Tarski

For those of you who have been kind enough to spend time on our site, we thank you AND we are pleased to say that we have made a significant breakthrough in our site’s performance.

The long and short of the issue is Plugins. Plugins can act as a significant drag on your site’s performance. We have noticed load times on this site approaching 11+ seconds (wayyyy to slow!). Now the load times are running at about 4.5 seconds (we think that’s much better!). In order to solve this load dilemma we have been using a set of free tools from Pingdom.

Areas of problems we noticed in our debug process included:

• misplaced and missing image directories in the tarski theme (we now have three directories of our little gif images… because of the errant calls within the theme internal calls)
• broken image links (yes we were part of the problem too…)
• numerous poor (read slooowwwwww) plugins; these are all removed

Additionally we have learned to remove any unused (not active) plugin. Inactive plugins can still act as a performance hit. And lastly, I scrubbed our DB. Numerous plugins had left a trail of unused tables and rows in our DB– the worst culprits were a forum plugin and an audit trail plugin.

Again, thank you to everyone for sticking with us. We appreciate your patience and hope you will find our little lessons-learned useful.

WordPress for Wiki prototype

According to Wikipedia:

A wiki is software that allows users to create, edit, and link web pages easily. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. These wiki websites are often also referred to as wikis; for example, Wikipedia is one of the best known wikis.^[1] Wikis are being installed by businesses to provide affordable and effective Intranets and for Knowledge Management. Ward Cunningham, developer of the first wiki, WikiWikiWeb, originally described it as “the simplest online database that could possibly work”.^[2]

Why wordpress as a wiki?
Put simply, WordPress is probably the finest Internet publication system available. It efficiently broadcasts posts to search engines and social networking services and provides excellent visibility, both in design, code structure and connectivity. To combine these well established features and the collaboration qualities of a wiki like setup produces a good combination of high visibility and group authoring requirements.

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