Last day when coming back to edit my blog (http://www.exnol.com ) I was literally shocked to find out that the login page took ages to load. Thinking that it was a server issue because I had been here a few hours before, I came to face the reality the hard way. The problem was that the landing page or the front page or the index page of the blog was alright without any problems but every other page including the admin pages took many minutes to load, sometimes even dropping the connection.

So what should we do on such situations? After a brief search on Google and coming out with no practical answers I decided to go my own way. The steps : Since the front page was OK it was not a Database or Server issue. To make this sure I tried [intlink id="filezilla-free-ftp-client-and-server-for-windows" type="post"]FTP using Filezilla[/intlink] and found out that FTP was fine. Since the admin interface was affected I couldn’t try deactivating plugins altogether. so I decided to try a trick. Rename the “plugin” folder.

Note the path to the folder : /wp-content/plugins

Right click on the folder and select Rename. Rename it with some other thing. You would successfully have brought down your WP blog now. Most probably your blog won’t work. (Make sure you try to access your blog at least once after the renaming). But hey its just temporary. Rename the folder back to plugins. Now you will have all of your plugins deactivated.

Now start reactivating plugins one at a time or in groups and watch which plugin is causing the trouble. This was my idea of the last minute trick you can use to deactivate plugins if the admin pages are unavailable. Share your thoughts!

The Wordpress community like any OpenSource project has got a highly creative and devout developer base. They never fail to please you with every major release of WP. So the customizable dashboard was also no surprise. But the fact that we can use some applets on the dashboard as makeshift feed reader is what really impressed me. If you have  a self hosted WP blog, you should probably have noticed this, or may be you don’t. So here is how you can view feeds on your WP dashboard.

You can use two of Wordpress applets as feed reader which will show you the title with the first few sentences from a feed. The third one is much limited. This is made from the “Incoming Links” applet and so it shows only the first few words of the posts and the link. The two applets that can be used to view latest feeds as excerpts are titled “Other WordPress News” and “WordPress Development Blog”. When you move your mouse over the Title Bar of these applets you can see a configure link.

Click on that ad you will be taken to a page where you can set options for that particular applet. The config options include number of posts to be shown from that feed, Address of the feed, Title of the feed and some minor tweaks. I have added this blogs feed to the applet to show you how its is done. Once you have set these options you ca save them and configure the other applet. Coming to the third applet which is a little less mighty, things ecome somewhat different. We cannot edit the title of this applet directly from the dashboard (although we can do it by editing WP core file). You can just edit the address of the feed and the number of posts to be shown.

If you would like to keep the original applet feeds, make sure you save the feed addresses before changing them. You can use these applets to subscribe to two blogs which you can never miss out on. Although this can’t be substituted for a regular feed reader this would be fun tweaking.

Many Wordpress blogs including this one faced a major problem after upgrading to Wordpress 2.7 a few days back. Although the whole new look of Wordpress is extremely easy and well designed for some the tinyMCE editor (default post editor for Wordpress) was screwed up. This meant that no new post could be made or existing one edited with the current setup.

The most common problem was that the Visual editor tab was missing. When you click on the new post or edit buttons you go straight to the HTML editing mode. And if you click on the Visual tab the whole text as well as editor window is blank.

In my case if I selected the editor windows I can see the HTML highlighted ie the text was still there but was in white color and un-editable. From then on no buttons on the page including HTML mode, Preview, Save Draft, Publish etc worked.

After going through numerous threads on the wordpress forum finally I was able to sort out the problem. Many a peple at the forums had pointed out that the problem would naturally be with some plugin that modified the TinyMCE advanced. I tried deactivating the TinyMCE advanced plugin. But it still didn’t work. After sometime I found that websuccessdiva solved the problem by deactivating RB internal links plugin. The plugin allows you to link the text with already published posts inside the TinyMCE window itself.

Solution : Try deactivating the plugins that directyly affect the tinyMCE interface. for some this was RB internal links, for some this was Kimili Flash Embed. Although there was an opinion to install Wordpress 2.7 fresh instead of upgrading this seemed not so practical.

Does anybody notice the rising CPU usage of your browser when you are at the create post page (Tiny MCE) of your self hosted Wordpress blog? Previously when I was using Firefox the CPU usage rose to 50 percent and FF was running fast like a snail. I thought it was because of problems with FF. Last day when I was using Opera Process Explroer was open. I couldn’t believe that Opera too used very much CPU resources. It was then that I realised the culprit was the Wordpress Create Post page (A intersection B, lol).

I was amazed when a Google search provided me only one relevent result. The problem is actually with the Wordpress “autosave” feature. If autosave is enabled, then the “Save” “Publish” buttons on my post page used to blink. Everything will come to normal once you “Disable AutoSave” on your blog.

To disble AutoSave you need to comment out the function wp_enqueue_script(‘autosave’); from the following file by adding “//” before them. Comment the line in the following files – /wp-admin/post.php  /wp-admin/page.php  /wp-admin/post-new.php  /wp-admin/page-new.php

After commenting the lines should look like – //wp_enqueue_script(‘autosave’);

Upload these files back and you will have solved the problem. Remember that since SutoSave is disabled you must manually save changes while writing a post.

I didn’t notice the CPU usage while using Opera because Opera is better than Firefox at managing memory and CPU. Also the overall perfomance of the Opera was not affected by the presence of the post page. But in FireFox when the page ws open I couldn’t scroll through any of the pages or couldn’t switch tabs by cliking on them.

I found all these information from Richard Timothy’s blog. Thanks Thimothy .

Wordpress has released its new version 2.5.1 It has got many security fixes and some minor bug fixes. You may either replace the security fixed files or do a complete update. The files that were fixed with security issues were – wp-includes/pluggable.php, wp-admin/includes/media.php, and wp-admin/media.php. You can just replace your existing files with the above one.

This release of Wordpress also adds a new security key feature to the wp-config.php file that will let you randomize cookie encryption. You can visit this link we set up to get a unique secret key for your config file. (It’s unique and random on every page load.) Having this line in your config file helps secure your blog.

The latest version of Wordpress – 2.3.3 is out now. It includes a major fix to the XML RPC file xmlrpc.php

A flaw was found in our XML-RPC implementation such that a specially crafted request would allow any valid user to edit posts of any other user on that blog. In addition to fixing this security flaw, 2.3.3 fixes a few minor bugs. If you are interested only in the security fix, download the fixed version of xmlrpc.php and copy it over your existing xmlrpc.php. Otherwise, you can get the entire release here.

Also, there is a vulnerability in the WP-Forum plugin that is being actively exploited right now. If you are using this plugin, please remove it until an update is available.

For more information about upgrading your Wordpress installation visit Wordpress Upgrade directions page at Wordpress Codex