I was looking for a way to use the same posts table for two seperate WordPress installations. The following will only work if they are using the same database. Turned out to be quite easy. All you have to do is edit the wp-db.php in the includes directory. (more…)
White flash on page loading in WordPress 3.2
I’ve encountered a strange bug, when I active bp_template_pack plugin refreshing the page you get a white flash before the page loads. Disabling it will return everything to normal. At first I thought it was ajax calls but I can’t pinpoint the exact problem. As a workaround I moved the ajax code to my functions.php and included the scripting in my own javascript file. While this works fine, I still would like to new what the exact problem is. Googling it I found a lot of other users having the same problem but no answers.
Diablo III wordpress buddypress theme
I’ve always wanted to create some themes for communities, with BuddyPress this became a reality. Normal WordPress doesnt offer much in terms of social interaction, BuddyPress and bbPress pick up the slack. The basic idea was to create a theme that is based on a single picture as the background. That way it should be easy to create different themes for different games. You can check out my example site for Diablo III. BuddyPress requires a lot of styling, so there are still some parts left to do but all in all it’s comming along nicely.
Microsoft’s Metro UI causing up a storm
The first of Windows 8 has been controversial to say the least, it shows the Desktop OS using the same Interface as the Windows 7 Phone. While it is a very fundamental change in the user experience, it is not the focal point of the storm. At the heart of the new Metro UI is HTML 5 and Javascript. An openly supported standard capable running of any platform. This is a radical change for the company known for it’s closed source mindedness. What ever the outcome it is a significant change of direction.
A lof of Windows developers are questioning this change and fear their hard earned skills become meaningless overnight. From what I can tell this is not the case, as the video clearly shows a normal Windows UI running inside the Metro UI. I doubt the normal interface is ever going away. The new UI is geared towards more simple computing and touch screen devices, I can’t really see it working for power users. My own preference would to not use Metro at all, while its nice on the phone, i run dozens of applications at the same time and on multiple screens and somehow I cant see it working. As for Silverlight and WPF, these are not going anywhere, Microsoft is the one company that is commited to backwards compatiblilty. Most likely WPF will be able to generate HTML 5 and Javascript code as well as normal output.
The biggest disappointment right now is that all the questions go unanswered by Microsoft, they haven’t giving out a single statement about this major shift and keeping us in the dark. Things are getting cold in hell already, what’s next?
Performance tuning your WordPress Plugin
Ever since I started working on plugins I have learned a lot about coding but I never really looked closely to performance. While not mandatory at first, your plugin will work without it, it is something that you will run into as you get closer to finish it.
Lately i’ve been working with Xdebug to increase performance and it has helped. It dropped about 5ms each pagehit from 23 ms to 18 ms. The average pagehit takes about 1300ms. Note that running xdebug causes a lot of overhead and these figures drop a lot when you turn it off, but the percentage gain stays.
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