Category: Wordpress

It’s early days in the life of this blog/website, I am just setting up my site after all, but here are my evolving favourite (essential?) plugins – ones that I am using now (in no particular order): –

• Jetpack (obviously?)
• Akismet Anti-spam: Spam Protection [subscription] (because I want to limit spam content)
• UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore (because it’s simple to backup to AWS S3)
• WP 2FA – Two-factor authentication for WordPress (because I want to force every user who wants to register on my site to use 2FA)
• PublishPress Permissions is great for advanced content permissions. The Members plugin is great but it does not appear trivial to block posts completely based on role, the title is still visible. Although it might be able to do this the control is not obvious. PublishPress Permissions, for me, offers the control I need. I can add permissions for a Categories (and Tags) as well as Posts! This, for me, is important because I need ‘restricted’ Categories and Tags.

And some plugins I’m using but am unsure about at the moment: –

• WP-Optimize – Clean, Compress, Cache

In our shared hosting installation we discovered that incorrect file and directory permissions prevented our images (media) from being displayed … probably due to a mistake when transferring the initial WordPress installation from our remote client.

For shared hosting all directory permissions should typically be 0755 and files should be 0644 (except wp-config.php, which should be 440 or 400 to prevent other users on the server from reading it). You can read a discussion of this in the WordPress file permissions documentation, specifically the section on Shared Hosting with suexec

To fix the visibility problems we changed the permissions with our standard FTP client (FileZilla) to recursively set permission of directories and files. Remember that the WordPress installation consists of thousands of directories and tens-of-thousands of files, so be prepared to wait for a few minutes for the client to finish the Job.

We’ve chosen to use the Updraft plugin to perform our site backups. There are about 3 million installations, and it is under active development (with mods made in the last few weeks). It also supports Amazon AWS S3. To do this we create: –

• An AWS Bucket (e.g. kaitak.org)
• An IAM User with a Policy that provides access to the bucket

There’s more than one way to access an Amazon S3 bucket as a backup destination but we created an AWS IAM User, a custom (JSON) Policy, and an Access Key with a use case that’s “Application running outside AWS“.

Our Policy, which limits the user to just our bucket, looks like this: –

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": "s3:*",
            "Resource": [
                "arn:aws:s3:::kaitak.org",
                "arn:aws:s3:::kaitak.org/*"
            ]
        }
    ]
}

With the bucket created, and a User and Policy assigned, we simply have to provide the bucket and access key information in the Updraft Amazon S3 backup configuration, where the following fields need to be set: –

• Amazon S3 access key (you AWS access key’s access key)
• Amazon S3 secret key (your AWS access key’s secret key)
• Amazon S3 location (e.g. kaitak.org)

If all goes well, when you press the Updraft Test Amazon S3 Settings button you’ll see a Success message!