When cleaning up hacked sites and testing .htaccess tricks, it’s nice to have a list of WordPress directory and file names for checking patterns and finding strings directly via Search/Find. Especially when working remotely, having a complete list of WordPress files available online can help expedite the attack-recovery process.
Poll: www. or no www.?
This one’s self-explanatory, but a lot has changed so I thought I’d poll one up to see what people think. It seems there are a lot more sites these days without the www. in their canonical URLs, but a lot of big sites continue to include the “www” subdomain (think Google home page). Which one is best? Let’s find out..
Attach Unattached Media Files
Attaching any unattached media files that you may have floating around is a good way to keep things organized and running smooth. Normally, when you’re working on a post in the Edit Post screen, you click the Upload/Insert button and use the nifty drag-n-drop media uploader to get ‘er done. When you upload your media files in this manner, WordPress “knows” that you want to attach the file to that particular post. Super straightforward sure, but there are situations where WordPress doesn’t know which post to use. In this DigWP post, we walk through the process of finding unattached media files and attaching them to their respective posts.
Measuring Latency with Apache Bench
One of the important factors in the speed of your site is the distance between your servers and the browser visiting your site. The time it takes the information to travel from the server to the browser is called latency. Latency increases with distance, so no matter how fast your servers may be, high latency can make your site load slowly for visitors who are geographically removed from your servers.
Don’t fork your theme, flex it with “is_plugin_active” conditional
Donkey Work
Donkey work is really the last thing I want to be doing. Piddly tasks that could have been avoided with a little thought and perspective. Below I explain how I worked my way away from becoming a donkey with a dozen child themes to manage and maintain, with just a little knowledge of a native wordpress function.
v3.3 Printed Books are Here!
Good news! The new version-3.3 printed books are now available. The new books are better than ever, updated for WordPress 3.3 with new content, refreshed graphics, and new features galore. Each book is printed in full-color, with new extra-thick covers and slick spiral binding for laying it flat while reading. These features make the print edition feel really solid and durable, like you know you’re reading a well-crafted, quality book. Here’s a recent photo showing how the chapters are color-coded and easy to recognize:
Book Winner!
Congrats to Shawn Grimes for winning a brand-spanking-new print edition of Digging into WordPress v3.3 — Cheers!
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Getting Comment Info from the WordPress Database
An easy way for visitors to enter their emails is by commenting on a post. We did this recently for people to sign up for a notification email. Instead of using a plugin or custom function for a one-time email list, we just went with WordPress core functionality and used post comments for people to sign up. Then the trick then is retrieving the comment information from the database for the specific sign-up post.
We did this recently to collect commentators’ email addresses, but could have easily extracted other comment info as well — comment author, comment date, comment url, and basically anything in the
wp_commentstable, shown here:Keep Reading