Wordpress - frequently asked questions

WordPress site monitoring software/service

Wordpress Site Monitoring software / service Users are seeking software to monitor the uptime and performance of PHP/MySQL-based websites like WordPress, looking for solutions that alert them to downtime or slow performance while providing useful charts for problem analysis. Recommended tools include Testomato for WordPress monitoring, Pingdom for comprehensive checks and speed reporting (though it's a paid service with aggressive upselling), Zabbix for web performance and availability monitoring supporting POST and GET methods, and Insping for performance monitoring with email and SMS alerts. What do you use to monitor the uptime / performance of your websites, specifically those based on a PHP/MySQL platform like Wordpress? I'm looking for something that alerts me if the site is down, or performing too slowly, and has some useful (not volumeous!) charts showing me any potential problems, and what to do about them. Thanks! Try testomato, here is the tutorial, on how to m...

What's the best way to develop against WordPress on Windows when you already have IIS/SQL Server installed? To develop WordPress on Windows with IIS and SQL Server already installed, several approaches can be taken: using XAMPP from a thumb drive, which requires stopping IIS, or installing PHP and MySQL to run WordPress directly on IIS, although this may lead to functionality issues like the absence of mod_rewrite. It's also possible to run both IIS and Apache simultaneously on different ports, adding flexibility, or to use virtualization tools like Thinstall from VMWare. However, many developers recommend using the more common stack of Apache, PHP, and MySQL for a smoother development experience. To develop WordPress on a Windows machine with IIS and SQL Server already installed, there are several approaches to consider: Using XAMPP : One common method is to run XAMPP from a thumb drive, allowing for multiple WordPress instances. However, XAMPP requires IIS to be stopped ...

How do I use SCM with a PHP app such as Wordpress? I run my blog using Wordpress and all too recently became a big believer in SCM. I really want to put my site into subversion (that's what I'm using right now, maybe git will come later) but I can't think of the correct way to do it yet. Basically, my repository is set up currently with an 'implementation' directory and a 'resources' directory, with implementation holding what will eventually be published to the live site. I want to be able to preview my site locally without having to upload to the server for obvious reasons. However, to do this I found that I needed to actually install Wordpress locally (not just copy the remote site down to my local box). This was told to me over at Wordpress. This brings up the problem of being able to use SCM with the install because I need to upgrade my local site every now and then but this generates inconsistencies with subversion because it can’t track what’s goin...

Getting IIS6 to play nice with WordPress Pretty Permalinks I've got a WordPress powered blog that I'm trying to get setup on our IIS6 server and everything works besides the permalink structure which I'm having a big headache with. After googling around/wordpress codex I learned that it's because IIS6 doesn't have the equivalent of Apache's mod_rewrite which is required for this feature to work. So that's where I'm at now. I can't seem to find a functional solution to get the pretty permalinks to work without the "index.php/," anyone have any recommendations? What I can't do: Upgrade to IIS7 Switch to Apache Quit my job Those suggestions have been offered to me, which sadly, I can't do any of those. Just an, FYI. Much thanks for anyone who can lead me in the right direction. 5 Answers I just came across the following answer on another question: Pretty URLs for search pages. Hope that helps! IIRF does this, for IIS6. ...

YouTube embeds not working in WordPress after import from Blogger I imported a series of blogger posts (via xml) into WordPress, and the YouTube embed tags were removed. YouTube URLs in posts are not identified. Instead, just the text of the url is left. Possibly as opposed to full embed tags. I'm trying to restore the embed codes so it's seen. Another fact that is notable in the XML import is that [EMBLED CONTENT] appears instead of the url, that is, the video... 5 Answers …by default, WordPress filters imported XML by removing possible troublesome tags…unfortunateely, including things like <embed> and <iframe> and other instances where you’ve included content in your posts. WordPress does so via a file you can find in /wp-includes called kses.php . In kses.php , you’ll want to scroll down to line 1309 and comment out the three lines under //Post filtering so that they look like this: // Post filtering #add_filter('content_save_pre', 'wp_filte...

How should a blog be structured to easily extract its data? I'm currently using Wordpress to run my website. However, with each new release I become more concerned with software bloat and the convoluted table structures used to store my data. Maybe this is a fruitless pursuit. Features are always added to blogging software until it claims to be a CMS - and at that point your data is probably stuck. 4 Answers You do have the option of sticking with the 2.0 branch. This will be maintained with just bug fixes until 2010. I also sometimes worry about the large changes WordPress undergoes. However, since all the important data (the posts themselves and the comments) are stored in a database, it does not seem difficult to extract them in case of need (moving to a different system, or just backup). Even if the table structure gets more complex, the MySQL DB WordPress uses is easy to access and extract data from. I'm sure that it is easy to find such extractors freely floating ...

What database privileges does a Wordpress Blog really need? I am setting up a few Wordpress blog sites. I have created a user in mysql that wordpress will use to access its database. The docs say to give this user all privileges on the database. Does it really need full privileges? I expect not, so does anyone know the min set of privileges that it really needs? 3 Answers I'm no Wordpress expert, but I would recommend it does actually have all privileges apart from GRANT. It will need to be able to create tables and insert/update etc. Several plugins use their own tables, which they create on the fly if they do not exist. I grant: ALTER CREATE CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES DELETE DROP INDEX INSERT LOCK TABLES SELECT UPDATE Hope that helps anyone else that looks into this. grant select, insert, delete, update, create, drop, alter on myblog Best practices for running Wordpress on the same domain as Rails app What's the best way to run Wordpress on the same do...

What's the best way to run Wordpress on the same domain as a Rails application? I've got a standard Rails app with Nginx and Mongrel running at http _ mydomain. I need to run a Wordpress blog at http _ mydomain _ com _ blog. My preference would be to host the blog in Apache running on either the same server or a separate box but I don't want the user to see a different server in the URL. Is that possible and if not, what would you recommend to accomplish the goal? 5 Answers Actually, since you're using Nginx, you're already in great shape and don't need Apache. You can run PHP through fastcgi (there are examples of how to do this in the Nginx wiki), and use a URL-matching pattern in your Nginx configuration to direct some URLs to Rails and others to PHP. Here's an example Nginx configuration for running a WordPress blog through PHP fastcgi (note I've also put in the Nginx equivalent of the WordPress .htaccess, so you will also have fancy URLs alre...

Is the syntax for the Wordpress style.css template element available anywhere? I've recently embarked upon the grand voyage of Wordpress theming and I've been reading through the Wordpress documentation for how to write a theme. One thing I came across here was that the style.css file must contain a specific header in order to be used by the Wordpress engine. They give a brief example but I haven't been able to turn up any formal description of what must be in the style.css header portion. Does this exist on the Wordpress site? If it doesn't could we perhaps describe it here? I think all of the answers so far are valid (obviously, I linked to the docs myself). What I'm looking for is a more formal description, i.e. Case Insensitive, What's the Template element, How free can your version number be (Oracle style x.x.x.x.x?). Thanks though, so far! aha, that makes a little more sense. It's pretty much free-text as far as I know, no requirements at all. I...

How do you add a JavaScript widget to a Wordpress hosted blog? I've got a site that provides blog-friendly widgets via JavaScript. These work fine in most circumstances, including self-hosted Wordpress blogs. With blogs hosted at Wordpress, however, JavaScript isn't allowed in sidebar text modules. Has anyone seen a workaround for this limitation? 4 Answers you could always petition wp to add your widget to their 'approved' list, but who knows how long that would take. you're talking about a way to circumvent the rules they have in place about posting arbitrary script. myspace javascript exploits in particular have increased awareness of the possibility of such workarounds, so you might have a tough time getting around the restrictions - however, here's a classic ones to try: put the javascript in a weird place, like anywhere that executes a URL. for instance: <div style="background:url('javascript:alert(this);');" /> sometimes th...