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WordPress 2.5 - Plugin Compatibility

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Yesterday, I upgraded WordPress to the latest version 2.5, which I liked much! For the upgrade I used a WordPress updater script I had written some months ago, which, by the way, still remains unreleased due to lack of time to prepare a stable release… Anyway, the script has worked quite well and the transition to the new WP version has been exceptionally smooth. I won’t go into much detail about the improvements of the new WordPress release. For such details please read the official announcement on the WordPress development blog. Despite the numerous improvements, the database schema hasn’t changed that much, so most existent plugins should work just fine. As far as the plugins that have been created and published by G-Loaded/CodeTRAX are concerned, all of them seem to work flawlessly in version 2.5. In case you run into trouble, please report the issue ASAP. Thanks.

How to fix the WordPress database’s character-set issue

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WordPress version 2.2 or newer allows the user to define the MySQL database character set and the collation (get familiar with these terms) inside wp-config.php. Today, after upgrading to the newest version of WordPress, I decided to also update this file and append the statement that sets the database encoding to ‘utf8‘. But, as soon as I started validating the RSS feed as part of a general test of the new WordPress version, I noticed some weird characters which were the cause of several warnings and errors in the feed validator’s output. This seemed a bit strange as I was certain that my data was being stored using the UTF-8 encoding! Having spent over two hours trying to dump the WordPress database, perform all the required conversions and re-import the fixed dump back to MySQL using all the possible combinations of character sets, I started thinking that I had made some very serious mistake while configuring MySQL itself or WordPress! Fortunately, this was not true…

Beginning with version 2.2, fresh installations of WordPress use UTF-8 as the default encoding for the database, tables and text/string fields, while older versions used latin1-encoded tables (with latin1_swedish_ci collation) by default. This means that the user data, regardless of its own encoding, was being stored in latin1 tables etc, which, eventually, has added extra trouble to all old (pre-v2.2) WordPress users, especially those who write in their national language. The inevitable changes in version 2.2 give old WP users two choices:

1. Either continue storing their data to latin1 MySQL tables, regardless of the actual encoding of that data, which obviously means to continue making the same mistake forever,
2. or follow the painful procedure outlined in the Codex in order to efficiently convert the character set of the database, tables and fields to the appropriate one, but without affecting the already encoded user data.

Of course, I chose solution No.2 so to get rid of this idiotic way of storing my data once and for all! The real problem is that the second solution is only provided in a “theoritical” form - no official database converters. Fortunately, a heroic WP user has coded a small UTF-8 database converter which can be used as a usual plugin and do the dirty job with a few clicks. Although this plugin has not been tested with the newest WordPress 2.5, after checking the part of the code that performs the actual conversion, I tried it and I think it works just fine. Afterwards, I checked the encodings of the WP tables (through a phpMyAdmin installation) and it seems that the plugin has done a good job. Also, the text is displayed correctly throughout G-Loaded.eu and its feeds, so, I recommend it…

I should state that this issue is totally irrelevant to the WordPress 2.5 release, which is probably one of the best releases I’ve seen so far. I just happened to try to resolve the database character-set issue today. Somehow, this post reminds me of the issue with the backslashes inside pre HTML tags I had written about in the past.

As always, if you notice any peculiar behaviour throughout the website, especially weird characters, feel free to contact me by email or use the forums.

Setting Up LVM On Top Of Software RAID Subsystem - RHEL & Fedora

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Setting Up LVM On Top Of Software RAID Subsystem - RHEL & Fedora

Here
is a quick look how to build an LVM on top of RAID 1 array, so that we combine
the power of these two. This kind of setup is extremely useful in situations
where we want a file server to store large amounts of data which provides
a centralized backup, storage space for downloadable files via ftp/http, and that
may grow enormously in the coming years after the initial setup.

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Installing The Open Source Ticket Request System (OTRS) On Fedora 8

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Installing The Open Source Ticket Request System (OTRS) On Fedora 8

This document describes how to set up the Open Ticket Request System (OTRS) on Fedora 8. Taken from the OTRS page: “OTRS
is an Open source Ticket Request System (also well known as trouble
ticket system) with many features to manage customer telephone calls
and e-mails. The system is built to allow your support, sales,
pre-sales, billing, internal IT, helpdesk, etc. department to react
quickly to inbound inquiries.”

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Speed Up Your System With Preload On Fedora 8

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Speed Up Your System With Preload On Fedora 8

This document describes how to install preload on Fedora 8. Preload
is an adaptive readahead daemon - it will monitor which programs you
use at the most. Parts of these programs will be cached to speed up
their load time.

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VMware Server v1.04 On Fedora 8 With Kernel 2.6.24

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VMware Server v1.04 On Fedora 8 With Kernel 2.6.24

This document describes how to set up VMware Server v1.04 on Fedora 8 with the brand-new kernel 2.6.24 (2.6.24.3-12.fc8).

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Osmo Personal Organizer On Fedora 8

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Osmo Personal Organizer On Fedora 8

This document describes how to install and use Osmo on Fedora 8. Taken from the Osmo web page: “Osmo
is a handy personal organizer, which includes calendar, tasks manager
and address book modules. It was designed to be a small, easy to use
and good looking PIM tool to help to manage personal information. In
its current state the organizer is quite convenient to use - for
example, the user can perform nearly all operations using the keyboard.
Also, a lot of parameters are configurable to meet the user’s
preferences. On the technical side, Osmo is GTK+ based tool which uses
a plain XML database to store all personal data.”

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Setting Up A High-Availability Load Balancer (With Failover and Session Support) With HAProxy/Heartbeat On Fedora 8

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Setting Up A High-Availability Load Balancer (With Failover and Session Support) With HAProxy/Heartbeat On Fedora 8

This document describes how to set up a two-node load balancer in an
active/passive configuration with HAProxy and heartbeat on Fedora 8.
The load balancer acts between the user and two (or more) Apache web
servers that hold the same content. The load balancer passes the
requests to the web servers and it also checks their health. If one of
them is down, all requests will automatically be redirected to the
remaining web server(s). In addition to that, the two load balancer
nodes monitor each other using heartbeat. If the master fails, the
slave becomes the master - users won’t notice any disruption of the
service. HAProxy is session-aware - you can use it with any web
application that makes use of sessions like forums, shopping carts, etc.

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Back Up Your Files With Fwbackups On Fedora 8

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Back Up Your Files With Fwbackups On Fedora 8

This document describes how to set up, configure and use Fwbackups
on a Fedora 8 desktop. The result is an easy-to-use backup system for
desktop usage. Fwbackups creates partial backups which can be stored
locally or on a removable device. You have also the option to run
scheduled backups.

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Online analysis of a webpage’s loading time

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Have you ever wondered how much time it takes a browser to load your web page across the internet or how this total webpage load time is distributed among the various HTTP requests that are sent to the web server in order to retrieve all the objects, including images, javascript, flash animations, et cetera your page contains? Recently, I’ve been wondering about such things, so I started searching for services that can provide both an estimation of a web page’s loading time and also some analysis about how long the retrieval of each of its objects lasts. The one that caught my attention is Pingdom’s Full Page Test. The service can be used free of charge. I guess the visual representation of the web page loading time and all the available features are quite satisfactory for a free service.