Behind The Blog

A Failed WordPress 3.2.1 Upgrade Due To GLACIAL Slowness

Dan York — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 12:22:45 +0000

Well, my Friday evening didn’t work out as planned. I was all ready to get this whole blogs.voxeo.com site moved over to WordPress 3.2.1. I’ve been running WP 3.2.1 on some of my personal sites (and the VOIPSA blog) and it’s been working great. Given my positive experience, I expected there to be no problems and was looking forward to it “just working”.

FAIL!

Some four hours later after numerous restorations and reattempts at upgrading while making various changes in between, I had to finally give in and admit defeat. I’ve had to keep the site at the latest 3.1.x release.

Why?

Because post-3.2.1 upgrade, the site admin interface was completely unusable. The upgrade would appear to work perfectly fine – and the blog posts would display perfectly fine… but then when it would go back to the admin dashboard it was g… l… a… c… i… a… l… l… y… … s… l… o… w….

So slow, in fact, that I never could really get to the “Upgrade Network” page to even finish the full installation.

I tried everything… I disabled plugins… I mucked around with themes… I made sure the base operating system was all set… I checked the master list of WordPress 3.2.1 problems… I spent a large block of time searching the WordPress forums for an answer…

… and in the end, it turns out I am not alone – a number of other people are reporting similar slowness. In fact, a good number of other people judging by the number of new forum posts featuring the words “3.2.1 slow”.

Judging from some of the posts, my guess at the moment is that perhaps there is some interaction between WordPress and the “Voxeo” theme we use on most of the blogs here. Our theme is, in fact, quite ancient in terms of WordPress… we developed it over 3.5 years ago based off of the old venerable Kubrick theme… and so perhaps that is causing problems. However, I have neither the time nor interest right now in coming up with a new theme… although maybe that will be the way forward.

Meanwhile, I guess I’ll be waiting for a WordPress 3.2.2 to see if that will work better.

One Post-WordPress-3.1 Plugin Upgrade – and The Challenge of “mu-plugins”

Dan York — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 03:14:51 +0000

After the upgrade of the site to WordPress 3.1, a couple of users noticed one little detail… they couldn’t use the new YouTube embed codes – the ones that use the tag so that the video can be viewed on different devices like the iPad and iPhone that don’t, well, support Flash.

Now what was strange was that this had worked perfectly fine before. Two years ago I’d installed the Unfiltered MU plugin specifically to allow anyone with “Editor” access or above to be able to embed iframes or anything else they wanted.

Care to guess the problem?

Yep… I hadn’t updated the Unfiltered MU plugin since that first installation.

Oops.

A quick visit to the Unfiltered MU plugin site got me the latest version and very quickly our folks were back in action embedding iframes. Obviously something in WP 3.x broke whatever was in the old version of the Unfiltered Mu plugin I had installed.

The Problem With “mu-plugins”

And therein lies the problem with the mu-plugins directory inside of WordPress.

You have NO way of knowing when any plugins in that directory need updating.

To review, in a WordPress 3.x Multi-Site (formerly known as “WordPress MU”), there are TWO directories into which you can place plugins:

wp-content/plugins – where all regular plugins go. These get activated for each blog or now can be activated network wide… but through the WP admin interface.
wp-content/mu-plugins – where previously (in WPMU) all “network-wide” plugins went. There is no admin interface to activate these plugins… place a plugin in this directory and it is immediately activated.

The mu-plugins directory still works in WP 3.x Multi-Site and still does the same activation across all your blogs. Some plugins may still need to be placed there.

The challenge is, as I said, that you don’t see the update status of the plugins in mu-plugins in all the spiffy update/upgrade interfaces now in WordPress 3.x.

There are really two paths I can see:

Someone adds a function to WordPress to treat mu-plugins like the regular plugins directory… perhaps just under the “Network Admin” tab.
Plugin authors allow their code to move out of mu-plugins into the regular plugins directory and then be activated network/site-wide.

This second path seems to be what the Unfiltered Mu folks now allow, per the installation page, which is probably what I’ll end up doing with this plugin in the long-term. This allows it to make use of the standard upgrade notification while also allowing it to be activated across the entire network of sites.

We’ll see what direction the WordPress community goes… in the meantime, if you ever installed “Unfiltered Mu” in the past… you probably want to see about upgrading if you haven’t already

One Subtle Yet Great Feature of WordPress 3.1

Dan York — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 21:32:36 +0000

One subtle change I’ve found since moving to WordPress 3.1 that I greatly appreciate is the subtle change to the “Add New User” box for a blog. The key point is that you new have:

Add Existing User
Add New User

whereas before you only had the “Add New User” choice. The annoying part was that you had to enter both fields to just add one of your existing users to a new blog. Now, with the “Add Existing User” choice, you only have to enter one of the identifiers.

It’s a small thing, perhaps… but when you are frequently adding new authors to multiple blogs, NOT having to enter more info than necessary is greatly appreciated.

Great job, WordPress team!

Blogs.voxeo.com Now Running WordPress 3.1 Multi-Site

Dan York — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 17:39:29 +0000

It’s taken quite a while, but I’m very pleased to say that the Voxeo blog portal is now running WordPress 3.1. This is actually the first move from “WordPress MU” to the merged “WordPress” as I skipped over WordPress 3.0 entirely and jumped from WordPress MU 2.9.2 to WordPress 3.1.

It took some time in large part because of the success of our nimble little “blog site” turning into a much larger ship. We now have 20+ blogs running on the site (some listed here)… with a few more in development… so I don’t want to just make sudden moves that might disrupt activities.

In this case, I did testing of WordPress 3.0 and 3.1 on some other external sites and on my own personal network of blogs. I tested out the plugins that we use. I made multiple copious backups. I keep all the configuration for the site in a git repository, so I had that, too, but you can never have too many backups.

When I was ready to do the cutover, I was equally ready to just move the old files back into place… but in the end, it all worked.

With WordPress 3.1, we’re now up to the latest code base in terms of both fixes and features. I’m already loving the “admin bar” and am looking forward to using the new cross-post linking features.

That’s the news… if you happen to see something looking funky or strange on the site, please do let me know. Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to seeing what else we can do with this new and improved site!

WordPress for iPad Makes A Great Comment Command Center For A Blog Network

Dan York — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 19:18:34 +0000

When running a site like the Voxeo blog portal that features a “network” of different Voxeo blogs one of the ongoing challenges is handling comments. Not whether or not to allow comments… we have a very clear comment policy and publish all comments that comply… but rather just dealing with all the comment spam and moderating those comments that get through. We pay for an Akismet subscription, and that catches the vast majority of spam that hits our blog comments, but I also run the blogs in the moderation mode that requires your first comment to be approved by an administrator prior. Subsequent comments then are posted without moderation. I do this primarily because even with Akismet I was still finding spam getting through.

But this means, of course, that I or another blog admin have to approve all the initial comments.

While I get the email notifications and can simply click on the link to approve a comment, I often don’t have time to do it right then or I can see that it’s an obvious (unpublished) spam comment to ignore, and so I wind up approving or spamming a whole bunch of comments at the same time. I will login to one blog… but then I need to go to the next… and the next… which I don’t find as easy to do in the WordPress web interface.

Enter WordPress for the iPad….

It turns out to have a really nice interface for going into each blog and looking at the comments:

I can just tap back to the list of blogs, go into a new one, moderate comments, tap back and go into the next… all with the wonderfully intuitive and easy interface of the iPad. Simple and easy to do.

Now the caveat is that when I do this I generally don’t have a LOT of comments to approve or trash. If I had a lot, the bulk tools of the web interface would definitely be the way to go. But for just handling a few comments in each of the blogs, it works great.

If you have an iPad and haven’t tried out the free WordPress app for the iPad, give it a whirl… it’s rather cool!

Using WordPress with Cassandra or other NoSQL databases?

Dan York — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 14:07:05 +0000

How do you scale a WordPress installation? Or more importantly, how do you make it so that your WordPress installation is always available? I asked this question about a year ago in a post, Suggestions for “clustering” WordPress MU servers? Or mirroring servers?, and I still don’t have a great answer. Sure, I have a system in place now that regularly syncs backups to a standby server that is just waiting there to be brought online. If anything happened to the main blog server we could be back online within a short time period.

But I don’t want to go through that process – I just want the content to be always available.

The big challenge with a multi-server WordPress installation is this:

how do you keep the database in sync between the servers?

I can set up multiple WP servers. Install the same WP software. Install the same plugins. I could even set up DNS to do a round-robin between the servers… but all that only works if the servers have the same database of posts, comments, etc.

Yes, we’ve drawn up a plan to set up a MySQL sync between two servers, etc., etc…. but I haven’t implemented that yet in part because I just haven’t made the time but more because it’s just uglier than I want.

What intrigues me instead is the idea of using Cassandra or another one of the so-called “NoSQL” databases (like MongoDB, CouchDB, SimpleDB, etc) as the underlying database. The main difference from MySQL is that Cassandra is a distributed database from the start. Forget the “master / slave” relationship you have to set up with MySQL… all Cassandra nodes are equal.

In theory, subject to replication timing (which you could also force in Cassandra, requiring the writing to all replicas before the item is truly committed) this would give you the same database layer across multiple servers with WP installed.

Of course, in reality, this would be a decidedly non-trivial change.

WordPress is entirely written around the use of a relational database (and specifically MySQL) so moving the code to work on a NoSQL base would require a good bit of work. It’s good to see that there are suggestions into the WordPress team around this:

WordPress + Cassandra (annoyingly you cannot comment on this post to express support)
Suggestion: support MongoDB, HyperTable or other noSQL storage
No-sql alternative!

I was also pleased to see someone announced their intent to create a NoSQL fork of WordPress over on StackOverflow back in October… but it looks like that’s been put on hold until this coming summer.

I don’t personally have the cycles (nor really the NoSQL background) to work on a modification of WordPress like this, but if someone else is out there working on one, I’d sure be willing to help with some testing or other assistance. I think this would definitely be a great way to enable availability for WordPress sites.

What do you think? What do you do now for a multi-server WordPress install? Do you think a NoSQL alternative would be useful? Which NoSQL database do you think might work best?

P.S. For readers who aren’t aware of what the whole “NoSQL” world is about, this RWW post may be useful: Is the Relational Database Doomed?

How To Add a Facebook “Like” Box to a WordPress Sidebar

Dan York — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 21:10:39 +0000

(NOT the real box – just an image)

If you look over in the first sidebar of this blog, you’ll note that I’ve added a Facebook “Like Box” that lets you interact with Voxeo’s Facebook Page directly from the box.

I did this primarily as an experiment to see what impact (or not) it might have on people joining the page as… well… what we used to call “Fans” but now perhaps have to call “Likers”.

As I had to tweak the Facebook-provided code a little bit, I thought I’d write down what I did. First, I went to Facebook’s “Like Box Plugin Page”:

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like-box

On that page you can specify the width of your column, your page name and a few other options. After that you can press the “Get Code” button and, in theory, receive the code you can just “drop in” to your website. (Basically all it is doing is creating an “” that pulls content over from Facebook’s site.)

The problem I had was that regardless of whether I unchecked the “Show stream” box, I always received code showing the stream… and that’s way too long for the sidebar here. So I just tweaked their code a bit (note that for display reasons I’ve broken the code up into multiple lines a bit – in reality this is all jammed together as one line):

My changes were:

Changed “stream=true” to “stream=false”.
Changed the height to be a size that worked for me.

NOTE THAT YOU HAVE TO CHANGE THE HEIGHT IN TWO PLACES!

It took a bit of experimentation to figure out the best height, but in the end I now have a box in the sidebar.

P.S. While you’re here, why don’t you become a Fan/Liker/whatever?

Suggestion for a WordPress plugin to publish posts to a Facebook Page?

How can WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg balance open source and capitalism?

Dan York — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 12:48:45 +0000

What is the future of WordPress? What is the role of open source? Yesterday, Mashable published “WordPress Founder on the Key to Open Source Success,” a brief interview with Matt Mullenweg that had some useful points about “open source” as it relates to WordPress and to the greater market – and to how open source can coincide with commercial interests.

It intrigued me because I think WordPress is in an interesting spot in it’s evolution… it is really becoming the platform that people use for blogging – and also becoming a major platform used for just “regular” web sites.

WordPress has become another major layer in the open source software stack.

As Apache is to web servers … as Firefox is to web browsers (although it’s getting challenged by Chrome)… and as BIND at least was to DNS servers… WordPress is becoming for content management systems (CMS), and specifically for blog-style CMS systems. Some may dispute that… but I think the ecosystem around WordPress and the sheer volume of users attest to that.

So WordPress is in an interesting place… and I found a couple of Matt’s comments quite on target:

Twitter is the ultimate service for the mobile age — its simplification and constraint of the publishing medium to 140 characters is perfectly complementary to a mobile experience. People still need longer stuff, but they see the headline on Twitter or Facebook.

I added my emphasis to the last point, as it is the key. Twitter and Facebook are the way so many people get their “news”… and so headlines are an insanely important part of creating any blog post. You have literally seconds to attract someone’s attention – your headline had better hook them! (How did mine do on this post? )

The biggest challenge for Open Source is that as it enters the consumer market, as projects like WordPress and Firefox have done, you have to create a user experience that is on par or better than the proprietary alternatives.

User experience is critical! And Matt is absolutely right… for open source products to survive and thrive in the consumer world, they must pay attention to the user experience.

The Mashable interview covered a few other points, including that Matt sees no issue with balancing open source and capitalism… he’s very positive about both.

P.S. As a photographer, I have to say that I really think that photo of him is great!

Update – Status of “GT Search all Blogs” plugin for WordPress MU

Dan York — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 21:20:47 +0000

Quick update on the continuing saga of searching across all blogs in a WordPress MU / WordPress MultiSite installation…. after asking about what current plugins did cross-blog search well, I received answers from a number of folks that they hadn’t found any great plugins for doing this. However, the always-helpful Andrea_R pointed out the (“DUH!”) option in her comment that I should contact the author of the no longer maintained “GT Search All Blogs” plugin to see if he would be open to someone else maintaining it.

I did reach out to him and he is no longer maintaining it himself and is perfectly fine having someone else take it on. I’m not sure I’m personally interested in maintaining the plugin… but at the very least I’m going to get a web page up here for it and stick the source code out in Github or somewhere like that so that folks who are interested can get access to it and use it and/or improve it.

Stay tuned… I’m going to try to get that out in the next week or so.

Editorial Calendar – a great WordPress plugin to help you plan out your content

Dan York — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 03:55:29 +0000

Have you wanted to plan out a series of blog posts over a period of time? Or have you wanted to see when a number of different authors plan to publish their blog posts? Or have you just wanted to see visually when posts to your blog were published?

The Plugin

By way of Chris Brogan’s blog I learned of a great plugin for WordPress called “Editorial Calendar” that does exactly that. Once installed, you have a new “Calendar” menu choice in the left sidebar (in your admin interface).

When you click on that Calendar link, you will now see a traditional calendar view (seen below) of a period of weeks that shows you all of your:

already published posts
scheduled posts that will be published
scheduled draft posts

The scheduled draft posts are interested because they will not be published unless you go in and then change them from “Draft” status. What’s nice about this is that you can go in and set up a whole series of draft blog posts and see them visually… but yet they won’t be published until you actually edit the text and schedule them.

What is also cool is that you can create new posts directly from this calendar interface. So if you decide that you want to have a series of three posts coming up on the next 3 Mondays, you can go in right from this calendar view and set up the posts for those days. You can enter complete posts – or simply create blank stub posts that are placeholders until you can enter the rest of the text.

You also can move posts from one day to another simply by dragging the scheduled posts around in the calendar interface.

By clicking on the “Screen Options” link toward the upper right of the page, you can also configure the plugin to display the author of a particular blog post. All in all it works rather well:

Using It With WordPress MU

I’ve installed the plugin here on blogs.voxeo.com and activated it across our various blogs. So far it is working great and I’ve seen no issues with it with our WPMU 2.9.2 install.

Now, it sets up a calendar for each individual blog. What would be a cool enhancement would be if it were available at the Site Admin level and could show you your posts scheduled across all blogs in a WordPress network of blogs.

The use case would be for a blog portal like this one. As the overall manager of the site, I would like to ensure that we have a new post coming out every day on at least one of our blogs. I’d love a plugin like this that would give me a macro view that could show me what is scheduled across all our blogs. I could then go into days when we don’t have content scheduled and create some new posts.

While that would be a cool enhancement for network sites, as it is alone it’s a great help and I’m very pleased to have found it. You, too, can install it from its plugin page if you would like to add this functionality to your site.

P.S. I also wrote about this plugin on my external Disruptive Conversations blog.