Tag Archives: WordPress

WordPress Memory Usage

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WP Engineer has great post on WordPress and memory usage. Many users load up every plugin under the sun and do not understand that all though these plugins seem to be lightweight they can easily consume all of your PHP memory if your PHP max_memory settings are too low (which they often are with webhosts).mem_usage

The two plugins mentioned in the WP-Memory-Usage by Alex Rabe and the even more detailed WP-System-Health by Heiko Rabe. Both work checking out to see if your blogs are getting close to maxing out on the php memory limits.

The Importance of Query Caching and Proper SQL syntax!

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In the past I blogged about using MySQL Qcache and how important it is, for those WPMU admins out there doubting this I HIGHLY advice you to get on this. After enabling the Debug Queries plugin I was more or less shocked at the number of queries some blogs were generating. If Qcache was not being used I am sure our processor would be working beyond overtime. I have seen total queries ranging from a low of 25 to 100+ to get this 823+ on a page, this shows how poorly some plugins and themes are written. This would crush our server if we were not using Query Caching…

For those developing plugins please keep queries consistent:

SELECT * FROM blogs WHERE blog_id = ’1′
is different from:
select * FROM blogs WHERE blog_id = ’1′

Both queries will be cached because they are different to MySQL (same goes to white space at the end of a query trim it!!!).

Whistler Wordcamp

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Wordcamp Whistler This weekend I attended my first Wordcamp which I found to be worth the trip even though it was aimed more at the entry level user.

The Wordcamp opened with a talk by Lorelle the queen of WordPress who gave a inspired talk and ended with a few useful tips.

Other talks of interest included Tris Hussey’s WordPress as a CMS which was relevant because we will be offering that service here. The real take away from his talk was how fast you can roll out sites… Something we do not do here!!! Novak and Enej will be choked at me for saying this but theme development really is a waste of time in my opinion. In his talk he showed that one of the real pluses of WordPress is the fact that there are thousands of themes already developed (many of these suck) but there are many gems and many high quality premium themes (like this one) which cost very little $50-$150 which are designed by experts in typography, grid design and browser compliance these can be modified to look unique with most sites in most cases by changing a few lines of CSS. These theme designers make there living developing these so it is critical they work well for there users or people will stop paying.

Andy Peatling the creator of BuddyPress also presented. I still think BuddyPress might be a worth while avenue for UBC Blogs to pursue in the future. I know it will not be popular like Facebook is on campus amongst students but it would enable several features that would be useful to course creators including direct messaging between classmates/instructors, group forums as well as extended profile features which would be great for “eportfolio” projects.

The SEO talk was also cool. Many think WP does it all but this is not true it is still missing a couple of key SEO components, the good thing is there are a plugins you can install to fix this, including Google Sitemap XML and the All in One SEO.

All in all it left me inspired even to the point I started hacking a plugin.
I have a pretty good idea for a paper related to campus blogging will have to talk to Brian about my idea to see if it could fly.

Happy to be have a job where I get to work with this platform.

The Importance of SSL on a Campus Blogs Setup

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I recently had a comment by a co-worker asking why we had to have SSL on our admin/dashboard pages. This is a good question it can slow down things when SSL is enabled on the WordPress Dashboard (although I do not notice any significant change) but I argue that this slight hit to performance GREATLY out weighs the potential cost of not implementing this, the reason being Blogjacking. For the hacker types out there the next time you are sitting on your cafe network have some fun load up the Wireshark and login to your Blog without SSL you will be in for a surprise. Imagine if a disgruntled student decided to jack a prof’s blog? I am pretty sure our project would be shutdown pretty quickly as would other Campus Blogging Platforms. Securing web apps is always a battle, this is one fix you would have to be insane not to implement.

Check out this great video by WordPress on the importance of SSL in the Dashboard.

*UBC Bloggers take note we use HTTPS by default.

WordPress Video Solution Framework

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This frickin rocks literally just discussing this as a “wouldn’t it be cool if” at yesturdays meeting and now it’s happening. I love Open Source ! I love WP!

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpresscom-video-server/

The package contains video solutions framework, including transcoder and administration interface utilities, written in PHP. The code was developed by Automattic Inc, and powers wordpress.com video solutions. We hereby make it open source project so that you can reuse it, build upon it, and share with the community.

The solution is a WPMU plugin. However it can not be used as “out-of-the-box” type because it also depends on your file serving infrastructure, and your URL schemes. Customize your pieces, then you have a full-fledged video solution. Or you can just reuse the individual components such as video player or transcoder.

scooped from Bavatuesdays.

WordPress and Creative Commons

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We talk the talk but we don’t really walk the walk with regards to “open content” on the Blogs @ UBC project, we still don’t have a proper option to allow the users to CC license their content.

What CC plugin are people using?
There are quite a few options:
1) http://wiki.creativecommons.org/WpLicense
2) http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/progressive-license/
3) http://www.g-loaded.eu/2006/01/14/creative-commons-configurator-wordpress-plugin/
4) http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-cc/
5) http://labs.creativecommons.org/2008/07/01/per-blog-registrations-for-wordpress-mu/

I am kind of keen on #3 although it seems dated it includes RSS licensing.

I would like to use a plugin that I could use to create a list of CC blogs in our WordPress MU setup.

Buddypress @ UBC?

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Today the OLT Web Dev team met with Andy Peatling the creator of BuddyPress. I have been watching the development of this WordPress MU plugin  for quite sometime and believe it would be a great extension for Blogs @ UBC, it would enable all the popular features of a social network site inside of blogs.ubc.ca things like groups, group messaging, friends, forums, extended user profiles etc. I haven’t poked around the nuts and bolts yet but looks very promising and getting better everyday, best thing is we would have to do little to integrate this with our install and we could have a full blown campus social network. Pretty happy we have WordPress running as our blog platform :)