Category Archives: WordPress

Getting to know the Trotts

Just goes to show what a hectic week it was last week. Despite it being on the front cover of the Business Section, I completely missed this Sunday Times interview with Mena and Ben Trott, the founders of Six Apart, makers of blog software Moveable Type, Vox, Typepad and owners of Livejournal.

It’s a personable interview that doesn’t go into any great technical detail but it’s interesting for me to find out a little about the competition from my outpost across the Atlantic.

Ask the developer

On January 20th I’ll be speaking at BarCamp South East on the subject of WordPress.com and WordPress MU. The talk is titled, “WordPress.com – running the biggest wpmu site in the world” which is vague enough that I could talk about anything but I’d like to know what you want to hear.

Public speaking isn’t my strong point, I prefer to be behind the keyboard, or looking through a camera lens but sometimes you have to push yourself to do unfamiliar things. Here’s my go at public speaking.

Talks will be in 45 minute slots and I would like to make mine more of a discussion forum like the WPMU talk we had at WordCamp way back in August last year. It went really well and everyone got something out of it.

Subjects I’m considering include:

  • Merging code from WP core which is horribly exciting, have you ever seen vimdiff in action?
  • Site stats – did you know we publish them?
  • Hardware – server porn. How do we handle the load generated by Slashdots, Diggs, and almost 600,000 blogs?
  • Hooks and plugins – new hooks in the signup process and wpmu admin backend.
  • Anyone interested in working from home and virtual company issues? Automattic has employees in at least four countries.

So, if you’ll be there I want to hear from you. If you won’t, I still want to hear from you because I’m sure Bernie or someone will record the talk and put it up online.

Caching WordPress with WP-Cache in a spam filled world

WP-Cache and spam. Who’d have thought they were related? Unfortunately they are because when your blog is spammed WP-Cache doesn’t check if the comment is legitimate or not and deletes cached files related to the spammed post.

I noticed this happened a lot on In Photos.org after I added thumbnails to the top of the page. The thumbnails change when the page is regenerated but I noticed that they would change much more frequently than expected. After some debugging I realised that comment spam was invalidating the WP-Cache cache.

How do you fix this? Here’s a small patch that can be applied to wp-cache-phase2.php, version 2.0.19 (and probably lower) that checks if the submitted comment was moderated or not. You’ll also find wp-cache-phase2.txt below. Just rename that to .php and copy it into your plugins/wp-cache/ folder for it to work.

Remember to update WP-Cache too. Despite last year’s date on the above post, it was updated as recently as last month!

Download

  1. wp-cache-phase2.diff
  2. wp-cache-phase2.txt

Patch will be on it’s way to gallir in a few moments but if you’re using WP-Cache this could be a big help to your site. (and if you use Ultimate Tag Warrior I hope you’re using my patch?)

BarCamp in the Sunny South East

News from Keith is that plans are underway for a BarCamp to be held in Waterford sometime early in the new year. After their positive experience at the BarCamp in Cork, he and Tom Corcoran are planning it, and they can make available, “the facilities of the WIT centre in Carriganore – a superb building situated on its own campus.” Sounds good!

Plans are at an early stage yet, but I think I’ll be able to make the drive there for the day. I haven’t been to Waterford in ages and it’ll be nice to see the place again. Would anyone like to hear about WordPress, WordPress MU or WordPress.com? I’m not saying I will, but maybe …

Check out the Wiki too. That will probably have the most up to date information.

Jason's Custom CSS for WordPress MU

Many moons ago, Jason’s Customciser was released onto an unsuspecting WPMU forum. It’s a small plugin that allowed one to change the value of some of the CSS elements in a theme’s style sheet.

Before you get too excited, it’s in rather a raw format, can cause problems and needs work to be usable. The original plugin used some PHP5 conventions and functions which limited the audience who could use it. I’m posting this because people are wondering where the PHP4 port I wrote disappeared to. It’s still here, but please link to this post instead of linking to the zip file.

Download Jason’s Customciser-doc – this plugin needs a lot of work to be usable. I’m not joking!

If you’re wondering, this is not the same plugin that is used on WordPress.com to allow editing of CSS files. I just wonder why someone doesn’t write a simple templating system in Smarty or something that loads through the traditional WordPress theme files? It’s a no-brainer. It may not be the most efficient way of doing it, but it’s one simple way.

Brians Latest Comments Cached

After the success I had with Ultimate Tag Warrior I turned my eye to another popular WordPress plugin that I use: Brian’s Latest Comments.

This plugin lists the latest comments on your blog and I wanted to squeeze every bit of performance out of my server so I guessed that caching the output of the plugin would save several queries for every page generation. Comments are cached for an hour. The cache isn’t invalidated by a new comment so don’t worry if the comments list doesn’t update immediately after a comment is made.

Install

I used the same cache directory that WP Cache 2.0 uses, wp-content/cache/. You’ll have to create that directory and make sure the webserver can write to it. The simplest way of doing that is by running the command chmod 777 cache. Download the file below and copy it into your plugins directory. If you’ve never installed the original plugin you’ll need to download it and read the install.txt to find out how to use the plugin.

Download

brianslatestcomments.txt – rename to .php and copy into your plugins directory.

The Schneider Interview

Robert Scoble talks to Toni Schneider, the CEO of Automattic in this video interview about WordPress.com, Automattic and lots of other stuff. I’ve only watched the first 10 minutes, Toni talks about some of the features of WordPress.com – paid features, making money, adverts, fighting splogs and more.

Do you like Akismet? That’s covered too. Make sure you set aside some time today to watch this interview if you use WordPress!

Ping Google Too!

Google announced that they will accept pings to their blogsearch service. Hopefully Pingomatic will support it soon so you don’t need to update your “Update Services” in WordPress. I’d say Matt’s sleeping off the jet lag from his trip to Vienna but it’ll probably be there in a few hours!

If you can’t wait, add “http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2” to the “Update Services” in your WordPress Dashboard under Options->Writing.

Why is this good? By pinging Google you can tell them that you have updated your blog. That will get your post into the Google Blog Search index that much faster.

Update! Matt has already updated Pingomatic. WordPress users can rest easy that their posts will show up quickly on Google Blog Search now!

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