G-Loaded Journal » Wordpress

WordPress is getting better

George Notaras — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 23:48:18 +0000

The first time I used WordPress back in September 2005 I considered it to be the content publishing platform of choice as far as a personal or business website was concerned. It was easy to set up and publish content and, also, easy to customize, even with ugly hacks. Today I still consider WordPress to be the overall best choice, despite the fact it still does not excel in any particular sector. Although I am not a pro, I have enough experience to say it’s the engine with the most acceptable trade-off between ease of use, security, features, ease of customization and being a solid base for development upon it. It is also one of those open-source projects that can create business opportunities for software engineers, system administrators, web designers, internet advertisers and marketers. The huge and active community of users and developers have boosted this project over the years. It proves that, if an open-source project is surrounded by a big active community and has good marketing (like WordPress had all these years) it can fly and create business opportunities in many sectors. During the last days I spent much time trying some of the features that have been implemented in the newer releases of WordPress and also various plugins. I must admit that today, by using WordPress, it is just a matter of some hours to have a high performance, good looking and feature rich small web site from scratch with minimal cost.

WordPress is getting better, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.g-loaded.eu.

Declutter Plugin for WordPress

George Notaras — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 21:28:04 +0000

Web applications that add unnecessary HTTP headers or meta tags and links in the HTML HEAD section of my web pages usually make me nervous. Today, WordPress, once again, made me spend my free time trying to find which filters add such useless data in my web pages and try to remove it. Removing the meta tags and links from the HTML head was rather easy using the remove_action() function, but the HTTP headers gave me a hard time. Before giving up, I decided to search for a plugin that could possibly provide a solution. Fortunately, I discovered a great plugin, named WP-Declutter, which makes it possible to remove all that useless stuff in one go. Below, there is some information about which items I have removed.

First of all, I should say that the plugin’s feature set by far exceeded my expectations as it can remove links and metatags from the HTML HEAD area, HTTP headers added by WordPress, the generator element of the feeds, and also various classes WP adds to various HTML elements.

I removed the following items from the HTML HEAD:

Link to the Really Simple Discovery service endpoint. That’s the link to: /xmlrpc.php?rsd
Link to the first post on your blog.
Link to the Windows Live Writer manifest file. That’s the link to: /wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml
The generator meta tag.
The shortlink.

From the “feeds” section I removed the the “generator” element.

Finally, from the HTTP headers section I removed everything. In my case, the ETag, Expires and Cache-Control headers are added by the webserver (FileETags and mod_expires). If this is not the case for you, then consider keeping these enabled.

Another thing you should keep in mind is that if you use any caching mechanism, like WP-Super-Cache, make sure you clear the cache after you make any changes in the WP-Clutter’s administration panel, otherwise the changes you made will be visible after the cached pages expire.

Declutter Plugin for WordPress, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.g-loaded.eu.

Issues with the feeds are now resolved

George Notaras — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 06:06:46 +0000

This is just a quick notice that during the last five days there was a problem with the website feeds. The web server returned a 500 Internal Server Error to almost all requests for /feed/ URLs. Also, there was a big increase of the server’s CPU load behind the scenes, which was caused by php-cgi processes. It turned out that a custom plugin (unpublished) I had written for WordPress in the past was the cause of all the trouble, but, before coming to that conclusion, the fact that the problems had started without me doing anything on the blog during the last weeks together with a series of other random observations led me do a thorough examination of the whole server just in case.

So, after spending two days in front of a Linux terminal, I came to the conclusion that the following code had been problematic from the beginning and it was like a time-bomb for which the time had come to cause issues to the web site and the server that hosted it.

function rsse_add_related_posts($PostBody) {
  if (!rsse_verify_feed()) { return $PostBody; }
  if (function_exists('yarpp_related')) {
    $PostBody .= yarpp_related(array('post'),array(),false,false,'rss');
  }
  return $PostBody;
}
 
add_filter('the_content', 'rsse_add_related_posts', 252);

This code used a function of another plugin to attach a ‘related posts‘ section at the end of the full content of each feed entry. As soon as I commented out the above filter and started attaching the related-posts section to the feed content through the YARPP plugin’s administration interface, everything was normal again. No more php-cgi processes timing-out or over-consuming the CPU cycles.

The following graph shows clearly the problematic period:

php-cgi processes consuming the CPU

The httpd error_log included many errors like the following:

[...]
Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 18893 bytes)
[...]
mod_fcgid: process ... exit(communication error), terminated by calling exit(), return code: 1
[...]
[warn] (104)Connection reset by peer: mod_fcgid: read data from fastcgi server error.
[...]
[warn] mod_fcgid: stderr: PHP Fatal error:  Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 4864 bytes)
[...]
Premature end of script headers: index.php
[...]

Note that these errors might appear in several occasions.

In my case, finding that faulty piece of code was a huge relief, I can tell you.

Issues with the feeds are now resolved, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.g-loaded.eu.

How to upgrade WP-Super-Cache

George Notaras — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 09:11:58 +0000

A while ago, I had published a step-by-step guide about how to install WP-Super-Cache in WordPress successfully. Now, I’m going through the upgrade procedure, so to safely and effortlessly upgrade the plugin whenever a new version is released. I know that documenting this sh** should not be needed, but it turns out the installation of this software is rather complicated (compared to other WordPress plugins I use), so a step-by-step upgrade guide is almost mandatory.

First of all, go to the plugin’s administration panel and set caching to OFF.
Delete the expired and cached pages by pressing the relevant buttons on the same page.
Make the wp-content directory writeable (how to make a directory writeable)
Go to WordPress’ plugin administration panel and de-activate WP-Super-Cache.
Now, replace the old version of the plugin with the new one in wp-content/plugins/. This should be straightforward.
Now, go to WordPress’ plugin administration panel and activate WP-Super-Cache.
Go to WP-Super-Chache’s admin panel and set caching to ON again.
Remove the write-bit from wp-content directory so to make it read-only for the web server process (f.ex: chmod go-w wp-content).

That should be it.

Procedure last updated on: May 7, 2009 for WP-Super-Cache v0.9.4.3

How to upgrade WP-Super-Cache, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.g-loaded.eu.

Upgraded to WordPress Coltrane

George Notaras — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:48:05 +0000

Just before the outage, and having read fog’s comments about the newly released 2.7 version of WordPress, I upgraded G-Loaded’s engine. Once again I used my WordPress updater script. This script has worked well for a considerable number of upgrades, so, although it is still in alpha stage, I will probably make a public release soon. As for the new WordPress version, it seems like a fine release as far as functionality is concerned. Also, I like the new administration interface.

Upgraded to WordPress Coltrane, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.g-loaded.eu.

How to enable WP-Super-Cache in WordPress

George Notaras — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 13:45:03 +0000

It was about time I started using a cache in WordPress. After doing some research, I found out that WP-Super-Cache is sophisticated enough and works quite well, judging by the posts of many satisfied users. In this post I will outline the installation procedure step-by-step, because the installation instructions of the README file were a bit confusing. I mainly post this for my own reference, but I am almost 100% certain that it will work for you too.

Requirements

Speaking about httpd (Apache), the following modules should be loaded:

LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so
LoadModule expires_module modules/mod_expires.so
LoadModule headers_module modules/mod_headers.so
LoadModule mime_module modules/mod_mime.so

The modules above are so standard, that there is high probability that they are already loaded.

Installation

Before installing WP-Super-Cache, make sure you have properly uninstalled any other caching plugin. This step is not covered by this guide. Please, consult each plugin’s documentation.

Download the plugin (wp-super-cache.X.X.X.zip) and unzip it in your plugins directory, so that you have a directory structure like /wp-content/plugins/wp-super-cache/. Assuming you are in the root directory of your website (DocumentRoot):

cd wp-contents/plugins/
wget http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/wp-super-cache.X.X.X.zip
unzip wp-super-cache.X.X.X.zip
rm wp-super-cache.X.X.X.zip

Make the directory wp-content writeable by the Apache web server. If this is not possible, give write permission to the “world“. Do not worry, this is a temporary modification. Permissions will be reverted after we are finished. To enable write access for the the “world“:

chmod o+w wp-content

Go to the WordPress plugin administration panel and enable WP Super Cache
Then, edit wp-config.php and make sure you add the following line anywhere above the “require_once(ABSPATH.'wp-settings.php');” line

define( 'WP_CACHE', true );

Go to the plugin’s administration panel in WordPress (that will be under the Settings menu) and enable caching (that is in the very first configuration section “WP Super Cache Status“).
Put the mod_rewrite rules in the .htaccess file located in the root directory of your website. Make sure you paste them above WordPress’ rewrite rules. The plugin guides you in an excellent way for this, so follow the on-screen instructions. There are also some other settings that need to be placed in wp-content/cache/.htaccess, but these should have been created automatically.
Remove the write permission we had set in a previous step. If you had enabled it for the apache user, then remove it from that user. If you had enabled it for the “world“, do the following:

chmod o-w wp-content

The benefits of using the supercache are that your content is delivered fast and the system resources are not wasted. WP-Super-Cache creates and serves static versions (pure HTML) of your webpages and thus php is utilized less and less SQL queries are sent to your database server (MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc).

At this point, the plugin should have started caching your content as you visit web pages. Sit back and enjoy!

Upgrade WP-Super-Cache

For step-by-step instructions about how to upgrade WP-Super-Cache to newer versions, please read the “How to Upgrade WP-Super-Cache” article.

PS: The use of this plugin also implies that I have stopped using my Fast-Static-Feed plugin, since wp-supercache caches feeds too.

How to enable WP-Super-Cache in WordPress, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.g-loaded.eu.

Fast-Static-Feed WordPress Plugin

George Notaras — Sat, 10 May 2008 04:44:56 +0000

Syndicated content has almost become the standard way of distributing web content nowadays. WordPress can deliver its content in various different feed formats -RSS 2.0, Atom 1.0, RDF, RSS 0.92- and can generate feeds for both the published posts -grouped by time, category, tag, author etc- and the comments that have been submitted by readers. Moreover, some RSS add-on modules are being used in the generated feeds, so that modern feed readers can even retrieve the submitted comments for each of the feed entries. It is obvious that all these features greatly enhance the user experience, but, on the other hand, depending on the website’s traffic they might increase the server load and thus the content delivery times.

Taking these things into consideration, I decided to write Fast-Static-Feed, a plugin that can cache the site’s entries feed, and deliver a static XML file instead of constantly generating the feed content on every client request. This, combined with the fact that the web server can compress the web content on-the-fly, has greatly reduced the waste of bandwidth and system resources.

How it works

Fast-Static-Feed performs the following actions:

Every time a post is published or an already published post is edited, the plugin dumps the entries feed (that is the feed of the blog posts) to a file. This way, the static XML file is always contains the most fresh content of your blog.
Every time a feed is requested, instead of re-generating the XML content over and over, this plugin delivers the static XML file. This is completely transparent to the client as there are no HTTP redirects involved. Your content is just being delivered faster!
If the plugin is enabled, but the static files have not been created yet, the plugin will try to generate them automatically. Upon failure to do so, a 404 Not Found HTTP error code will be returned to the client.
It also checks if the client’s request includes the If-Modified-Since HTTP header and, in such a case, it checks the static file’s modification time. If the client’s cache is current, it just returns a 304 Not Modified status to further reduce bandwidth usage.

The plugin caches all four types of feeds WordPress supports -RSS 2.0, Atom 1.0, RDF, RSS 0.92-.

Only the feeds that contain your blog posts are cached. The comments feed, each individual post’s comments feed, feeds for categories, tags, authors etc are still generated dynamically every time they are requested.

This plugin does not interefere in any way with the generation of rewrite rules and the generation of your site’s feed links.

Configuration

Generally, the plugin does not require any configuration in order to work.

One mandatory prerequisite is that the wp-content/ directory is writable by the web server. If it is not, the plugin will not be able to create the static files and, consequently, the clients who request a feed will receive a 404 Not Found HTTP code.

Furthermore, there are two options within the source code fast-static-feed.php that can be set.

// By default, the WordPress feeds contain elements of the 'wfw' namespace
// (CommentAPI), so a feed reader can fetch each feed entry's comments.
// By setting the following to 1, these elements will be stripped
// from the static feed.
// It is recommended to set this to 1 in order to save bandwidth.
// More info: http://wellformedweb.org/news/wfw_namespace_elements/
$FSF_STRIP_COMMENTS = 0;
// Set the following to 1 and various messages will be recorded in the logfile,
// which is located in the cache dir (wp-content/cache-xml/)
$FSF_DEBUG = 0;

It has already been mentioned, but it is important to note it again: The only mandatory prerequisite is that wp-content/ is writable by the webserver.

Installation

Make any changes to the configuration options within fast-static-feed.php and upload the file to wp-content/plugins/ directory. Then, activate the plugin through the WordPress administration panel.

License

Fast-Static-Feed is an open-source project, released as Free Software under the terms of the Apache License version 2.

Downloads, Issue Tracking, Support

For the latest releases of Fast-Static-Feed please visit the downloads section of the Fast-Static-Feed Development Portal.

The development website also hosts an issue tracking facility, where you can submit your feature requests or report bugs, and discussion boards, where you can get first class support from the community of users.

Donate

This plugin is released as free software. Nevertheless, its development requires time and effort. A small donation, as a sign of appreciation of the effort, is welcome. Please, use the following button to visit the Donations page. Thanks in advance for your support!

Fast-Static-Feed WordPress Plugin, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.g-loaded.eu.

Remove-Generator-Meta-Tag WordPress Plugin

George Notaras — Fri, 09 May 2008 11:14:23 +0000

Yesterday, I noticed that the template tag, which existed inside the default WordPress theme and added the Generator meta tag to the HTML head area, has been replaced by an internal action. This change makes the removal of that specific meta tag a bit harder for users. I can understand that the project may use the generator metatag for statistical purposes, but, on the other hand, it reveals the WordPress version, which makes it easy for automated scanners to locate a confirmed-to-be-vulnerable WordPress version. Remove-Generator-Meta-Tag is a very small plugin, an one-liner actually, that gently removes the action that writes the Generator meta tag to your HTML pages.

Installation

To install the plugin just upload the remove-generator-meta-tag.php file inside the wp-content/plugins/ directory and activate it through the administration panel. No configuration is required.

License

Remove-Generator-Meta-Tag is an open-source project, released as Free Software under the terms of the Apache License version 2.

Downloads, Issue Tracking, Support

For the latest releases of Remove-Generator-Meta-Tag please visit the downloads section of the Remove-Generator-Meta-Tag Development Portal.

Donate

Remove-Generator-Meta-Tag WordPress Plugin, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.g-loaded.eu.

More-Feed-Excerpt WordPress Plugin

George Notaras — Thu, 08 May 2008 13:53:44 +0000

Since WordPress v2.5, it is no longer possible to use the tag within a post in order to define an excerpt which will be used on both the web and feeds. Now, WordPress uses this tag to split a post for the web only, while the feeds can contain either the full-text or an excerpt that is calculated by WP. G-Loaded delivers the More-Feed-Excerpt plugin to all those whose who have gotten used to the old behavior and do not feel comfortable with this change.

Installation

To install the plugin, upload the more-feed-excerpt.php file in your wp-content/plugins/ directory and activate it through the WordPress Administration panel. No other action or configuration is required. The plugin does not interfere with the WordPress database or templates in any way, so uninstalling it is as simple as de-activating it.

License

More-Feed-Excerpt is an open-source project, released as Free Software under the terms of the Apache License version 2.

Downloads, Issue Tracking, Support

For the latest releases of More-Feed-Excerpt please visit the downloads section of the More-Feed-Excerpt Development Portal.

Donate

This plugin is released as free software. Nevertheless, its development requires time and effort. A small donation, as a sign of appreciation of the effort, is welcome and highly appreciated. Please, use the following button to visit the Donations page. Thanks in advance for your support!

Special Thanks

I would like to publicly thank PiXELWiT for the support and Andrew Arensburger for code contribution.

More-Feed-Excerpt WordPress Plugin, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.g-loaded.eu.

WordPress 2.5 – Plugin Compatibility

George Notaras — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 03:48:24 +0000

Yesterday, I upgraded WordPress to the latest version 2.5, which I liked much! For the upgrade I used a WordPress updater script I had written some months ago, which, by the way, still remains unreleased due to lack of time to prepare a stable release… Anyway, the script has worked quite well and the transition to the new WP version has been exceptionally smooth. I won’t go into much detail about the improvements of the new WordPress release. For such details please read the official announcement on the WordPress development blog. Despite the numerous improvements, the database schema hasn’t changed that much, so most existent plugins should work just fine. As far as the plugins that have been created and published by G-Loaded/CodeTRAX are concerned, all of them seem to work flawlessly in version 2.5. In case you run into trouble, please report the issue ASAP. Thanks.

PS: An issue with the feeds always delivering full-text has been corrected with the More-Feed-Excerpt plugin.

WordPress 2.5 – Plugin Compatibility, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.g-loaded.eu.

G-Loaded Journal » Wordpress

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