One of the things I spoke about in Social Media Marketing for Dummies was the power of syndication within the digital space. Syndication enables small businesses to re-purpose content across multiple channels to engage users in a consistent manner without have to create entirely new content. We use WordPress as our hub for syndicating information out to various channels.

For Pink Cake Box, we have employed this strategy across many of our channels and with the introduction of iFrames for facebook fan pages we took advantage of this on our facebook fan page.

We created a facebook application that pulls content from our wordpress site and repurposes that content in a format that fits within the confines of facebooks design parameters. The page allows users to interact by leveraging our search feature and displays our most recent cakes and most popular cakes.

This enables us to create a dynamic and fresh facebook page that is automatically updated whenever our wordpress site is updated.

This is just the first step and as Jeff states, there are further opportunities to personalize the experience for facebook users. I’m very excited about this new feature and look forward to seeing more innovations in this space.

And, for every twenty votes we receive, we’ll donate $1 to Icing Smiles, a non-profit organization that provides custom celebration cakes and other treats to families impacted by critical illness of a child.

Our goal is 10,000 votes and a $500 donation to Icing Smiles!

In conversations with our web hosting provider they claimed our traffic was in the top .01% of sites they host and the implementation of our web server was not optimized to handle such a load. They suggested we take a look at NGINX which is a lighter and faster web server as compared to Apache. (Check out this web server comparison they did)

We decided to take a different route and ended up implementing three options which appeared to have helped:

1) Optimized Xcache values
2) Implemented a content delivery netowork for static assets using Amazon Cloudfront
3) Optimized wordpress plugins/queries

Here are some details for others who may be having similar issues:

Optimizing xCache

Our web hosting provider offers Xcache for caching php pages, but the default values were not doing the job. After reading through this excellent xcache post from Chris Meisinger, I started testing a variety of different values for the slot and cache sizes (xcache.size & xcache.slots) and finally settled on optimal sizes that worked best with our site.

I used apache benchmark tool to help test different configuration options:

ab -n 1000 -c 20 http://blog.pinkcakebox.com

Implementing Amazon Cloudfront

Setting up Amazon cloudfront was a breeze. Dreamhost holds your hand through the process and the only work I really had to do was update our wordpress database and any HTML files to point to our new images.pinkcakebox.com.

We noticed a TREMENDOUS performance boost from this approach and it also helped ease the burden on Apache.

Note there are plenty of plugins to help ease the process of integrating Amazon Cloudfront/S3 with WordPress. I personally did not try any of them.

Optimized wordpress plugins/queries

Last but not least I spent time tuning some of my existing plugins and identified some troublesome bottlenecks in third-party plugins. I used this excellent plugin from Frank Bültge which lists all your wordpress queries with timings.

As a result of this exercise I was able to tune my search tags plugin as documented here.

The other bottleneck I had was with Version 3.2.4.2 of SexyBookmarks. It was adding 5 seconds of load time to my main blog page. I did NOT investigate if these performance issues were specific to the plugin itself or perhaps a conflict the Sexy Boomarks plugin and another plugin on the site.

All I know is that as soon as I disabled the plugin my wordpress load time decreased by 5 seconds. The folks at shareaholic.com do a great job maintaining this plugin so I’m more apt to believe it was some issue specific with our wordpress site (which is highly customized so I wouldn’t be surprised).

Here’s an excerpt from the case study:

Pink Cake Box, at PinkCakeBox.com, bakes spectacular cakes, cupcakes, and cookies for special occasions such as weddings, bar and bat mitzvahs, birthdays, baby showers, and bridal showers. Its cakes have been featured in Modern Bride, People, Elegant Bride, The Knot, a Martha Stewart TV special, and two of TLC’s Ultimate Cake-Off competitions. It recently won one of them with their Legoland Birthday cake. Pink Cake Box typically delivers within 100 miles of its Denville, New Jersey, storefront, but ships cookies nationally.

So I took a look at the queries I wrote for searching tags and realized they were incredibly inefficient.So I rewrote them and performance has greatly improved.

The positive here is that search on Pink Cake Box is now noticeable faster. For example a search across Wedding Cakes is not greatly improved…

Thanks Loïc!

Download the latest version of the plugin here

Our facebook app now has access to over 1200+ cakes and is automatically updated whenever we post new cakes. I’m proud to say that I believe this is the largest library of cakes available via any facebook application.

So I want to talk a little bit about how we integrated the wordpress search function. There are a few ways to do this, and the two options I considered were:

1. Integrate directly to wordpress default search using the ?s parameter
2. Create a custom search query

Ultimately I choose option 2 so I could create a search results template file in my wordpress theme that was separate from our default search results template. The new search results template file (which is pictured below) was customized to fit the look and feel of the facebook application:

So here are the steps I took to integrate wordpress search with my facebook application:

Step 1) Created a new search results template file that took in a GET parameter as a search term. The search results template uses the GET parameter as input into a custom query to search tags and the post content. Finally it returns the results and formats to match the look and feel of the facebook application.

Here’s the section of code that takes the GET Parameter and runs the custom search query:

These results are returned and looped through to produce the search results output. I use the meta data tags embedded in our posts to pull the appropriate cake thumbnail. This query also restricts itself to only searching categories related to cookies, cakes and cupcakes and not other general categories that do not have cake related photos.

Step 2) Once the wordpress template was all setup, I modified our Facebook canvas page to add a search box which posts to the new search results template page:

Here’s a photo of how it looks:

Step 3) The last piece of integration is ensuring the new search results template can interface back with the facebook application once the user has chosen the cake they want to send to their friends. So there is one more post from the search results template back to the facebook application page that handles the next step of allowing the user to choose the friend they want to send the cake too:

Here is the overall workflow for further clarity:

What’s cool about this application is the tight integration with wordpress that enabled me to to expand it to almost our entire portfolio of online cakes. I was able to tie the facebook API with the wordpress API which allowed me to tap into the existing cakes posted in our online cake galleries. The application is setup so that it can pull based on any wordpress tag or category. So anytime a new cake is posted it automatically shows up in the facebook application.

This application illustrates the power and advantage of the structured wordpress environment and its ability to re-purpose content across multiple channels.

Here is a screenshot of the application landing page for sweet 16 cakes:

Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like when a friend receives one of our cakes:

Also, the application helps drive traffic and links to our site since each time you send a cake via facebook it includes a link back to the wordpress blog post about the cake. This approach aligns with advice from Matt Cutts who has always talked about providing “useful services” to help attract high quality links and traffic.

In the book, Jan will spotlight some of the things Pink Cake Box has done as it relates to Social Media. I put a lot of effort ensuring I provided some insightful and actionable advice for small business owners – I hope everyone enjoys it!

The admin panel isn’t done yet, but the key user-facing pieces are completed. Download the latest version here:

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