WordPress is licenced under a GNU General Public Licence. That means it is free and as a general rule you are free to copy, modify, make derivatives works and share it…freely.

And that’s all generally good. I like free; especially when you can get a top quality, extremely flexible and versatile product like WordPress.

But what I am distressed about is the recent controversial battle between the author of the Thesis Theme Chris Pearson and the original author of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg.

It’s complicated but the argument goes something like this: the Thesis Theme is a derivative work…a derivative of WordPress…and it must also be free. Chris is accused of breaching the WordPress licence by charging people for the Thesis Theme.

As with most legal disputes there are grey areas. It isn’t black and white.

Ok! I like free especially when you get software like WordPress. It really is top notch. And with my geek hat on, the versatility and extensibility of WordPress is one of its strengths. But with my consultant/user hat on, I just want to get it installed and get things working. I also want something that is well documented and facilitates productivity both for me but also for my clients.

Herein lies the problem with free!

There are tons of free themes and plugins and precisely because they are free they are a problem. Clever (and some not so clever) people write plugins because they want some functionality that is missing. Then they decide to release it to the public but there is no motivation or incentive to maintain or support the plugins.

For example…

Today I wanted to install a social bookmarking plugin. A common desire. There should be a ton of plugins to choose from because it is a popular feature. I thought I would spend twenty minutes tops to find one or two plugins and get them installed. So I googled social bookmarking wordpress plugin to find a quick review or recommendation. This article 5 Best Social Bookmarking Plugins for WordPress looked good and from there I choose 3 plugins to try.

A strike on the first plugin: too many comments on the download page about problems with it.

A strike on the second plugin: not a valid header error when I tried to activiate it.

A strike on the third plugin: it installed okay but screwed up any posts with an embedded object (like video).

See this is the problem with free plugins: poor quality, lousy documentation (usually) and no support.

Same problem with themes. There are some great free themes. But you don’t want to get too dependent on a theme that isn’t maintained and supported because sooner or later they break. There you are with a 100 pages of content. You decide to upgrade your WordPress because…well there are new features and functions that you want to take advantage of. If you’re like me, you test your themes and your plugins on new versions of WordPress on a test site before you upgrade a live site.

But many people don’t. I’ve had more than one call from a panicked client. Help! I upgraded and now it’s broken!

I use the Thesis Theme and I recommend it to all my clients. I was willing to pay for it precisely because I got burned by free themes. Thesis gets developed, maintained and supported. And I’m quite happy to pay for that.

Postscript 12 Jul 2010: After writing this post I was engaged to manage the upgrade of 6 wordpress blogs. During that assignment we discovered a problem with the Bei Fen backup plugin. Basically it works the first time you do a backup but it fails on subsequent backups. You won’t know that it has failed unless you look for the relevant zipped file for downloading. If you delete the plugin and reinstall it, it works again but only the first time. Bummer!

If there’s one thing I know about data backups it’s this: most individuals or small business owners aren’t even doing one.

This article is specifically for the internet publisher who is using a third party provider to host their WordPress website.

It is a mistake to think you can rely on your website hosting service to backup your site…unless you are specifically paying for a managed backup service. ¹ Even then, my cardinal rule is never trust anyone else to backup my data.

I can tell you plenty of horror stories about failed backups. I’ve seen the most zealously cautious organization discover that their backup procedure was in some way “flawed” only to discover the problem later on when there is some disaster and an urgent need for a restore. It isn’t enough to do a backup, you also have to test the reliability of it.

When it comes to backing up a WordPress site it is a two stage process. It needs to include the database files and the directory files. There are a variety of ways to do this and you can do it all manually but this is tediously time consuming, prone to error and if you are technically challenged it can be a bit daunting. I have not yet found the perfect user-friendly method but there is a free WordPress plugin that makes it relatively easy to backup your site.

The Ben Fei plugin will backup both the WordPress database files and the directory files in a couple of clicks. It will do a complete backup stashing all the data into one zip file that you can then download to your PC for safe keeping.

The thing I don’t like about the plugin is that you have to manually cleanup leftover backup files. If you don’t do that, you’ll end up chewing up disk space in your hosting account. But it provides an easy interface to do this cleanup. It also doesn’t automatically prompt you to download the zipped backup data. ² You have to use an FTP client to do this.³ If you are not familiar with the use of an FTP client, you can also log into your hosting service cpanel to download the file that way.

You can find this plugin at this link: download Ben Fei plugin and the documentation is at Ben Fei Info.

There are other backup plugins available for WordPress but many are foiled by their geekiness or they only do half the job.⁴ The Automatic WordPress Backup Plugin sounds good at first glance. Automatically backups your whole WordPress site to the Amazon S3 service.⁵ But it only works on a Linux host and only if curl is installed and shell_exec is enabled and the upload folder has the right permissions. Blah blah blah.⁶ This might all be okay for the more technical types to handle but the average user might find all of this too daunting. Still…if you can get it setup and if it is reliable…it could be a nice set and forget solution. ⁷

Remember, you can’t be totally sure about the reliability of a backup until you’ve actually tested a restore. I’ll make that the subject of a future post.

Aside: for my young friend who has the YLOD problem on his PS3…
check this out YLOD Fix