wp_cache_delete($post_id,'posts');

By contrast if you’re developing with WordPress and you reach a point where you have to go beyond core and start building custom plugins there’s really no pattern to follow. Sure there are hooks and filters that allow you to customize as much as you want. But because WP is not a custom framework, it isn’t built for customization and there are no internal conventions for full-on custom modification. So each plugin you look at has a slightly different approach to accomplishing goals. The Pods CMS project attempts to create a standard for customization, but it has not yet been fully developed or fully adopted.

PyroCMS on the other hand, being CI based, strictly follows the MVC pattern and thus allows developers to anticipate the structure of any module, and replicate and override those modules if necessary. This is what custom frameworks setup to do. PyroCMS combines the code-base scalability with WordPress like features and the ability to quickly launch sites. Though, it still has a ways to go match up with WordPress on features.

This distinction is relevant for clients too. You decide to save on development costs and use a system like WordPress for your CMS. But then you start customizing everything and before you know it what you really have is a custom site attached to a WordPress install. This is fine until your developer goes on to bigger and better projects and you have to find a new one. Well, your WordPress install is too hacked and customized for average WordPress developers to handle. But because it wasn’t built on a custom framework, PHP developers will not be able to easily and quickly understand how the site was setup. Either way the cost of maintenance is going to be considerably higher than if you had gone custom in the first place.

global $current_user;

This was used to return an object containing not only the primary user fields but all the meta fields as well. So if you set a user meta field called “age” you could simply do:

global $current_user;
if($current_user->data->age > 21) {
  // the do some adult stuff;
}

But this shortcut is no longer available to developers and for good reason. As a general rule code should be efficient, meaning it does only what it has to. To load even the most superflous meta fields every time you access the basic user object is a waste of resources.

So good for WordPress, they are improving. But there are likely others like me who figured if WordPress was going to give me the info, then I was going to use it. And like me they’ll have to spend all day tracking down everywhere they used this shortcut and fixing it. Ugh.

So here are a few tips to help.

Don’t use a plugin unless you have to.

I’m not bashing plugins. Plugins are part of what makes WordPress such a great tool. There’s a plugin for just about everything and on low-traffic, low-usage sites you’ll be just fine loading up with 30 or 40 plugins. But as your site grows, you need to be aware that each plugin is performance drag … yes … even caching plugins at times.

The reason for this is obvious if you think about it. A plugin is designed for general usage … as it should be. A plugin developer has to anticipate multiple environments and prepare for as many of them as possible. They need to add user options. A stylesheet. A few javascript files maybe. And to make sure their functions are always available to end users, they load those functions as early as possible.

Contrast that with a custom approach. High performance PHP frameworks like CodeIgniter or Kohana make an artform out of limiting the resources used by a web application to exactly what is needed. If your website has a registration page, there’s no need to load any function or library that is not absolutely necessary for that process. But because every website is different, you have to make that discrimination on a case-by-case basis. Hence the word “custom”.

Budgets and resources will always limit how many plugins you can swap out with custom programming. And of course, if the custom programming sucks or the developer doesn’t understand how WordPress works, you’ll probably still be better off with a plugin. But if you can replace a plugin with a custom solution you’ll find it will help your performance.

Carpet Bombing Won’t Cut It

Most people take a carpet bombing approach to caching. Just install W3 Total Cache and you’re done. WTC is a great plugin and just having it installed is better than not having it installed. But if you have inefficient code, it won’t save you forever.

Let’s say you have a slow query that takes 3 seconds to run (hint: that’s waaaaay too long for a regular query). You turn on WTC page caching and no problem right? Except that page caching is turned off for logged in users, of which you have 30. And the page cache is dumped everytime something new is posted (including comments!!) and before long you’re still having crashes. The only difference is that now they are intermittent and seemingly unpredictable.

In the ideal world, you figure out where the slow query is and fix it. But at the very least you should know your site well enough to know where the bottlenecks are. And once you do you can target the trouble areas with a smart bomb instead of the usual napalm.

For instance, I have client using a Tabbed Widget plugin. It’s a good plugin but it just doesn’t scale. The client has ten tabs each with 10 to 15 sub-items. The way the tabbed widget code is written it takes some absurd number of queries to build it. Something on the order of 800!!! Seriously. So to smart bomb this widget you can actually use the WordPress Object Cache to cache the whole damn thing as an HTML object so that it is only rebuilt every so often.

Let’s say our troubled widget is in the primary widget area. We can do something like this in our sidebar.php:

$cached_widget = wp_cache_get('widget-primary-widget-area','custom-flag');
if(!$cached_widget):
  ob_start(); ?>
The  stuff you want to cache

First we’re checking to see if $cached_widget exists by checking for it in the cache. If it isn’t there then you do what you would normally do in your sidebar, but precede it with ob_start(). Then take the buffered object and assign it to the $cached_widget variable and clean up with ob_end_clean(). Then set the object cache and give it an expires time of 60*60 which would mean it’ll refresh once an hour. Here’s what it would look like using a pretty standard sidebar.php.

$cached_widget = wp_cache_get('widget-primary-widget-area','custom-flag');
if(!$cached_widget) {
	ob_start();
	?>



	

You can read more about Object caching here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Class_Reference/WP_Object_Cache.

Lazy Loading

A concept used in the custom programming world that is often lost on WordPress developers is “lazy loading“. If you’re running a big site chances are your theme functions.php has gotten a bit crowded. I had one site whose functions.php got to 2000+ lines before we got around to reorganizing (not recommended).

As these files get bigger they become more burdensome to load. You should consider creating a directory called functions and storing “libraries” in that folder with a naming convention that makes sense to you. Then in your functions.php load those file using include_once($pathtofile);. You can then wrap these includes with standard WordPress conditionals to make sure they only load when you need them.

Lets say you have a special page template called page-directory.php. This page houses your super-awesome site directory that requires all sorts of special functions to make it work … i.e. custom javascript includes, a special stylesheet, and a few custom template tags. Doing something like this in your functions.php could help your performance by only loading that functionality when needed.

Wrap it up

There are a lot of advantages to WordPress and performance is NOT one of them. But a little planning and a little knowledge of how WordPress works you can get a long way toward a high performance site without giving up the many good things WordPress has to offer.

add_action('bp_core_signup_user','bp_set_notification_default',100,1);
function bp_set_notification_default($user_id) {
	$keys = array('notification_activity_new_mention','notification_activity_new_reply','notification_friends_friendship_accepted','notification_friends_friendship_request','notification_groups_admin_promotion','notification_groups_group_updated','notification_groups_invite','notification_groups_membership_request','notification_messages_new_message','notification_messages_new_notice');
	foreach($keys as $key) {
		update_user_meta($user_id,$key,'no');
	}
}

Please note that this function is hooked to bp_core_user_signup which means existing users still have to manually turn off notifications. But you could easily run this function on an array of user_ids to change the defaults for existing users.

/* jQuery Easing Plugin, v1.3 - http://gsgd.co.uk/sandbox/jquery/easing/ */
jQuery.easing.jswing=jQuery.easing.swing;jQuery.extend(jQuery.easing,{def:"easeOutQuad",swing:function(e,f,a,h,g){return jQuery.easing[jQuery.easing.def](e,f,a,h,g)},easeInQuad:function(e,f,a,h,g){return h*(f/=g)*f+a},easeOutQuad:function(e,f,a,h,g){return -h*(f/=g)*(f-2)+a},easeInOutQuad:function(e,f,a,h,g){if((f/=g/2)<1){return h/2*f*f+a}return -h/2*((--f)*(f-2)-1)+a},easeInCubic:function(e,f,a,h,g){return h*(f/=g)*f*f+a},easeOutCubic:function(e,f,a,h,g){return h*((f=f/g-1)*f*f+1)+a},easeInOutCubic:function(e,f,a,h,g){if((f/=g/2)<1){return h/2*f*f*f+a}return h/2*((f-=2)*f*f+2)+a},easeInQuart:function(e,f,a,h,g){return h*(f/=g)*f*f*f+a},easeOutQuart:function(e,f,a,h,g){return -h*((f=f/g-1)*f*f*f-1)+a},easeInOutQuart:function(e,f,a,h,g){if((f/=g/2)<1){return h/2*f*f*f*f+a}return -h/2*((f-=2)*f*f*f-2)+a},easeInQuint:function(e,f,a,h,g){return h*(f/=g)*f*f*f*f+a},easeOutQuint:function(e,f,a,h,g){return h*((f=f/g-1)*f*f*f*f+1)+a},easeInOutQuint:function(e,f,a,h,g){if((f/=g/2)<1){return h/2*f*f*f*f*f+a}return h/2*((f-=2)*f*f*f*f+2)+a},easeInSine:function(e,f,a,h,g){return -h*Math.cos(f/g*(Math.PI/2))+h+a},easeOutSine:function(e,f,a,h,g){return h*Math.sin(f/g*(Math.PI/2))+a},easeInOutSine:function(e,f,a,h,g){return -h/2*(Math.cos(Math.PI*f/g)-1)+a},easeInExpo:function(e,f,a,h,g){return(f==0)?a:h*Math.pow(2,10*(f/g-1))+a},easeOutExpo:function(e,f,a,h,g){return(f==g)?a+h:h*(-Math.pow(2,-10*f/g)+1)+a},easeInOutExpo:function(e,f,a,h,g){if(f==0){return a}if(f==g){return a+h}if((f/=g/2)<1){return h/2*Math.pow(2,10*(f-1))+a}return h/2*(-Math.pow(2,-10*--f)+2)+a},easeInCirc:function(e,f,a,h,g){return -h*(Math.sqrt(1-(f/=g)*f)-1)+a},easeOutCirc:function(e,f,a,h,g){return h*Math.sqrt(1-(f=f/g-1)*f)+a},easeInOutCirc:function(e,f,a,h,g){if((f/=g/2)<1){return -h/2*(Math.sqrt(1-f*f)-1)+a}return h/2*(Math.sqrt(1-(f-=2)*f)+1)+a},easeInElastic:function(f,h,e,l,k){var i=1.70158;var j=0;var g=l;if(h==0){return e}if((h/=k)==1){return e+l}if(!j){j=k*0.3}if(g
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		http://www.mikevanwinkle.com/wordpress/manage-buddypress-inactive-users/
		http://www.mikevanwinkle.com/wordpress/manage-buddypress-inactive-users/#comments
		Mon, 04 Jul 2011 20:54:28 +0000
		Mike Van Winkle
				
		

		http://www.mikevanwinkle.com/?p=1110
		
			So I quickly threw together this plugin today for a project I’m working on in which I need the ability to resend individual “welcome” emails via the standard WordPress admin. It very simply adds a screen in the user admin that queries inactive users and then adds a button to each row to send the email. This plugin was designed to work with BuddyPress installations and is not a stand alone. I’ll be adding mass edit and manual activation shortly.

Download Plugin
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