Social Networks for the life of the world
Notes and thoughts about using WordPress to get the word out there.
At the request of a user I configured the Index WP MySQL For Speed plugin to use php’s composer package manager for installation. That plugin has a mu-plugins component because it sometimes needs to intervene in core and plugin updates. Ordinarily, activating it puts the the code into the mu-plugins/ directory. But some WordPress installations … Read more
Does your password protection seem to be broken on your WordPress site? If your WordPress site uses a page cache (like Litespeed Cache), and you have password-protected posts, disable the page cache on those posts. (The same is true for pages or any other post type.) The password submission workflow, when your audience member puts … Read more
Maybe I should have known this. But I didn’t, to my detriment. Empty arrays are falsey. Like so. The rule that an empty array is falsey bit me when doing this sort of thing. Many SQL queries can return an empty result set, that is, a result set with zero rows in it. That’s a … Read more
The good people at Gravity Forms were kind enough to give me a developer license to their plugin, to allow me to analyze their indexes on request from a user of Index WP MySQL For Speed. These are the tables. All of them look like they have OK indexes, except wp_gf_entry_meta, which has a couple … Read more
I’ve been working on the SQLIite Object Cache plugin for WordPress. I’m using the APCu User Cache, php’s RAM cache subsystem, to accelerate cache lookups — specifically to support wp_cache_get() and wp_cache_get_multiple() operations. I’ve had to figure out a few things about this php feature. Here are some notes. Its documentation is not as comprehensive … Read more
What’s this problem? WordPress plugins run on a variety of sites running on a variety of server configurations, and a variety of other plugins. It’s common for unexpected configurations to cause trouble for plugin users. Then, users open support threads saying “something went wrong.” The plugin authors then need to ask for configuration information to … Read more
Somebody asked how to set up a WordPress / WooCommerce shop with the Flatsome theme. Understand that this is a web site operations project, not a development project, at least until you get it basically working. For now, ignore any advice to use Bricks, Elementor, Divi or some other site builder. You’ve chosen Flatsome. Get … Read more
You can, but you’re using it in a different way than you would on a full-custom site. Back in the days of Adobe Dreamweaver, people crafted their web sites from HTML using an HTML-aware text editor. It could edit Javascript and CSS too. It was possible, and indeed necessary, to write custom HTML for everything, … Read more
php’s microtime( true ) function returns a floating point number of seconds since the UNIX epoch. On my computer each call takes about 200ns. The same is true of the time() and hrtime() functions. hrtime() is more modern and gives nanosecond resolution, so use it if possible. It’s available in php 7.3 and beyond. By … Read more
WordPress’s core search capability is very simple and very primitive. That can be frustrating. We’re spoiled by Google, Bing, and the other search engines which have had decades to get really good. What makes them good is a lot of information beyond the content of any given site, and thousands of programmer labor years making … Read more