After about 4 hours of sleep at New England GiveCamp, I’m up and groggy, but feeling like working while my mind is still kind of mushy. Does that even make sense. Gar.

Anyway, there are a number of technical tasks on the list today. One of them is to back up the database on the client’s site, and arrange for some kind of automated backup.

I use a plugin called Adminer that is like a mini-version of PHPMyAdmin, but this is probably overkill. So, I’m looking to see what’s new in the world of WordPress plugins. The plugins xcloner and BackWPUp look promising. The criteria I look for in a plugin, when first scoping out the field of potentials, is somewhat subjective initially:

1. Has it been recently updated for the latest version of WordPress, and does it have a history of such updates?
2. Is the description of the plugin comprehensive, with some sense of “excellence” in the tone of writing?
3. Does it have more than a few positive 4-star ratings?

Plugins that match these criteria tend to be well-known, mainstream solutions that many people use. For something like backup, that’s probably a reliable indicator of probable technical excellence and usability. For more esoteric problems like caching, opinions tend to split along popularity (“it works, and it’s what I’ve always used”).

So, I might as well install these plugins in my own installation and see how that goes.