Why Update WordPress Plugins?

The wisdom of the crowd gets it wrong on this one. Automatic Updates for WordPress can only help fix WordPress’s tarnished security reputation. Microsoft showed that this solution works unreasonably well. So, it follows WordPress should copy the same playbook. When you have a large distributed install base you most definitely need Automatic Updates. We see no better way to deploy security fixes than to remove the human element. Have the systems repair themselves.

So, Who becomes the crank that advocates tampering with the built in security solutions? Why do they undermine the best solution to the security problem? How did they get this way?

The One Week Plugin

Behind the scenes at metapult we’ve developed a tool chain that makes building WordPress Plugin prototypes easy. Internal tools like ours have become table stakes in the contract development game. If you don’t have a system for making ideas come to life quickly then your customers will go elsewhere. Your customers will come to metapult.

Yoast-ing Marshmallows over an Open Plugin

I now have an idea for this week’s developer challenge: Writing a Yoast Plugin extension that provides the E-Prime feedback within Yoast’s UI. I think it should add a peer section to the ‘Readability’ and ‘SEO Analysis’ tabs. A simple ‘E-Prime’ layer that conforms to the Smiley face convention and accordions to show the sentences that have violations.

I have no idea if it’s possible, but I’m racing off to look into it this afternoon. Hopefully Yoast has some clearly structured code that I can crib from…

Wish Me Luck!