Tag Archives: WordPress

More plugins releases soon

WP Super Cache, Domain Mapping and Sitewide Tags are all getting quite some attention.

Ron and I have been busy with Domain Mapping and Sitewide Tags.
A new version of Domain Mapping was released a few days ago with a couple of bug fixes and also a new feature that allows you to ignore the “primary domain” on your blogs. It has the potential for duplicate content if a blog can be found at multiple domains but some people need this feature. With careful organisation of content this can be avoided.

Sitewide Tags is almost ready for a new release. Ron added thumbnail support last week, and I checked in code last weekend to fill in the tags page with posts made before the plugin was installed. It needs testing, and if you’re any good at PHP please take a look at the development version on the download page.

WP Super Cache has had a number of bugs squished, preloading works better – it cancels immediately when you click that Cancel button. It also prints the url of the current post being preloaded which is handy if you’re not sure it’s working or not.
I added some extra debugging to make sure the homepage is cached correctly, but you have to enable “extra paranoid checks”. It works fine on my sites but I would really appreciate feedback if you have WordPress installed in a directory, installed in a directory different to where the site is or whatever configuration you might have. If it doesn’t work, the only side effect is that the homepage won’t be cached so it’s easy to spot when there are problems. I want these checks to be active all the time when the new version is finally released so it’s important this works correctly. Grab the development version from the download page and give it a whirl!

Don’t worry about upgrading when the next versions of Super Cache and Sitewide Tags are released. The version number in the development version is the same as the current release so a new version notice will still appear on your dashboard.

I almost forgot. Cookies for Comments has been worked on too! I added code that keeps an eye on how long a visitor reads a post before they post a comment. If the comment is made faster than a certain time the comment is automatically caught. I’ve used it over the weekend here and elsewhere and it’s catching a good number of “real looking” but spammy comments! The development version on the download page is what you’re looking for if you want to try this.

I think I need a P2 blog to post these sort of updates. Blog titles are such a pain sometimes.

The worst targeted spam ever!

I honestly thought that spammers had gotten smarter about making sure their emails were taken seriously. Even the most geeky and anti-marketing of developers will realise that big red and bold text, center justified, looks like something out of the last century. I hope for the sake of their business that they put more effort into their backup service.

This email, which I received twice in the last week is just a joke. I would have immediately marked it as spam and forgotten about it but it mentioned WordPress and obviously my email address is on their list of WordPress bloggers. I wonder if they read my blog?

At least they didn’t CC everyone like an Irish guy did a few years back.

If you want me to look at your new service, write me a nice friendly email, address me by name, email me from your own email address, talk to me about something you’ve gleaned from my blog or my twitter stream so I at least think you’re a friendly individual and I may even check out your site.

Easy Setup for WP Super Cache

One of the things that has bugged me about the WP Super Cache settings page was how it was laid out. Well, the next version of the plugin will display a simplified settings page to new users. If you’re upgrading, you’ll get the same old page as ever, don’t worry.

This version also adds a new method of serving cache files. It uses PHP, but serves supercache files. So, it’s a halfway house between using mod_rewrite (difficult to install for some users), and the legacy caching of WP Cache. That caching will be what is activated for users who use the simplified settings page.

There are lots of other bug fixes. The cache tester works if WordPress is installed in a sub directory, the admin page is separated out into tabs now to make it easier to find things. Error messages show up as “update messages” at the top of the browser now, making it easier for new users to figure out when mod_rewrite rules need updating and when other house keeping tasks need doing.

The code is red hot, liable to bend and break and may cause problems but it works fine here and on a test multi site install but I need testers to hammer on it and do things I don’t expect. If you’re brave, grab the development version off the download page. Thanks!

Tweet Tweet dives into the past

I overhauled my Tweet Tweet plugin for WordPress yesterday so it would work with the new Twitter OAuth mechanism. This morning I made it possible to download your older tweets, up to the max limit of 3,200 tweets that Twitter allows.

It’s still a work in progress but I want to get a new release out as soon as I can for current users who are using the basic auth that doesn’t work any more. If you’re feeling adventurous give the development version on the download page a go and tell me what you think!

99% of the OAuth code was ripped from Alex King’s Twitter Tools which in turn uses Abraham Williams’ twitteroauth.php library and OAuth.php from oauth.net. Thank you all for doing the heavy lifting required!

WIP: the Super Cache admin page

A small update, I’m slowly working through the WP Super Cache admin page in an effort to make it better. You can in fact download the development version if you want to follow along.

What you see above is my first pass. An effort to make the first options section match the look and feel of the standard Settings pages in WordPress. It’s all likely to be mixed around and moved about before the next release, so please, dig in and lend a hand!

The MU forums are moving

The MU forums will shortly be closing up shop.

WordPress 3.0 integrated everything that MU always did so it’s better to consolidate the forums too. There’s a MultiSite forum on WordPress.org and any queries about upgrading or problems using WordPress 3.0 should go there.

The old forums aren’t going anywhere but later today or perhaps tomorrow I’ll be making them read-only. You’ll still be able to browse the forum, and Google will still index the wealth of information already there but posting will be disabled.

So, thank you to everyone who contributed to the forum over the years. You helped make WordPress MU great.

WP Super Cache 0.9.9.2

WP Super Cache 0.9.9.2 has just been released! This version works with WordPress 3.0 and adds a number of new features and bug fixes:

  • Cache Preloading will cache every post on your site.
  • A cache tester that will check if your homepage is cached.
  • Much better support for mobile plugins.
  • Mod rewrite rules can now be updated from within the admin page.
  • Lots and lots of bugs fixed. See the changelog for more details.

Preloading creates lots of files on your server so if you have many thousands of posts please be aware of this. Filesystem limitations may cause problems if you use a flat permalink structure. For example, ext2 or ext3 only allows 32,000 directories in a directory. If you have more than that number of posts you may run into problems.

The plugin does not preload category or tag pages but because your single posts will be cached you’ll find the load on your server will be reduced. Uncached pages will be served more quickly and your visitors will have a quicker and better experience on your site.
You may also see an increase in site traffic if your server was previously underpowered!

Update! I just released 0.9.9.3 to address the (mostly minor) bugs that were reported overnight. If you don’t notice anything wrong there’s no need to upgrade.

Preload the cache in WP Super Cache

See that nice dip in the graph for this week? I started to preload the cache used by WP Super Cache last Sunday and it’s made a noticeable difference in the load on my server here. The big spike is the preloading process.

I’ve always discouraged users from preloading the cache (Askapache Crazy Cache will do this for any cache plugin), mainly because of the possible problems so many files will cause for hosting companies. If you have thousands of cache files, it’s going to take so much longer to recover from a disk crash.
On the other hand, Google will now be using speed as a metric for judging how “good” a website is. In the past this plugin ignored the pages visited by bots because the bots only visited each page once so caching a page after the fact was pointless. The page, all pages, have to be cached first before Google ever visits.

That’s what it looks like. Once you start preloading it launches a wp-cron job to fetch 100 posts, then schedules another job 10 seconds in the future to fetch another 100 posts until it finishes. It also disables garbage collection of old pages, but making comments or posts will still clear out the appropriate cached files.
It only caches single posts right now. It may not be worth caching archive or tag pages because many sites already tell bots to ignore those pages as the server is doing less work it will serve those archive pages more quickly anyway.

The preloading only works if you’re using the plugin in Supercache or “ON” mode. It’s still a work in progress but has worked fine here. As well as the preloader the development version of the plugin has:

  1. Better support for mobile plugins.
  2. A cache tester.
  3. Can be configured to only delete the page a comment is left on, rather than the front page and associated pages.
  4. Works in WordPress 3.0.

It also has a number of bug fixes and other features added too.

I need testers though, so grab the development version from the download page. Install it and please leave feedback here or preferably on the support forum.

First Day at #WCIRL

So, day one of WordCamp Ireland draws to a close, there is a dinner tonight but the talks and sessions are over for the day.

I briefly helped John Handelaar during his talk on WordPress MU, but my main talk was on WP Super Cache. Thank you Hanni, Jane and Sheri for recording the talk. Hopefully it’ll be available online next week. In the meantime here’s the OpenOffice slides of my talk.

I must extend a big thank you to Sabrina Dent and Katherine Nolan for organising a great day and to the sponsors who made the weekend possible.

Looking forward to the dinner tonight, and the rest of the conference tomorrow.

Update! I’ve added a few photos from Day 2. I was shattered tired though as I was up until 1.30am chatting with Donnacha!

Update 2! Sabrina has written a thoughtful post about WordCamp Ireland. I for one had a great time there and so did everyone I spoke to. I totally agree with her about child minding facilities. My son Adam had a whale of a time, and is still talking about it. (and for an almost three year old, that’s a very good sign!)

Continue reading “First Day at #WCIRL”

WordPress MU 2.9.2

WordPress MU 2.9.2 has just been released and is mostly a security and bugfix release based on WordPress 2.9.2. Grab it from the download page.

As well as the security fix mentioned above, this version also fixes a few bugs, makes the blog signup process much faster and adds a new “Global Terms” Site Admin page.

The “Global Terms” page is one I should have added years ago. Currently it’s fairly bare, but hopefully in future versions of WordPress it will be expanded. It allows the Site Admin to “fix” the terms (tags and categories) used in MU blogs. These terms are normally synced with the “sitecategories” table but sometimes they go astray. This can happen if you “import” a blog using PHPMyAdmin without going through the WordPress importer, or if a plugin manipulates the terms table directly.
WordPress MU forces the “slug” used by terms to be a sanitized version of the “name”, which isn’t the case in WordPress. This page can optionally rename the terms so they match the slug. It doesn’t do the opposite because that would break public facing URLs on the site. (I must extend a big thank you to Deanna for helping debug that page)

Enjoy!