Archive for the ‘WordPress’ Category.

Everybody update!

WordPress logo If you’re running a [WordPress][] blog, then please go upgrade now to version 1.5.1.3. A serious security vulnerability has been found in version 1.5.1.2 “Strayhorn” which can lead to remote code execution.

Read the official announcement here.

Searching with Google

The search functionality offered by [WordPress][] is — how to put it? — simple. You type some words and it makes a LIKE query against the titles and contents of your posts. So that’s kind of slow, doing a full scan through the posts table for each search without using any indexes at all.

What is worse is that it looks like the results are ordered by date and not relevance. So I’ve now made a little box which uses Google to search the site, which will hopefully give better results. As always, let me know what you think of this.

Saving bandwidth

In my continued effort to make my site faster and better I’ve enabled gzip compression of the output produced by [WordPress][]. So if you’re on a slow link, then you should be able to download the pages faster. Of course this comes at a price for the server, which now has to work a little more to compress the pages. Please let me know if you notice a slowdown because of this.

Comments enabled on all pages

You can now leave comments on all the pages here and not just on posts. “Pages” are [WordPress][] terminology for static things, such as my [PHP Tutorial][], and “posts” are the date-based stuff like what you’re reading now.

Filters in WordPress

Having just read the very interesting and throughout explaination by Michel Fortin of his problems with the WordPress filters when trying to get [PHP Markdown][] right, I think it’s amazing that it works at all!

His experience together with the recent discussion started by Denis de Bernardy about the plugin system (and specifically the hooks offered to plugins) seems to suggest that the whole system could use some rethinking. (And when doing so, then please document it! :-)