WordPress plugin release tools

When developing WordPress plugin for distribution on the wordpress.org directory, we need some tools to automate the release process. It’s convenient to use github (or another source-code control vendor) to hold the day-to-day development source code. And, when we’re ready to release the plugin to the WordPress repository, we need to use WordPress’s Subversion (svn) … Read more

Real users slow applications down

Anybody who’s worked with databases knows this: as they grow they can slow down. It’s the curse of the customer base. Successful applications gather users and other transactional data. In this article I’m using MySQL database queries based on WordPress’s database design. Still, the ideas in this article apply to every application built on any … Read more

Capturing and examining queries

This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series WordPress MySQL performance monitor

It’s straightforward to get WordPress to capture the MySQL queries it uses to generate each page view. We can then analyze the captured queries. Capturing WordPress offers a way to capture a list of the database queries it uses in each page view. It’s simple: define the global SAVEQUERIES symbol. You can define it permanently … Read more

Analyzing WordPress database operations

This entry is part 1 of 2 in the series WordPress MySQL performance monitor

People are using the Index WP MySQL For Speed WordPress plugin! That’s great. But it shoots into the dark: nobody can tell how much improvement they’ve seen except subjectively. That’s not good. It’s hard to improve something unless we can actually measure it. Two things can make a troublesome query. If it runs just once … Read more

WordPress multisite programming tricks

This pulls together some notes on handling plugin programming for WordPress multisite (network) installations. Basic information Lots of this information comes from the globally instantiated $wpdb object. Tables To get a list of WordPress tables you can use the wpdb::tables() method. Here’s a quick way to get a useful list of tables. This list include … Read more

WordPress’s maintenance mode — how to enter and leave it

Writing a WordPress plugin I had to dig around to figure out maintenance mode. That’s when visitors get this message. Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute. It’s easy to do from plugin or theme code. To enter maintenance mode Write a file named .maintenance into your document root with something like … Read more