Posts Tagged ‘WordPress plugin’

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Upgrade WordPress to 2.8.1 on 1and1

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

In the bad old days upgrading anything WordPress related (plugins, themes, or WordPress itself) would at best involve manually downloading a zip, extracting it locally and then using FTP to upload the changes to your web server. At worst it could require manually editing files, and making database changes.

In February last year I wrote about how cool it was that the All in One SEO Plugin had a one-click upgrade facility. Updating plugins had always been a big pain, especially when you have a blog with many plugins (this one has about 10) so it was great when WordPress introduced one-click plugin upgrade support. Although plugins could now be upgraded with a single click, upgrading WordPress itself was still a manual task.

In WordPress 2.7 they introduced one click upgrade support of WordPress itself. When 2.8.0 was released a message at the top of my blog console prompted me to do a one-click upgrade. I decided to wait. Upgrading to a x.x.0 release can be risky. These are major updates and often have many bugs. Waiting until the x.x.1 release can be safer unless there is an urgent reason to upgrade (such as a critical security update).

Another reason for delaying a WordPress upgrade is that it can take a while for the plugins that you use to be updated to be compatible with the new version. Sometime no changes are needed, but when WordPress update their database structure, plugins are particularly vulnerable to breaking.

Even though you can now upgrade from 2.7.x to 2.8.x with one click, upgrading is never that simple. With each upgrade there is a chance that you will completely trash your blog.

Firstly make sure you have plenty of time. If it goes well it shouldn’t take too long. What you don’t want to do is for it to go badly wrong and end up with your blog trashed, just before you have to leave for an urgent appointment.

You MUST do your backups before upgrading. Before backing up I make sure all the plugins are up-to-date and I delete any comment spam so this isn’t backed-up.

I always do three different backups.

  1. File backup – I FTP all the blog files down to my computer.
  2. XML export – Export all the blog information as an XML file using the Tools->Export option.
  3. MySQL database backup – A full MySQL database backup using the backup instructions from the official WordPress website. On 1and1 you select the MySQL admin panel using the highlighted button shown below.

Oneandone MySQL icon

After backing up I verify that the backups look correct. I generally diff the XML and database dump to my previous backup using the Beyond Compare tool. The main thing to check is that the backups haven’t been truncated due to a failed download. If the files are much smaller than previous backups then you may have a problem.

I’d read that in order for the upgrade to work on 1and1 you need to ensure that your website is processing .php files using PHP5 rather than PHP4. To ensure this you must have the below line in your .htaccess file in the root of your blog.

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

After all this there was just one thing left – to press the ‘Upgrade’ button.

I pressed it and held my breath. Some messages appeared on the screen and about 10-15 seconds later it said the upgrade had succeeded. At first I thought something must have gone wrong, as it was so quick. I logged back into the blog and saw that it had worked!

The only problem that I found was due to me having made some changes to the default theme. These changes had been overwritten. Luckily due to the file backup that I had made by FTP I was able to restore them in a few minutes. The lesson to learn here is not to change the default theme. You should copy it to a new directory and only change the copied version. If you want to keep any updates to the default theme in sync with your modified theme you may have to manually merge them in, but at least you won’t lose your theme updates.

Congratulations to the implementers of this feature in WordPress. It is much appreciated by me :)

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Speeding up a WordPress blog with caching

Monday, August 4th, 2008

I decided to investigate some methods of speeding up page load times on my this blog.

An obvious way to do this seemed to be to add some caching to the site to reduce the load on the MySQL server.

Searching for WordPress caching information gives a lot of references to adding a define('WP_CACHE', true); line to your wp-config.php file. However this information is now out of date. The WordPress file-based object cache was removed in version 2.5.

I decided on the WP Cache 2.0 plugin which stores the generated pages in /wp-content/cache/ and then serves them to your readers. It does this completetly transparently.

Two questions that I did have about WP Cache before I installed it were:

  1. Does it work with Google AdSense?
  2. Will Google Analytics still work?

The answer to both of these questions is yes!

I’ve been using the plugin on my other blog for about a week now with no problems. The speed difference is noticeable but small. You may notice a bigger difference if you have a more popular blog than mine.

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AdSense Injection WordPress plugin tweaks

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

On this blog I use the AdSense Injection plugin to automatically add Google’s targeted AdSense adverts to my posts. The plugin is excellent and has helped to make more money for this site but there are a few tweaks that I have done.

First, I’ve made a modification so that if a individual post page is shorter than a certain number of characters then the number of adverts is limited to one.

Second, I’ve made a change so instead of looking for ‘<p’ tags to use as AdSense insertion points it looks for the full paragraph tag – ‘<p>’. The reason I did this is because I often include code in my posts in <pre> tags and the AdSense plugin code was inserting adverts in my source code snippets which looked wrong. After making this change the adverts only appear in the text of my posts.

Both sets of changes are shown in the code below. You can simply replace the ai_the_content() function in version 2.0 of the plugin with this version.

adsense-injection.php
function ai_the_content($content){
  global $doing_rss;
  if(is_feed() || $doing_rss)
    return $content;
  if(strpos($content, "<!--noadsense-->") !== false) return $content;

  if(is_home() && get_option('ai_home') == "checked=on") return $content;
  if(is_page() && get_option('ai_page') == "checked=on") return $content;
  if(is_single() && get_option('ai_post') == "checked=on") return $content;
  if(is_category() && get_option('ai_cat') == "checked=on") return $content;
  if(is_archive() && get_option('ai_archive') == "checked=on") return $content;

  global $ai_adsused, $user_level;
  if(get_option('ai_betatest') == "yes" && $user_level < 8)
    return $content;
  if(get_option('ai_notme') == "yes" && $user_level > 8)
    return $content;

  # RML: backup content
  $original_content = $content;

  $numads = get_option('ai_nads');
  if(is_single())
    $numads = get_option('ai_nadspp');

  $content_hold = "";
  if(strpos($content, "<!--adsensestart-->") !== false){
    $content_hold = substr($content, 0, strpos($content, "<!--adsensestart-->"));
    $content = substr_replace($content, "", 0, strpos($content, "<!--adsensestart-->"));
  }

  while($ai_adsused < $numads)
  {
    $poses = array();
    $lastpos = -1;
    # RML: change <p to <p> to stop ads before <pre>
    $repchar = "<p>";
    if(strpos($content, "<p>") === false)
      $repchar = "<br";

    while(strpos($content, $repchar, $lastpos+1) !== false){
      $lastpos = strpos($content, $repchar, $lastpos+1);
      $poses[] = $lastpos;
    }

    //cut the doc in half so the ads don't go past the end of the article.  It could still happen, but what the hell
    $half = sizeof($poses);
    $adsperpost = $ai_adsused+1;
    if(!is_single())
      $half = sizeof($poses)/2;

    while(sizeof($poses) > $half)
      array_pop($poses);

    $pickme = $poses[rand(0, sizeof($poses)-1)];

    $replacewith = ai_pickalign(get_option('ai_lra'));
    $replacewith .= ai_genadcode()."</div>";

    # RML: remove hardcoded length
    $content = substr_replace($content, $replacewith.$repchar, $pickme, strlen($repchar));
    $ai_adsused++;

    # RML: if content is short then limit to one advert
    if(strlen($original_content) < 2500) return $content_hold.$content;

    if(!is_single())
      break;
  }

  return $content_hold.$content;
}

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