Ring Of Blogs

April was our first month of using the themes-s3 plugin for offloading WordPress-Mu theme files to Amazon-S3. I have received the monthly bill from Amazon just a few days ago and thought I would share the numbers. So here you go ( the numbers in bold are the real costs):

$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used 0.006 GB-Mo $0.01
$0.10 per GB - all data transfer in 0.011 GB $0.01
$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out 2.784 GB $0.50
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests 3810 Requests $0.04
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests 2394466 Requests $2.39

The total monthly cost is $2.95 and most of the charge is for GET requests - 2,394,466 of them. As you can se, storage and data are very cheap and according to Amazon’s announcement, this month they will be even cheaper.

Overall performance has improved but offloading is not the only reason. We did a few more thing with our system but “saving” 2,394,466 requests and file servings must have helped.

I saw a few people looking for solutions to off-load wpmu files to Amazon-S3 service. This is something we wanted to try on our installation (just a few thousand blogs) so I wrote a plugin that will serve themes css and image files from S3.

The plugin uses the ‘stylesheet_directory_uri‘ filter to set the stylesheet uri (css file). In turn, the stylesheet uses the ‘url‘ method to call the image files of the theme so they get the same base url as the stylesheet. Most themes uses the ‘stylesheet_directory‘ call correctly so you will not run into trouble but if a theme uses it to call a php file you should change the call to use ‘template_directory‘.

Download: themes-s3.zip

Usage:

1. Signup for an Amazon-S3 account.
2. Create a bucket for your files. Since you have to select a globally unique name for your buckets I call it s3.domain.com were domain.com is my wpmu installation.
3. To point s3 to your bucket setup a CNAME record: s3 -> s3.domain.com.s3.amazonaws.com. (don’t forget that extra dot at the end).
4. Load your themes css and image files to your bucket keeping the exact directory structure for each theme (/wp-contents/themes/… ). You can use the excellent S3 FireFox Organizer to mange your files.
5. Edit the plugin to include your bucket name.
6. Place the plugin in the mu-plugins directory.
7. Test, test and test all your themes!

Whats next? The next step I’m planning is to off-load the Java Scripts in the wp-includes folder. Also planned is an option to serve the users files from S3. If you are interested in helping in any way please leave a comment and we can take it from there.

As I promised a few days ago, the 5 minutes video plugin is now ready. What is 5min:

5min is a place to find short video solutions for practical questions and a place for people to share their knowledge.

The idea behind 5min is very simple: any solution can be visually explained in no more than 5 minutes. Our goal is to create the first communal Life Videopedia allowing users from all over the globe to contribute their knowledge by sharing visual guides in areas such as arts, business, fashion, sports, health, tech, food, and much more.

Download: 5min-video.zip

Install: For WordPress-MU just place in the mu-plugins directory. For the personal version of WordPress drop the file in the plugins directory and activate it.

Usage: each 5min video has a special unique id. It is the number at the end of the viseo’s URL. Just copy the number of the video you want to embed and place it like shown in the followin example:

[5min:123]

If you face any problems please leave a comment below.

For a long time I wanted to be able to insert 5min.com videos on WordPress-Mu. Since their embedding code is not allowed on WPMU based system I have written a small plugin that will allow it. It will work on regular WP blogs as well. The plugin is still in testing but I will post it here soon. Here is a demo video using the plugin: How to Hack iPhone 1.1.2 and 1.1.3 with ZiPhone. Just check out this great player they have!

WordPress Mu 1.3.3 is out. Donncha announced:

I just released WordPress MU 1.3.3 and it’s now available for download. This is a critical security release based on WordPress 2.3.3 and everyone is encouraged to upgrade.

Here is the forum announcement. I also listed the 3 security fixes that were the reason for 1.3.2. If you haven’t upgraded yet, please do.

Please upgrade!

It took about 24 hours from the release of WPMU 1.3.2 RC until the formal version was released. Donncha announced:

WordPress MU 1.3.2 was tagged earlier today. This is a major security update that brings together the fixes in WordPress 2.3.2 and a number of critical WordPress MU specific security problems.

Details of the fixes will be posted to the WordPress MU forum next week to give administrators time to upgrade. This release should be seen as an urgent upgrade.
Thanks to Alex Concha for his help with this release.

You can find the download files here.

Donncha announced today that WPMU 1.3.2 RC (release candidate) is out:

Some highlights:
1. “Whitelisted options” means some of your plugins may break. Se here for more..
2. Signup control is fixed if you limit signups to blogs only.
3. Uploads via xmlrpc can now be checked via the wp_upload_bits filter.
4. Synced with WP 2.3.2 and lots of minor bug fixes.

Download it here.

Using the WP-Super Cache plugin with WordPress-MU is very simple.

WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly.

Instructions on how to install the plugin can be found in the readme file that comes with the plugin. As noted in the file, installing the plugin for WordPress-Mu differs just a bit from the regular WordPress install:

If you are using WordPress MU you will need to install this in ‘wp-content/mu-plugins/wp-super-cache/’ and the file wp-cache.php must be copied into the mu-plugins directory.

But there is a small problem with the plugin that I find very annoying. Although the cache is cleared with every post update and every theme change, when a user updates his blog’s widget settings the cache is not cleared and the user will not have a clue what is going on. This will result in a flood of support tickets.

I have been trying to solve this issue without changing any core files but came short. Finally I edited the wp-admin/widgets.php file and added just after line 266 the following code:

// Added to clear WP-Super Cache after the widgets are updated.
// Code by Elad Salomons http://www.ringofblogs.com
if(function_exists('wp_cache_no_postid')) {
wp_cache_no_postid(0);
}

If someone finds a way to use a plugin for this please let me know. By the way, this should work just the same for the regular WordPress.