WordPress 3.0 does some rather (positively) aggressive caching itself, but with nginx behind it we have witnessed our page-load times to be up to 4× faster!

Chasing YSlow and PageSpeed rankings we needed to update the nginx expires headers condition to cater for our plugins’ static files (CSS and JS). Again, not that I have ever particularly noticed but not all plugins reference the latest version of their CSS’ the same way. One comes across:

• .css
• .css?1278974243 (UNIX timestamp)
• .css?ver=2 (variable followed by an integer ONLY)
• .css?ver=absd234 (variable followed by mixed characters)
• .css?version=2.2alpha (variable of any length followed by mixed characters including “.”)

You see where I’m going with this. So after picking up a useful rewrite from StackOverflow – which catered beautifully for Redmine, we were faced with variations in WP we didn’t encounter originally and the script didn’t cover either. Digging deeper into the issue we came up with this, which now fully caches all 0f the above mentioned variations:

if ($request_uri ~* \.(ico|css|js|gif|jpe?g|png|pdf|rar|swf|zip)(\?[0-9]+)?.*$) {
 expires 1M;
 break;
}

This should go into your config file in “/etc/nginx/sites-available/whatever-your-config-file-is-called”.

Hope it helps

So you’ve just finished upgrading, everything went smooth and you now have some time to amend the core of WordPress to accommodate for the hacks and workarounds you have implemented over the time. You have styled, laid out and customised your comments, you have changed the default size of Gravatar, Avatar or any other user pictures you display only to find them going back to default (32px × 32px) as soon as you upgrade.

Worry not! In order to change it back to what it was, head to: “wp-includes/comment-template”, locate line #1322 (function wp_list_comments()) and change the defaults array value (“avatar_size”) from 32 to anything you like (we use 50px), so the result will read:

$defaults = array('walker' => null, 'max_depth' => '', 'style' => 'ul', 'callback' => null, 'end-callback' => null, 'type' => 'all',
'page' => '', 'per_page' => '', 'avatar_size' => 50, 'reverse_top_level' => null, 'reverse_children' => '');

And zet is zit. Save and refresh your comments page and enjoy, your user icons and images are exactly big (or small) as intended.

Helpful? Drop me a line here.

First of all: the following only applies to WordPress 2.8 and later every WordPress installation we came across since 2.8 (including the most current 3.0).

1. Open the default-widgets.php (to be found in the “wp-includes” folder of your blog)
2. Insert “<?php    the_excerpt();    ?>” on line 553 (straight after

   <li><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" title="<?php echo esc_attr(get_the_title() ? get_the_title() : get_the_ID()); ?>"><?php if ( get_the_title() ) the_title(); else the_ID(); ?> </a></li>

3. Save
4. Refresh a page with the widget displayed

Whilst I did look into installing a widget that would do this for me automatically I couldn’t find one that’d satisfy me. If you are using one please let me know which one, I’d love to consider automating the process. The reason I wrote this post is also because Google didn’t offer accurate enough or up-to-date results.

Helpful? Drop me a line…

Error response: <br /> <b>Warning</b>: fsockopen() [<a href='function.fsockopen'>function.fsockopen</a>]: unable to connect to ssl://www.google.com:443 (Unable to find the socket transport &quot;ssl&quot; - did you forget to enable it when you configured PHP?) in <b>D:\websites\*******\wp-includes\js\tinymce\plugins\spellchecker\classes\GoogleSpell.php</b> on line <b>86</b><br /> Could not open SSL connection to google.{"id":null,"result":[],"error":null?

There is a way hot to solve it: enable the php_curl extension in your php.ini. Just delete the “;” (semicolon) in front of this line: ;extension=php_curl.dll and you’re done. WordPress will now be able to check your spelling and suggest correct alternatives!

Any problems let me know.

BTW – it has nothing to do with any other library, simply just php_curl.dll library.