WordPress Archives

Tips and Tricks on WordPress usage and development. I am very passionate about WordPress, but it doesn’t work just by itself – it needs a rich environment to live and breathe in.

If you’re after theme and plugin alterations, we have a category for that.

Workshop: How to post Source Code in your Comments

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In this workshop I’ll show you how you can make source code show up in your comments. I’ll also show you how to format it so it looks different to ordinairy text. By default, WordPress strips out most HTML tags for security reasons. That’s a good thing, however if you’d like to share some HTML … Read more

WordPress Anatomy and How to Log In

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In this screencast I will talk you through the basics of WordPress. I like to call it the “anatomy” – i.e. Front Page Header Sidebar Footer I’ll also show you how to login to your backend and how to work with two browser tabs open at the same time. Enjoy!   https://wpguru.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/podcast/101.mp4Podcast: Download (Duration: 3:57 … Read more

Disk Space Pie Chart Plugin

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I’ve written a Plugin that shows your free and used server space as a funky Pie Chart in your backend. It also shows a percentage bar in your WordPress dahsboard.

Following the success of my server space script for one of my clients, I thought it would be great to use it under WordPress. This Plugin was inspired by Richard who came to host with me after being on WordPress.com for some years. He really liked to keep track of how much space he has left to upload pictures and I was happy to take on this challenge.

Special thanks again to Rasmus Peters for his amazing PHP Pie Chart Script 😉

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Upgrading WordPress… FAILED!

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We’ve all been there many times: a new WordPress Version comes out, you think you’re upgraded in under a minute, and then this message comes up to tell you that you’re not:

WordPress Upgrade Failed!

Bugger…

Let me talk you through the many many possibilities for this and what you can do to make this work after all…

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Why does WordPress ask for your FTP Details

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So you’re upgrading a Plugin, a Theme or the WordPress Core. Thanks to the built-in upgrade function it’s a piece of cake for most of us. But have you noticed that on some installations WordPress will ask for your FTP credentials, while on others it doesn’t?

I certainly have, and I wondered how this could be explained. I have installations on the same server that behave differently, so it can’t be a server issue. It must have to do with the way WordPress was installed (Fantastico installs don’t ask for credentials, whereas manual installs do).

More to the point: how can we avoid this from happening? Let me share my findings with you 😉

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The Drunkjeans.com / Roundstorm.com Hack and how to get rid of it

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Saturday morning a couple of my sites were hacked by something I’ve not found a lot of info about. I’ll call it The Drunkjeans Hack. I’ve also found this being inserted from other domains (see below).

Some idiot has inserted a piece of code into the main index.php file that looks like this:

The first line calls a JavaScript file on the given domain, while the second line is a unique identifier (consider yourself an individual).

What this thing does is unclear, but depending on how far the hackers get with this, it could be anything from a wonky homepage to the entire site being down. I did some digging and here’s what I found out:

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Testing HyperDB

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I’m as excited as a kid in a candystore! I’ve heard a lot about HyperDB and what can be done with it, and I’ve been thinking how cool it would be to implement it on the sites I’m hosting. And today my friends I’m proud to say that IT WORKS A TREAT!

Hyper What?

Let me tell you a bit about HyperDB. It’s another super cool Automattic project fronted by Matt, Andy, Ryan and Blogluftwaffe. It’s a rather complex plugin for WordPress that will let you specify more than one Database Server. In a high production environment your one and only Database Server can get busy or even crash and die – so all websites would be down until you restart it.

HyperDB solves this by letting you specify several servers in the handy db-config.php file. You can set one as master server for write queries and several others for read queries. This means that the master server doesn’t get bothered with read queries while several other servers can deal with those. If one read server dies, the others can pick up the slack. It’s genius!

The Experiment

Before a general roll-out to live sites a little test might be an idea. Currently I have three servers at my disposal and a dev site for testing. All servers are running CentOS 5 in a mixture of 32-bit and 64-bit installations, with Plesk 9.3/9.5 on them. Here’s my setup:

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