Just recently, I was facing a very slow response from my sites and even if I have wp-super cache installed, I feel that my sites are still crawling. Luckily, I stumbled a very good caching plugin that works extremely well with two other caching plugin.

Enter Hyper Cache.

Hyper Cache works like very much the same with wp-super cache except that it doesn’t mess up with your .htaccess. It also provides you real time statistics about the page being cached and the one being missed. So I decided to remove wp-super cache and have Hyper cache installed.

DB Cache Reloaded

As the name of the plugin says, It caches database queries. If this is combined with hyper cache you will notice the difference in page load times right away. (I used Yslow for firefox)

WP Minify

If you have a lot of javascripts and other CSS files on your blog then this plugin us a must. What it does is it combine all javascript and CSS and compressed them to improve page loading times.

Use all these three wordpress plugins on your shared hosting and see if it will make your wordpress blog much faster. You can check my diet blog and see how fast it loads.

Have you encountered this already?

This message always comes up whenever I try to update my WordPress core and plugins in the WP dashboard. It’s kinda frustrating actually because three of my most used blogs can’t be updated within wordpress. For the longest time, I didn’t bother to check what needs to be done in order for IT to work but this day is an exemption. With all my plugins getting outdated as well as my wordpress core, it’s time to take action.

If you’re missing that link to automatically upgrade your wordpress plugin, here’s how you can do it.

warning: make sure to back-up your wordpress database before continuing.

1. In phpMyAdmin, go to your WP options table. Find the record with the option_name as "wp_user_roles" (though if you’re smart that "wp_" will be something else – it matches your prefix for all WP tables). You can also use the search funtion of  MySQL.
2. Edit this record. If you don’t know serialized data, this is what it is – an array of values coded as a plain string. To get a better idea, paste your value into http://www.functions-online.com/unserialize.html and see what the array is in a more readable form.
3. You’ll probably not find 'update_plugins' => true under the administrator capabilities. This needs to be added in.
4. In the original record’s value it’ll start something like this: a:5:{s:13:"administrator";a:2:{s:4:"name";s:23:"Administrator|User role";s:12:"capabilities";a:69:{. That last number is the number of items in the array data that comes inside the following curly braces. Increase that number by one.
5. Now, just after that curly brace, add the new item: s:14:"update_plugins";b:1;. This means: "A string with 14 characters is the key; a boolean value of "1" (true) is its value."
6. Save the record and you should be done.

from: gyrus

MT VPS does not have one-click install, Dreamhost has it. Bluehost and HostPapa offers Fantastico and cPanel. But unfortunately….

Not all webhosting are created equal. Not all has Fantastico, not all has one-click installers and most importantly not all bloggers are techie enough to be able to install WordPress manually. For bloggers without much technical knowledge and who are starting to use WordPress as their blogging platform this could be a very problematic and a time consuming task. If you happen to be in this situation, don’t be upset. WordPress has become so easy to install nowadays even without Fantastico or one-click installers.

A better way to install WordPress…

Enter, EasyWP Install. It is a PHP script that you can upload to your server and access it by entering the web address www.yourdomain.com/easywp.php. That’s it. The script will automatically do the task of installing WordPress for you. No hassles at all. Once the installer is done, all you will see is the WordPress blog setup.

The script is free and licensed under the GPL.