Episode 39: WordPress 2.5 released - Live from WordCamp Dallas
I’d intended to release this episode during the week of March 30th, days after it was recorded live at WordCamp Dallas, but problems with the recorded audio prevented doing so. The audio you’ll hear was actually ripped from the video John Pozadzides released, so thanks, John!
Joining me on the dais were Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today, Mark Jaquith of b5media, later Mark Ghosh of Weblog Tools Collection, and later still, Matt Mullenweg of Automattic. Lorelle Van Fossen was nice enough to run around handing the wireless mic around so people could comment and ask questions. Subjects discussed and links to items mentioned in this episode include:
- WordPress 2.5 had been released exactly 24 hours prior. Some people have experienced problems with IE7 and other plugins. Expect 2.5.1 within about a month.
- Beginning with WordPress 2.2 incoming links were changed from Technorati to Google Blog Search. If you’d prefer to revert back or use some other link reporter, find the Incoming Links Box’s “Edit” link in the Dashboard and change it to the RSS feed of your choosing.
- Issues with “disappearing plugins” relate to the plugin updater’s requirement that plugin authors build in additional functionality to work properly with the updater and submitting it to the plugin directory.
- Mark Jaquith discusses the genesis of his Comment Inbox plugin. Lorelle chimes in with Comment Ninja, a Firefox Greasemonkey script.
- We discussed security, including the possibility of an independent review of the core, as well as the direction themes and theme development might take in the future.
- Matt expressed a desire for improved client-side JavaScript performance.
- Ronald Huereca asked an interesting question about how developers might store data without creating new database tables.
- Scott Ellis asked for examples of WordPress being used as a CMS or other unusual uses, and the panel offers up Automattic’s Publisher Blog, Trumors and 71 Miles, amongst others.
- Rick Ankrum’s question about changes made to the default theme leads to an interesting throw-away comment by Mark Ghosh concerning a possible file integrity-checker making its way into future versions of WordPress.
- Jill McKeever’s question about image borders and a “word wrap button” stumps the panel. (Did we ever come up with an answer for this?)
- Someone asks about the future of Sandbox, and the possibility of incorporating its best features into the core. Several themes are discussed, including the Options theme and Regulus.
- Matt expressed frustration with the way WordPress handles menus as static pages and sub-pages, raising the possibility of choosing which items appear in the navigation menu. Mark Jaquith brings up his Page Links To plugin which allows you to point pages and menus to links outside of your blog’s domain.
- Matt also expressed frustration with the disparity between the image uploader and inserting an image from within the WYSIWYG editor, and brought up the possibility of an easy “image caption” function.
- Jeff Chandler’s frustration with the perception of WordPress not being able to withstand the “Digg effect” leads to a minor debate on caching. Matt effectively debunks the issue, blaming bad server configurations and cautioning against reliance on WP-Cache and WP-Super Cache. Mark Ghosh cautions against the use of Bad Behavior for high-traffic sites.
Okay, I give up. Where is the “Incoming Links Box’s “Edit” link in the Dashboard” located?
When did Matt debunk the issue against caching?
The two things I remember were basically full page caching was akin to going back to the days where you had to rebuild the site on every change. The problem with the statement is that the site is still dynamic and can easily be rebuilt without affecting any other page. To compare having to rebuild each “static” HTML page to the caching system simply invalidating and pulling the data again does not effectively debunk the argument against caching.
He also stated, albeit accurately, that most users won’t need to use caching, except I think he assumes that most users are on dedicated servers with dual or quad cores. It would probably help to have caching if you are on a shared server, and the “Digg Effect” effectively proves that you will want to use caching. All of the shared hosts I’ve been on don’t use any opcode caching, therefore the load is completely dependent on PHP’s two stage process. Compound that with NFS external storage and you’ll have one fun time trying to brace several thousand visitors.
Bad server configurations? Rasmus gave an excellent presentation a while back, which goes step by step on how to properly configure the web server to effectively serve many hundreds of requests per second. It is true that if your server will only serve 5 requests (like mine), then you’ll be pretty screwed, but luckily I’ve never had the digg effect hit my blog or perhaps it would be a good thing.
It is interesting, but only to those who have the money for dedicated servers and those that have enough traffic for running on them. It is fascinating also that Matt will continuously state that WordPress doesn’t have performance issues, which is true, but people have to also use what tools are given to them.
I would caution against those cautioning against caching, because it has its purpose and trade offs. If people are fine with it, then so be it. It isn’t like you have to cache everything in the page.
I mean to say, that I’m currently having a performance issue with a piece of software that I’m using and it isn’t WordPress. I wish it was built using WordPress because the core systems would be better optimized, but alas it isn’t. After seeing the alternative, I’m quite happy with the performance of WordPress. Well part of my problem is the database table access class pattern they are using which causes many hundreds of mysql_query calls. Let me tell you, if you have to wait five seconds before PHP is even finished executing the page, then you seriously need caching along with better server configurations.
@Carson - In WordPress 2.5 the Dashboard page has administration and navigation links at the top, then below that there’s an outlined box containing a thick red line (Right now) (Write a new page) (Write a new post).
Underneath that outlined box, there are two more outlined boxes side by side, each occupying half the width of the page. The box on the right is called “Incoming Links”, and in the top right of the Incoming Links box are three underlined links: See All | Edit | RSS. The one in the middle is the one you are looking for.
@Michael - But I’m still on 2.3.3. I’m waiting for my host and/or Fantastico to offer an upgrade to 2.5. Thanks for the response though.
In response to Mark Ghosh’s comments regarding keeping the Bad Behavior table optimized for performance reasons:
Bad Behavior optimizes its table on approximately one of every 1,000 blocked requests. Based on his comments regarding high traffic sites, this is probably not frequent enough for him. (Originally this was one of 100, but this seemed to be too frequent.) People with very high traffic sites should experiment with lowering this figure and report their results back to me.
This housekeeping is called only at the end of processing a request which has been blocked; Bad Behavior never does housekeeping on a request which has been permitted. The point being, of course, to get legitimate users through as quickly as possible. We waste the spammers’ time instead.
At minimum, a high traffic site should ensure that verbose logging is disabled; it is only needed to capture information on false negatives (spam that gets through). In addition, the next release of Bad Behavior will provide an option to disable logging entirely, which will eliminate this problem.
It’s my first visit to this podcast blog, and it’s very interesting.
Especially this latest article about the wp 2.5. I’m so much into it, so curious about what others say about it, and what it has in store. This one enlightened me somehow, and I really look forward to Comment Inbox!
Bad Behavior 2.0.15 has been released to address the issue raised by Mark Ghosh.