Posts Tagged ‘content themes’

How to fix bug with WordPress domain extra trailing slash (Double wordpress trailing slash)

Monday, July 9th, 2012

How to fix bug with wordpress extra slash, domain double slash issue pic

2 of the wordpress installations, I take care for had been reported an annoying bug today by some colleagues.
The bug consisted in double trailing slash at the end of the domain url e.g.;

http://our-company-domainname.com//

As a result in the urls everywhere there was the double trailing slash appearing i.e.::

http://our-company-domainname.com//countact-us/
http://our-company-domainname.com//languages/

etc.

The bug was reported to happen in the multiolingual version of the wordpress based sites, as the Qtranslate plugin is used on this installations to achieve multiple languages it seemed at first logical that the double slash domain and url wordpress issues are caused for some reason by qTranslate.

Therefore, I initially looked for the cause of the problem, within the wordpress admin settings for qTranslate plugin. After not finding any clue pointing the bug to be related to qTranslate, I've then checked the settings for each individual wordpress Page and Post (There in posts usually one can manually set the exact url pointing to each post and page).
The double slash appeared also in each Post and Page and it wasn't possible to edit the complete URL address to remove the double trailin slashes. My next assumption was the cause for the double slash appearing on each site link is because of something wrong with the sites .htaccess, therefore I checked in the wp main sites directory .htaccess
Strangely .htacces seemed OKAY and there was any rule that somehow might lead to double slashes in URL. WP-sites .htaccess looked like so:
 

server:/home/wp-site1/www# cat .htaccess
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

# Rewrite rules for new content and scripts folder
RewriteRule ^jscripts/(.*)$ wp-includes/js/$1
RewriteRule ^gallery/(.*)$ wp-content/uploads/$1
RewriteRule ^modules/(.*)$ wp-content/plugins/$1
RewriteRule ^gui/(.*)/(.*)$ wp-content/themes/$1/$2 [L]

# Disable direct acceees to wp files if referer is not valid
#RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} .wp-*
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .wp-*
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !.*media-upload.php.*
#RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*cadia.*
#RewriteRule . /error404 [L]

# Standard WordPress rewrite
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

Onwards, I thought a possible way to fix bug by adding mod_rewrite rules in .htaccess which would do a redirect all requests to http://www.our-company-domainname.com//contact-us/ to http://www.our-company-domainname.com//contact-us/ etc. like so:

RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ /$1

This for unknown reasons to me didn't worked either, finally thanks God I remembered to check the variables in wp-config.php (some month ago or so I added there some variables in order to improve the wordpress websites opening times).

I've figured out I did a mistake in one of the variables by adding an ending slash to the URL. The variable added was:

define('WP_HOME','http://our-company-domainname.com/');

whether instead it should be without the ending trailing slash like so:

define('WP_HOME','http://our-company-domainname.com');

By removing the ending trailing slash:

define('WP_HOME','http://our-company-domainname.com/');

to:

define('WP_HOME','http://our-company-domainname.com');
fixed the issue.
Cheers 😉

Possible way to Improve wordpress performance with wp-config.php 4 config variables

Tuesday, March 6th, 2012

Wordpress improve performance wp-config.php logo chromium effect GIMP

Nowdays WordPress is ran by million of blogs and websites all around the net. I myself run wordpress for this blog in general wordpress behaves quite well in terms of performance. However as with time the visitors tend to increase, on frequently updated websites or blogs. As a consequence, the blog / website performance slowly starts to decrease as result of the MySQL server read / write operations creating I/O and CPU load overheads. Buying a new hardware and migrating the wordpress database is a possible solution, however for many small or middle size wordpress blogs en sites like mine this is not easy task. Getting a dedicated server or simply upgrading your home server hardware is expensive and time consuming process… In my efforts to maximize my hardware utilization and increase my blog decaying performance I've stumbled on the article Optimize WordPress performance with wp-config.php

According to the article there are 4 simple wp-config.php config directvies useful in decreasing a lot of queries to the MySQL server issued with each blog visitor.

define('WP_HOME','http://www.yourblog-or-siteurl.com');
define('WP_SITEURL','http://www.yourblog-or-siteurl.com');
define('TEMPLATEPATH', '/var/www/blog/wp-content/themes/default');
define('STYLESHEETPATH', '/var/www/blog/wp-content/themes/default');

1. WP_HOME and WP_SITEURL wp-config.php directvies

The WP_HOME and WP_SITEURL variables are used to hard-code the address of the wordpress blog or site url, so wordpress doesn't have to check everytime in the database on every user request to know it is own URL address.

2. TEMPLATEPATH and TEMPLATEPATH wp variables

This variables will surely improve performance to Wodpress blogs which doesn't implement caching. On wp install with enabled caching plugins like WordPress Super Cache, Hyper Cache or WordPress Db Cache is used, I don't know if this variables will have performance impact …

So far I have tested the vars on a couple of wordpress based installs with caching enabled and even on them it seems the pages load faster than before, but I cannot say this for sure as I did not check the site loading time in advance before hardcoding the vars.

Anyways even if the suggested variables couldn't make positive impact on performance, having the four variables in wp-config.php is a good practice for blogs or websites which are looking for extra clarity.
For multiple wordpress installations living on the same server, having defined the 4 vars in different wordpress seems like a good idea too.

How to change default Comments and No Comments location in WordPress in wordpress default theme

Tuesday, April 5th, 2011

For a number of time I’ve been planning to change my blog comments placement. Until this very day however I’ve kept the default wordpress theme’s Comments button placement.

I realize the default Comments button placement is a bit hard to see and not that much intuitive for the user that enters my blog for a first time.

My first guess was that there might be somewhere a wordpress plugin which will allow me to adjust my comments button placement.
After some research online and a realization that probably there is no such plugin existing yet. I’ve forced myself to tune it up myself.

It was clear to me that in order to change the it will be necessery to edit the WordPress templates files. I’m not a designer and when I hear about templates I usually get scared, however I took the time to take a look at the default wordpress template and find out actually that template modifications is actually rather easier than I thought.

My previous idea was that in order to edit templates you have to be some kind of CSS and HTML guru (which I’m not). Nevertheless it seems that in order to play and adjust in a good way the templates you don’t need ot be a pro.
Even an uneducated fool like myself can easily do almost everything he thinks of throughout few lines of code in the wp templates.

To get back to the major topic thanks God after a bit of review and reading of wordpress.org documentation and some user forums. I’ve figured out that in order to change my Comments placement you need to modify the file:
 

  • blog/wp-content/themes/default/index.php

In index.php find the line starting with:

You will notice within this opened paragraph the php code:

<?php the_tags('Tags: ', ', ', '
'); ?> Posted in <?php the_category(', ') ?>
| <?php edit_post_link('Edit', '', ' | '); ?>
<?php comments_popup_link('No Comments »', '1 Comment »', '% Comments »'); ?>

This is the actual default theme php code that makes the wordpress Comments or No Comments that maes the comments appear on the blog.

Now I’ve decided to let this be as it is but add one more Comment button to wordpress on a different location that is more appealing to my blog visitors

After quick evaluation I’ve determined that probably the best location that the Comments button should have is right after the end of the post text

If you think my idea for button placement is appropriate, to set this location for the Comments button, you will have to find the follwoing code in index.php:

<div class="entry">
<?php the_content('Read the rest of this entry »'); ?>
</div>

Right after the end of this code place the following code:

<?php comments_popup_link('No Comments »', '1 Comment »', '% Comments »'); ?>
</div>

How to add manually adsense code to your wordpress blog in blog index and single page posts

Thursday, April 7th, 2011

I’ve recently realized that the Easy Adsenser plugin which I used to place google adsense advertisements on my blog, is probably stealing some portion of my clicks.

There were some fraud reports on wordpress.org by people who have found out the author of Easy Adsenser rips clicks, by showing sometimes his own ad code even if the plugin is configured to not grant any clicks as a donation to the plugin author.
I don’t know how true this story is and I don’t have the time to observe the whole plugin code to say for sure if the rumors about clicks stealing are true.

However as I’m paying my internet access (that guarantees) by blog to stay online with some adsense advertisements and the adsense revenues are either equal to my internet tax or a bit higher (depending on the month), it’s quite unpleasent to hear someone is stealing from the ads clicks which still generate very low revenue.

Thus I took the time to read some blog posts online which gave me some hints on how can I directly place the google adsense advertisement code into the theme template files

My goal was to place one google adsense ad to appear right after the title of each article and one to appear as a vertical bar in the end of my sidebar.

In this article in short I’ll explain how I achieved this banner placement via the default wordpress template which obviously I use on my blog.

Let’s start:

1. Add adsense to the index page of the blog

Edit your blog/wp-content/themes/default/index.php file

Therein find the code:

<div id="content" class="narrowcolumn" role="main">

and right after this line put the following php code:

<?php
$postnum = 1;
$showadsense1 = 1;
?>

This code is necessery to assure the adsense code only appears on the first blog post from the blog index page

2. Find the code:

<small><?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?> <!-- by

Immediately after the code place the php code:

<?php if ($postnum == $showadsense1) {
echo '<div class="adsense" style="float:right;margin:12px;">;paste here your adsense code ...</div>';
} ?>

<?php $postnum++; ?>

Now with this changes, 1 adsense advertisements should start appearing right after your first and only on your blog post, next step is to place manually one more vertical adsense banner.

2. Place adsense vertical bannre in wordpress blog sidebar

Login with admin user to wordpress and navigate to:

Appearance -> Widgets

Among the available widgets you will notice the widget called Text click over: Add to add this widget to the list of widgets to appear on your blog sidebar.

Afterwards look up over the Sidebar list of widgets find the newly added Text widget and click over Edit to modify it’s content.

Further on put a Title for the widget or choose to leave the title field as blank if you don’t want a name to appear.
On the next textbox just paste your adsense code and you’re done. A simple refresh of your wordpress blog index page should show you a vertical banner with your adsense code.
! Note that if you have recently issued the adsense code it will take about 10-20 minutes until the banner starts showing up.

Until now wordpress is configured to show adsense adverts on the blog main page, as a next step we need to place the same adsense adverts to appear whether a single blog post is reviewed (opened).

Place an adsense advertisements to single posts opened

For that purpose it’s necessery to edit the file single.php it’s again located in blog/wp-content/themes/default

Once again you will first need to find the code:

if (have_posts())

Put the code after the end of the line on a new line:

<?php
// below code is for adsense
$postnum = 1;
$showadsense1 = 1;
?>

Next lookup in the file for the code:

<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>

On a new line after it place:

<?php if ($postnum == $showadsense1) { echo '<div class="adsense" style="float:right;margin:12px;"><script type="text/javascript"> place here your adsense code </div>';
} ?>

<?php $postnum++; ?>

That’s all now the adsense advertisements will be also showing on the single blog posts reviews found via some search engine (google, yahoo etc.).

Hope this article will be helpful to somebody, if so drop me a thanks line in comments 😉

How to add sidebar to single.php (Single Posts) to your wordpress blog default theme

Tuesday, April 12th, 2011

Until recently, I have used a default wordpress theme which historically is a bit old and used to be a default theme to the older versions of wordpress.
Since however, I’ve went to many updates and on the other hand I do like and enjoy the template I have decided to continue use it for my blog until this very day.

However this nice theme’s default behaviour is a bit weird, since by default the Single opened posts are configured in a way that the usual index page sidebar is missing.
As in the sidebar there are plenty of navigation buttons and search in the blog button, at a certain moment I have realized it’s probably not a good idea that the single.php (single blog posts) open up with the right sidebar missing.

Thus I’ve decided to put back the missing sidebar in the single posts, with a hope that this will be helpful to my readers and hence have positive impact on the overall blog user experience.

Doing so prooved to be rather easy, here is how I added back the right sidebar to my wordpress single posts :

1. Edit blog/wp-content/themes/default/single.php

debian:~# vim /var/www/blog/wp-content/themes/default/single.php

2. In the single.php look up for the code:

<div id="content" class="widecolumn">

Substitute this html code with:

<div id="content" class="narrowcolumn">

3. Next find the code: <?php get_footer(); ?>

Right before the get_footer(); php function add in the function;

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

Tadam! Refresh a single post in Firefox and you should see your blog index.php sidebar to show up.