Up until I completed the following quick fix, wordpress was using almost 30MB per instance, this means that I could only at peak have 66 or so visitors at the same time before my server became overrun and hid under the bed. What I needed to do was supercharge php and the easiest way to do that is by caching. Thanks to this interesting article on php caching by itst.net I chose APC (Alternative PHP Cache) which is supported by the php foundation and showed the most promising speed improvements.

Installing APC really couldn’t have been made any easier on debian; it does require some dependencies, obviously php 5.x plus the pear package installed but apart from that not much else is needed to be installed and it you use apt-get they are installed as part of the installation process. The instillation process is as simple as follows:

apt-get install php-apc


/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Once APC has been installed and apache restarted you can issue the following command to ensure that it has installed correctly:

php -r 'phpinfo();' | grep apc

Once that has been done and you get a positive response to the above command you should see that wordpress is using considerably less memory. My install with its 16 or so plugins now uses 3.16MB rather than almost 30MB! That is what you call a good improvement.

One draw back with apc as with many caching processes is that it does cause an initial increased draw on the processor while it compiles the php into an performance enhanced executable file and stores it in a ram disk however once this intial process it done you can stand to see upto 200% increase in performance and a severely reduced memory footprint for each of your php apps.

As a quick fix to the problem I have included the following if clause in my search.php template file:

if ( $post-->post_status == 'publish' ){ ... }

Its not the best way to fix things, but it works for now and until I get back home next week its the best I can do. I hope this helps other people with similar problem until the plugin developer fixes things.

I had been using the following code to do this:

if($post->post_parent=="11"{ ... }

While this simple switch works if you are one layer deep for example Fish (ID 11) > Tropical Fish (ID 12) it wont work if your more than two layers deep such as Fish (ID 11) > Tropical Fish (ID 12) > Amazon Fish (ID 13) because $post_post_parent for Amazon Fish becomes 12 not 11. In terms of programming this is all very logical, however the solution to finding out the original post_parent otherwise known as the grandparent or great grandparent is not very well documented and it was only luck that helped me stumble upon it. The very simple function get_post_ancestors() solves this problem by effectively returning an array with every post id related to the one in which it was called as the following example shows:

$ancestors = get_post_ancestors();

$ancestors now becomes an array which we can search through the php in_array command by the following code:

in_array(11,$ancestors);

In this example if one of the $post_id’s of the current posts ancestors is 11 then the in_array function will return with true, otherwise it will return false. This then makes showing information on all sub pages (child pages) of Fish(ID 11) a simple matter of using the following code:

$ancestors = get_post_ancestors($post);
if(in_array(11,$ancestors)){
	...
}

I use this on my projects page’s to provide a link back to the projects page from the sidebar of all its children, it could also be used to show a custom header for that section of your blog or certain links from a link category relevant to that section. The usefulness of this function is never ending and should be one of many you use when writing your own templates.

[EDIT]

Right, due to the nature of the backup I used a lot of the database was scrambled, I have just finished running custom scripts to de-scramble it and things should be running smoothly once again.

I had begun to get bored with the last one a while ago, however I have been so busy that I haven’t had time to really work on this website. Those who visit here regularly may notice that I will do redesign and publish it when it is only half baked. That is why a lot of static content is missing from the projects, photography, portfolio and colophon, I simply ran out of time and published it with the mindset of finishing it when I got round to it.

Well as I never really got round to fixing the old theme I have decided to make a new one, you may have already noticed that it is similar to a few well known websites and you would be right in thinking so. To quell any fears, I haven’t plagerised them byte by byte instead I have chosen my favourite elements from each design and put them here.

The basic requirements for the redesign where the following:

• Back to basics: meaning very simple mark-up. If it can be done without using excessive elements then it will be done with out them
• Standardised: I tended to focus simply on the front page and work out every other page
• from there. With this design and consequently future designs, I have worked on each page as their own creative domain. Thus the about page looks different from the gallery and the gallery looks different from the front page. I believe this helps give the different areas of this website their own look and feel.
• Simple Theme: this is the same as back to basics, however not just with the code, I decided that this redesign is to use as few images within it as possible. Not only does this help with accessibility issues, but it also means quicker load times and less load on my poor aging server.

With that all said and done, I shall be re-coding my old pinecone theme and publishing it here very soon as I have had quite a few people email me with interest in using it on their own blog.

In the mean time if you need any help with my plugins feel free to fire me an email.

[Update]

The next update for zenphotos 2.2 will be released as soon as I am able to spend some time on it for the time being I am implementing the following new features as required by my new theme (to launch soon) and requested by you guys:

• Plug-in Panel so you can set the default settings within your dashboard rather than edit the plugin file yourself.
• Adding the option to create custom output formatting, which will make it easier to design around.
• Adding the option to select the latest pictures from just one album within your gallery rather that from the whole gallery.
• Adding the option to show a user defined selection of random images from either one album or the whole gallery.

This being my final degree year I have a lot of  work to get finished and not a lot of time to get it all done in, due to this I can’t say for sure when the new plugin will be released as I am having to work on it when I get literally a spare few minutes.