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.

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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.

The following plugins have been chosen to emulate a wiki-like feature set. Most wiki features have been accomplished with these carefully selected plugins. We will evaluate this setup and refine/adjust as required. Most of these plugins have been selected to provide ‘connectivity’ between subjects, topics, keywords and meta information.

0. Awsom News Announcement: Allows you to post news announcements in the area above your posts on the index page (or anywhere else you want). By Harknell.
1. Audit Trail: Keep a log of exactly what is happening behind the scenes of your WordPress blog. By John Godley
2. Autolink tags for content: This plugin automatically checks out your posts to add tag links for the tag text in the posts. By Kelvin Xu.
3. Image Caption Easy: Transforms the alt text of an image into a caption which can be controlled through css. By Mark W. B. Ashcroft
4. SH-Autolink: In posts and comments, it transforms predefined words automatically into hyperlinks. By Stevie.
5. Snippet Highlight: embedd code between <pre> </pre> tags. apply code language as css class: php, css, js etc. By Roland Rust.
6. Subscribe2: Notifies an email list when new entries are posted. By Matthew Robinson.
7. TreeMagic-Cypress: Way of making Internet and Intranet information easily accessible. By Ambient Webs LLC
8. Upload+: Secure, cleaner and customized file names for uploaded files. By Pixline
9. User Permissions: Per-post user permissions By John Godley.
10 WP-DownloadManager: Adds a simple download manager to your WordPress blog. By Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan.
11 WP-Footnotes: Allows a user to easily add footnotes to a post. By Simon Elvery.
12 WYSI-Wordpress: This plugin adds a more advanced WYSIWYG editor to the Wordpress post editing screen. It includes advanced image handling, including on-the-fly thumbnail resizing and compression. It also includes Martin Chlupác’s excellent Iimage Manager v 1.4.1. By MudBomb.com.
13 Yet Another Related Posts Plugin: Returns a list of the related entries based on keyword matches, limited by a certain relatedness threshold. Like the tried and true Related Posts plugins—just better! By mitcho (Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine).

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