Tag: wordpress

Why Use WordPress

Why use WordPress in a classroom and for production websites?  Well, one reason is that one in four websites is now powered by WordPress.

The milestone figure doesn’t represent a fraction of all websites that have a CMS: WordPress now powers 25 percent of the Web.

The latest data comes from W3Techs, which measures both usage and market share: “WordPress is used by 58.7% of all the websites whose content management system we know. This is 25.0% of all websites.” While these numbers naturally fluctuate over the course of the month, the general trend for WordPress has been slow but steady growth.

cms_w3techs_november_2015

“We should be comfortably past 25% by the end of the year,” Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg declared. “The big opportunity is still the 57% of websites that don’t use any identifiable CMS yet, and that’s where I think there is still a ton of growth for us (and I’m also rooting for all the other open source CMSes).”

How to convert an entire MySQL database character set and collation to UTF-8?

I found myself in need of upgrading a number of older wordpress sites to change from the old latin1_swedish_ci to UTF-8, both the character set and collation.  I utilized a command line SQL prompt to accomplish this.  Modify the appropriate parameters “test” for your database, and “yourpasswordhere” with your password, ymmv, and have fun.

I am using Fedora 21 and MariaDB 10.0.15

(echo ‘ALTER DATABASE `'”test”‘` CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;’; mysql -u root –password=”yourpasswordhere” “test” -e “SHOW TABLES” –batch –skip-column-names | xargs -I{} echo ‘ALTER TABLE `'{}’` CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;’ ) | mysql -u root –password=”yourpasswordhere” “test”

I don’t believe I needed to login twice; however, I was rewriting this from some notes and it worked, so I left it.  Feel free to send me the shorter code.  I always appreciate it.

WordPress 3.3 “Sonny”

Posted on WordPress.org, December 12, 2011 by Matt Mullenweg. Filed under Releases.

The latest and greatest version of the WordPress software — 3.3, named “Sonny” in honor of the great jazz saxophonist Sonny Stitt — is immediately available for download or update inside your WordPress dashboard.

WordPress has had over 65 million downloads since version 3.0 was released, and in this third major iteration we’ve added significant polish around the new user experience, navigation, uploading, and imports. Check out this short video that summarizes the things we think you’ll find are the cat’s pajamas:

For Users

Experienced users will appreciate the new drag-and-drop uploader, hover menus for the navigation, the new toolbar, improved co-editing support, and the new Tumblr importer. We’ve also been thinking a ton about what the WordPress experience is like for people completely new to the software. Version 3.3 has significant improvements there with pointer tips for new features included in each update, a friendly welcome message for first-time users, and revamped help tabs throughout the interface. Finally we’ve improved the dashboard experience on the iPad and other tablets with better touch support.

For Developers

There is a ton of candy for developers as well. I’d recommend starting your exploration with the new editor API, new jQuery version, better ways to hook into the help screens, more performant post-slug-only permalinks, and of course the entire list of improvements on the Codex and in Trac.

How To Optimize Your WordPress Database

I am looking at a number of WordPress plugins to optimize my databases.  I did run across the WordPress method of optimizing a database.

First backup your database.

http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/maint/repair.php

Click on the Repair Database button to have WordPress internally executes two SQL queries on each WordPress database table: CHECK TABLE and REPAIR TABLE

Click on the Repair and Optimize Database button to have WordPress internally executes the two SQL queries above and two additional SQL queries on each WordPress database table: ANALYZE TABLE  and OPTIMIZE TABLE

I hope this improves my WordPress performance.