URL Sentences in WordPress

WPCandy is back under Ryan Imel and it’s been loaded with good stuff lately, including this great run-through of how to use Chris Shiflett’s URL sentences idea in WordPress.

digwp.com/thinks/this-is-a-cool-idea

Version 3.0 Launch!

Posted on: September 1, 2010 by Jeff Starr

It’s here! Digging into WordPress Version 3.0 is here and it’s packed with goodness, including a new chapter on WordPress 3, updated core content, and a super-sleek new cover. Check it out:

[ Digging into WordPress V3 ]
DiW3 cover by Chris Coyier

Updated Core Material

Much has changed with WordPress since our previous book update (v2), so for version 3.0 we went through the book and updated/removed outdated core content. Everything is now hot-wired and fine-tuned to the latest version of WordPress, with new popouts and fresh links throughout the book. Here’s a close-up of one the updated pages (a flow-chart for templates):

[ Digging into WordPress Screenshot ]

New Chapter on WordPress 3.0

WordPress 3.0 is better than ever. Released on June 17th 2010, WP3.0 features tons of new functionality and CMS capabilities. So much good stuff, that we added an entire chapter covering all the best new WP3.0 features:

  • New default theme
  • Custom Admin usernames
  • How to customize your background
  • How to setup and use WP MultiSite
  • Custom taxonomies, menus, and post types

Plus a whole bunch of other stuff, including how to use the built-in shortlink feature, author templates, comment-form template-tags, and more. It’s 20+ pages of new WP3.0 content.

[ Digging into WordPress Screenshot ]
Detail-view of new WP3 content

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Pimp your wp-config.php

Posted on: August 25, 2010 by Jeff Starr

Easily, the most important file in your WordPress installation is the wp-config.php file. It serves as your site’s base configuration file, controlling key aspects of WordPress’ functionality and enabling WordPress to do mission-critical stuff like connect to the database. Without wp-config.php, WordPress simply won’t work. So whenever you install WordPress, one of the first things to do is pimp your wp-config.php.

And it’s pretty easy too – just get your database credentials in place and you’re done. The other settings available in the wp-config.php file will work just fine using the default values, but there are some cool things you can do to customize functionality, tighten security, and improve performance. Once you get the basics of wp-config.php, you can really pimp it out to do some awesome stuff. We’ll break this down into four basic parts:

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Delay Loading of Print CSS

Peter Wilson walks us through making sure print stylesheets are loaded after the rest of the page is loaded, so they don’t hold up page rendering.

Digg Technical Talks – Rasmus Lerdorf

Pardon my ignorance here, but Rasmus starts talking about latency and concurrent requests about 16:30. He then mentions “one line of code” installation of something that sounds like “aqua code cache” that gives WordPress a 3x performance boost in response time / number of transactions per second. Anyone knows what he’s talking about there, shoot a note and I’ll update this permalink with the info. He goes on to talk about much more hardcore-PHP-nerd WordPress optimization stuff.

The scoop via Joost Schuur:
Rasmus is talking about an ‘opcode cache’. It essentially caches the parsed PHP scripts in memory. That means PHP doesn’t have to read it from disk or even convert the humanly readable PHP script code into executable machine code (opcode). The one he’s referring to is APC, which is likely going to be included in the next big release of PHP. Xcache is another popular kind. I run it on my site and got about a 3x performance increase on page request server times, so the numbers add up. The W3 Total Cache WordPress plugin has the option of using Xache or APC to keep popular pages in memory via opcode caching.