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How to Get Notification of WordPress and Plugin Updates

How to Get Notification of WordPress and Plugin UpdatesHave you ever wished you could be notified whenever there’s a WordPress update available or there’s a plugin on your WordPress powered website that’s in need of upgrading?

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.

UPDATE!

We now recommend ManageWP.com as the go-to service for keeping one or many WordPress installs up-to-date. You will need to install their plugin on each WordPress website you manage. Thereafter you can choose to be notified by email when there are plugins, themes, or core WordPress updates available and even apply those updates to all the websites you manage from the ManageWP.com website. They also offer pay-for services such as backups, automated security checks and more.

Sign up for a free account at ManageWP.com here and download the ManageWP Worker plugin to start keeping all your WordPress website up-to-date. [Read more…]

WordPress as a CMS and plugins that help

ThemeShaper.com has a good article on using WordPress as a CMS and lists a few plugins that come in handy for this: Use WordPress As a CMS: Plugins, The Bare Minimum

I have a few recommendations of my own to add to the list.

  • Feed Control is a plugin that lets you add your WordPress pages to your RSS feed, and will also allow you to remove pages or posts from your feed.
  • Sitemap Generator is a good tool for providing a site map to your visitors.
  • Order Pages is a plugin that allows you to easily and visually arrange the order of your pages in navigation bars and menus — you can certainly edit the “page order” number by hand for each page but if you have a lot of pages this makes ordering those pages a breeze. And the My Page Order plugin can do this well also.
  • Category Order — while the above plugin arranges the order of your “pages”, this plugin arranges the order of your blog “categories” — which is handy if you are using your blog categories in an unusual way while using WordPress as a CMS — Category Order can be found near the bottom of the linked page here.

Update: Here is a great list that contains some very helpful plugins for leveraging WordPress as a CMS — Top 10 WordPress CMS Plugins at Blueprint Design Studio.

Update: (Friday; April 11, 2008) — Obfuscate E-mail is a plugin I find I need on most WordPress powered sites I setup — you can post email addresses as links and this plugin will obscure the address in the html so as to confuse spammer bots.

Update: (Tuesday; May 6, 2008) — the Role Manager plugin gives fine control over which users have access to what features on your WordPress install.

Update: (Tuesday; October 21, 2008) — Search Unleashed – Advanced WordPress searches with highlighting as well as searching of pages and posts.