With WordPress in use on such a large number of websites worldwide it has never been more vulnerable to attack. Unfortunately there will always be people who are trying to find and exploit any weakness they can use to their advantage. Whether it’s a weakness in the WordPress code itself or a flaw in one of the many plugins available for WordPress there will always be a risk.

Keep your WordPress up-to-date

That’s why keeping your WordPress install and all the plugins you use up-to-date is so important.

Fortunately for you and me there’s a plugin that will keep you posted when there’s an update available.

It’s called WP Updates Notifier and this handy plugin will email you whenever a WordPress update has been released or a plugin updated.

Do I really need this?

You may not think you need a plugin like this if you only run one WordPress powered site. But how often do you log into the WordPress admin panel?

If you aren’t in the administration area of your WordPress site often you will easily miss an update and your website could be vulnerable to an exploit for several days.

It’s even more challenging if you manage more than one WordPress website. If that’s you then this plugin will give you peace of mind. You’ll know when you need to apply an update. And you won’t have to worry about logging in to each of your WordPress installs to check.

Here are a few of the helpful features of the WP Updates Notifier plugin

• Choose between Hourly, Twice Daily or Daily checking
• Choose to send notification emails to more than one address — especially helpful if you aren’t the only administrator of your blog
• Choose to be notified of plugin and/or theme updates
• Choose to be notified of all plugins or themes or just those that are active
• Choose to hide the core WP update nag from non-admin users

What about Multisite?

The plugin will also work on WordPress Multisite. Just install the plugin then activate on the main blog and enter the settings. There’s no need to activate this site wide or on individual blogs, but you may want to set it to notify you of all installed plugins and themes and not only those that are active on the main multisite blog.

So grab the WP Updates Notifier plugin and keep those sites secure. You’ve got no excuse now.

Want to develop websites faster? Start using WordPress. Maybe that should be my number one tip. But in my opinion, to best build and prepare a website for deployment you’ll be much happier working on the site if it’s running an a WordPress install that’s running on your own machine.

If you’re using a Mac check out this very thorough and helpful tutorial over at WPCandy.com on How to install WordPress locally on a Mac.

If you’re using a PC then I’d suggest using this BitNami WordPress stack to install WordPress locally.

When you’re ready to move your WordPress site to the web server WPCandy.com has help for that too.

One of the things I appreciate about the forums is that they are free and open with no restrictions or fees to pay to get the help you need as you learn to make Thematic do what you want.

10 design tips for your custom wordpress theme built with thematic at Cozmos Labs — in fact there’s a whole category of posts on Thematic at the Cozmos Labs site and I’ve found myself there often poking through those posts. There’s also a few free Thematic child themes available there.

Add “Featured Posts” to your Thematic child theme — popular in magazine style layouts, here’s a good tutorial on adding featured posts to your Thematic based theme.

Build WordPress Sites Fast With the Thematic Theme Framework — this post has a wealth of Thematic resources, like help with theme hooks, tutorials and links to lots of child themes.

Thematic Page Structure — This is a visual representation of most of the div elements, theme actions, hooks, and widget areas in Thematic. As you dig into the nuts and bolts of Thematic this will help save you time as you track down what goes where.

How To Modify WordPress Themes The Smart Way — this is a series of posts on themeshaper.com that covers, WordPress Child Theme Basics, Modular CSS in WordPress Child Themes, Using Filter Hooks in WordPress Child Themes and Using Action Hooks in WordPress Child Themes.

Useful Thematic Filters — this a a very helpful post with some handy Thematic filters such as: how to Replace the Blog Title with Your Logo; Add a Search Form to the Header; Add “Home” to Menu Options; Remove Blog Description; Remove the Post Footer; Add Google Analytics Tracking Code; Change the Footer Message; Add a Favicon; Removing Plug-In Code; and Removing and Renaming Widget Areas.

My sincere thanks to Ian Stewart and everyone who contributes to the Thematic framework making it such a powerful WordPress theming tool.