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How to Get Notification of WordPress and Plugin Updates

How to Get Notification of WordPress and Plugin Updates

Have you ever wanted a way to be notified when there’s a WordPress update available or there’s a plugin on your WordPress powered website that’s in need of updating?

With WordPress in use on an estimated 60% of all websites worldwide, it is a prime target for attack. There will always be bad actors trying to find and exploit any weakness they can use to their advantage.

Whether there’s a weakness in the WordPress code or a flaw in one of the many plugins for WordPress there will always be risks. But the risks can be minimized. [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.