I have a great appreciation for wordpress plugin developers. Having released a few simple plugins myself, I understand the time it takes to develop and test a quality plugin. On top of that, devoting time to support the plugin and keep it up-to-date as wordpress rapidly evolves is another effort in itself.

That’s why I appreciate the plugins Joost de Valk has been churning out.

Just recently I setup his Search Suggest plugin on our cake blog. This plugin offers a clever way to mimic some of the useful spelling suggest features offered by major search engines.

This is especially important on our cake blog. Using search meter, we’ve found that many people are searching for cakes using common misspellings. And while we’ve developed a plugin to correct common mispellings, this tactic doesn’t scale well as it requires us to hardcode common misspellings.

Joost’s plugin allows us to cover a wider array of mispellings. A good addition to this plugin would be a feature to allow wordpress admins the ability to add overrides for commonly misspelled words. This would be useful because the Yahoo API doesn’t work as well for word combinations. For example, the API will catch the misspelling for Haloween, but does not catch misspelling for “Haloween Cake“.

I suggest wordpress admins check out Joost’s complete lists of plugins.

I’ve been delaying the upgrade of our wedding cake blog to 2.6 because I wasn’t thrilled with the post revision option. However, there is an easy way to turn it off without having to edit any configuration files.

With this plugin, I can also turn off the autosave feature which often leads to multiple drafts of posts which I end up having to spend time deleting.

Once I had the plugin installed, the upgrade to WP 2.6.1 was smooth. I tested the upgrade first on our test blog and found no issues and then deployed it on our main site without any hitches.

Kudos the the wordpress team for another smooth upgrade.

Trent brought to light the unintended performance impact of just activating plugins without even using them in your theme. Highslide was one of the plugins he profiled.

As our wedding cake blog has grown in traffic we’ve been working to optimize our plugins to reduce overhead.

Using Charles Proxy Tool we took a look at the entire footprint of our site and started identifying optimization opportunity areas. One area were we made gains was modifying our plugins to only load javascript libraries when absolutely needed. For example if you are only using a plugin in your category section, is it really necessary to load that library for other sections of your blog?

This approach helped reduce our overall load time and hopefully should help keep our users happy…

If you are using the wordpress the_tags function and you want to exclude certain tags from showing up with associated posts you can use the following function in place of the_tags:
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Secure your wordpress blog.

Here are my notes related to my upgrade of our wedding cake blog to Wordpress 2.3:

1. Custom Query String refers to the old wp_categories table. Had to edit line 252 to reflect the new terms table:

Note: Looks like Moshu made this change and added tagging support. Download it here. This means I can now throttle the number of cakes that appear in a tag archive page.

2. Ran importer for UTW and updated theme to use new native tag commands. Everything worked fine, although I did have to run the following query in the backend to remove the dashes from the old UTW tags:

3. Dropped old wp_tags and wp_tag_synonyms tables

4. Upgraded Headspace2. I noticed headspace 2 doesn’t expose the ability to use tag names in your meta tag descriptions (someone please correct me if i’m wrong) So I hacked inline_tags.php and added the following on line 54:

Update: John has already updated his headspace2 plugin to include a %%tag%%. I highly recommend checking this plugin out. John does a tremendous job supporting the tag - please help support his efforts by donating.

5. Tags associated with a post are not searched by default, so I created a plugin to do that. I also use this plugin to correct user search miss-spellings. For example, try searching for brithday cakes on our wedding cake blog.

Note: An even better alternative to my plugin is John’s Search Unleashed plugin.

6. Updated my linking structure so that I don’t use trailing slashes for categories or tag pages

I’m usually frustrated when an online search returns another set of search results. Back in March, Matt Cutts spoke about this on his blog, and I’ve been meaning to ensure to exclude our cake search results from all search engines.

At first I thought about adding an exclusion in my robots.txt, but because the search results are built off of index.php, I figured a theme modification would be better.

To do this I added the following in my header.php:

Short and simple…:)

I recently upgraded one of our testing sites to WP 2.1 Here are some of the issues and fixes that I went through:
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