Holy Shmoly!

WP Super Cache version 0.9.1 is now available. WP Super Cache is a page caching plugin for WordPress that will significantly speed up your website.

Major changes under the hood in this release, and many bugfixes:

• If your blog is installed in a folder then compare the mod_rewrite rules in your .htaccess with those on the admin page. I fixed a bug in how those are generated.
• Out goes the shutdown function the plugin relied on for years (going back to the days of wp-cache), and in comes plain old output buffering on it’s own.
• If you’ve had problems clearing the cache on your blog it could be because wp-cron isn’t firing. I’ve added checks for that. Joost helped me debug that and he blogged about it too. You’ll get a nice warning message if those checks fail.
• If after all that, your cache still doesn’t clear, add $wp_cache_shutdown_gc = 1; to wp-content/wp-cache-config.php to clear the cache at the end of pageload instead of by wp-cron. It will slow down page generation for a tiny number of your users though.
• The Last and Next garbage collection times are now in the timezone selected for your blog.
• Added an admin notice on the plugin page to warn that caching has to be enabled. A warning is shown below the plugin activation row too.
• If your site runs on a Windows server, I fixed a small problem with slashes and creating the config file.
• The plugin created empty supercache folders, but that’s fixed now.
• Bad Behaviour support seems to work nicely now!
• You can now relocate the supercache plugins folder. See $wp_cache_plugins_dir in wp-cache-config-sample.php.
• I added 2 new filters: wp_cache_served_cache_file in wp-cache-phase1.php (BB uses this) and wp_cache_file_contents in wp-cache-phase2.php where you can filter the contents of the newly created cache before it’s written out to a file.
• The readme.txt has been updated too warning about using NFS to store the cache folder, solving wp-cron problems, added the list of Apache modules required for expired pages to really expire in the browser cache.

I also added a donation link in the readme.txt and on the admin page. You can hide it with the click of a button but if you’re feeling generous, I’d appreciate a donation.
I don’t expect many donations, that’s how these things work, but if you tell me your site does 100,000 page views a day and you couldn’t live without caching I might be slightly annoyed if you come looking for free support.

PS. Looks like Bad Behavior support is broken because the docs on the BB site were a little misleading and I don’t use the plugin. Grab badbehaviour.php and copy into plugins/wp-super-cache/plugins/ overwriting the file of the same name in that folder.

As I may have mentioned once or twice before, we were at The Irish Blog Awards on Saturday night. Here are a few photos. They’re after the jump because there are 70 there and I’d hate to see them load every time someone loaded the front page of my site!

Gallery of shots from the photowalk to come tomorrow. Possibly over 100 shots in that. I do like to take photos don’t I?

BTW - Please Photoshop Grandad above. What’s he saying? Two example to follow ..
Continue reading ‘The Irish Blog Awards in Pictures’

Last Saturday night many of the Irish blogging community got together in The Cork International Airport Hotel for the Irish Blog Awards. I was there with my wife Jacinta, it was a great night and I was delighted to see so many WordPress powered blogs. Both WordPress.org and WordPress.com blogs were represented again and again among the top bloggers in Ireland.

I had planned on writing a post analysing the breakdown of WordPress vs Blogspot vs MT vs everyone else but lucky for me, Cathal Garvey already did the hard work!

He has some very interesting stats on version numbers, and I’m shocked that “Best Technology Blog” (sponsored by Bitbuzz) has the worst record for upgrading WordPress. Hopefully this attention will encourage those bloggers to upgrade.

WordPress is the most popular blogging software among the Blog Awards nominees and Blacknight is by far the most popular hosting service. I don’t think you can get a better recommendation than that for either WordPress or Blacknight.

BTW - That’s Grandad in the photo above. Go read his blog, Head Rambles. You’ll love it!
PS. Here are the results of the Awards, read more by Red Mum, Robert, Niall and Jason who reminds us we should vote for the excellent Cork International Airport Hotel. TheChrisD has a massive post listing everyone in his feedreader who posted about the Awards, a few pics, and some of the videos shown on the night.
I’ll be uploading photos from the night in a post here and to Pixie later.

PPS. Alan Burke got in touch and asked me to give Drupalcamp Galway a plug. He added, “Maybe we could convert a few Wordpress users ;-)” but of course that’ll never happen!

On Saturday 4th and Sunday 5th of April 2009 in Galway, 2 groups of Drupal developers will work on building 2 real working Drupal sites for 2 good causes. They will have 24 hours to complete their website. We are calling organizations, charities and NGOs from Ireland to submit their site proposal. Any organisation can register as long as they are not-for-profit and do not have a Drupal site already running. (A few static HTML pages is the limit for being accepted).

Sounds like a great idea and a worthy one too.

Jacinta and I are just back from the The 2009 Irish Blog Awards and we’re elated after the experience. If I thought I could convey half the good humour and energy and enthusiasm I’d try but I know I’d fail dismally. It was a wonderful night, full of great people and I’m only sorry we couldn’t stay longer and chat some more!

Thank you Damien and everyone who helped. You pulled off a hugely success celebration of Irish blogging.

Oh yeah, a couple of Ryanair staff really love WordPress! Or maybe not. Jason Roe discovered that Ryanair’s website session handling isn’t 100% reliable. Click through to the voucher section, click back and suddenly the price of your flight is 0.00!

Unfortunately a few Ryanair staffers decided to take it upon themselves to chastise Jason for his blog post and took a dig at WordPress while they were at it.

You dont get a free flight, there is no dynamic data to render which is prob why you got 0.00. what self respecting developer uses a crappy CMS such as word press anyway AND puts they’re mobile ph number online, i suppose even a prank call is better than nothing on a lonely sat evening!!

Personally, I believe him about ryanair.com and the “dynamic data” which I presume is POST data, but they should handle these situations better. Their chief rival in Ireland, Aer Lingus show an “expired session” page at every wrong turn which is annoying but at least doesn’t lead me down the garden path of trying to buy tickets for €0.00!

Maybe Ryanair should hire Damien to give them a clue about how to play nicely online. Can’t see that happening though. They’d probably charge you €2+€5 credit card fee just to send them a refund request by tweet.

PS. Jason verified the IP addresses of the Ryanair staff. They were browsing blogs at work from their company’s designated IP range of 193.120.152.0 to 193.120.152.127.

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