CMS Security Handbook: The Comprehensive Guide for WordPress®, Joomla!®, Drupal™, and Plone®

Deploying a Patch or Fix

Deployment of a patch hopefully should be an easy and straightforward process. Although several ways exist to conduct the actual installation of the patch, following are some of the more popular means you might encounter:

• Auto-update (as in Windows Update)
• Updaters (such as yum in Linux)
• Code with an install routine
• Updater scripts (such as update.php in Drupal)
• Recompilation of code (such as Apache)
• Editing code (typically through a text editor, and possibly done by a software developer)

You will find that the more mature products in the CMS space offer an installation-type routine. The less mature ones may offer code “fixes.” Documenting your preferred method of setup ahead of time should be part of your process.

As an interesting example of software maturity, WordPress (3.0.x) offers the capability for a single-click update of the core CMS and the plug-ins. This makes a typical WordPress update very fast and painless. Get into the practice of conducting a backup before doing an auto-update of any code.

In the case of compiled code (for example, Apache), it's not a simple matter of updating the code with a patch. Updating Apache requires downloading the source and compiling the code on the machine. Take special care in these instances to preserve any configuration files, or you'll wind up doing a restore to gather them back up.

Distributing a Patch to Your Administrators

Plenty of small, medium, and large companies have more than one site or administrator. ...