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.

In our continuing efforts to make WordPress easier to use, WPH now affords WP developers & users the opportunity to double-click on any text word on this site and gain “instant” access to related WP resource information from:

• WordPress
• Lorelle
• Automattic
• WordPress Themes
• WordPressHelp
• AmbientWebs and
• TreeMagic

Users may access the information from these sites either individually (via the drop-down menu which appears when you double-click on a term) or in a collective, intelligently, pre-processed and correlated fashion (via the WP Banyan Portal). This Web 3 functionality allows users access information ‘on-the spot’ and then return to the source for continued reading and information gathering.

If you have additional sites you wish for us to incorporate in our WP Banyan Portal and TM-Banyan Search function, please use our Contact page to let us know.

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

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.

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).

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.

A close favorite is Drupal. No-one can argue against the professionalism and quality control that Drupal has built into their CMS, but it does favor the experienced web master and programmer to get the best out of the system. That was not an issue for us personally, but we wanted to focus on a technology that was easy to use for our users and clients and that provided an out of the box solution for web publication.

WordPress fulfills that criteria and a lot more besides. Ease of use comes as standard, but when you look under the hood, one can see a wealth of code features that make it stand apart from the rest. Extensibility, connectivity and reliability are hallmarks that readily come to mind with WordPress. And so we made WordPress our codebase of choice to develop, expand and experiment with exciting new features. You will hear more about these as time goes on and we are very happy to share some of the goodies back with the Wordpress community.

So there’s our first post … what else to say, except

Three Cheers For WordPress!