The problem – site visitors could not see his videos.

Flash Doesn’t Work On iThings

Apple and Adobe agreed to have a battle, said Apple to Adobe you broke my brand new rattle (excerpt from Apple through the looking glass).

Apple and Adobe had a big falling out recently when Abode created a development process where applications could be run in flash on iThings.  The problem is, they could circumvent the Apple app store with this process.

Apple protected their platorm/spat the dummy to stop uncontrolled |un monetised apps (delete as applicable) and as a result removed support for flash from their mobile devices. Here is what Apple have to say http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/.

A lot of WordPress video plugins which use flash will not show video on iThings.

How Much Traffic Is Mobile?

You may be thinking meh! I don’t get much traffic from mobile devices, but I think you will find you do, a quick check of my stats in Google Analytics shows that 3% of my traffic is from mobile devices.  Not a huge amount, but significant enough to take notice.  Some of my clients have mobile traffic at 10-15% now that is worth taking note of.

This will be growing at an alarming rate over the next few years so it is imperative that you make your site mobile ready.

Many Video Plugins Use Flash

Many of the popular video plugins like WordTube or any of the flowplayer plugins use flash to show the videos on your WordPress site.  They take the native format wrap it in a video player then stream that content in flash.

Try to view that on an Apple product and you will get an error.

The Solution

You need to stream your video in a format iThings play nicely with, this could be a native foramt like mp4 or from a platform the Apple likes.

Here are some of the ways you can get around this

YouTube – embed your videos directly from YouTube rather than using a flash player.  Appel devices recognise YouTube content and open it in the YouTube app that comes with the device.

Stream in a format acceptable – You could encode and stream your videos with Apple’s Quicktime format http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/embed-quicktime/ but this may cause you issues on other browsers without the correct plugin

Find An HTML Video Plugin – A quick search on the plugin repository and you will find plugins like this one http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/html5-and-flash-video-player/ (caveat I’ve not used this one before, don’t give me grief if it does not work).

HTML5 For The Rescue

The new HTML5 standard has video streaming built in, thsi will solve our problems eventually. many plugin developers are scrambling to to an html5 re-write, but this doesn’t help us right now.

This will be the way forward but the plugins are not here yet.

What I Did For My Client

We swapped out the videos to embed YouTube.  I installed and configured the Jetpack plugin and we used the YouTube embed short codes.

He was already using YouTube to host his videos and JW Player to play them, so the chaneg was not that huge just a little tedious to swap over all the code.

Wrap Up

Even the most ardent Apple Fan Bois cannot think banning flash is acceptable, it’s a format generally accepted across the net, but when you buy inot a closed eco-system like Apple’s Apps they get to call the shots.

People love their iThings (I’m and iPhone fan) so you are swimming against hte current if you try to make them match your site choices, my suggestion adapt and make your site mobile ready.

A Mobile Ready WordPress Site

I’ll be talking more about making your site mobile ready in the very near future, it’s a huge thing as more and more people consume internet content, why not join my mailing list to keep up to date with my new posts.

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

Case Study: Flash Video and iThings

Hosting Companies Are Mean By Default

It has been my experience that hosting companies will be mean with their memory allocation by default.  It is not uncommon for hosting companies to give you 32mb of memory.

This may be fine for a static site, but throw in a couple of complex plugins and your site will very quickly run out of memory.

Testing Memory Limit

The quickest way to test your memory limit is to run the PHP command phpinfo().  Please click on the link to download a zipped copy of phpinfo.php which will run the command for you.

Download phpinfo.zip>>

Upload the unzipped php file to the root of your site and run http://yourdomain.com/phpinfo.php.  You will see a screen filled with various PHP config variables, the one we are looking for is memory_limit.  You will see your current memory value, as you can see from my example, it is 32M (32 megabytes).

NB: This exposes a lot of your site config information which could be useful to a hacker so delete this file once you’re done.

Increasing Memory

This will really depend upon your hosting company, but many allow you to edit the memory value, look for a file called php.ini on your site, edit and increase the memory_limit to 48 or 64M and see if that stop your out of memory issues.

If you are not happy editing your config files I would refer this to your hosting company, the majority are more than happy to help you do this.

Image by brainblogger

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

Case Study: Finding Out How Much Memory Is Available to WordPress

Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.

What Causes This Problem

This problem is caused by a failed automatic update on one or more parts of your WordPress site.

When WordPress is automatically updating the core WordPress files, plugins or themes, your site is marked as under maintenance.

This problem occurs when the under maintenance is not marked as done at the end of the process.  This can be caused by an interrupted update, the updating taking so long that it times out or browser crashes.

How To Fix It

Fortunately the fix is fairly simple, you need to attach to your site using ftp or with the file manager in your hosting account, and in the root of your installation you will see a file called .maintenance, simply delete this file and you site will come back to life.

SPECIAL NOTE: files which start with a full stop/period are marked as hidden files on unix/linux, you may need to enable show hidden files on your FTP client before you can see this file, for example on filezilla you need to go to server->force show hidden files.

If At First You Don’t Succeed

Once you have deleted the .maintenance file it is a good idea to re-apply the updates you were doing to make sure they have been completed correctly.

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

How To Fix: Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.

This post is designed to talk you through that process and to point out any pitfalls.

Why Move?

Good questions, hosted WordPress takes all of the burden of supporting your site, applying updates, fighting with miss behaving plugins and the whole shebang. If you want a low overhead, no trouble site where you create content and publish I suggest you stay with wp.com.

You only need to move to wordpress.org if you want the flexibility of your own themes, any plugins you want and ownership of your data.  (WP.com has been guilty of censoring any sites which don’t comply with their T & Cs).

Themes

You should have no problems keeping the look and feel of your site as most of the themes available on wp.com are available to download and install on wp.org.  Check the bottom of you site to get the theme name from the footer and search in http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/ for that theme.

I say this with a small caveat, nearly all of the projects I have worked on required small tweaks on the theme to make them exactly the same, for some reason the code used on wp.,com is not the same as the downloadable version.  These are very minor typographic things usually, but my clients have noticed them immediately and asked for fixes.  Not a game stopper but a little annoying.

Plugins

WP.com limits the number of plugins available to you, and all of the plugins on .com are available to download from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ and a whole lot more.  Don’t get too giddy .com’ers when you see how many new plugins are available to you .

Export/Import of Data

WordPress has a built in export and import function.  Using the export function on your wp.com site you can greate an XML file which contains all of your posts, pages, categories, comments and tags in fact all of your user generated data.

This is under the tools -> export function.

You can export all of the data, or subsets on authors, dates, categories etc

Click to see full size image

Take this import file to your new wp.org site and run the import from tools->import.

If it is a new site you will need to go through a process to install the importer, this is just like adding a plugin.

During the install process there is an option to download and import any attachments, click on this to bring over any images / other content on your old site.

Something to note, you can import wp.com data to an existing site so this can also be used as a tool to reconcile two sites.

Things to watch; if you have a lot of data on your wp.com site and the export file is large, some hosting companies have a cap on the file upload size and you may need to make multiple exports using the export function, for example export two files of different date ranges.

Redirection

Once you have moved all of your data, the last thing to consider is a redirection to send all of your site traffic from wp.com to your new shiny.org site.

This is much easier to do than it once was, WordPress have created an upgrade option for $12 to do this for you.  Purchase the update and setup the redirect to your new site.

This is a 301 redirect so any listings in the search engine indexes will be updated with your new location.

Wrap Up

Moving to self hosted has been made deliberately simple, it is the obvious next step for bloggers as they become more confident with WordPress, follow this process and not much can go wrong.

If you are still a little unsure of this process feel free to get a quote from my on my WordPress technical support page.

Image by jmichaeltracy

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

Case Study: Migrating From WordPress.com

Here’s What They Do

They think that by changing the site URL and leaving the files where they are, they can change the URL structure of their site, this is wrong, you need to copy your files to the new location before you make the changes.  If you don’t WordPress redirects requests to fields that do not exist and your site will crash.

These are the options under settings->general

Here’s The Fix

To get your site back online you need to edit the wp-config.php files, this is in the root of your WordPress install, and add the following two lines with your original URL. These options overwrite anything in your database added by accident.

define(‘WP_SITEURL’, ‘http://{your original URL.com}’);
define(‘WP_HOME’, ‘http://{your original URL.com}’);

Connect to your site with ftp, or use the file manager in your hosting account, and edit the file wp-config.php

Now You Need to Edit the Database

If you want to revert back to your previous entries permanently you need to edit your database.  If you go to settings -> general now, you will see that your site and blog URL options are greyed out you cannot change these back.

Load up phpmyadmin or other tool provided by your hosting company, and open up the wp-options table and look for the siteurl and home options, edit these and roll back to the old URL.

WPTroubleshooting Will Feature This Fix

If you sign up for my WPTRoubleshooting members only course, I will be adding a screen cast video on fixing this issue very soon.

Image by rhysasplundh

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

Case Study: Change Your URL Kill Your Site

I want to tell you about my methodology and give you a chance to learn more about it my my new mini course WP Troubleshooting

How My Methodology Works

WordPress is built up of many layers, core WordPress files, plugins and themes.  I like to strip away and isolate the various layers of WordPress so I can find which layer, be it themes, plugins or the core files is causing the problem.

I do it in a top down manner eliminating each layer and testing as I go in this order.

One: Disable / TroubleShoot Plugins

Because the majority of problems I see are with plugins, I start at this layer first.  I disable all of the plugins on a site, and check to see if the issue is resolved.  If it is I can fairly confidently say the problem is with a plugin.

Next I re-enable the plugins one at a time, checking after each enable to see if the problem comes back, when it does I have isolated the problem plugin.

I then re-enable all of the other plugins and test again (just in case there are multiple plugins causing the issue)  if the problem is gone I have isolated and identified the problem plugin.

Two:Disable / Troubleshoot Themes

If after disabling all of the plugins I still have an issue, I then move down a layer to the theme files.

To troubleshoot a theme, I disable the currently active one and enable a default theme supplied with WordPress.  These default themes are approved by the team who developed WordPress and should not cause any issues (unless you have edited them and introduced errors).

So I enable a default theme and re-test the site, if it is okay, I re-enable he plugins and (you guessed it ) re-tested, if at that point there are  no errors, I can safely say the problem is with the theme and I begin to investigate the theme.

Three: Re-Install a Clean Version of WordPress

At this point, the plugins are offline, I’m working with a default theme.  My final option is to re-install a clean version of WordPress.

I have seen occasions when WordPress files do become corrupted, or deleted, this can cause problems with a site.

I can a clean copy of WordPress from wordpress.org.  I download it, unpack it and attach to the site in question via FTP.

I then do the following:

• Take a copy of wp-config.php (just in case it gets overwritten)
• Rename wp-includes
• Rename wp-admin

The renames ensure that you have a completely clean copy of the WordPress core files and everything you upload is in play.  I have seen times when a file is corrupted, and it cannot be overwritten by the upload which means the corrupt file is still present on your site.

Then I test, hopefully this has solve your problem.

What Type Of Errors Can This Solve

I use my methodology to solve all kinds of issues, in particular the following problems:

• The dreaded WordPress “white screen of death”
• Header already sent errors
• Plugin and Theme Fatal errors
• Out of Memory Errors
• … many other WordPress problems too

What About When The Dashboard is Unavailable

Sometimes if you experience any of the above errors, the dashboard is also unavailable so you cannot disable the plugins or themes, there is a way around this, you need to FTP to your site and manually disable the theme or plugins, all of this is explained in detail in my course.

Backup First

I always recommend that you take a full backup of your site (whatever condition it is in) so that you can restore back to a point in time before you began troubleshooting just in case you introduce more errors.

Want To Learn More About My Methodology?

I have created a WordPress troubleshooting course over at wptroubleshooting.com this includes detailed video tutorials to teach you how to trouble shoot crashed WordPress sites using my methodology.

It’s a members only site with screencast videos, downloadable resources and support from me via comments.  If you would like to learn my methodology in more details please visit wptroubleshooting.com

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

My WordPress Troubleshooting Methodology

What We Are Going To Do

We are going to setup a series of sidebar widgets that will link to twitter, facebook and linkedin.  This can be used for any other social media site such as YouTube by simply changing the image and URLs used.

Social Media Images

The first thing we need is a series of social media images, there are hundreds available to download, do a google search for social media images and you can find many that will match your site.

Here is a zip file for you to download with various sizes and platoforms

social media logos>>

Create a text Widget

Once you have decided which logos you like you need to add them into your sidebar, so go to appearance-> widgets and drag a html/text widget onto your sidebar

Insert The HTML Code

We need to add some HTML code into the text widget, I’ve done all the hard work for you all you need to do it cut and paste this into your text widget created above.

<!-- Twitter -->
<a href="http://twitter.com/wpdude">

<img src="http://wpdude.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/twitter_sidebar_green.png"/></a>

<!-- Facebook -->

<a href="http://en-gb.facebook.com/people/Neil-Matthews/1105047622">

<img src="http://dev.wpdude.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/facebook_sidebar_green.png"/></a>

<!-- Linked In -->

<a href="http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/neil-matthews/23/324/a87">

<img src="http://dev.wpdude.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/linkedin_sidebar_green.png"/></a>

Set The Widget Title

Set the title of the widget, it seems like most peoople use follow me or elsewhere online

Add your Own Profile URLs

The html code provided links to my social profiles you will need to edit these and replace them with your own details. The red items after a href

Point To Your Chosen Images

Again I am pointing to my chosen images, upload your desired image through the media uploader and link to that instead (red item after img src)

That’s It

I hope that has helped you to build out wordpress as your social media hub.

Image by 42106306@N00

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

Add A Follow Me Sidebar Widget

My problem is that I am based in the wrong time-zone for the majority of my coaching clients, so I cannot book as many coaching sessions as I would like.

I am therefore trialing an e-coaching program which I call Ask WP Dude.  This will allow me to provide a coaching service to a much wider audience by conducting the coaching via email.

How It Works

Tell me your burning WordPress problem and I will teach you how to solve that problem with coaching emails.

The emails will contain descriptions, screen shots and perhaps video how to tutorials to take you through your problem.

The system is designed for people who want to learn more about WordPress, but need a little hand holding.

What’s With The Beta

I’m want to work out all of the bugs in the system before I go live (that means charge for the service).

While it is still in beta, all coaching is free, but please be aware it is a beta test and there may be some delays in getting your coaching reply back to you.

Give It A Go

Pop over to Ask WP Dude and ask me your burning WordPress problem.

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

Ask WP Dude (beta) E-Coaching

The Problem

I reviewed the page in question and it looked fine but when I switched to the html mode I saw what the problem was, the page was packed full of spurious html code.  A quick check with my client revealed that he had written his page copy in a word processor then cut and pasted it into the page.

Why is this a problem?  Because it brings over a whole host of html encoding, and this encoding was causing problems with the text editor.

Think for a minute that the text editor is also an html page inside of your blog, add additional codes and you can screw up the web page.  Some og the html code was effecting the way the editor worked and the page could not be edited.

What’s The Solution?

The solution to this problem is to only paste text into the WordPress, and fortunately WordPress has a solution for you.  If you check out the toolbar you will see two clipboard icons, one with a T and one with a W (see image below).

This takes the contents of the clipboard and pastes them into the editor.  The T clipboard takes the clipboard content and strips all encoding pasting only text, the second clipboard takes the contents and teats them as a word document, converting this to the appropriate HTML retaining any enhancements you have made; bold, italic, H1-H6 headings etc.

Writing Your Posts OffLine

If you prefer to write your posts offline, you may want to check out my post How to Write WordPress Posts Remotely this shows you a number of techniques to write posts outside of your visual editor without the need to cut and paste text.

Testimonial

So happy was my client he gave me the following testimonial:

Neil Matthews came to the rescue with my WordPress problem. He was not only swift, professional and courteous, but he was very determined to do whatever it took to make my website work again (I had some major issues not working on my WP site).

Neil would constantly check in with me to show me that he had identified the issues and was working on them, not just leave me wondering and hoping that he was “on it.” He went above and beyond my expectations and treated me the
way a customer wants to be treated — like a real person who is in a bad situation and needs help right away. He DID NOT just treat me like some anonymous customer out in cyberspace who he just wanted to collect a payment from for the minimal amount of effort and move on to the next guy.

Thanks, Neil. I will definitely be calling on you in the future with any WP issues (even though I hope I don’t have any more).

Doug R, Los Angeles, CA – USA

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

Case Study: Cut and Paste from Word Processor

I was working with a client recently who’s WordPress blog was killed by comment spam.  I thought I would write it up and give you some tips to stop this happening to other blogs.

The Problem

My clients database was stuffed full of comments, when I looked at the issue there were more than 140K comments in the moderation queue.  This was exacerbated by a plugin called BAStats which was creating log entries for all activity, this table had over 1 million entries.

The blog was running on a standard hosting installation the database was just too big and cumbersome.  As as result whenever anyone tried to access the front end, they were timed out, a database connection could not be made, and if anyone tried to access the backend dashboard the same happened, the blog was unreadable from the fron end and unmanageable from the back end, a pretty pickle to be in.

A review of the comments from the backend database showed them to be comment spam, someone was running a comment spam bot to inject huge numbers of spammy links into the system.

phpMyAdmin

I am going to talk about phpMyAdmin and modifying backend database a lot in this post, so I thought a quick note on phpMyAdmin was in order.

phpMyAdmin is a MYSQL admin tool which allows you to perform functions on your database.  You will probably find this on your hosting control panel.

This is a GUI tool which allows you to tweak your database, it is not for the faint hearted, you can do real damage if you don’t know what you are doing, you have been warned!

The Solution

I disabled the BAstats plugin by renaming all of the php files , I could not do this from the back end because I could not log in.  Using my ftp client I navigated to the plugin directory and manually renamed the php files so they were not called.   This stopped the stats package from working and reduced load on the database a little giving me some breathing space.

The next step is a little radical, but it was all I could do, and that was to delete all comments in the moderation queue.  First I made a backup of the table wp_{prefix}_comments, then ran the following SQL command from within phpMyAdmin.

delete from wp_{prefix}_comments where comment_approved=0

This is a radical approach which will delete all comments held in the moderation queue regardless of whether they are spam or ham (good comments).  My client felt is best to start a-fresh with no comments held for moderation.  The query removed all of the comments held for moderation.

As a final step I also disabled comments on the blog temporarily to prevent further comment injection.

Preventative Measures

That fixed the problem, the front and back end were now accessible, but I felt preventative measures were in order to stop the issue re-occuring.  I delved into the backend.

The route cause of the problem was that spam capture was disabled.  Akismet was not automatically deleting and spamming comments.  I re-enabled this and ran the “check for spam” routine, another couple of hundred approved comments were spammed.

Do you remember I said that I disabled commenting, spam comments were still coming in!  My client was running an old version of WP and I suspected that a spam bot script was pushing comments into a WordPress vulnerability or plugin loophole, my recommendation to my client was to upgrade to the latest stable version of WordPress and to download and reapply the plugins they used only from legitimate sources, in the hope of sealing teh vulnerability.  This is in progress.

Your Reputation Is In Danger

There is a long term danger if you do not moderate your comments well, and that is loss of reputation through your page rank.  Your site will be demoted and traffic may dry up.

A real life analogy is if you start hanging with the dangerous kids at school smoking, taking drugs and bullying kids, you will be marked as one of these type pf people.  The same goes if you give out a link to a dodgy site, you are seen as giving them an endorsement and your site is marked down.

Wrapping Up

Moderate brutally, keep your comment spam plugins in place, tighten up your moderation policy and give my posts on comment spam a read: What is Comment Spam and How To Control Your WordPress Comment Spam

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

CASE STUDY: When Comment Spam Bots Kill

She wanted the discussion to be moved away from her comments so she had no moderation overhead and people could discuss to their hearts content without it mixing and being confused with her blog content.

What Are the Options

To my mind there are three options, you can have a completely separate forum from the blog, one which plugs into the same users database and closely integrates into WordPress or lastly you can get a forum plugin which works inside of your blog so administration is in one place.

In this post I want to discuss the pros and cons of the three types of forum solution for integration with WordPress.

The Distinct and Un-Integrated Forum

There are a large number of free open source forum solutions, forgive me (or leave a comment) if I miss your favourite off the list, but here are a few I have used.

• Vbulletin
• phpBB
• Phorum

Pros

These are well used and supported forum solutions with a wide range of plugins and themes  to extend your solution to give you exactly what you want. They will have powerful management functions, monetisation and membership plugins.

Cons

Not integrated (easily) with WordPress so you will need to keep two separate databases on-line and your users will not have a single sign-on solution.  In other words you will need to manage two distinct websites, your blog and your forum.

The Closely Integrated Forum

When I talk of a closely integrated forum solution, I am,of course talking about one solution BBPress, the forum developed by the same team which brought us WordPress.

It can work as a stand alone solution or it can use the same user DB and login cookies that WordPress uses.  To ungeek this, that means you use one set of user tables and if they login to WordPress they are logged into BBPress.  A very neat solution/

Pros

A single singon tightly integrated forum which makes for simpler user management.  Here is a screencast on integrating WordPress and BBPress

Cons

A smaller user base than the other big forum solutions so there is not as many plugins out there, but I suspect this will grow in time as it is embraced by the wider WordPress community.  I also suspect that integration will be made much easer in later editions of BBPress.

The Forum Plugin

I don’t know how many times I have said it, but where there is a WordPress problem, there is a plugin, forums are not overlooked by our stout community of plugin developers.

I have used the following forum plugin, let me know of others in the comments section below.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wpforum>>

Pros

The forum becomes another function of your blog, and is administered from a user interface you are already very familiar with.

Cons

Limited extension, you only get the functionality of the plugin, no 3rd party plugins or themes  I’m afraid.

The Final Solution

In the end, my client went with BBPress, this was because she wanted a distinct forum rather than a page of her blog with a forum inside of it.

So if you are looking to create a more interactive community on your blog over and above the comment section why not check out one of these three options.

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

CASE STUDY: Adding a Forum to a WordPress Blog

Photo by disfry

I was working with a client recently who had installed a number of plugins.  These plugins proceeded to screw up his dashboard so he could not use it to administor his blog or even disable the plugins.  His question was,  can you show me how to disable plugins when I don’t have access to the dashboard.

Before We Start

Backup your WordPress installation, this is a major undertaking we are about to set out on,  if you break everything else it’s not my fault, I warned you.

Backup you database and take a copy of your existing WordPress file base now.

Delete the Plugins Using FTP

The idea goes that if you delete the plugins, WordPress sees this and marked them as disabled, turning off the

Load up your favourite FTP program (I use Filezilla) and connect to your host.  Your hosting provider should have provided the ftp password and user ID for your account when you signed up.  Please contact them if you are not sure what this is.

Browse to the directory {blogroot}/wp-content/plugins.  Under this directory you should see a directory name matching your suspect plugin.  Delete this using your FTP client.

When you log back into your blog and go to the plugin section, you should see the following message

The plugin {PLUGIN NAME} has been deactivated due to an error: Plugin file does not exist.

Jobs a Good-Un!

At this point I usually re-installs the suspect plugin to check if it recreates the problem if it does I am looking for some plugin support.

I really mean it about backing up your blog before you mess around deleting files.

All of my case studies are tales from real client running on production blogs.

UPDATE: WordPress TroubleShooting Training Available

I have recorded a video training session on troubleshooting WordPress for my WordPress training and support community the WP Owners Club.

I’ve got a 14 day free trial at the moment, why not take out trial membership and check out the training, here’s what you need to do

1) Sigup for a 14 day free trial account at wpownersclub.com/sign-up

2) Go to   http://wpownersclub.com/wordpress-troubleshooting-guide and watch your training

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

CASE STUDY: Disabling a Plugin When the Dashboard is FUBAR

Just a quick posts to talk about a number of issues I have seen with slow wordpress performance after a 2.7 upgrade.

What I Have Seen?

When you access the front end of the blog, things run especially slowly.  On a number of blogs I have seen the theme load but no posts.

When you attept to connect to the backend i.e. wp-admin the problem is not re-created.

Theme Schmemes

The problems I am seeing are with themes which have not benn upgraded to make use of the new 2.7 functionality.

I assume that they are trying ot run a previous version function, and when this does not work, the system retries for a period before failing.

Testing For A Dodgy Theme

There is a very quick test to see if your theme is causing your issues. Simply change your theme to the wordpress default theme, and test your blog again. If performance improves the theme is the culprit.

If you are running a cache program disable is to ensure nothing is cached and the latest file are being served up.

What to Do?

Go back to the web designer who developed your theme and check to see if this is a know issue. It is quite probable that a 2.7 version of the theme has been released.

Download this latest version and upload it to your blog, fingers crossed the problem will be solved.

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

WordPress 2.7 Performance Issues

photo by beatboxbadhabit

I was working with a client who wantedto redirect their blog from one domain to another, they has some issues with the process they used.

The Problem

At attempt to redirect the blog has been done byamending the site URL and the home page in the blog options within wordpress.

This redirected as expected, but it also prevented login to the site.  When they tried to login to blog/wp-admin, they were redirected to newblog/wp-admin.  This made the admin section of the blog unaccessible.

The Solution

It was down and dirty database edit time.  I gained access to the hosting account and using phpmysqladmin I was able to edit the tables and revert back to the original blog URL and home page.  I also noted that the .htaccess file had a redirect to the wrong directory, so I amended this also.

I installed the appropriate 301 redirection plugin and gave my client instructions on the best way to migrate domains.

If you want to redirect your blog I recommend leaving your old blog intact and using a 301 redirection plugin.  I detail this in my case study post  Migrating From One Domain to Another

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

CASE STUDY:Redirection Problems Using WordPress Options

photo by tomasrotger

I was approached by a client who was having problem with the wordpress password reset.

The Poblem

My cient was attempting to change his password from the normal password change screen under wp-admin.  When he attempted to reset his admin user password, a new password was sent, but the new password did not work.

As a side note, his ISP had reported that certain scripts on his blog were open for vulnerabilities.

My Solution

I suspected that the blog had been hacked and the password reset was sending to some nefarious web troll.

What I did was to white-hat hack the database, and using techniques I don’t want to document here, I was able to get a new MD5 encrypted password.  I then updated the database with that password so I was able to login with an admin level password.

The next stage of the fix was to restore the wordpress code base, I took a copy of wp-config.php, backed up all of the existing files before deletingthe blog root, wp-admin and wp-includes, next I refreshed the blogs code base with a mint copy 0f wordpress 2.7 and re-installed wp-config.php.

The Outcome

The blog was back online and in full working order.  My client was happy and I am now on his blogroll.

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

CASE STUDY: Password Reset Not Working

Photo by joeshlabotnik

A client approached me asking to help him install a theme.

The Problem

The theme was failing with the following error when he attempted to upload the zip file.

Folder already exists.: Please Read This First – Double Here To Read ME.txt

I think my client was attempting the upload using the new theme upload function in wordpress 2.7.

My Solution

I have not used the upload theme function in wordpress 2.7, I am sooo 2.6 when is comes to themes so I planned to unpack the theme and FTP it to the wp-content directory and then activate the theme. This is where I found the problem.

The theme was packaged with several colour variations and three plugins to make it work.  In other words instead of a single theme, there were 6 or more themes plus several plugins all packaged together.

I assumed therefore that the theme upload function cannot handle multiple themes and plugins.  I uploaded the files manually using my ftp client, activcated the plugins and set one of hte themes as teh active one.

The client went away happy that his newly created blog was ready to tell the world and his friends about me.

I f you need some website design help, check out Willdfire marketing,

Post from: WP Dude If you need wordpress technical support please visit my services page

Case Study:Problems with the WP 2.7 theme uploader