Specifications for limits in Name Directory fields and overall index size

  • Resolved jaykaybee

    (@jaykaybee)


    6 years ago

    Dear Name Directory, I am evaluating your plug-in for possible use with a list of resources. Ideally I want to make sure the plug-in will be suited for many years of building this resource list for my consulting clients. Hence my pre-sale questions (I will be happy to make an annual donation if I use your plugin.)

    My plan is to “label” the resource in the name field, and add a link and longer discussion in the description field.

    (I really like the “more” capability in that regard! Also your export capability is reassuring for possible future migration if needed.)

    A few questions that I did not find covered in the past support or FAQ (apologies if I missed it):

    1. What is the character limit, if any, in the name and description fields?

    2. In my research of plugins, I found one plugin (Simple Link Directory) which states their users have experienced size limits: “If you are having problem with adding more items or saving a list or your changes in the list are not getting saved then it is most likely because of a limitation set in your server. Your server has a limit for how many form fields it will process at a time. So, after you have added a certain number of links, the server refuses to save the List. The server’s configuration that dictates this is max_input_vars. You need to Set it to a high limit like max_input_vars = 15000. Since this is a server setting – you may need to contact your hosting company’s support for this.” Do you know if your plug-in hits this kind of limit? My resource list may grow to be many thousands of entries.

    3. Do you have any documentation about how your plug-in saves entries in the underlying WordPress database? I am not a developer, but I hire developers to maintain my site, and always need to be thinking about our technical debt, in terms of if we ever want to move the database or copy/export etc.

    4. If I understand correctly, my entries will be listed in one long list – there is no pagination?

    5. My entries will not be alphabetical. So I will number them to order them sequentially. In my tests, if I number 1, 2, 3, …, 10, 11, … 99, 100, 101, the plug-in does not recognize the order of the numbers. It then lists my entries as 1, 10, 11, … 2, 20, 21,… 3, 30, 31, 32, etc. (Do you see how 1, 2, 3 are mingled alphabetically into 10, 20, 30?) Could you save me a bit of time and explain what behavior I can expect, for example if I anticipate having up to 9,999 entries, and I want them listed sequentially, could I list them with prefixes 00001, 00002, 00003? Or would it be better to try a decimal such as 1.001, 1.0002, … 9.999? Or do you have any other suggestions? What if I used a prefix reflecting the date of entry such as 20190313, 20190315, 20190401, would that be listed in order when alphabetized? Please advise.

    6. If I am perhaps trying too much to pound a square peg into a round hole with my use of your name directory for a more general resource list, could you suggest any other plug-ins? I have looked at “curated list” plug-ins, as well as plug-ins that just let you embed a database table. I like how simple yours is though! But I do need to plan for a large list of resources, in a sequential order that I specify with my numbering prefix.

    You can see my test page at https://members.jeffbelkora.com/resource-list-3/ although by the time that future readers may read this, it will likely be gone.

    Thank you for this plug-in and for your great support.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • Plugin Author Jeroen Peters

    (@jeroenpeters1986)

    Hi @jaykaybee,

    thanks for contacting me. You really took the time and be prepared, I appreciate that. I bet your customers will very much like that.

    Here I’ll try to answer your questions as good as possible:

    1. The database-size of the ‘name’ (subject, resource, movie, etc) is 255 characters. This is called a varchar in the database, 255 is it’s max (this is great when searching).
      The size for the description has a maximum of 16,777,215 characters, this is called mediumtext in the database.
    2. There is no limit as to the maximum entries in a directory that you can have in this plugin. The only limits are the ones from question 1. I don’t think you will run into the max_input_chars limit in this plugin because every name is stored and saved in one record. You can have unlimited records for as much as the plugin is concerned.
    3. I do not have explicit documentation on this, but it’s very easy. Once your developers checkout the code at https://plugins.svn.www.ads-software.com/name-directory/tags/1.13.1/install.php they will instantly know how I do it. The plugin doesn’t use ‘custom post types’ at this moment, so it’s very easy. (For your developers, WordPress installs a TEXT column as mediumtext, hence the 16 million chars).
    4. At this moment there is no pagination. However, I did receive a code update for this from a user just this week. I will check it out in the coming week and see if I can add this (with options for page size and enable/disable pagination). But at this very moment it isn’t available yet.
    5. As for sorting, the ordering is not “natural” (which orders 1,2,7,10,20), but it’s really on databaselevel ordering (1, 10, 2, 20, 7), as you have already seen. Your suggestion with the numbers prefixed by zeroes would work best if you want to create your own ordering. It would order 00001, 00010, 00100, 01000, 10000 in this same order. ??
    6. I cannot recommend other plugins. Not because this is my plugin, but I really don’t use any other of this sort. Actually, I created this plugin for my wife, when she wanted to make a list of suggestions to name your bird. She has her own Dutch bird-website ParkietenVilla.nl. It had to be a simple one, so that’s what I created. I keep it as simple as possible, and that seems to be what the users like about it. A specific ordering sequence is just not one of the features I have, but if you would one the numbers (00001, 00250, 00100, etc) to disappear, a little Javascript would take care of that. I can help with that if desired, or one of your developers ofcourse.

    I saw your test page. When you would change a few of your entries to prefix zeroes, you can see the ordering working ??

    Thanks for your compliments, and for asking these questions. It was fun to answer! A donation would not be required, but very much appreciated, especially if you would make money with it.

    Good luck with the choice! If you do choose my plugin, let me know, I alway like to know how the plugin is used. It’s cool to see what other people create with it.

    Kind regards,

    Jeroen Peters

    Thread Starter jaykaybee

    (@jaykaybee)

    Thank you Jeroen! I will do a little more testing on the sequential ordering and then make a decision. Your suggestion to use Javascript to hide the awkward numbers is intriguing. I will circle back to you if that seems like the way to go. I’m also putting my thinking cap on and will test how things get ordered if I use any special characters as prefixes. I am also going to think about using a date prefix like 20190313 or 2019-03-13 because it would have the advantage of also indicating chronological freshness, not just sequence. I will update you when I have made a decision, and will donate accordingly. Thanks!

    Plugin Author Jeroen Peters

    (@jeroenpeters1986)

    Hi @jaykaybee ,

    I did not mention it, but date ordering would also work great because of the leading zeroes in the dates for day and months.

    I would rather hide the date/Numbers with CSS but infortunately CSS has no first-word selector (yet).

    Have a good time testing the plugin, and no matter what the outcome, I am curious about your findings.

    Kind regards,

    Jeroen Peters

    Thread Starter jaykaybee

    (@jaykaybee)

    Hi Jeroen, I am experimenting with prefixing each entry with the date in ISO format, e.g. 2019-03-15. So far, I’m liking the results. I will post another thread with some feature requests/suggestions.

    Plugin Author Jeroen Peters

    (@jeroenpeters1986)

    Yes, that’s alright! Great to hear everything is to your liking so far.

    Plugin Author Jeroen Peters

    (@jeroenpeters1986)

    @jaykaybee Thanks for all of your contributions! Some of the ideas add too much for the simplicity of Name Directory. If you would like or need them, we could check if there is something that I can build especially for you if you need it, I sometimes do offer paid help. But I also read you have your own developers. It’s an open source plugin, so maybe they can achieve what you want.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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