Social Networks for the life of the world
Notes and thoughts about using WordPress to get the word out there.
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
John Blackbourn’s Query Monitor plugin sometimes reports slow queries and duplicate queries. How can you interpret these reports? What are slow and duplicate queries? Slow queries Query Monitor defines slow queries as those that take more than 50 milliseconds (1/20th of a second). Query Monitor shows query times in seconds in the rightmost column of … Read more
Here’s an oddity which baffled me and kept me from being able to use xdebug with PhpStorm for a while. I installed a bunch of different versions of php on my Ubuntu VM. I used Ondřej Surý’s repository, rigging my vm to install them like this. To get php5.5, use these commands: Then, I followed … Read more
Drupal is a open-source content management system, like WordPress. It’s very similar in many ways. Similarities to WordPress Differences from WordPress
I’ve been successfully hacking WordPress more or less regularly since 2008. It’s good software, and it’s aged reasonably gracefully, feature- and bloatware- wise, compared to many enduring software brands. Its developers have been insistent on backward compatibility while they painstakingly built a community of loyal developers and users doing all sorts of amazing things with … Read more
WordPress lets site administrators assign roles to their registered users. These roles are, on a standard WordPress installation, Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor, and Subscriber. Plugins can add custom roles. For example, WooCommerce adds Customer and Shop Manager roles. The roles assigned to each user are stored in the wp_usermeta table. In an ordinary single-site install … Read more
WordPress’s WooCommerce plugin uses a table called wp_woocommerce_order_itemmeta as an extensible key-value storage mechanism for order line items. Its parent table is wp_woocommerce_order_items. These two tables work similarly to wp_postmeta and wp_posts, and have the same performance issues. In large sites with a long history of orders, lookup may be slow. wp_woocommerce_order_itemmeta This DDL, usable … Read more
I’m seeing a lot of questions about sites being slow. Anecdotally, it seems like many of those are Elementor sites. So a database performance fanatic like me smells an opportunity to make improvements. Some of the WordPress punditocracy says “don’t use Elementor”. But, they have over ten million downloads. So let’s help those sites if … Read more