Category: WordPress
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Page Generation Graph for WordPress
At work, one of the more interesting customizations we have on WordPress.com for our VIP clients is a dashboard that contains custom widgets. One of them is a page generation graph that shows the average page generation time for their site compared to all others. That way they can judge their code performance against a…
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Quick Tip: DreamHost cron and WP-CLI
If you’re hosting your WordPress website on DreamHost, and use their cron system to offload your WordPress faux-cron for better reliability, be careful of what version of PHP you have in your code. I recently had an issue where my cron events weren’t firing, and after enabling email output, I ended up with something like…
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Blogging Anonymously
An interesting problem I came across recently was how to set up a WordPress blog with an anonymous user. Now, a simple way would be to create a brand new user with fake information, but that’s too easy. After looking for some prior art, I found the Anonymizer plugin in the WordPress.org plugin repository. Unfortunately, it’s…
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Logging Failed Redirects
WordPress has a built-in function called wp_safe_redirect(). This allows you to create redirects in code, but only to whitelisted domains (via the allowed_redirect_hosts filter). The downside to this is that you have to remember to whitelist the domains. It’s easy to forget if you’re doing a lot of redirects, for instance with the WPCOM Legacy…
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Purging All The Caches!
One of the best ways to ensure that a WordPress site–well any site really–stays performant and not broken is by leveraging caching. WordPress by default doesn’t do much caching other than some in-memory caching of objects, and the odd database caching via the Transients API. This site currently has three layers of caching: PHP OPcache…
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Disabling WordPress Faux Cron
The WordPress WP-Cron system is a decently okay faux cron system, but it has its problems, such as running on frontend requests and not running if no requests are coming through. WP-Cron works by: on every page load, a list of scheduled tasks is checked to see what needs to be run. Any tasks scheduled…
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Quick Tip: Force Enable Auto-Updates in WordPress
I know that auto-updates are a bit of a (#wpdrama) touchy subject, but I believe in them. In an mu-plugin I enable all auto-updates like so:
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Query Caching (and a little extra)
By default, WordPress does not cache WP_Query queries. Doing so can greatly improve performance. The way I do this is via the Advanced Post Cache plugin: By running this plugin (hopefully as an mu-plugin) with a persistent object cache, WP_Query calls, along with get_post() calls (only if suppress_filters is false) will be cached. Bonus! Now…
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Auto-enable WP_DEBUG with a cookie
One of the most important things to do when working on new themes, plugins, or debugging issues in WordPress is to turn on WP_DEBUG. According to the Codex: WP_DEBUG is a PHP constant (a permanent global variable) that can be used to trigger the “debug” mode throughout WordPress. It is assumed to be false by…