Manchester WordPress User Group May

In a sunny Manchester…

General Session

WordPress News

3.9.1 - bug fixes

Interesting statistic: The 3.8 automatic updates, updated 97% successfully without errors.

Developers now have to be extra careful when adding anything to WordPress as the automatic updates will affect around 100 million websites worldwide.

Image editing has been improved. As mentioned last month, it's now possible to drag images directly into the post view. Also after doing this it's possible to edit the image that brings up an improved interface and also it's possible to alter the image size by resizing it. This will only change the image size using code however, it won't actually create an image at the set size.

Hip Hop Mike Yo

Jetpack - 3.0 is out with new features, site verification and related posts.

There's a WordPress Android App update.

Google fighting Oracle about APIs: https://recode.net/2014/05/09/oracle-wins-appeal-in-java-copyright-fight-with-google/

WordCamps

WordCamp Sheffield was last month: https://2014.sheffield.wordcamp.org/

WordCamp Manchester is set for June 28th, with tickets going on sale… Now! https://2014.manchester.wordcamp.org/2014/05/22/tickets-are-now-on-sale-and-going-fast/

There's also a 'Call for Speakers' if you fancy speaking: https://2014.manchester.wordcamp.org/call-for-speakers/

Next month's MWUG… Bring your laptops and we'll be looking at helping people get started to contribute to WordPress.

WordPress Questions and Answers

Categorising images, Mike has used: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-media-library-categories/

I mentioned about the drag n drop image bug I found, where sometimes if I drag and drop an image to add to a post then click too soon, then the 'Insert' button becomes unclickable. A handy quick fix for this, if you're in Chrome, you can use Cmd + Shift + C to inspect the element above the button, then h to hide it allowing you to now click the 'Insert' button :smile:

Mike also recommended if you encounter bugs like this, report them :wink:, you can do that here: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/

Adding screenshots, screencasts, a link to a live example or any other information will help people work out what's going on and hopefully get the bug fixed.

502 error page

Mike had previously encountered an issue with a hosting company, where someone had restored an old back up, he could clearly see that people had accessed certain pages previously, yet in his site they didn't exist. Fishy…

wordpress.com vs wordpress.org

wordpress.com = (Service) owned my Matt Mullenweg and is a hosted service using the WordPress software, unlimited bandwidth and is free, you can't run a shop free (but can pay for one), will show ads (although you won't see this logged in).

wordpress.org = (Do it yourself) Manage it yourself, can add a shop if you wish.

https://en.support.wordpress.com/com-vs-org/

SEO question

There's lot and lots going on with SEO these days and is also subject to change, such as page speed, more frequently / recently updated content. Mike's site was the first in Google for the search time 'Mike' at one point. However with lack of updating others now surpass him.

Also mentions the wonderful Yoast plugin: https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/

Someone mentioned about having an idea, but not time to do it themselves.

https://wordpress.org/ideas/ is a place you can submit these to, although there are discussions this may vanish.

I asked about keeping track of what users have edited posts.

The following plugins were recommended to check out:

• Audit Trail
• Auditor
• Stream (new but meant to be good)

For each post or page can set restriction access

Members: https://wordpress.org/plugins/members/

Role Scoper (lots of control, but a bit more complicated) but.. Compatible up to 3.6.1 ooops: https://wordpress.org/plugins/role-scoper/

Maybe try out Role Scoper's successor: https://wordpress.org/plugins/press-permit-core/

Part 2

Tim Nash 'Going Beyond LAMP'

Jedi Tim using the force to show us the way of the cache

Shared hosts - unfortunately not all will let you do what you want. Of course if they do… probably time to move :wink:

PAAS Platform as a service - building a customised environment.

LAMP - linux apache mysql php

WIMP - yes this still exists…

enjinx / Engine X - HTTP and Proxy Server

enjinx or Engine X? how do you pronounce it? #MWUG

— Simon Owen (@s10wen) May 21, 2014

Maria DB & Percona Server - 'Oracle = big bad corporation' MySQL - Mike mentioned Maria and Maria is ran by the creator of MySQL and also the name of his daughter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Widenius

HHVM - HipHop Virtual Machine - designed by Facebook - parity to PHP 5.4 (but with bugs), you can drop Hack into WordPress.

Normally with PHP it runs a bit of code, then another bit of code, but Hack works async, but currently has no debugging tools.

Give it 6 months and hopefully there will be debugging and where PHP is going, it's blisteringly fast, put perhaps not production ready

Should be quicker to store data to memory, but in some cases (not many) is faster to disk. However anything in memory may not come back use with caution.

Quick Tip: "Always set an expiry on a Transient"

Queue Management System

• when you click approve on a comment, it's sending an email out..
• brought server down because of 1000 comments
• I mentioned why isn't this in core? and this is because it requires dependencies, Mike mentioned in most cases it probably won't be required, but if it is, go for it and another way that can handle this is by using a 3rd party such as Mail Chimp where the notifications would be sent to them to handle.

"Caching can and will screw with you!"

Cloudflare is a no, no. Varnish and cloudfront are both good.

Page caching will speed up, fragment cache is the next best step, object caching (related search, querying your own database, putting it into the transient).

This talk should be available soon here: https://timnash.co.uk/mwug-may-2014/