Techniques and Web Technologies
After updating my WordPress to the newest version, site was hit with enormous number of SPAM messages. For a day or two, Akismet marked 3 to 4 thousand messages which sounds a bit problematic. With few lines in htaccess and simple plugin, I’ll try to reduce that number.
Comment posting on WordPress site has stopped working. Instead of displaying saved comment, “page not found” page was shown. URL redirection was also strange “comment-page-/#comment-” (something I never saw). Comment posting is a very important part of my blog so I have started repairing it immediately.
Frontpage of my site was displayed nicely but when I tried to login to the wp-admin, I got blank page. After loading other posts on my WordPress, half of posts were white pages while second half was just fine. Inside error_log wasn’t any recent message and from this point I started to search for the problem.
How to convert post tags to categories in WordPress. You don’t need to install any additional plugin or performing SQL queries directly on the WordPress database. Tag to category converter (and vice versa) already exists in WordPress.
Post explains simple way of how to display related posts based on best matching post tags and categories. It is only needed to expand theme file single.php with SQL and final loop. In two steps you can have related posts feature without plugin installation.
The main idea was to select posts marked by a custom field “popular”. I didn’t want to install a massive plugin with writing a page statistics to the database. My WordPress site is big (or small) enough so manually editing post list isn’t any problem for me. With custom fields, you can add extra meta-data to the post. Next it’s only needed to fetch posts marked with “popular” meta-data.
In few steps, WordPress can be moved to another host. Idea is to move complete installation from public host to local host. Why? Because this way you will have test and production site. Test site isn’t public and you can play and try some modifications before publishing. Posts can be written locally, and after finishing, just perform copy & paste from test to production site.
WP-Cache can make WordPress very fast. I have been monitoring my www.redips.net and discovered that WP-Cache doesn’t work. Directory wp-content/cache was empty (only wp_cache_mutex.lock file was inside). In WP-Cache control panel was written 0 cached pages and 0 expired pages (WP-Cache was enabled). That was call for repair.
New WordPress installation with few modules can give only 3.44 requests per second. After turning on MySQL cache and PHP cache, site becomes 150% quicker. This can be done on MySQL and PHP level. On the other hand if your site is installed on shared host, you probably have restricted access and you can’t edit my.cnf nor install APC. You can only install cache module like WP-Cache is, to improve speed.
Popularity means more traffic or we can say more requests per second. Did you ever measure how many requests per second your Web server can handle and how to improve it? This article should give the answer and show how to increase quickness of Web applications like WordPress, phpBB, Joomla …
With Google Syntax Highlighter you will be able to highlight source code. Highlighting is pure JavaScript without need for any server side action. Google Syntax Highlighter is structured with one main file and optional brushes. In current version, GSH is able to paint: C++, C#, CSS, Delphi, Java, Java Script, PHP, Python, Ruby, Sql, VB, XML/HTML …
I didn’t have any experience about WordPress till now, and all I can say that is a great CMS. With my LAMP background there wasn’t any problem to customize plugins or WordPress template. This post should be a small cookbook of tips and tricks to do before publishing WordPress site.