Flash Fonts

For those of you out there not aware of these, take a look at my site at http://www.takeitnational.com.  I purchased this theme from Theme Forest, with Flash Fonts, which for some reason has nicer themes than most places where you can buy a quick theme. You will notice the red fonts on the home page are not your normal css or text fonts.  They are each individual Flash Fonts.  This third party application actually converts each letter one by one.  Why is this cool?  Basically it allows my site to have nicely curned fonts that are very appealing compared with some of the text and css that currently have limits.  Also, the real key to Flash Fonts is the <h1> and <h2> tagging are not messed up for SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  This means that, in the past, when Flash was used, it would hose up your SEO text on the page, since Flash was not so SEO friendly.  It also meant in the past with Flash that the website would slow down.  But this does not seem to be much of an issue with flash fonts.  Where to get them.  I am using Sifr (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement), which is an easier to implement version of this stuff.  Best answer is just find a theme with them built in already and you will get them…

Amazing Ajax Graphs And Charts

Another thing that somebody pointed out to me recently is this amazing array of ajax graphs.  See this article.  Basically with just simple ajax and html you can pop dynamic charts onto your wordpress page.  Years ago I was addicted to EasyCharts, one of the first open source chart, javascript, chart produc the market.  Now it is a cornucopia of charting and graphing to go around.

When A Post Is Not A Post

Asked to give a few people advice recently about their WooThemes themes they purchased I looked carefully how the Woothemes get implemented and this seems to be a pattern.  What they basically do is ask you create a post category.  Let’s say we call that “Features”.  Then they have this admin section in the back that allows you to select the “Features” category to show up in a particular part of the home page.  It could be a calendar-like section or a middle section, sidebar left or right or testimonials.  Notice that I do not use the word “Widget” in discussing this method.  Because what they typically do is use posts as content in places on the home page or throughout the site.  On the area where it is the full blog, the site knows to ignore “Features”, because that is how this works.  Woothemes and other theme makers use posts as static content, so that is why the blog ignores it.  Some use categories to do this, others use tagging.  For the events area, the site uses additional fields which show up under posts, down below on the page.  This way the posts are tracked as “events”  (You have to go into their special admin and set events as the event category).  These are part of many clever ways that WordPress is used to solve content issues.

Next time, an article on new words, that WordPress has sealed in the english language…

Load Balancing, Why Do It?

• Redundancy
  If one of your servers crashes, hangs ups or experiences a hiccup, you have another hot one ready to serve pages.
• Server Speed
  If you are overloading one server, obviously a second server will resolve some of the speed issues if you are having IO issues.  This is only if you are TechCrunch or Huffington Post.
• HTML Loading Issues
  If you are far away from the server, yes it could take a long time to view a page.  Ever wonder how long it takes to reach your website from Buenos Aires.  If you wanted to know, look at a service like Gomez or Keynote.  Not sure of any free services out there to tell you this, and if you find one definitely let me know the URL!

WordPress On Multiple Servers

I am sure Automattic has been doing this for the larger clients at a fee, and that is where some of their revenue is coming from, because this is where the pain kicks in, while implementing WordPress.  If you have two servers that need to split the WordPress traffic load, this will work fine, as long as you can call them both the same name, with separate IP addresses.  This is where the loadbalancer does its job.  Not an expert at loadbalancing, but I have heard of an F4.  Basically, it splits the load and sends web traffic either round robin or on some algorithm to each site.  It can be tweaked if one box is acting up or doing something wrong.  If there is extremely high volume of traffic, you could go to many boxes, but then you may want to look at cloud computing.

Load Balancing Across Multiple Locations

Now this is where the bigger issues come into play.  For instance, if you were to creating multiple load balanced servers in different data center, including different international locations, you will have to deal with the issue of syncing of files and of syncing of either DB latency issues or distributed DBs.

The MySQL Database Issues

Sudden MySQL and pretty much every DB becomes an issue when you are running a site in mutiple locations.  You can do it, and we are going to be running WordPress in a multi server environment soon, so we can experience the latency first hand.  By latency, we are referring to a site in one city, let’s say Houston, and the DB in Los Angeles.  That would mean every DB query would have to cross the country and there would be some delay in the query result arriving.   This would also mean that there is a chance the site will be worse off than before the new remote servers go online, and what would be the point of that.

Solutions For The WordPress MySQL DB Issue

First solution to consider is Caching of content.  Looking at wp-cache 2, and Super Cache, it is possible to have the individual sites create their own cache locally after one DB hit, or the first one after the cache times out locally.  This would only make sense if you have a website with little dynamic content.  This is good for web pages, but for rapidly changing blog comments or forums, it does not work, because it would mean it never will update proper.  However, experimenting with this is a good thing, and will help.

The second solution is to come up with a way for the MySQL DBs to be sync’d on a regular basis, preferably offline.  Possibly one way would be every hour or 5 minutes a script would kick off and check for any changes.  The changes would be sync’d to the other DBs in the distributed network and you would be able to keep all the sites local MySQL and speedy.  Good luck on this one.  Maybe a plugin to do this, is the answer.

So let’s say you use WordPress for  your personal blog.  Fine.  You know how to set it up; you know how to find a free template; you know how to load a plugin and configure a plugin.  As you know there are over 4,000 plugins to choose from.  Let’s say you are even at a higher level, with years of programming experience, or system experience and have an IT job…

So, you recommend to your employer, hey let’s switch over our sites to WordPress!  Sounds good, right?  Well, first off, yes, it is a good decision. There are a dozen other rational decisions out there, some of which are better for enterprise-level solutions.  However, the reasons why companies implement enterprise solutions are different from a single site you run with some limited pages and posting needs.  There is scalability, security, user approvals, multi-lingual (localization), an ability to manage upgrades, an ability to implement features. The list goes on and on.

So why did I recommend to my employer that we implement WordPress across our diversified 5-8 corporate sites and essentially go against all the negatives.  Most people when they hear WordPress, only think blog.  There is one big reason.  Not exactly what WordPress is today, but what is it going to be tomorrow, and how much support and critical mass it appears to be getting.  More specifically, to new users or WordPress, it can do a lot more than Post Blog Articles.  It can do everything from hosting pages, categorize those pages, to rapidly implement designs, and this is not covering the 4,000+ plugins out there.

Last time I checked, but over 2.8 million people were downloading every new stable version of WordPress.  The number and type of plugins, as I will prove, in this series of articles, saved my butt many times over the past few months.  And as each version of WordPress comes out, it gets closer and closer to ultimately what I exactly need.

What is interesting is we were able to either write or fill in the gaps where WordPress did not.  We created our internal plugins on the open source base product by Automattic, and found the pieces that ultimately filled in the puzzle.

Let’s get to the nitty gritty of the positives.  Along with this WordPress conversion all our home grown and purchased CMS’s were slowly removed.  That means less  code management, and less developer time and energy focused on fixing our code.  That is the beauty of open source.  Instead of fixing basic problems with an old Cold Fusion CMS we had, we now have the developer working on plugins that add new functionality we need to be fully enterprise.

The standardization of the backend UI.  Now all our sites have the same backend and everybody knows what to expect.  I have not had to give a WordPress UI class yet.  This standardization of how the plugins fit and how the themes just pop in, has made it universal for the standards of the design work to be completed, and has set expectations for outside designers of what we require to implement their design.  In many cases the designer has been separated from the coding effort and can work independently on their own wordpress version and when they are ready to implement, the design pops right in.

Then there is the manpower issue.  Other than design work, there really has not been a need to hire an additional developer we were looking to hire back when we were supporting multiple CMS’s.  We are running a lot of these sites with a part-time plugin developer, a content manager and SAs moving around the code.

There fundamentals of WordPress Enterprise are in place.  It will cut your dev costs.  It will standardize parts of your applications that make it actually possible to get an upgrade.  It will make your world more predictable managing websites.  It allows you to access thousands of free open source code to solve programming issues that developers would have to hired for.

If anything, you would think this will reduce programming.  In fact we still need lots of programming, but for specialized, strategic dev purposes.  What I mean is we used to spend a lot of time on the login, the membership system and other basic functions that WordPress manages for us.  Now these are less of a concern and integration and plugins are really where it is at.

In my next article, I will discuss the specific system issues, the plugins we use, the plugins we are developing or have developed, theme management, code management and how we got through the more mundane implementaton issues.

Click Here to go to Article 2, Issues and Plugins
Click Here to go to Article 3, Problems During Implementation