I'm experimenting this days with Elgg – An Open Source Free Software GPLed Social Network which enables users to quickly create Communities.
Elgg is really easy to install and all it requires is a Linux/BSD or Windows system with PHP, MySQL and Apache installed.
Elgg is provided with dozens of nice plugins which for a short time enables individual to create fully operational Social Network like facebook.
Many people nowdays use facebook without realizing how bad facebook is how it breaks their privacy.
Facebook is actually a spy network, it stores data and pictures, likings and user behaviour of million of users around the world.
This needs to be stopped somehow, maybe if people start using the free software networks like elgg to build a mini-community which has profound interests in a certain spheres of work, life and amusement.
The evil empire of facebook will slowly start to loose it's position and the small projects networks based on Elgg and the other Free Software Social Networks which are currently available will start to rise up.
I'm currently really a novice into Elgg but I'm more convinced that the guys who develop it and contribute to it in terms of handy plugins have done really a great job.
It's ultra easy even for non professional middle level user to setup himself an Elgg install.
The installation procedure is not much harder than a simple wordpress blog or joomla based website install.
The installation of elgg takes no more than 10 to 20 minutes, the plugin installation and setup time further could take few days but in the end you have a full featured Social Network! This is really amazing.
The installation of new plugins in elgg is also fool proof / easy all you have to do to equip a newly installed elgg with plugins is to go to it's root directory and look for the mod directory. The new plugins which needs to be installed, could be directly downloaded and saved via links, elinks, lynx or even wget to the elgg installation directory.
Most of the elgg plugins comes in a form of zip files so after being installed simply executing:
server:/home/elgg/mysocialnetwork/mod# unzip walltowall.zip
....
The above cmd will for example unzip the WallToWall elgg plugin and the plugin will be further ready to be enabled via the administrator user set upped during your elgg installation.
The configurations of elgg are being accomplished via:
Administration -> Tool Administration
I should I'm still experimenting with Elgg social, until this very moment I've installed the following elgg plugins:
aaudio
akismet
artfolio
blog
bookmarks
buddytalk
captcha
categories
chat
crontrigger
custom_index
custom_profile_fields
default_widgets
diagnostics
elgg-ebuddy
embed
embedvideo
emoticons
externalpages
family
fbconnect
file
file_tree
flyers
forum
friend_request
friends
garbagecollector
groups
htmlawed
invitations
invitefriends
izap_videos
kaltura_video
lastfm
likes
logbrowser
logrotate
lucygames
members
messageboard
messages
milockergames_frameme
noscript_message
notifications
pages
polls
profile
reportedcontent
resume
river_comments
riverdashboard
riverfaces
search
siteaccess
tagcloud
theme_simpleneutral
thewire
tidypics
tidypicsExt
tinymce
twitter
twitterservice
user_contact_list
uservalidationbyemail
walltowall
weather
wp1
zaudio
One very handy feature I truly enjoy about Elgg is that it gives every user an own blog which or in other words when somebody registers in Elgg, he automatically gets a personal blog! How cool this is Yeash 😉
The Elgg photo upload plugin is also another interesting story. The photo plugin is a way better from my first impressions than facebook's buggy upload client.
Elgg also uses heavily jquery for it's various operations and the user experience feels very interactive.
Of course as with all free software things are not perfect some of the elgg plugins or (mods) as they are called are not working.
For example I couldn't make by so far the weather plugin which is supposed to report the weather.
Maybe some tweakening of the not working plugins will easily make them working. What is really important is that the Elgg basis system looks and seems to work really good and enpowers the user with a social network alternatives to the ugly facebook.
In order to experiment with Elgg and I've established a small social network targetting at University College and School Students called MockATeacher – mockateacher.com>/i>. The idea behind is to help students in their report writting by providing them with a place where they can meet other students and share files.
Some other aspects I've planned for MockATeacher is to build a small community of people who would like to share about idiot teachers, teacher stupid sayings as well as to mock the idiotic type of education that we and our children are up to in this age.
Just to close up, if you're looking for some time to spend in experimenting in an enjoyable way you definitely need to install elgg and play with it 😉
How to resolve (fix) WordPress wp-cron.php errors like “POST /wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron HTTP/1.0″ 404” / What is wp-cron.php and what it does
Monday, March 12th, 2012One of the WordPress websites hosted on our dedicated server produces all the time a wp-cron.php 404 error messages like:
xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx - - [15/Apr/2010:06:32:12 -0600] "POST /wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron HTTP/1.0
I did not know until recently, whatwp-cron.php does, so I checked in google and red a bit. Many of the places, I've red are aa bit unclear and doesn't give good exlanation on what exactly wp-cron.php does. I wrote this post in hope it will shed some more light on wp-config.php and how this major 404 issue is solved..
So
what is wp-cron.php doing?
Suppose you're writting a new post and you want to take advantage of WordPress functionality to schedule a post to appear Online at specific time:
The Publish Immediately, field execution is being issued on the scheduled time thanks to the wp-cron.php periodic invocation.
Another example for wp-cron.php operation is in handling flushing of WP old HTML Caches generated by some wordpress caching plugin like W3 Total Cache
wp-cron.php takes care for dozens of other stuff silently in the background. That's why many wordpress plugins are depending heavily on wp-cron.php proper periodic execution. Therefore if something is wrong with wp-config.php, this makes wordpress based blog or website partially working or not working at all.
Our company wp-cron.php errors case
In our case the:
212.235.185.131 – – [15/Apr/2010:06:32:12 -0600] "POST /wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron HTTP/1.0" 404
is occuring in Apache access.log (after each unique vistor request to wordpress!.), this is cause wp-cron.php is invoked on each new site visitor site request.
This puts a "vain load" on the Apache Server, attempting constatly to invoke the script … always returning not found 404 err.
As a consequence, the WP website experiences "weird" problems all the time. An illustration of a problem caused by the impoper wp-cron.php execution is when we are adding new plugins to WP.
Lets say a new wordpress extension is download, installed and enabled in order to add new useful functioanlity to the site.
Most of the time this new plugin would be malfunctioning if for example it is prepared to add some kind of new html form or change something on some or all the wordpress HTML generated pages.WP cache directory is manually deleted with rm -rf /var/www/blog/wp-content/cache/…
This troubles are result of wp-config.php's inability to update settings in wp SQL database, after each new user request to our site.
So the newly added plugin website functionality is not showing up at all, until
I don't know how thi whole wp-config.php mess occured, however my guess is whoever installed this wordpress has messed something in the install procedure.
Anyways, as I researched thoroughfully, I red many people complaining of having experienced same wp-config.php 404 errs. As I red, most of the people troubles were caused by their shared hosting prohibiting the wp-cron.php execution.
It appears many shared hostings providers choose, to disable the wordpress default wp-cron.php execution. The reason is probably the script puts heavy load on shared hosting servers and makes troubles with server overloads.
Anyhow, since our company server is adedicated server I can tell for sure in our case wordpress had no restrictions for how and when wp-cron.php is invoked.
I've seen also some posts online claiming, the wp-cron.php issues are caused of improper localhost records in /etc/hosts, after a thorough examination I did not found any hosts problems:
hipo@debian:~$ grep -i 127.0.0.1 /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
You see from below paste, our server, /etc/hosts has perfectly correct 127.0.0.1 records.
Changing default way wp-cron.php is executed
As I've learned it is generally a good idea for WordPress based websites which contain tens of thousands of visitors, to alter the default way wp-cron.php is handled. Doing so will achieve some efficiency and improve server hardware utilization.
Invoking the script, after each visitor request can put a heavy "useless" burden on the server CPU. In most wordpress based websites, the script did not need to make frequent changes in the DB, as new comments in posts did not happen often. In most wordpress installs out there, big changes in the wordpress are not common.
Therefore, a good frequency to exec wp-cron.php, for wordpress blogs getting only a couple of user comments per hour is, half an hour cron routine.
To disable automatic invocation of wp-cron.php, after each visitor request open /var/www/blog/wp-config.php and nearby the line 30 or 40, put:
define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', true);
An important note to make here is that it makes sense the position in wp-config.php, where define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', true); is placed. If for instance you put it at the end of file or near the end of the file, this setting will not take affect.
With that said be sure to put the variable define, somewhere along the file initial defines or it will not work.
Next, with Apache non-root privileged user lets say www-data, httpd, www depending on the Linux distribution or BSD Unix type add a php CLI line to invoke wp-cron.php every half an hour:
linux:~# crontab -u www-data -e
0,30 * * * * cd /var/www/blog; /usr/bin/php /var/www/blog/wp-cron.php 2>&1 >/dev/null
To assure, the php CLI (Command Language Interface) interpreter is capable of properly interpreting the wp-cron.php, check wp-cron.php for syntax errors with cmd:
linux:~# php -l /var/www/blog/wp-cron.php
No syntax errors detected in /var/www/blog/wp-cron.php
That's all, 404 wp-cron.php error messages will not appear anymore in access.log! 🙂
Just for those who can find the root of the /wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron HTTP/1.0" 404 and fix the issue in some other way (I'll be glad to know how?), there is also another external way to invoke wp-cron.php with a request directly to the webserver with short cron invocation via wget or lynx text browser.
– Here is how to call wp-cron.php every half an hour with lynxPut inside any non-privileged user, something like:
01,30 * * * * /usr/bin/lynx -dump "http://www.your-domain-url.com/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron" 2>&1 >/dev/null
– Call wp-cron.php every 30 mins with wget:
01,30 * * * * /usr/bin/wget -q "http://www.your-domain-url.com/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron"
Invoke the wp-cron.php less frequently, saves the server from processing the wp-cron.php thousands of useless times.
Altering the way wp-cron.php works should be seen immediately as the reduced server load should drop a bit.
Consider you might need to play with the script exec frequency until you get, best fit cron timing. For my company case there are only up to 3 new article posted a week, hence too high frequence of wp-cron.php invocations is useless.
With blog where new posts occur once a day a script schedule frequency of 6 up to 12 hours should be ok.
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Posted in System Administration, Web and CMS, Wordpress | 3 Comments »