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.

Randomized Grid of Posts

Posted on: August 16, 2010 by Chris Coyier

I’m all about tinkering with different ideas to display posts with WordPress. After all, it’s just a bunch of data at our fingertips! WordPress makes it easy to output whatever we need. Not long ago we experimented with making a Thumbnail Based Archives. Now let’s build a Randomized Grid Archives.

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Easy Comment Management via SQL

Posted on: August 9, 2010 by Jeff Starr

Here are some sweet SQL code snippets for easy comment management. Sometimes it’s easier to modify comment status and delete unwanted comments on a sitewide basis. Using a program like phpMyAdmin makes it so easy to do stuff like remove spam, close/open comments on old posts, enable/disable pingbacks for specific time periods, and so on. Just remember to backup your database before running any queries.

Remove all spam comments from the database

This SQL query removes all comments marked as “spam” from the database:

DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE wp_comments.comment_approved = 'spam';

Works great in all versions of WordPress including 3.0!

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Using Menus in WordPress 3.0

Posted on: August 2, 2010 by Chris Coyier

The menu system in WordPress 3.0 was hotly anticipated. But perhaps unbeknownst to many average WordPress users, actually using this feature takes some coding work. In fact, even enabling the features take a bit of code.

Below we’ll go through the steps for inserting a custom menu into your theme. Note that many themes will have menu functionality built-in. This is for Do-It-Yourself folks who are trying to add it to their existing theme.

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WordPress Update: 3.0.1

Just a reminder that WordPress version 3.0.1 is available, so take a few moments and update your website. Staying current is one of the best ways to keep things running smooth, safe and secure. The new version addresses about 50 minor issues and helps to make WordPress 3.0 even better.

Amazingly, WordPress 3.0 was downloaded nearly 11 million times in 42 days. So HUGE congrats and thanks to the entire WordPress crew for an amazing piece of software.