http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/ Weblogtoolscollection News Forum: WordPress Tips and Hacks en Thu, 23 May 2013 07:44:31 +0000 http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/topic/add-custom-meta-fields-to-custom-taxonomies#post-11149 Fri, 19 Oct 2012 15:53:10 +0000 smub 11149@http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/ <p>An efficient and fast way for adding custom meta fields to custom taxonomies.</p> <p><a href="http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-add-additional-custom-meta-fields-to-custom-taxonomies/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-add-additional-custom-meta-fields-to-custom-taxonomies/</a> </p> http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/topic/show-different-images-for-mobile-users-wordpress-tutorial#post-11140 Fri, 19 Oct 2012 01:37:44 +0000 wpexplorer 11140@http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/ <p>A short guide showing you how you can use aqua resizer and mobile detect to display different images to mobile users.</p> <p>View the tutorial: <a href="http://www.wpexplorer.com/different-images-mobile-users-wordpress" rel="nofollow">http://www.wpexplorer.com/different-images-mobile-users-wordpress</a> </p> http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/topic/now-wordpress-site-can-store-all-its-content-in-amazon-s3#post-10432 Tue, 15 May 2012 21:52:51 +0000 oblaksoft 10432@http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/ <p>Hello,</p> <p>OblakSoft is pleased to enable the possibility of running WordPress websites on Amazon S3. With the Cloud Storage Engine for MySQL (ClouSE) and WP2Cloud WordPress plugin, WordPress can store all its data in Amazon S3 – site content and media files. Amazon S3 has been able to power only static websites; now S3 can power sophisticated dynamic web software such as WordPress.</p> <p>Using Amazon S3 to store WordPress data has the following benefits:</p> <p>- No database backup and recovery is needed, now that Amazon S3 holds both for the website content stored in WordPress database and website’s media files.<br /> - Pictures and other media files are served by Amazon S3 directly<br /> - Storage cost scales with usage, no upfront reservation is needed<br /> - Storage consumption scales up and down with the amount of data stored<br /> - Storage is extremely reliable and durable by Amazon S3 design</p> <p>For more information please see <a href="http://www.oblaksoft.com/wordpress-on-s3-newsletter-may-2012/." rel="nofollow">http://www.oblaksoft.com/wordpress-on-s3-newsletter-may-2012/.</a></p> <p>A ready-to-run Amazon Machine Image (AMI) with fully configured WordPress that can run on Amazon S3 is available for free from <a href="http://www.oblaksoft.com/downloads." rel="nofollow">http://www.oblaksoft.com/downloads.</a></p> <p>Sincerely,<br /> Artem Livshits<br /> Founder CEO, OblakSoft | <a href="http://www.oblaksoft.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.oblaksoft.com/</a></p> <p>P.S.<br /> WP2Cloud is available under GPLv2 License </p> http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/topic/turbo-charge-wordpresswordpress-multisite-development#post-9698 Wed, 12 Oct 2011 21:07:00 +0000 Steveorevo 9698@http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/ <p>DesktopServer at serverpress.com allows WordPress developers to manage multiple projects (who ever works on one?) locally with a fictitious top level domain .dev (dot DEV). Create dozens of virtual servers in seconds. This allows developers to work on WP Multisite right away -no DNS propagation delays, try out domain mapping, evaluate plugins on an isolated server, work on multiple projects each with their own server, design and develop privately on your own time, and deploy when you want to. More info at <a href="http://serverpress.com/products/desktopserver" rel="nofollow">http://serverpress.com/products/desktopserver</a> </p> http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/topic/20-crucial-checks-before-releasing-a-wordpress-theme#post-9202 Mon, 20 Jun 2011 17:53:57 +0000 wpexplorer 9202@http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/ <p>I've been creating free and premium themes for around 2 years now and I thought it was about time to create a check-list of all the things I check before releasing a theme to make sure it's top-notch quality.</p> <p>Hopefully this will also help improve the quality of themes posted on this site. Enjoy!</p> <p><a href="http://www.wpexplorer.com/blog/wordpress-theme-checks.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.wpexplorer.com/blog/wordpress-theme-checks.html</a> </p> http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/topic/100-things-you-should-know-about-wordpress#post-8999 Tue, 12 Apr 2011 16:55:52 +0000 jtpratt 8999@http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/ <p>We gave a presentation last month to WordPress Ann Arbor about "100 Things You Should Know About WordPress", which consisted of 10 slides (10 topics), with all kinds of tips and tricks helpful for every level of WP user.</p> <p>The post has been very popular this week:<br /> <a href="http://www.jtpratt.com/100-things-you-need-to-know-about-wordpress/" rel="nofollow">http://www.jtpratt.com/100-things-you-need-to-know-about-wordpress/</a> </p> http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/topic/improve-your-wordpress-website-speed-part-2#post-8876 Wed, 09 Mar 2011 21:52:39 +0000 natalija 8876@http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/ <p>No matter how your website may be fast, it’s always good idea to find some new ways to speed it up. This time, speed will be gain by using very simple cache method that will allow you to cache some parts of the page: menus, widgets and other elements that don’t change that often.<br /> Intro</p> <p>Many parts of the page don’t change often, but require many SQL queries to be executed. If you have complex menu that combines categories, pages or posts and it can take more than 20 or even 50 SQL queries to make. For instance, all 3 menus on Dev4Press take about 30 SQL queries to get URL’s or structure. Similar situation is with widgets that don’t change every day, but can take a lot of SQL queries.</p> <p>Cache method that I want to describe uses database to manually store rendered HTML into the wp_options table using transient records that can have expiry time, allowing you to set how long the cached data will be valid. In multisite mode, for rendering that is related to all websites you can use wp_sitemeta table with transient records. I will note the different functions for this later.</p> <p><a href="http://www.dev4press.com/2011/tutorials/practical-wp/improve-your-wordpress-website-speed-part-2/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dev4press.com/2011/tutorials/practical-wp/improve-your-wordpress-website-speed-part-2/</a> </p> http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/topic/wordpress-security-part-6-plugins-038-themes#post-8861 Thu, 03 Mar 2011 22:49:01 +0000 natalija 8861@http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/ <p>WordPress website can’t work without plugins or themes. Well, you don’t need plugins, but in most cases WordPress alone is not enough. Choosing, downloading and using both themes and plugins may look as a simple task, but with increased popularity of WordPress it’s not anymore.</p> <p>Millions of websites run on WordPress, and that makes WordPress and everything related to it great target for hackers to exploit security holes and to plant some of their own into plugins and themes. Every now and them you hear that some plugin is used by hackers to get access to websites or to send users data to a remote website. Similar methods are used by themes. Themes are also used to plant spam links into header and footer of websites using encoded content (base64 or some other method). Some themes also had a malicious code that was able to replicate itself to other themes installed on the website.</p> <p>Preventing something like that happening to you is not very complicated, and it requires that you only be careful where you get the plugins and themes, and what are you installing on your website.<br /> Find and download themes and plugins</p> <p>Best source for free themes and plugins is main WordPress website (wordpress.org). Themes uploaded there are always scanned prior to publishing to make sure that malicious code is not embedded. When the plugins in the repository are concerned, it’s not nowhere near as strict as the themes, and plugins are removed only if multiple users report plugin as problematic. Over the years, there were cases of plugins uploaded to repository that where malicious in nature, but they are always quickly removed. Still, plugins repository needs a massive overhaul to make it up to date (90% of plugins are not compatible with latest WordPress versions, they are not maintained and they are not tested). But, as a source of free plugins that is the best way to get plugins.</p> <p>If you don’t download plugins or themes from there, you must make sure to get plugins and themes directly from their authors websites. Be careful downloading them from some third-party website. Free plugins are not big problem, but premium (or commercial if you like) plugins and themes are usually target of hackers. They get them illegally, change them and offer for free from their websites or other warez forums or sources. All commercial themes developers were affected over the years, and their themes end up on such websites, and always include some sort of malicious code.<br /> Check what you have downloaded</p> <p>Before you upload theme or plugin on your website, test it on your local computer. Also, you can search files in theme or plugin for a code that is potentially problematic. This is easier to do in the theme than plugin, since plugin can have not only more files, but there are legitimate reasons to use some functions that may be considered problematic.</p> <p>Any theme file can be affected, but most common files to be infected are: functions.php, footer.php and header.php. Encoded content is usually recognized by use of base64_decode function that contains long string that doesn’t make any sense on its own. Also, footer or header can contain long lists of links that are displayed as hidden. There is a free plugin called Theme Authenticity Checker, and you can use it to scan themes you have installed to find malicious code or links that shouldn’t be there.</p> <p>There are several ways that plugins and themes can send data to remote servers. That can also be a big security concern and check if curl functions are used, functions like wp_remote_get or file_get_contents. Checking for that requires that you are familiar with PHP and WordPress development.<br /> Conclusion</p> <p>Be careful what you add to your website, make sure to get plugins and themes from authors or some reputable source like official WordPress repository. Spend some time to test what you have download.</p> <p><a href="http://www.dev4press.com/2010/tutorials/practical-wp/wordpress-security-part-6-plugins-themes/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dev4press.com/2010/tutorials/practical-wp/wordpress-security-part-6-plugins-themes/</a> </p> http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/topic/wordpress-security-part-5-spam-prevention#post-8832 Mon, 28 Feb 2011 21:26:45 +0000 natalija 8832@http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/ <p>Most annoying thing when running a WordPress based website is cleaning up spam comments (there is no sure why to fully eliminate it) and removing spam blogs if you run open multisite installation of WordPress. Some of the things to help with this were already part of previous articles.</p> <p>If you run open blog that allows user registration and allow comments from register users only, great deal of registered users will be spam source. Eliminating such users is a big problem. Even bigger issue is multi site WordPress installation where registered users can get own blogs that can than be used as a source of spam. Filtering all that manually is very slow and tedious process. For spam comments you can use Akismet plugin and some .htaccess tricks. For spam registrations, problem is much bigger and as far as I know GD Press Tools Pro is the only plugin that can help you with that.<br /> Akismet</p> <p>Best system for automatic spam comments detection and filtering is Akismet. Plugin comes built-in with every WordPress installation, and it is very easy to use and it’s usually very precise eliminating spam comments. But, it’s not perfect, especially if you run popular website that get a lot of comments each day. Here, on Dev4Press, Akismet removes some 7.000 spam comments each month, missing couple of comments each day (on average). This is really good result, and requires only minor involvement on your part. Still, I would recommend that you check comments marked as spam at least while you are sure that Akismet filter is precise and is not removing comments you might want.<br /> Use GD Press Tools Pro to eliminate spam registrations</p> <p>GD Press Tools Pro monitors all user registrations attempts and can use 9 different methods to check if the registration is valid (see image on the right). If any of the methods fail, registration will be prevented. And also, system can learn and improve filtering by using previously logged data.</p> <p>Plugin will check email, username, domain part from the email and user agent from the request. Many spam registrations use invalid user agent that reveals that request is not coming from human user using browser. If any of the filtering method is triggered, it can be used to automatically ban username used, email, domain or IP. This data, if logged, it can be used further.</p> <p>Plugin also has Registration panel where you can see this log, and what is banned, allowing you to manually ban or remove existing ban further improving filtering. Using this feature on several websites, I managed to prevent more than 80% of spam users registrations. With proper control of logged data, this can improve further.</p> <p>Preventing spam registrations in multisite environment is very important, since spam blogs will generate content that is against the rules and topics you might allow, can cause problems with search engines, and will generate an enormous amount of warez and links and pirated content you don’t want in your network. Checking each site manually is very long and complicated process, that with GD Press Tools Pro Spam Registration prevention can be significantly faster because plugin will eliminate most of such users.</p> <p><a href="http://www.dev4press.com/2010/tutorials/practical-wp/wordpress-security-part-5-spam-prevention/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dev4press.com/2010/tutorials/practical-wp/wordpress-security-part-5-spam-prevention/</a> </p> http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/topic/wordpress-security-part-4-inside-wordpress#post-8804 Wed, 23 Feb 2011 01:19:09 +0000 gestroud 8804@http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/ <p>Good series. Keep it coming! </p> http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/topic/wordpress-security-part-4-inside-wordpress#post-8800 Mon, 21 Feb 2011 20:39:16 +0000 natalija 8800@http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/ <p>After you have secured your server file system and set the .htacess file, you can now turn to WordPress and make some changes or add features that will help improve security even further. And some of the tweaks proposed in this article are very important against several types of attacks.<br /> Username: admin should be changed</p> <p>Before WP 3.0, in every new installation of WordPress, main user account was named admin. After WP 3.0 you can choose new username during installation. Also, WP doesn’t allow changes of username directly. It’s not recommended to have admin username at all because hackers expect it and can use it to only crack the password and get access to your website. Considering that many websites use simple passwords, that can be easier than you may think.<br /> Update WordPress, plugins and themes</p> <p>This is something you hear from everyone: keep your installation up to date. But, on the other hand that can be a problem in some cases. Updating WordPress is a good thing if you don’t use some old and outdated plugins that don’t work with new WordPress, and is not maintained anymore. Situation with updating themes is similar, once you start changing the theme, you can’t update anymore or you will loose your changes. That is one of the reasons I added theme upgrade to my xScape premium themes, allowing you to change theme and still be able to update with new version.</p> <p>If you still run some old WP version (any 2.x version), from security point of view, you need to upgrade to latest WP 3.x version. If some old plugin is preventing you to do that, try to find someone to fix the plugin or write a new one. Investing in that can prove very important to keep your website safe in the long run.</p> <p>Best security policy with WordPress (and other well maintained CMS systems) is to use latest versions, since WP core developers are always been very fast in fixing all potential security holes. Compared with other similar systems, in my experience, WordPress is most secure one with a lot of security features built into the core.</p> <p><a href="http://www.dev4press.com/2010/tutorials/practical-wp/wordpress-security-part-4-inside-wordpress/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dev4press.com/2010/tutorials/practical-wp/wordpress-security-part-4-inside-wordpress/</a> </p> http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/topic/wordpress-security-part-3-htaccess-tips#post-8792 Thu, 17 Feb 2011 21:23:13 +0000 natalija 8792@http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/ <p>.htaccess is directory level configuration file used by Apache (and some others) web servers. Content for this file is very similar to web server global configuration file. Htaccess is used to override settings from global configuration and can be added to any directory of the website.</p> <p>I will not bore you with everything .htaccess can be used for, because it’s a lot, but here are some basics. WordPress uses .htaccess for activating rewriting engine and getting all the pretty permalinks that we are so used to. So, most likely you will have .htaccess file in the root of your website installation. You can add .htaccess to any directory, if you need to set something differently from parent directory, a good method to add extra protection to wp-admin folder.<br /> Basic thing you can do with .htaccess is to protect files from being accessed at all. Some types of files are already protected by global server configuration, but it’s better to ensure the protection using .htaccess also. You should protect .htaccess and wp-config.php files at least. If you attempt to access wp-config.php like this: <a href="http://www.example.com/wp-config.php," rel="nofollow">http://www.example.com/wp-config.php,</a> you will get empty page, since PHP is processing and that file and has no output to display. But, due to some exploit methods that can affect server, it’s also good idea to prevent access to this file. It’s recommended to prevent access to readme.html, since it contains WP version.<br /> By default, web server allows browsing of directories on the website, and that can reveal the content of directories that are not protected. One way to prevent that is to add index.php or index.html file to each directory, but better method is to do it with .htaccess and prevent it for all directories at once.<br /> Each web request should contain the user agent string identifying source of the request. UA strings are used to identify different browsers or other programs trying to access website. Based on the UA string we can identify many spammers, content scraper and other source that it’s best to ban from the website. With that you can even improve website performance since requests from banned sources will be stopped before server will generate content. There are many good lists available on the internet, and one such list is part of GD Press Tools Pro plugin (more info at the end of the article).<br /> GD Press Tools 3.9 Pro adds a .htaccess modifications to Security panel. Right now this panel allows you to control all tips from this article (except for IP limitations, that will be added in 4.0). Plugin can modify and update .htaccess on its own, so you don’t need to do it manually ever time you need to change something, just enable or disable some of the options, and plugin will do the rest.</p> <p><a href="http://www.dev4press.com/2010/tutorials/practical-wp/wordpress-security-part-3-htaccess-tips/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dev4press.com/2010/tutorials/practical-wp/wordpress-security-part-3-htaccess-tips/</a> </p> http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/topic/get-posts-for-a-category#post-8788 Wed, 16 Feb 2011 21:35:07 +0000 natalija 8788@http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/ <p>Yes, here is the link<br /> <a href="http://www.dev4press.com/2010/tutorials/wordpress-tips/get-posts-for-a-category/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dev4press.com/2010/tutorials/wordpress-tips/get-posts-for-a-category/</a> </p> http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/topic/wordpress-security-part-2-files-protection#post-8776 Mon, 14 Feb 2011 21:09:19 +0000 natalija 8776@http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/ <p>First step to ensure that your WordPress website is secure, is to set proper file permissions rights. Wrong file permissions can easily lead to hackers gaining access to your website. So, after you first install WordPress, no matter what method you used, you must check those rights and set them properly.</p> <p>When you first install WordPress, you can do it manually or you can use some sort of install script that is usually offered by the shared hosting companies. In my experience, those scripts usually do a good job in setting at least initial file permissions to all files and folders. But, on the other hand that may not always be the case, and you can end up in problems.</p> <p>Main issue is to allow WordPress to access files and folders it needs to be able to work properly, and in the same time not to set permissions too loose so that it can be exploited. To change the file permissions, Linux uses CHMOD command. Permissions for files and folders are represented by three values controlling access for file owner, for owner group and for everyone else (world). And each of these controls 3 rights: read, write and execute. There are different ways to display file permissions, and most common is to use 3 numbers: first for owner, second for group and third for world. File system and file permissions can be very complex, and more info on how all that is working can be found on URL’s at the bottom of this articles.</p> <p>Since we are talking about file system on your server, referring to users and groups has nothing to do with WordPress. User or owner is your account on the server not in WordPress.</p> <p><a href="http://www.dev4press.com/2010/tutorials/practical-wp/wordpress-security-part-2-files-protection/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dev4press.com/2010/tutorials/practical-wp/wordpress-security-part-2-files-protection/</a> </p> http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/topic/wordpress-security-part-1-hosting-environment#post-8749 Mon, 07 Feb 2011 21:21:37 +0000 natalija 8749@http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/ <p>First thing you need to take into consideration when security of the website is concerned is the server you host your website on. There are 3 main hosting type environments and depending on what you are using there are different security related concerns you must take into account.</p> <p>Hosting companies are offering UNIX/Linux-based servers or Windows-based servers. Due to pricing of Windows licenses, they are not commonly used to host websites based on WordPress or other PHP based systems. Most servers will run on different distributions of Linux, and they commonly use Apache as web server. I will not write about Windows-based servers, since they are much different to set up and use, and also they are very rare for WordPress website, and not really relevant for this article.<br /> Shared Hosting</p> <p>Most websites, especially smaller websites are hosted on the shared hosting servers because they are cheap and they are powerful enough to run. Shared hosting means that a single server is used for many different users accounts. Server is not yours to use and modify as you need, you are limited by the shared environment settings that hosting company set for all accounts on a server. There are some things you can change and use.<br /> If you decide to choose shared hosting company, make sure that they are using latest (or at least current) software: Apache server (or something similar), PHP (version 5 is a must, with 5.2 or 5.3 being preferable) and MySQL (version 5 is most commonly used). They need to allow you to use HTaccess files (there are still many hosting companies that don’t) and preferably allow you to use own copy of PHP.INI file for some settings that can be changed for each account. Good support is always important, especially until you set everything and make sure that server is working right. Always require access to some sort of control panel: CPanel, ISPManager or Plesk (there are others, these are the best).</p> <p>Shared hosting is limited in what you can do with the server (again, it all depends on the hosting company), and you will not be able to install additional software: Firewall, PHP extensions, MemCache… Most shared hosting companies have decent security related setup, but again, make sure to check what are you getting into.</p> <p>Sharing server by default means that all accounts and all domains on it will share single IP address. So, if that IP gets blacklisted for some reason because of some other user, you will be affected also. Most shared hosting companies offer purchase of separate IP for your account only.<br /> Virtual Private Servers Hosting</p> <p>Or VPS for short is becoming very popular in the recent years, mostly due to much better performance you get and much affordable prices caused by many more emerging companies offering this kind of service. VPS is basically a whole server only for one user, this server is not actual physical machine, but a virtual machine-made through process of virtualization and sharing of hardware resources. There are many different methods for this used today with nodes distribution and clouds getting more in popularity. You are only user of your VPS, and you can have full control over installing the server and setting it up. VPS can be unmanaged (you need to do everything by yourself), or is managed where hosting company is still in control of installing the server and helping you run it.</p> <p>If you decide on VPS hosting, be prepared to work more on the server setup and maintenance (depends on managed or unmanaged VPS configuration). If you need to use mail server on your VPS (and in most cases you will need that), make sure to set mail server properly: reverse DNS (usually you need to ask for this from the hosting company), set up limits, SPF records… Be sure to run latest version of OS you have decided on, updated kernel, updated web server, PHP and mySQL. Also, I strongly recommend installing some firewall software (LFD is really good one with a lot of options to set). Make sure to use strong passwords for everything and to change them often. If you run personal server (no outside users), there is a less chance of intrusion because you will be only one that has access to it.</p> <p>PHP also can be improved and expanded to include Suhosin security extension. Some Linux distribution (like Ubuntu 10.04), will install PHP with built-in Suhosin. To be honest, I don’t like it and I don’t use it. I find it hard to set up, and it was always causing more problems than I was prepared to deal with. But, if you have patience and time to test it, I recommend trying it. As for the mySQL, usually server is set to allow only local access to it, so no one can access it from outside your server.</p> <p>VPS is the best solution for hosting: not very expensive, full control over the server, great potential for setting it up exactly as you need and in most cases very easy to expand to use more hardware resources when your website(s) starts to grow and to get more visitors.<br /> Dedicated Hosting</p> <p>What I said about VPS can be said for dedicated hosting. But, in this case you actually have use of full physical machine. This is usually very expensive solution, but most powerful one. If you don’t care about spending more money, this is the best solution and the most complex from maintenance standpoint and work you need to invest also.. </p> http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/topic/custom-posts-filtering-with-taxonomy-terms#post-8733 Thu, 03 Feb 2011 19:34:58 +0000 natalija 8733@http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/ <p>Only when you get to work on a really huge WordPress website with hundred thousands of posts, post tags and other elements, you will realize that many operations you think as common are going to get very, very slow even on very powerful servers. What to do than?<br /> Intro</p> <p>In some cases, it’s best to give on WordPress and make your own CMS that is made for the need you have. Getting some other CMS is most likely not good solution since it will have some other issue that will cause troubles, since all CMS have one fatal problem: they are not made for a single purpose, they are made to cover all sorts of uses, and this type of generalization will always be slower than custom use specific coding. But, I don’t plan just to give up on WordPress for such complex tasks, best is to make changes that will solve the problem.</p> <p>Main problem and major slowdown on the AppHelp website was getting list of posts belonging to a post tag. One run of the query can take up to 1 minute (yes, one whole minute), and that’s not good. Using cache plugin is partial solution, and I prefer to have something that will solve the issue at the source, not to patch it after.<br /> Solution(s)</p> <p>Solution to this problem is to change the SQL query WP generates to get posts archive based on tags. The solution I have in mind takes 2 queries instead of 1, and these 2 queries need only 0.2 seconds to run. Compare that to 30 seconds (on average) original query takes for such large database, and you will see that new method is 100 times faster! Minor downside is that mySQL for these 2 queries will use a bit more memory (I managed to measure some 15% increase), and in my book that is a fair trade off for the massive speed improvement we got.</p> <p>Original WP code gets post tag (term) slug and makes a query that joins posts table with all 3 taxonomies tables. If you want to use multiple terms SQL where clause will try all of them in the same time, and in all cases will search by VARCHAR field. So, there are actually two solutions. First, and simpler one is to use term ID’s in where, instead of slug names. This is actually method WP uses to filter categories and category pages are much faster than post tags because of simple SQL. But, that method is still slow, as it takes up to 10 seconds to run, and we want to get it much, much faster.</p> <p>My solution is to add one more step. First, get the term ID’s for all terms. Than, make a new SQL query that will join posts table directly to the secondary, nested SQL query that will use term ID’s. Such method is very, very fast.<br /> The Code</p> <p>So, how to actually do this? Since we need to change whole query not only parts of it, there is only one way to do it without actually hacking WP_Query class. We need to hook up after the query is created and than make our own query. To do that we need to add filter for ‘posts_request’. This will give as full query made by WP_Query object, and the current instance of WP_Query object. Since, only problem are taxonomy pages (mostly tags in my case) code will check out if we are on the right page.</p> <p><a href="http://www.dev4press.com/2010/tutorials/practical-wp/custom-posts-filtering-with-taxonomy-terms/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dev4press.com/2010/tutorials/practical-wp/custom-posts-filtering-with-taxonomy-terms/</a> </p> http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/topic/expanding-plugins-panel-with-links-and-info#post-8720 Mon, 31 Jan 2011 22:33:12 +0000 natalija 8720@http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/ <p>If you are plugin developer, it’s very important to give as much info about the plugin updates as you can before the blog admins update the plugin to a new version. Also, some of the plugin control panels go into different menus, and it’s a good idea to have direct links on the plugins panel also.</p> <p><a href="http://www.dev4press.com/2010/tutorials/wordpress-tips/expanding-plugins-panel-with-links-and-info/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dev4press.com/2010/tutorials/wordpress-tips/expanding-plugins-panel-with-links-and-info/</a> </p> http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/topic/get-posts-for-a-category#post-8712 Sat, 29 Jan 2011 12:44:24 +0000 gestroud 8712@http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/ <p>Is there a link? </p> http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/topic/get-posts-for-a-category#post-8705 Thu, 27 Jan 2011 14:10:57 +0000 natalija 8705@http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/ <p>This is basic operation in WordPress, but it’s not as straightforward as you might think. For that, you will usually use get_posts() function that allows you to set category, but this function can use many more options than actually documented, you can use all WP Query arguments with it.</p> <p>We will see how to exclude child categories from results and how to do a bit more with some other additional arguments this function can use. </p> http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/topic/improve-your-wordpress-website-speed-part-1#post-8695 Mon, 24 Jan 2011 21:13:05 +0000 natalija 8695@http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/ <p>Generally speaking WordPress is fast. And this is the case even with large websites with tens of thousands of posts. Mostly, speed depends on the theme and than on the plugins. But in many cases the slowest part is the WordPress core. Here is how to speed it up.<br /> SQL execution background</p> <p>Most of the SQL queries WordPress uses are fast. They will get slower with more complex filters added to the query, but such queries are rare. In most cases you can’t do much to speed them up. Some of the operations WordPress runs will execute more than one query: filtering posts by category or tag, metadata queries. This is done because 2 simpler queries are usually faster than one query using joins.</p> <p>When number of posts rises, queries will tend to slow down. If the query relies on columns that are indexed (post ID for instance), speed will remain the same and number of posts will not affect speed. But, in some cases queries will rely on columns that are not indexed or even if they are indexed, index is not having effect. Such columns are ususally date/time columns.<br /> Speed problems</p> <p>While main SQL queries will usually remain fast, even with default configuration of WordPress, default theme and usual plugins, there are SQL queries in the WordPress core that are very slow. And most of the are not needed at all. This time we will focus on SQL queries that are part of the page header. Using filters WordPress core adds several functions to the header that are used to generate additional tags. These tags are adding additional URL’s inside the website: previous post, next post, parent post (for hierarchical post types), first post in category. These filters can generate 5 to 10 SQL queries, and in some cases they can take longer to execute than all the other SQL queries on the page combined!</p> <p><a href="http://www.dev4press.com/2010/tutorials/wordpress-tips/improve-your-wordpress-website-speed-part-1/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dev4press.com/2010/tutorials/wordpress-tips/improve-your-wordpress-website-speed-part-1/</a> </p> http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/topic/add-rich-text-editor-to-your-plugin#post-8684 Fri, 21 Jan 2011 22:00:19 +0000 natalija 8684@http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/ <p>Sometimes is very useful to be able and use existing WordPress rich editor within your plugins. TinyMCE editor built in WP can be easily reused and you can even set some elements. Following example will work in WordPress 2.8 and newer including latest WP 3.0.</p> <p><a href="http://www.dev4press.com/category/tutorials/wordpress-tips/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dev4press.com/category/tutorials/wordpress-tips/</a> </p> http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/topic/be-careful-naming-form-fields-in-wordpress#post-8677 Wed, 19 Jan 2011 22:19:36 +0000 natalija 8677@http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/ <p>When you create a complex form that will be used on page or anywhere in WordPress, there are some restrictions that you will not found documented, and will cause you a lot of problems if you are not aware of them and how to solve them.</p> <p><a href="http://www.dev4press.com/2010/tutorials/wordpress-tips/be-careful-naming-form-fields-in-wordpress/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dev4press.com/2010/tutorials/wordpress-tips/be-careful-naming-form-fields-in-wordpress/</a> </p> http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/topic/teaching-wordpress-to-absolute-beginners-part-1-the-build#post-8520 Wed, 22 Dec 2010 12:34:20 +0000 Siobhan 8520@http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/ <p>For people who have been using WordPress for years, many things are now second nature. How could anyone possibly find it difficult to create a page? Seems crazy! But approaching WordPress for the first time can be daunting, especially for people who aren't so familiar with the internet more generally. Read on for Part 1 of our advice on how to teach WordPress to absolute beginners. </p> <p><a href="http://wpmu.org/teaching-wordpress-to-absolute-beginners-part-1-the-build/" rel="nofollow">http://wpmu.org/teaching-wordpress-to-absolute-beginners-part-1-the-build/</a> </p> http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/topic/wordpress-security-101-8-tips-tricks-and-tweaks-to-secure-your-wordpress-websi#post-8450 Wed, 01 Dec 2010 04:14:21 +0000 gestroud 8450@http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/ <p>An excellent and informative read. Definitely recommend it. </p> http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/topic/wordpress-security-101-8-tips-tricks-and-tweaks-to-secure-your-wordpress-websi#post-8449 Tue, 30 Nov 2010 21:34:08 +0000 Siobhan 8449@http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/ <p>How safe is your WordPress installation? Do you use WordPress safely and securely? At wpmu.org I've put together a collection of WordPress plugins, tips and tweaks to help keep your WordPress secure.</p> <p>Check it out here: <a href="http://wpmu.org/wordpress-security-101-8-tips-tricks-and-tweaks-to-secure-your-wordpress-website/" rel="nofollow">http://wpmu.org/wordpress-security-101-8-tips-tricks-and-tweaks-to-secure-your-wordpress-website/</a> </p> http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/topic/best-wordpress-articles-of-september-2010#post-8256 Tue, 05 Oct 2010 07:33:33 +0000 dynamicwp 8256@http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/ <p>In this month (September 2010) we collect a wide selection of fresh wordpress resources. Start from tutorial, advice, free themes, plugin and cheatsheet.</p> <p>More here: <a href="http://www.dynamicwp.net/articles-and-tutorials/best-wordpress-articles-of-september-2010/">Best WordPress Articles of September 2010</a></p> <p>Hope it will useful, and enjoy :) </p> http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/topic/showcase-illustration-in-wordpress-blog-design-038-resources#post-7941 Thu, 22 Jul 2010 07:21:04 +0000 dynamicwp 7941@http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/ <p>In this showcase you’ll find beautiful wordpress blog designs that feature creative illustrations, integrated properly to create a visually pleasing effect. Also some resources, to help you create a good illustration.</p> <p>More : <a href="http://www.dynamicwp.net/articles-and-tutorials/resources-showcase-ilustration-in-wordpress-blog-design/">Showcase: Illustration in WordPress Blog Design &#38; Resources</a> </p> http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/topic/35-fresh-wordpress-tutorials-and-resources-of-june-2010#post-7337 Thu, 01 Jul 2010 06:23:55 +0000 dynamicwp 7337@http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/ <p>In this post we collect a wide selection of fresh wordpress resources from the month of June. All of the resources in this post are categorized and hopefully you will find a number of new resources that will be practical for your own work.</p> <p>Read More : <a href="http://www.dynamicwp.net/articles-and-tutorials/35-fresh-wordpress-tutorials-and-resources-of-june-2010/">35+ Fresh WordPress Tutorials and Resources of June 2010</a> </p> http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/topic/how-to-create-a-redirect-page-template-in-wordpress#post-7254 Sat, 19 Jun 2010 09:58:46 +0000 dynamicwp 7254@http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/ <p>Redirect page template is a page template to make a link to an external site. This page is very useful if you want to shorten your link address or it can also be used to hide your affiliate link. </p> <p>Read more : <a href="http://www.dynamicwp.net/articles-and-tutorials/how-to-create-a-redirect-page-template-in-wordpress/">How to Create a Redirect Page Template in WordPress</a>. </p> http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/topic/quick-tip-make-a-post-automatic-excerpt-with-image-thumbnail-on-wordpress-29#post-7198 Tue, 08 Jun 2010 07:59:22 +0000 dynamicwp 7198@http://weblogtoolscollection.com/news/ <p>Excerpt is a wordpress feature which will facilitate you to display a summary of the article on index pages automatically without requiring you to add a function readmore (more tag). However, this feature has a weakness, namely a picture in your article will not appear on index pages automatically.<br /> Lucky, start from WordPress 2.9, theme authors can easily enable Post Thumbnail.</p> <p>In this post we will learn <strong>how to make A post automatic excerpt</strong> and <strong>how to set post thumbnail</strong>.</p> <p>Read More : <a href="http://www.dynamicwp.net/articles-and-tutorials/quick-tip-make-a-post-automatic-excerpt-with-image-thumbnail-on-wordpress-2-9/">Quick Tip : Make A Post Automatic Excerpt With Image Thumbnail on WordPress 2.9+</a> </p>