I’m running this blog on WordPress  and have just upgraded to the new version, 4.5, named ‘Coleman’ after jazz musician Coleman Hawkins. It is good that the system is kept up to date to ensure security although I’m sure there are an increasing number of clever things it can do that I don’t know about and might not be interested in even if I did.

At least I’ve got my updating protocol down to a fairly established process. I use the WP Migrate DB plugin to take a snapshot of the underlying database and then run the main update. That takes care of the details and, so far, has run smoothly every time. I use Git to keep an eye on the files on the server and commit the changes at that point, pulling them to a local copy. This means I can potentially roll back any change to files and can also spot any hacked changes – a couple of years ago something got into my website and it was a hassle picking through for infected files while now nothing can change without me being able to spot or even reset it if required.

As a consequence, I can cope with the regular round of WordPress updates without breaking a sweat. However, without my dev background I think I would definitely want to use a hosted WordPress set rather than running my own to avoid getting in a twist.