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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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How to increase the Upload Limit in phpMyAdmin?

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Since phpMyAdmin is written in php, all we need to do is change the file upload limit in the php.ini file. On CentOS and RHEL distributions, this file is located in /etc/php.ini Find this section: ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; File Uploads ; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; Whether to allow HTTP file uploads. file_uploads = On ; Temporary directory for … Read more

WordPress 3.0 is here – but should you upgrade today?

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Fellow WordPressers,

Looks like the big news just broke – WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious” is here (that’s named after Jazz pianist Thelonious Monk by the way). You may have seen an upgrade notice in your dashboard already that urges you to upgrade.

Which is why I thought I’d drop you a message:

DON’T UPGRADE UNTIL YOU READ THIS MESSAGE!

This is especially important to users of the WP Ecommerce Plugin, which IS NOT compatible with WordPress 3.0 (I’m thinking of Davey Lee from Western Straia here). Trust me, I’ve tried it on my Beta Site. It’s all tears and no joy from there.

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How to change “View with Piclens” message in NextGen Gallery

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Alex Rabe’s NextGen Gallery plugin is certainly the best there is, even though I find it a tad too complex at times. I love it though, and I use it on all my sites whenever I want to upload a batch of pictures and insert them into my posts with little hassle and great convenience.

One thing that bugs me though is the message that reads

[View with Piclens] above my thumbnails, which gives the viewer a chance to see my gallery as a slideshow. It’s a great feature.

Trouble is, nobody actually knows what PicLens is or what it does – including myself, let alone my readers.

Lucky for us, it’s fairly easy to fix – let me show you how:

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How to create Rotating Ads on your site

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I was looking for a solution that displays more than just one advert or banner in one spot. Say I have some space in my sidebar and I wanted to display some adverts there – but I don’t want them to be the same one all the time.

I’d like a solution that upon a page refresh gives me a random banner out of a selection that I can define.

Enter Datafeeder’s Random Ads V2 Plugin!

As if these people had read my mind, this amazing plugin does exactly what I had imagined in my dreams:

You can define several groups of banner codes (say one for vertical sidebar banners, one for pre-post horizontal banners, etc). You can add as many groups as you like, and add as many “code-snippets” as you like to each group.

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How to modify MANSION by GraphPaper Press

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I wanted to use Mansion for my Miami Beach Huts website. It was ideally suited, however all my images are portrait instead of landscape. Some tweaks were necessary which I thought I’d share with you for endless hours of fun.

I wrote this for Version 0.2 of this theme. A few things have changed since then, especially the documentation. Keep that in mind while I’ll talk you through some tips and tricks of MANSION.

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How to style THESIS by DIYThemes

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Thesis is one of THE most amazing premium themes there is. Nearly every element of your website can be amended and styled thanks to the use of hooks.

It’s got a vast array or user options in the back end and I’m not lying when I say they’re the most sophisticated I have ever seen in a premium theme.

When you decide to buy the theme, you’ll get access to a huge moderated members only forum so all your install/how-to/troubleshooting/styling questions will be answered promptly.

At the time of writing, Thesis is at version 1.8. Consider getting it before version 2.0 hits the market – Chris Pearson has hinted at a hefty (and well deserved) price increase from then on – which won’t be applicable for version 1.x subscribers! You can get Thesis here.

Whenever I built a new site, I often start with Thesis – which is why I often have to tweak some defaults to my liking. Here are the small bits of code I always forget where to find:

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Themes and where to get the Good Ones

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There are literally thousands of WordPress Themes out there on the net. Here’s a list of repositories you can have a look at and see which one’s right for you. I sometimes review Themes and give you an in-depth description of the pros and cons – check out all I’ve written on this topic here. … Read more