Let's talk about local Wordpress sites

[Tim Lund]

This is something I posted about on a thread about Sydenham Community Radio a while back, but I'm reviving it here following a good positive conversation I had yesterday with a local councillor.

In a sentence:

Because Wordpress is so much the dominant technology used for creating web sites, those of us who are using it locally should be getting together to exchange ideas about how to use it better.

In another conversation yesterday, I was talking to an LB Lewisham officer about how he could make better use of Wordpress on a site he runs. We got to the point of agreeing in principle to a demo, and hopefully something will come of that, although I'm not counting on it. In a few minutes, I hope to be talking to a Council contractor, who I see is also using Wordpress, but I'm not counting on that either - just chipping away at the basic idea, my one sentence explanation above.

It's not really a technical problem - there are some technical problems around, but whole point of getting people together is to share expertise, and get such problems solved.

The main problem is human - or you could say political, with a lower case "p". Or maybe that's another way of saying it's a communications problem. How do you get someone who wants a website, but isn't interested in the technology for its own sake, feel comfortable with the advice of someone who is? One solution is to go professional - you find someone who offers to do the work for a fee, and whose other websites look good, and you pay them. The problem with this is that most customers don't know enough about web site development that they are very likely to waste money, or get ripped off. They would be better served if they knew where they could go to pick up advice from local people - so what I'm proposing - where they can talk to other local people who have some experience, and only start paying if they need more done than can reasonably be ask for free.

I don't want to go into too many technicalities here, but I think a couple are worth mentioning.

• There are Wordpress sites and Wordpress.com sites. Wordpress.com sites can be set up for nothing, can look very good when run by someone with good design and comms skills, but they miss out on a lot of the extras which can be done with third party Wordpress plugins. Plugins are much of what I'd expect any exchange of Wordpress ideas to be about.
• We're not just talking about Wordpress - by using plug ins a Wordpress site can be made to link in to other social media, such as Twitter & Facebook. Just now I also googled 'Wordpress plugin Instagram', and there are a whole lot of plugins which look as if they will link in with that - learning more there is what I'd hope to get from exchanging Wordpress ideas.

To illustrate this last point, in another conversation this morning, a friend said she'd seen something I'd posted in the Friends of Dacres Wood Facebook page.



which was kind of news to me, because all I'd done was post to the Friends of Dacres Wood Wordpress site, which has a plug in which automatically tweets links to any new posts on @dacreswood, and, thanks to my having been made an admin on the Friends of Dacres Wood Facebook, I'd set that up to post automatically whenever there was a tweet from @dacreswood.

I don't expect everyone to be as excited by all this techie stuff, but there are ways the wider community can leverage off such enthusiasm.

[admin]

I am a fan of Wordpress (the main Sydenham site is Wordpress) but not a fan of what you propose.

I would encourage bloggers and small organisations to use the free community wordpress.com service - and blogspot.com. I would most definitely not encourage people to host wordpress sites themselves unless they are experienced system administrators. There lies disaster - and many weeks of my time has been wasted helping people to recover.

The basic problem is Wordpress is designed to be user friendly. You don't even need "Wordpress for Dummies" to get a site going. That's good but the price is terrible. It is written in PHP which is bad. And big chunks of it are written badly. It has long had a record of prioritising features over stability and security. The fact that you can publicly upload stuff and the defaults are set way too open should be warning enough.

Understanding these risks means you can mitigate them. I have had to write special scripts to scan the Wordpress directories daily to spot any trojans. And I've found them! You have to lock down access and permissions. You have to keep it bang up to date. When Wordpress update the fact that its easily readable source points to the thickest hacker exactly what the discovered vulnerability is. You really need to get the update in before they can write code and scan you. From my logs I can see that is what most of my traffic is. Plus the dictionary attacks on the login.

So unless you are an expert - stay away or use the wordpress/blogspot sites which are locked down by professional system administrators. Hosting elsewhere so you can use extra themes & plugins can be lethal if you don't take extreme care.

Admin

[Tim Lund]

Oh well!

Can you delete this thread then, to save my embarrassment?

[admin]

Why? Its my opinion. There may be other, better opinions. If so I'd love to hear them. We all have much to learn.

Admin

[Tim Lund]

Why? Its my opinion. There may be other, better opinions. If so I'd love to hear them. We all have much to learn.

Admin

Why? As I wrote, to save my embarrassment , but I can get over it, so now, let me thank you for pointing out what I was missing

I guess the main point remains, what it's worth discussing local Wordpress sites, just that my follow ideas need to be treated with caution. Hopefully we can get more people to contribute, either here or elsewhere.

[Lemon]

I agree that Wordpress has it's issues, but if the site being created is a basic site for informational purposes then is there really much harm?

@Admin, maybe you could answer this for us. What is the worst that could happen if a hacker was to get into an informational site such as one on a local park with information about the park facilities etc? Also, why would they want to?

I'm completely ready to admit that this may be a very naive point of view, but I do think that using local knowledge to help people get basic websites online would be a great idea.

[admin]

Lemon,

The point I was making was that a basic informational site is ideal for either Wordpress, Blogspot or any of the others on their free community sites (eg wordpress.com). They take care of the security for you. The price is you are limited to their basic set of themes and plugins.

Even if you have fancier ideas its an excellent place to start.

However, once you step our from under wordpress.com's skirts to host your very own site using the wordpress download - you have to do that yourself. The more fancy things you try the greater the risk.

Hackers don't care what your site does or says. They only want to use it as a springboard to make money or fame at your expense. They do this in a number of ways including:

1) Defacement. Putting their message instead of yours and/or just showing off. "Hacked by ISIS" makes some people think they are smart. This type of defacement is the least effective since you can spot it immediately (or someone else will) and your hoster will take it down if you don't. Their effort is wasted.

2) Canadian Pharmacy scam. This subverts your pages to show drugs at incredible prices to the Google search bots. But your pages look the same to you so unless you do a Google search on yourself you might not be aware. Your traffic increases but incoming users from Google are re-directed to the hackers specialist drug sites.

3) Once penetrated a wordpress website can be used for many other purposes - like hacking other wordpress sites. Hackers rarely attack using their own computers. They capture others and use those for the attack. They do this millions of times so it is impossible to track back to the hacker or stop them all. its a numbers game.

There are many more. If you are unlucky enough to get hit then getting the site clean again is challenging for even an expert. Unless you have one in hand or pots of money that means your total investment in the website may be lost. The hack goes right into the database, the heart of wordpress. It may have been there for months so even if you back up your database it might be impossible to get back to a clean one. Its very difficult to excise. If you haven't shut the original backdoor you can expect to be re-infected within weeks.

So going back to the original point. Keep it simple and use wordpress.com or similar unless all the above makes sense. The more working info sites the better.

Admin

[Lemon]

Gotcha Admin, thanks for the info. I think if design is the main objective then wix can be a good tool although if you ever want to move to your own domain you'll need to use their hosting... http://www.wix.com/upgrade/website

Some Wix designed sites do look really good though... http://treiandco.wix.com/treiandco/

Also, while I'm at it Canva - https://www.canva.com/ is a fantastic free tool for throwing together some designs

[Tim Lund]

Thanks for this Lemon.

I spoke to Admin about this before I went off on holiday, which was helpful for me in that it showed me some of the things I'd been doing right, without realising it - such as only using plug-ins on the sites I host which had good reviews and lots of downloads, and keeping them up to date. I also only use the standard Wordpress themes, which is where other local sites have run into trouble.

In a way, our discussion illustrated perfectly why it's good to talk about Wordpress sites - it helps us all learn. With the possible exception of Admin, who knows everything necessary already, as far as I can tell

[leenewham]

Content is king with websites.

We use Wordpress.com a lot and you can do a lot with it. There are other options, but for the back end system it's really good. It enables you to have other users with different roles, it links to Facebook and Twitter and other social media well. It's simple to get up and running. We used it for sites for Mountsfield Park and Friends of Home Park (which helped them get funding), Sydenham Library and all the 'What If' sites. It's quick and simple and cheap. I set up one for the Save Forest Hill Library a years ago, but someone decided that another system was better, which wasted time and didn't look that great and was difficult to use. Whatever you do, make use it works, is easy to use and people can get access to it. Wordpress ticks all those boxes.

From a design point of view, we just used Adobe Muse to do our own site which worked really well.

If you want to get to word out there about seething local, make it look professional, link it to social media etc, then Wordpress.com is pretty hard to beat. You can buy dedicated domains so it doesn't look like it's wordpress.com.