Social Networks for the life of the world
Notes and thoughts about using WordPress to get the word out there.
Background When presenting so-called “archive” pages of content to users WordPress uses the notorious SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS MySQL extension to populate its display that looks something like this. This kind of user interface is known as “pagination” because it lets the user select pages of results. So, it’s really useful. The phrase “Showing 1-12 of 1348 results” … Read more
I’m using php’s imap extension in a WordPress plugin (Post from Email) to fetch email messages from POP3 email servers. I had to figure out how to internationalize (i18nize) the error messages from imap_errors(). These messages are English-language text strings. I had to try a lot of scenarios to work out what English messages are … Read more
Index WP MySQL For Speed, the WordPress plugin, allows users to monitor their MariaDB or MySQL database traffic and upload the results of those monitors. It gathers information about the queries, including how long they take and how many there are. Analyzing the uploaded monitor data allows me to identify the most frequent queries and … Read more
To improved sustainability of software like WordPress, it’s important to ask Where is power consumed? At the data center, at the client (the user’s machine or device), and in the network routers and line drivers used to transport the data. To reduce data center power: To reduce client power: To reduce network power, make your … Read more
I have been working on a WordPress search plugin to use Valerian Saliou‘s Sonic search backend. It is a lightweight alternative to backends like Elastic Search. Its straightforward approach to normalizing natural language queries makes it useful for searching WordPress content. And its speed and feature set lend themselves gracefully to autocompletion. Using Sonic in … Read more
Someone asked how to get started developing with WordPress. Here’s my take on it. You gotta learn to use it first. These are steps to getting power-user skills. Hosting Buy an account on a budget hosting service. ~US$10 per month is a reasonable cost. It MUST support multiple WordPress sites. Sometimes these are called “subdomains” … Read more
To plugin developers WordPress offers the Settings API. It lets us define settings pages, sections within those pages and fields within the sections. WordPress Settings API We use WordPress options to store configuration variables for our plugins. The settings API lets us create pages in the WordPress back-end dashboard to allow users to enter and … Read more
Jetbrains, the Czech company that makes PhpStorm, WebStorm and Intellij-Idea, has their Gateway product in beta. It works like this: you run the Gateway software on your desktop machine — you know, the one with the nice display — and it connects to some other development machine to run your IDE. I’ve been using it … Read more
During its occasional and automatic core version updates (for example from version 5.9.2 to 5.9.3) WordPress inspects its tables in its database server (MariaDB or MySQL) and tries to restore them to WordPress’s standard schema. Sometimes a site owner or plugin customizes those tables. For example my Index WP MySQL For Speed plugin reorganizes some … Read more
Here’s a WordPress instance with 100,000 fake users made with the DemoPress plugin. It also contains fake posts, pages, and comments. If you need to test a plugin or theme with a large site, this may help you. The image of the instance was made with the Duplicator plugin. Download the zip file, unzip it, … Read more