Author: mikey

I recently created this program to help me deploy and update clients’ sites using Github.

If you’re looking for a free, lightweight, self-hosted, Github based deployment solution, please give it a try!

You can find the repo here.

The WPScan Vulnerability Database (https://wpvulndb.com/) provides an excellent service for checking your WordPress core, themes and plugins for known vulnerabilities.

It is a little tedious to use manually (i.e. enter your core version and the names and versions of your themes and plugins one at a time), but an API is provided which can make this an automated process IF you can get the core, theme and plugin details automatically as well.

Anant Shrivastava wrote a tool which makes use of WP-CLI and the WPVulnDB to check your WordPress installation for vulnerabilities. It’s here on GitHub. It uses WP-CLI to extract the WordPress core, theme and plugin versions from your site, and then checks them against the VPVulnDB database. It uses version 1 of the WPVulnDB API so it’s a little out of date now but I think it still works. So if you’re using WP-CLI this is probably worth a look.

Unfortunately for me, it seems most of my clients’ websites don’t allow SSH access so I’m stuck with FTP. This is mostly why I purchased Wordshell, which is an excellent piece of software for managing multiple instances of WordPress. It doesn’t require SSH or a plugin to be installed, which is awesome.

Another Wordshell customer requested some sort of tool which would do for Wordshell what Anant’s commandline vulnerability reporter does for WP-CLI. I thought that was a great idea, so made it myself. You can find my wsvulndb_commandline tool here.

If you use Wordshell, please give this a go and provide feedback!

I just recently started using the Sage starter theme for WordPress theme development, after positive recommendations from many theme developers. I had been using Bones theme, which was (and still is) excellent, but Sage is (in my opinion so far) even better.

One of the cool features of Sage is BrowserSync, which automatically keeps a linked browser updated with changes as you make them. The problem is, I do my local development using Vagrant/Virtualbox, and BrowserSync doesn’t work inside Vagrant without a little bit of tweaking.

I like to run gulp etc inside the VM, in order to keep my host machine as clean as possible. This is much slower and BrowserSync doesn’t work out of the box this way, but that’s just too bad. As long as I can get the Sage dev tools to work at a reasonable speed, I am reasonably happy with that. Anyway..

If you want to run browsersync inside Vagrant, the fix is really simple. What you need to do is forward the (3000 & 3001) ports using Vagrant.

Simply add the following lines to your Vagrantfile:

config.vm.network :forwarded_port, guest: 3000, host: 3000, auto_correct: true
config.vm.network :forwarded_port, guest: 3001, host: 3001, auto_correct: true


That should do it! Thanks to KahunaCoder for providing this solution on StackOverflow here.