Brutally Succinct: curating web designer resources

Buffer – A Smarter Way to Share on Social Media »

By DonnaD on Mar 31, 2012 | In Uncategorized | Comments Off

Buffer – A Smarter Way to Share on Social Media.

This may be good for a client you have that tweets lots of stuff. Makes it easier.

WordPress › Easy Theme and Plugin Upgrades « WordPress Plugins »

By DonnaD on Mar 31, 2012 | In Wordpress | Comments Off

WordPress › Easy Theme and Plugin Upgrades « WordPress Plugins.

This should be part of WordPress. Highly recommended for every single installation of WordPress.

Some WordPress things you can do, to make your life easier as a developer »

By DonnaD on Mar 29, 2012 | In Code code code, Wordpress | Comments Off

Many of us use WordPress for the websites that we create for our clients. It allows the client to modify their content, and write blog posts either for events, blogs, news, products etc. It gives them a lot of power. However, being clients, they sometimes go rooting around the admin panel and they “try” things that may screw up their website, then come running to you to fix, most likely expecting it for free since you are supposed to know they will screw it up and you should have made it unbreakable. Sigh, sorry, had a client this week who did just this.

Here are a couple of little things you can do in order to make the site a bit less likely to be messed with. All of these snips go into the config file, just above where it says to no touch the code below. MAKE A BACKUP OF YOUR EXISITING WP-CONFIG FILE BEFORE YOU TOUCH IT TO EDIT. I know that most of you are smart enough to do that, but there are always a few out there… you know the type. Also from the codex:

The contents of the wp-config-sample.php file are in a specific order. The order matters. If you already have a wp-config.php file, rearranging the contents of the file may create errors on your blog.

The “home” and “site URL” can be defined in the config file, so that the client cannot “accidentally” alter them in the admin panel.

define(‘WP_HOME’, ‘http://example.com’);

define(‘WP_SITEURL’, ‘http://example.com’);

Make sure this is wherever the wordpress install is located. This should be the same value that it has now, the config merely makes it un-editable by the admin user.

DO NOT use this to change the location on the server of the installation. Ain’t the right code.The database will be confused. This is just to define the paths in the admin panel and make it so they cannot be changed by an unsuspecting client.

Now for housekeeping code snips:

This is to limit the number of revisions on a post that are stored in the database. Posts with revisions that are a mile long, get slower and slower, and make the dbase work harder than it should. I don’t recommend disabling it totally, that can cause you grief. But making it a low number can save the dbase some time

define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 3);

Where the number is how many you want to allow. 3 is low, I usually do 5.

Now to the almighty autosave. WordPress autosaves a draft every 60 seconds. This again can be a drag on the database server. This code can extend that time in-between autosaves.

define(‘AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL’, 180 );
where the number you enter is how many seconds you want. 180 seconds is 3 minutes. Decently long enough.

And one final little piece of code to keep the database tidy. Empty the trash. I believe the default for WordPress to empty the trash is 30 days. If you client deletes alot of posts that they make mistakes on, etc., the number of posts in the trash can climb quickly and slow down the database. This code empties the trash at your defined time.

define ‘(EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS’, 2);
for 2 days. If you do not want it to hold any trash, put in a 0 (zero) in place of the 2.

You can find all of this in the WordPress Codex on the config file page.