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Category Archives: Little Tips
Be Careful of the Autoupgrade Feature in WordPress
As many of you who’ve upgraded to the new WordPress 2.5 version have maybe noticed there is an option on the Plugins page which basically suggests that you can auto-upgrade a plugin. I would strongly suggest you do NOT use this function right now. First off, this is not a feature that is directly supported by plugin authors, it is a function that works outside of the plugin. So if something goes wrong there may be no way for any plugin author to help you fix the situation since the plugin itself did not do the action. Secondly it’s been acknowledged that this feature is really not very robust yet and may very well fail and hose your entire WordPress insall.
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.
Language Display issues in WordPress
I’ve had a few reports come in that people using the AWSOM News Announcement plugin or Pixgallery have been having some issues displaying different language types, most notably Asian or other non-English based character sets. The fix for these issues with AWSOM plugins, or any other plugins displaying this phenomenon, is within the WordPress database. When a database is set up in MySQL one of the things you can assign to it is the language encoding type. In addition, all of it’s fields and tables can also be assigned a language encoding type. By default MySQL utilizes Swedish as it’s encoding type (MySQL was developed in Sweden). WordPress typically tries to set up it’s database as UTF-8. In some cases this doesn’t work right, especially if the admin has updated their version of WordPress continually from a version previous to WordPress 2.1.x where this wasn’t defined.
So, the fix is to go to the database directly though phpmyadmin or another database editor and change the language type for the affected Tables and fields to the language type that you need to display. For AWSOM plugins it’s pretty obvious which tables are for what plugin by their name (I make great pains to place the plugin name as the table name)
In extreme cases you can contact me to help you out, but the best bet is to do a google search for how to use phpmyadmin.
Ping Services
One powerful feature built into WordPress is it’s ping services capability. Basically, whenever you update your blog with a post, WordPress has the ability to reach out and notify various websites that you’ve added new content to your site. Therefore, you can possibly be listed in various search areas and other locations and gain more traffic passively. It’s really a no-brainer to get this enabled, since it generally doesn’t do anything negative and can only add more traffic to your site. To get more information on a good selection of ping sites check out the Update Services page at the WordPress.org codex.
Oh, one thing I do need to mention, the one negative that can happen after adding services to your list can be that your posts take longer to add to your blog. This is because at the moment you add the post, it sends out the ping–so a delay at any of the servers on your list can slow down the total process of posting. There is a plugin called “No Ping Wait” that’s out there for those of you using WordPress 2.0.x though to help with this. For versions past 2.0.x the delay has been mostly eliminated though, so it shouldn’t be a major issue for those users.
Information every WordPress user should know and post when problems strike
I often go on the WordPress.org forum and try to answer help questions from users who are having problems with their install. In many cases the problem is easily solved by knowing a small amount of information–but it’s usually true that most users do not know the most basic information about their setups. In general, anyone who is setting up a WordPress website should know the following information:
- The Version of WordPress they have installed
- They Type of Server they are using (Linux, Windows, Solaris, etc.)
- The Version number of PHP (the programming language WordPress is written in) that is running on their server
- The Version number of MySQL (the database system typically used by WordPress) that is running on their server
It’s also good to know generally what version number your theme is and all of the plugins you have active in your install. This very basic information can usually diagnose many of the most common problems with WordPress. The most common issues of aberrant behavior stem from out of date versions of the above items.
In my experience it is best to have at least PHP 4.2.2, MySQL 4.1.x, and WordPress 2.0.11 running. Using a Linux server also seems to cut down on the possible problems that can exist, since WordPress was specifically developed with that type of server.
If you are having a problem it’s best to post your install information immediately so others can work with all of the facts, in many cases your problem can be resolved within hours. (Oh, and always remember to post a link to the page/site that is not working, it’s always best if we can see what the problem looks like directly.)
Little Tips: Who loves you?
One of the better things to pay attention to other than visitor traffic is who is linking to your site. If you are getting a large amount of linkage odds are you’re doing a good job on developing your site (unless of course every site that links you has “sucks” at the end of it’s URL name). The easiest way to check who’s linking to you (besides looking at your pingbacks and trackbacks) is to google yourself. The more specific version to look at though is Google Blog Search. While regular links on websites are good to know about, it’s what people are saying in their personal blogs and forums that gets you the real meaty information about how you’re doing. I definitely recommend doing this at least once a month to see how far out your site has reached into the Internet.
There’s also the possibility that you might find someone using your content illegally, so that’s good to know also.