Charles Stricklin

First I’d like I’d like to thank Charles and the crew over at the WordPress Podcast for airing my question to Matt (the founding developer of the popular open-source blogging software WordPress) . It was a nice treat to have Matt right there to answer my question. I’m not sure if he answered my question directly or not (is he running for office by chance), but I think he said, “There’s not a chance of making anything stable”. He talked about support for 2.0 as being a problem, but it was important to have that version there for people that could not upgrade to newer versions of other software like php and MySQL. In fact without that version I problably would never have started to use WordPress. I know several people that had to use that version due to their server configuration.

My basic warning for small business is to not use this software unless you have some one you can count on to help you not only fix it, but also maintain it on a regular basis.  The risk it just to high. Once a site is compromised it will take some serious expertise to restore it. Most of the time in order to sovle this problem the site needs to be deleted and rebuilt from scratch. Backups can help, but sometimes the compromised it not noticed for quite awhile and trying to return to a version that is still available and does not contain any compromised or contaminated in anyway it difficult to discover.

If google discovers a problem with your site it will be delisted pretty quickly and users will be steared away from it. Now used get omonis looking red screen warning them that your site might distroy the visiters computer. Most users (I’d say 99%) will not continue and will probably not return.

Jonathan Bailey

We use WordPress for this site primarily because our focus is on doing a podcast and wordpress really helps us distribute our podcast. We use a script to automatically update the the WordPress software and log in frequently enough to be notified of WordPress updates. Also we use several plugins to make you (our readers) experience more useful and enjoyable, but these plugins also need to be updated. It’s getting to the point that every time I login in to add some information I have to do some type of update as well.

The problem with WordPress are not unique to WordPress. Any php software that you install
on your site that allows you to add any kind of content to your site has the potential of being compromise and allow malicious user to add or change information on your site.

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