Unforseen PITA with stepping-stone sites

[SpikeTheLobster]

I thought I'd post this little lesson I learned today, partly because it should make a lot of you chuckle and partly because it might forewarn some of you about an unexpected PITA (pain in the a**) situation.

 

I have a bunch of stepping-stone sites, as I call them. These are basically static installs of WordPress with the Themia-Lite theme installed (with a few modifications).

 

Themia-Lite has a button at the top and three "featured links" with images below, so it's a neat way of setting up a sort of stepping-stone landing page: button goes to actual site, featured URLs can be used for ads. Since they're effectively static pages, they don't need much maintenance.

 

Unfortunately, I hadn't forseen the PITA of WP updates...

 

Every single one of the sites needs the core WP update. And I should really do the plugin updates. And the theme update. Oh, and when the theme's updated, I need to switch back to my own footer and take out the big useless graphic so there's just the featured links.

 

No big deal. All that only takes 5-10 minutes (since I had the sense to keep copies of my updated php files for the bits of the theme I changed).

 

Unfortunately... I have about 30 of these sites. OMG. What a right royal pain this is...

 

So, you know, if you're going to use a setup like this to short-cut building the page yourself, the lesson is this: once the page is done, get a copy of the WP-generated HTML and use THAT as your page. No updates.

 

D'oh!

[Nathan]

Oh damn that sucks.

 

So what was your solution? You turn you Wordpress page into a basic HTML page? How would your modifications work then?

[SpikeTheLobster]

Basically, I'm going through them and doing the updates. But then, instead of leaving them, I go to the front page (which is the only page, really, since they're effectively static) and grab the source HTML. Put that in place of the WP index file and job done. No more updates needed, ever - they become static HTML instead of WP installations, if you see what I mean.

 

That said, I haven't deleted the WP index pages - if I want to change stuff in the future, I'll be able to come back, rename the WP index, access the installation, make changes and re-save as HTML.

Edited May 4, 2012 by SpikeTheLobster

[vaudevillianvet]

Does your website still have the vulnerabilities WP may have, since the WP is still installed?

[SpikeTheLobster]

Does your website still have the vulnerabilities WP may have, since the WP is still installed?

 

Only if someone somehow accesses the WP files, at a guess. The index page is just HTML, so there's no risk there - no more than usual for static HTML, anyway. I could just delete the entire WP install minus the few bits the index page references (style sheet and so on) if I wanted to be sure, and just do any future changes to the page by hand.

[vaudevillianvet]

Only if someone somehow accesses the WP files, at a guess. The index page is just HTML, so there's no risk there - no more than usual for static HTML, anyway. I could just delete the entire WP install minus the few bits the index page references (style sheet and so on) if I wanted to be sure, and just do any future changes to the page by hand.

 

If you have your index backed up, the only risk would be someone accessing your database, which is empty anyway if you're only using the design. So maybe deleting all your WP files wouldn't be worth it.