Victor Granic is part owner of a WordPress development, hosting and training company called SwitchWP. He built and manages their hosting environment as well as helping with the development of customer websites. SwitchWP places a strong emphasis on content strategy and gets a real kick out of helping people organize and manage their data which leads to easy to use, intuitive websites.
Presentation: Steps to Securing WordPress
My presentation is about how to better protect a WordPress installation from being hacked. There are lots of steps that can be taken to turn WordPress into a veritable bank vault and I plan on providing those in a clear and concise talk.
What do you want people to learn from your presentation?
The main thing I want people to get from my talk is that securing a WordPress installation environment should be approached using a layered strategy where each step adds some protection. Also, I hope to make it clear that the best defense is vigilance along with some best practices that apply to most software, including WordPress.
What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?
WordPress is a smokin’ platform for learning and improving skills related to systems, software, content and design, which is exactly the kinda thing I’m interested in these days. It’s easy to install, use and manage, as well as being a successful open source project with tons of talented people involved. The vibrant developer community working on the ongoing development of the core, plugins and themes is inspiring. All of these qualities makes WordPress a great solution for a variety of projects and after all, variety is the spice of life!
What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?
Meeting all the people using and developing with WordPress, and secretly hoping Matt Mullenweg makes a surprise guest appearance. 😉
Why did you decide to speak?
I thought it would be a fun and interesting thing to do. I don’t get many opportunities to go to conferences (3 kids!) but since WordCamp Toronto is about a 15 minute bike ride from my house there was no reason to miss out. I think by sharing some of what I’ve learned over the past couple of years I’m giving a tiny bit back to the community. On the selfish side of the equation, well, I get into the conference for free and I can shamefully promote my company – SwitchWP.
What is your favourite WordPress plugin or theme, and why?
The Genesis theme framework is designed for developers but easy enough to use by any WordPress user. They put a strong emphasis on quality code which equates to a very secure and useable API, helping me build custom websites way faster.
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