photo: turbine
Authentication Hacks
My first talk was on User Authentication with MU in Existing Ecosystems, all about integrating WP with LDAP/AD/CAS and other directory authentication schemes, as well as the hacks I did to make that integration bi-directional and deliver new user features. My slides are online (.MOV / .PDF), and you can read earlier blog post [...]
What is the current status of web servers…Is Apache 2.x “fast enough?”
Automattic uses Lightspeed (for PHP), nginx (for static content), and Apache (for media uploads). For WordPress-generated content, all server options are approximately the same speed.
What about APC?
Automattic uses beta versions of APC, and provides a 3-5x performance increase. It’s tied closely to the PHP [...]
Why BuddyPress? “Build passionate users around a specific niche.”
Do you have to become a social network? “No, look at GigaOM Pro,” a recently launched subscription research site based on BuddyPress.
But, yo do get “BYOTOS: bring your own terms of service.” That is, you get to control content and interactions. And your service won’t be subject [...]
90% of WordPress blogs he sees are spam. But for those who aren’t spammers and want to do better in Google….
“WordPress automatically solves a ton of SEO issues…WordPress takes care of 80-90% of SEO.”
Still, he recommends a few extra plugins:
Akismet — reduce spam comments
Cookies for Comments — reduce spam comments
FeedBurner FeedSmith
WP Super Cache — improve [...]
It’s not WordCamp Paris (running on 7 February), but WordCamp Edu Northeast is today. I’m there to meet up with fellow WordPressies and talk about extending WordPress with Holladay Penick and Dave Lester.
Squeezing the three of us into a single time slot requires quite a bit of cutting, especially if we hope to have time [...]
The huge problem with open source software is that there are no sales numbers to show how many people are using it. We know that WordPress.com hosts over three million blogs. We know EduBlogs powers nearly 200,000. But how many sites are hosted using the original, downloadable, self-installed and managed version of WordPress?
Now, the automatic [...]
I hadn’t heard of Global Voices Online, a community generated global group news blog, until Jeremy Clarke spoke of it at WordCamp. And I didn’t think the site, with it’s do-good premise, worked until I actually explored it for a while. But, well, it’s a bit fascinating.
Global Voices grew out of a one-day conference in [...]
Emil Ong is the Chief Evangelist and a lead developer for Caucho Technology, the developers of the Quercus PHP to Java compiler. The idea, I guess, is to write in PHP, deploy in Java, which some people say is better supported by the “enterprise.”
Ong claims 26% performance improvement over Apache + mod_php + APC. [...]
“Apache is like Microsoft Word, it has a million options but you only need six. Nginx does those six things, and it does five of them 50 times faster than Apache.” –Chris Lea.
Why? No forking. No loading of unnecessary components. Fast CGI. And to prove it’s not as complex as you might think, he’s installing [...]
I’ve been pretty aware of the risks of SQL injection and am militant about keeping my database interactions clean. Mark Jaquith today reminded me about the need to make sure my browser output is filtered through clean_url(), sanitize_url(), and attribute_escape(). Furthermore, we all need to remember current_user_can(), check_admin_referer(), and nonces.
