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If you professionally build a WordPress site, please consider turning off the native plugin and theme management, and replace it with composer and files non-wri

If you professionally build a WordPress site, please consider turning off the native plugin and theme management, and replace it with composer and files non-writable to PHP. https://roots.io/bedrock/ https://roots.io/bedrock/ is a neat boilerplate for how this can be done.

berkes 5y ago
I've grown a now-popular wordpress hoster. We tried a "secure plan", which, a.o. ran the WP codebase on read-only filesystem (technically: chrooted, so WP could not change its own codebase). We pitched this with the "professionals" amongst the customers. They liked the idea, but abandoned it nonetheless. Too many themes won't work OOT. Too many plugins write files. Too many features appeared "broken" to their clients. When someone logs in as root, hits the update-button and gets errors, they consider it crap, rather than "proper security practice". So, while it seems nice in theory, the practice is -unfortunately- not there yet: as long as it is not the de-facto way, but an obscure, unfamiliar way, to run a WP site, people will too often abandone it. A feedback-loop causing it to never become really secure.
- sascha_sl 5y ago
  I am not too surprised by this. When I was doing agency work I was fortunate enough to be able to set a priority for security and build most things from scratch, only using a hand full of utility plugins (e.g. ACF) where I could have at least a glance at the code doing things well. Anyone who has a site valuable enough to do that (and use a git workflow) should be using a framework like Bedrock. I've never had a positive experience with a theme that had a thousand built-in options or even turned WP into a fully blown site builder. The code quality - both of the plugin/theme code and the generated markup - was usually quite bad. I imagine the main audience for managed WP hosting is there.

berkes 5y ago

I've grown a now-popular wordpress hoster. We tried a "secure plan", which, a.o. ran the WP codebase on read-only filesystem (technically: chrooted, so WP could not change its own codebase). We pitched this with the "professionals" amongst the customers. They liked the idea, but abandoned it nonetheless. Too many themes won't work OOT. Too many plugins write files. Too many features appeared "broken" to their clients. When someone logs in as root, hits the update-button and gets errors, they consider it crap, rather than "proper security practice". So, while it seems nice in theory, the practice is -unfortunately- not there yet: as long as it is not the de-facto way, but an obscure, unfamiliar way, to run a WP site, people will too often abandone it. A feedback-loop causing it to never become really secure.

sascha_sl 5y ago
I am not too surprised by this. When I was doing agency work I was fortunate enough to be able to set a priority for security and build most things from scratch, only using a hand full of utility plugins (e.g. ACF) where I could have at least a glance at the code doing things well. Anyone who has a site valuable enough to do that (and use a git workflow) should be using a framework like Bedrock. I've never had a positive experience with a theme that had a thousand built-in options or even turned WP into a fully blown site builder. The code quality - both of the plugin/theme code and the generated markup - was usually quite bad. I imagine the main audience for managed WP hosting is there.