WordPress

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.

The TreeMagic-Banyan tools on this site now provide easy access to more than 800 cross referenced WordPress articles.  These articles are read and cross referenced using AmbientWebs unique SWED  based technologies and served on our Banyan portal.
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WordPressHelp (WPH) is very pleased to announce that we have implemented the newest release of TreeMagic-Banyan thereby aggregating the web’s most important WordPress information all in one location!!!

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I discovered this by accident and it worked! I had a blank white page on my local WP test site after installing a plugin or maybe another problem, who knows? I could not even login, as the admin pages were just stuck loading.

Any way if you append your base URL with this “wp-admin/plugins.php?deactivate-all=true” it allows you to deactivate all plugins from the outside of admin. I did this and now my site is functional again. Of course you get the login screen first, to authenticate the call

Prior to this, I could not get past the login screen even to disable stuff in admin in the usual way.

The full url call looks like this on my machine. http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/plugins.php?deactivate-all=true

This applies to moving the site within your own webspace, or if you want to move it to another host server. I have read a few versions of how to this and many details have been missed that are important.

Notes

1. When moving a site you have to consider if you have ever modified (hacked) any core files in wordpress

2. If you have and you want to maintain the functionality you must copy these over to the new installation

3. WordPress stores all user data in the wp-content folder and sub-directories and its database. This means all plugins, themes, images and other added fies will be in wp-content folder. NOTE. Some plugins DO put files elsewhere. Be aware!

4. If your file mods/ hacks are in the wp-content folder then carry on as below.

5. If you have hacked/modified files anywhere else, these must be copied over separately.

6. If you have no special mods/hacks, simple ignore the above.

Preparation on the old site

1. log into the original site as admin

2. Deactivate all cache settings and cache plugins. Make sure all cache files are cleared/ deleted.

3. If you have Askimet installed make sure you delete any spam comments in the moderation queue.

4. Log in to the FTP account and copy the wp-content folder and config.php to your desktop.

5. Copy any other files from other locations if they have been modified! (see notes above)

6. Some plugins are poor at removing their database tables and configs from the database. Login to phpMyadmin and delete any tables that are no longer being used by your existing activated plugins.

7. Now optimize your database using the cpanel or other utility

8. Make a database backup, using cpanel, phpmyadmin, db backup, or some other utility.

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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We are a small group of keen WordPress users who are happy and proud to offer something back to the user community.

We spent a long time exploring the merits of java, hoping its scalability and efficient code protocols would lead us into developing a specialized CMS. What we did not realize was that java makes high demands on server side processing and memory. To run an interactive, dynamic site with high traffic requires a dedicated server with heaps of processing power and even more memory. It’s an expensive overhead. Putting all that back end power into a php platform would provide suerb results also and it did not seem to make sense to pursue the java route without taking a closer look at the php alternatives again.

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