Well it has come time to review, update and clean up my WordPress instance to get it refreshed so i can start to put some new posts. Below is a brief snapshot of the plugins and themes i use, and high level clean-up steps i performed.
Themes
- GeneratePress theme (https://wordpress.org/themes/generatepress/) as its clean and free and offers some of the features i really wanted to have:
- Posts need to have a date on the post, so people can instantly see relevance – i find many bloggers remove this and its frustrating as a reader.
Plugins
- Akismet Anti-Spam – https://wordpress.org/plugins/akismet/ This is self explanatory as to why i have it.
- BackWPup – https://wordpress.org/plugins/backwpup/ This is a basic backup that i use, specifically to do backups locally as well as to Dropbox and Azure Blob storage. Its free for the the backup destinations i use, and restores are more ‘hands on’ but that’s ok for me.
- Highslide for WordPress *reloaded* This plugin helps user experience when clicking on images – rather than the page loading the image, it simply creates a ‘lightbox’ with the image, and a second click closes it. This plugin is no longer available on WordPress, but is a very simple implementation looking at the code. I will replace it if it causes issues
- JetPack – https://wordpress.org/plugins/jetpack/ Offers signing in with WordPress account, and MFA. Also there are some additional benefits it offers for free that make it worthwhile
- Urvanov Syntax Highlighter – https://wordpress.org/plugins/urvanov-syntax-highlighter/ Nice and very feature rich syntax highlighter for code. I have customised this to suit the way i like code displayed.
Configuration
Most of the config is fairly straightforward and wont cover off. Below are more noteworthy changes worth documenting:
- SQL updating all tables that reference my old domain and point everything to https://ivan.dretvic.com. This just cleaned up all broken links/images in posts.
- Cloudflare was put in front of WordPress. This provides protection benefits including:
- WAF/security protections
- TLS enforced on all connections
- Cloudflare Access to get into any of the sensitive directories like /wp-admin
- Updated all previous logs to use the new Syntax Highlighter. I used to use a different one previously, but with no development for two years (the developer past away) i decided to migrate.
- Ran a security vulnerability scan using a tool to validate that the server, database and WP instance is configured appropriately.
- Configured WP, plugins and themes to automatically update. Historically i have had no issues due to keeping it vanilla, so not worried about doing it automatically.
Whats next?
Ill keep updating this post as i update with any new changes. What I will look at doing is building out some automated testing to validate that a) the site is up, and b) is rendering as expected.
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