I’m still working on the theme elements, but for those of you having the major slowdown issue this version will fix that while you wait for the next full release.

The files can be downloaded here: http://www.awsom.org/filerepository/awsom-pixgallery460beta1.zip. Just replace the files on your server with these and you should be good. Load the settings page and save the options to enable the new setting.

Of course you will now always need to remember to either add this back in after upgrading versions of WordPress, or keep a copy of this file and just merge it into things afterward (and make sure any updates didn’t affect this file).

The one thing that is unfortunate is I was hoping to be able to add some stuff to my plugins for this for anyone to benefit, but can’t. Oh well.

The actual code to get separate loops working is a bit tricky, but not too hard once you understand the process. The major issue arose in getting both posts to appear and not overlap or conflict when appearing side by side.

The typical way to do this in a theme is to make both loops into separate HTML div’s, then do a float on them to get them to appear next to each other. The problem comes in when you need to retrofit this into a theme and CSS setup that wasn’t initially set up with this expectation.

The cascading nature of CSS is normally a good thing–the evil comes in due to different web browser compatibility levels, as well as weird “by design” issues with CSS itself. One of the most frustrating things with CSS is that due to the cascade, you may not actually easily know why something isn’t appearing correctly. While the element level can clearly have a specific CSS entry that tells it to do something, there are times when an overarching CSS entry (like a div level img setting behavior) can override your local entry. It involves which CSS entry the browser decides to do first, then second. You would assume that the local entry would trump the div level one, but that’s not always the case.

Anyway, back to my specific problem: The floats for the 2 news entries weren’t working properly. The CSS caused elements from both div’s to overlap, or get pushed under the other div. Or the background wasn’t being extended correctly behind both divs. It was turning into a mess.

Then the answer hit me: screw CSS for placement. While I’m sure many people will choke on this statement: Tables almost always work properly for placement, so use them sometimes where appropriate. In my case all I needed to do was make a simply 2 row table and place each loop inside each td.

Boom, works great and no issues for any browsers. And yes, I did use CSS to make the look of the table correct. A bonus is the mobile version of the site looks perfect since tables are easy things to get correct in even the crappiest mobile browser.

So, my lesson is sometimes it’s not worth ripping things apart when the simple solution is available.

What you are doing is turning off the loading of pixgallery.js.php, which can easily cut down on your file transfer amounts as well as overall server cpu/memory resources.

I’ll post more tuning tips over time for my plugins, as well as general ideas for overall speed/resource tuning for WordPress.

First thing you need to do is go to your web server and go to your MySQL administration tool. Typically this is a program called PhpMyAdmin (which I’ll be using to demonstrate–but any program will work as long as you can access the same areas I’ll be showing).

Start by selecting your WordPress database. This is the database you input into the wp-config.php file when you originally set up WordPress. You can select from your current databases by using the drop down menu on the left side:

Once you’ve selected the correct database you need to go to the AWSOM News Announcement table that’s in the database. It is named awsomnews but has a header prefix that’s typically wp_, but could be a custom one that you added to the wp-config.php file. click it’s name in the list under your database name on the left and it should open a new page in the main area showing details of that table.

Notice that there is a column called “collation” and it lists “latin1_swedish_ci”–this is the default language type that MySQL uses unless specifically told to use a different language type (MySQL is originally a swedish product). This language type does not display Asian or other non-English lettering based languages well (and honestly has issues with regular English also). What we need to do is change this to the correct language for you.

You can do one of 2 things at this point. You can mark the checkbox next to “newstext” and click the bottom pencil icon or more simply click the pencil icon in the same row. This will open up the individual field for editing.

Now, the difficult part. In the collation drop down select the language type you’d like. Yes, there are a very large number of them and it’s not always easy to know which one to use. For regular English “utf8-bin” is good. You’ll need to look this up for your own language since I have no idea what’s good for any other specific language. Once you know which one you want make sure it’s selected in the drop down box. Then click the “save” button.

That’s basically it. Go and try it out.

The current projected date for release of WordPress 2.6 is July 14 2008, and i expect to have a new version of the Plugin available by that date that fixes these issues, but I just wanted to caution any early adopters to make sure that you know that there could be some issues.

I would strongly suggest that you continue to download all plugins yourself and upload them to the server. In the case of AWSOM.org plugins they all upgrade themselves properly when you reactivate them, so it’s actually not really more difficult anyway.

Please email me or comment here or at Harknell.com and let me know if the new file helps the situation.

UPDATE:I’ve decided to skip the idea of integrating with the built in WordPress tinyMCE and now have packaged a version of the Visual Editor directly into the AWSOM News plugin. Right now this is a test so literally every possible function is enabled. I can’t guarantee everything works in this test version though, so it’s for people who really need to use the Visual Editor and want to try out something immediately to see if it will work for them now. I’ll package up a formal update soon.