Upgrade your Wordpress blog frequently to keep it more secure

There are a large number of people who want to start blogging, don't like using a shared platform such as Blogger, and install a Wordpress blog on a shared hosting service. And once installed, they start adding new content, generating more user visits. However, a huge percentage of these people do not upgrade to the latest Wordpress version, with many of them having versions of Wordpress that is many versions old. It does not even occur to many of them that is infact a security risk. A security risk ? How come ? One would think that maybe you can lose out on a few new features by not upgrading, but how would this be a security risk ?
Well, not upgrading your version of Wordpress is like not installing the periodic security patches that come with Microsoft Windows. These security patches are meant to close holes that have been discovered in Windows, and not installing them means that you stand to risk somebody being able to hack into your system. Similarly, Wordpress is an evolving software, with holes being discovered, and the Wordpress community patching these holes through more recent versions. Consider the following page (link)

Right now there is a worm making its way around old, unpatched versions of WordPress. This particular worm, like many before it, is clever: it registers a user, uses a security bug (fixed earlier in the year) to allow evaluated code to be executed through the permalink structure, makes itself an admin, then uses JavaScript to hide itself when you look at users page, attempts to clean up after itself, then goes quiet so you never notice while it inserts hidden spam and malware into your old posts.
2.8.4, the current version of WordPress, is immune to this worm. (So was the release before this one.) If you’ve been thinking about upgrading but haven’t gotten around to it yet, now would be a really good time. If you’ve already upgraded your blogs, maybe check out the blogs of your friends or that you read and see if they need any help.

The above example is a live example of why you would want your Wordpress installation to be upgraded to the latest available version. Who wants to be in a position where you have to fix your blog after you find that the worm caused lots of problems ?

Ad: Click Here to learn about Two Powerful & Profitable WordPress Plugins!

WordPress for Business Bloggers: Promote and grow your WordPress blog with advanced plug-ins, analytics, advertising, and SEO (Paperback)

Wordpress Plugins: Use a plugin to update your plugins

If you have a blog on Wordpress (or multiple such blogs), there are a lot of extensions you can make for your blog. You get a cool theme, and then start looking for plugins that give your blog additional features, whether these be administration, or allowing users to tag or search, or the plugin shows other related posts and comments. Okay, so your plugin is now in place, and your blog is ready. What happens a couple of months down the line, when the plugins you use may have some updates, such as having some bug fixes, or some new features, or the plugin has been updated to work with a newer version of Wordpress. How long will you keep on trying to track down updates, and manually updating these plugins ? This can be pretty painful, and take a lot of effort.
So, there should be some way to automate the process, or at least make it simpler, and there is an answer - Single Click Plugin Updater WordPress Plugin (site).

This plugin extends the plugin update notification feature introduced in WordPress 2.3 by adding an “update automatically” link to update notifications. When you click the link, the new version of the corresponding plugin is downloaded and installed automatically. It also lets you know which plugins have update notifications enabled.

There are a lot of comments in the page, so if you have a problem, it should be easy to find the solution.

In addition, you can read more at this page on wordpress.org (link)

Single-click plugin upgrades in WP 2.3 and up. The techniques that this plugin uses are slightly different from the built-in plugin upgrade feature in WP 2.5, so it's possible that on some blogs the plugin updater works and the built-in updater doesn't (or vice versa).
Quickly determine if there are any pending updates and how many plugins are active. This plugin displays that information right below the "Plugin Management" headline.

Ad: Click Here!