As always, it’s good to have the most recent code on your website to protect against security threats. Once a bug fix is found and made public, you can be assured that malicious hackers would love to exploit sites that have not yet updated their code and turn your site into an ad-bot or worse.

Today WordPress releases version 3.1.3, which contains the following fixes:

• Various security hardening.
• Taxonomy query hardening.
• Prevent sniffing out user names of non-authors by using canonical redirects.
• Media security fixes.
• Improves file upload security on hosts with dangerous security settings.
• Cleans up old WordPress import files if the import does not finish.
• Introduce “clickjacking” protection in modern browsers on admin and login pages.

You can read the full announcement at the WordPress site.

If you have a Self Hosted WordPress Website, be sure to follow the upgrade links at the top of your WP-Admin Dashboard.

As always, it’s good to have a backup before you do any upgrades, even when you are only upgrading your plugins. If you do it manually through your host’s SQL manager and file manager, that’s adequate, but there is indeed a way to save you a whole lot of time – The WordPress Dojo recommends the BackupBuddy plugin from iThemes. It not only does backups, but Restores, and migrations – something no other plugin does. I will be reviewing this outstanding plugin for you at a later date…

I can tell you this plugin has helped me save time (and my bacon) way more than once.

Back to work, now…

-Anthony