DOC – Installing Software Updates

An important component of internet security is keeping software maintenance up to date to assure the latest security patches are installed.  Our objective is to keep all the software updated for security and feature enhancements, to position the system for more advanced options, and solidify the overall architecture with things we’ve learned from our Learning Communities.  Flexibility and reusability are important attributes moving forward.

Note that this Post doesn’t cover WordPress software updates which are significantly more involved then Plugins, Themes, Uploads, and Database updates. As discussed in the DOC – Backing up and Restoring a WordPress website Post, you should ALWAYS do these significant upgrades and testing in a staging environment. For information on what is involved in rolling back a WordPress upgrade, refer to https://jetpack.com/resources/how-to-downgrade-a-wordpress-website-to-a-previous-version/.

One of the key periodic updates is bringing all the installed Plugins and Themes up to date.  This process is very straight forward and well documented on the web.   No real issues are generally encountered other than the fact that we don’t have sufficient licenses to update the POST TABLE PRO plugin in other than the production environment. This is generally not a big deal since the staging environments are built from the production system and the Post Tables will work in other websites copied from production, however POST TABLE PRO will currently need to be upgraded in production.

It was also important to enable some future changes without changing the core WordPress and Kadence software.  We agreed to implement a “Child Theme” architecture where we could make our changes in the child files instead of the core WordPress or Kadence files.  This approach isolates our changes from maintenance updates. After some research on Child Theme maintenance, it was determined that a free plugin called “Child Theme Configurator” seemed like the obvious choice.  We installed this plugin without incident and created a Child Theme, allowing us to support cookies, session variables, link redirection and a few other things without disturbing the core system software files.  The child theme editing capabilities of the plugin proved excellent and made some of the changes very straight forward.  

All these software changes went well and provided an up to date platform upon which we can continue evolving our infrastructure.  As mentioned earlier, this process is well documented and fairly intuitive so I won’t spend time documenting that piece.