Hi John,

If you would like an easy way to kick the tires on the Wordpress platform and become more familiar with it, I suggest you check out the Turnkey Wordpress virtual appliance. You can spin this VM up in moments. It’s basically a self-contained Linux host with a fully preconfigured instance of Wordpress, ready to go out of the box. This is far better than tinkering with something like a free account on Wordpress.com because you can get under the hood and really play with doing some serious administration.

 

https://www.turnkeylinux.org/wordpress

HTH,

Al Puzzuoli

Information Technologist

Michigan State University,

Resource Center for Persons with Disabilities,  120 Bessey Hall East Lansing, MI  48824-1033

517-884-1915

http://www.rcpd.msu.edu

 

Good morning MSU! 

(imagine I used a Robin Williams voice for that!)

 

I’ve had some questions about Wordpress from one of my faculty that I can’t answer, because I don’t use it, and I don’t have it installed on any of my web servers.  I was hoping that an experienced Wordpress user or admin could answer a few questions for me.  If you know, please let me know by replying in list or offline.  I’m happy to take a phone call if you have the time.

 

1)       Is Wordpress a decently featured CMS?  In years past it was very popular for setting up blogs and similar user managed content, but is it a robust CMS?

2)       To make it useful as a CMS, do you need a lot of plug-ins installed?  Nearly every article I read about Wordpress security seems to indicate that plug-ins are the inroad for many security attacks, and the more plug-ins you add, the more time you will spend continuously patching your Wordpress installation for security fixes.  Is that your experience?

3)       Do I need to install Wordpress on the web server where I want to manage content, or can a separate Wordpress server be set up to do development and editing, and then only push out HTML content to the production server once that content has been approved? I’d rather not install yet another set of tools on our production web site if I can avoid it. I’d rather be patching a development Wordpress server than take the chance of introducing more software to my primary web server that needs more patching.

4)       Can anyone refer me to a decent article on basic Wordpress administration and setup?  Anything you have found useful would be great.

 

Well, again, my thanks in advance for any information you may be willing to share.  Have a great morning!

 

 

 

John Resotko

Assistant Director, Systems Administration and Support

Michigan State University College of Law

648 N. Shaw Lane, Room 208 Law Building

East Lansing, MI 48842-1300

 

email: [log in to unmask]

phone: 517-432-6836

fax: 517-432-6861

web: http://www.law.msu.edu/

 

MSU IT Council , Law College representative and board member: https://tech.msu.edu/itcouncil/index.php