lists all outdated versions on the server. Read more about our plugin at http://nixtree.com/ntv.php . Please note that the front-end is exclusively for cPanel / WHM. Anybody can use the script to run  with other control panels / without any control panel after some minor modifications to the back-end script. Please note that GUI is not available in case of non-cPanel servers; you can read the output from a text file. Please contact us at info[at]nixtree.com, if you want us to do any customization to the script to suit your needs!