WordPress Meetup Columbus November 19th

I have been attending the WP-Columbus meetups often over the last year and find them to be very valuable and a great opportunity to meet others in the WP community. The plan is to start posting about topics discussed in these meetups and share some useful tips learned.

At a prior meetup, there were questions about how to do backups of your site. Many solutions were offered, some premium and some at little to no cost. I will do a video of a very manual option that I believe could be done by many users with a little bit of knowledge of how to connect to their host via ftp and how to do very minor SQL edits using phpMyAdmin (which is usually available for many hosts).

At the November 19th meetup, it was great to see some very new faces. Thom agreed to host the meeting as our usual host was unable to attend. Thom is very knowledgeable given that he has only been using WordPress for the last couple years. One questions was about LearnPress and if it was a good plugin to use. We did not go into detail about the plugin as Thom nor anyone else had used it yet. Thom was considering to use it for one of his clients, so this plugin might be something for me to research and try out and do a little review of later.

The biggest take away for me was using WordFence as an initial catch to watch for potential hacks of my sites. Thom suggests using the plugin and also paying for Sucuri to keep the site clean of malware and for their great recovery solution. I am just starting to use WordFence on a few of my sites, and have already noticed a scan for the TimThumb vulnerability against one site. I am able to block the IP from Poland based upon this information and will see how usage of this plugin proceeds over time.