WASHINGTON, DC – May 6, 2014 – inQbation was fortunate enough to have been invited to the first WordPress for Government and Enterprise summit, an exclusive event held in Washington DC at Chief, to hear from Matt Mullenweg, (@photomatt) co-founder of WordPress & founder & CEO of Automattic, his ideas about how government websites can be better and easier to manage by using WordPress as their content management system (CMS). But not only that, he also believes that municipalities, agencies, counties, states and so forth, should be more connected, work together to share what they are doing and avoid reinventing the wheel all over and over, and so, invest the taxpayers dollars on more functionality rather than duplication of features.
When he was asked about WordPress vs. Drupal, he didn’t deny that Drupal was a powerful tool, but said that WordPress do great efforts to be backward compatible so it’s easy to update without breaking, and also release major and security updates frequently, as opposed to Drupal, which take years to release major updates, and those are prone to break web functionality, or even end the support of certain features.
Matt also talked about WordPress and cyber security, and said they are aware that WordPress sites are a big target due to their popularity, therefore they have development teams that focus on keeping WordPress secure, and also consult with well known and trusted cyber security firms. His points were later supported by a technical conversation given by Andrew Nacin (@nacin), WordPress Lead Developer, in which, he recommended to do these things to avoid security issues in WordPress websites:
- Keeping WordPress, plugins and themes up to date.
- Choose plugins carefully, and verify they are secure.
- Perform security audits by a WordPress security consulting company.
- Enable SSL.
- Have your website under a version control system.
- Disallow file modifications.
- Add 2-factor authentication, i.e. restrict admin area for certain IP addresses.
In regards to website performance, Nacin strongly recommended using Nginx as web server, since it can support 10,000 request per second, and it can also be used as front end proxy and caching layer.
This event was definitely great, and for sure, the WordPress team made clear that they want to change the stereotype that government websites should be developed in Drupal, and they are aggressively promoting WordPress as the best publishing platform, easy to use by any user.
