Questions before purchasing this plugin

Hi Acon,
Sorry for the slow reply. Not all emails come in from the forum, sometimes they go missing. I do read up on the RSS feed then, but hadn’t done that this week yet ??

I see that WordPress post content is a longtext field. This guestbook uses a longtext field as well for content. You can store 4GB of text in there.
https://chartio.com/resources/tutorials/understanding-strorage-sizes-for-mysql-text-data-types/

My local test install has 120,000 entries now and some queries are marked as slow by Query Monitor. With 10,000 entries this should not yet be a problem.
I assume indexing might help. Using a single field for status might help as well. That might need to be looked into in the future for this plugin.

In the readme is described how you can best format the CSV. There is also an example file in the zip file. If you base it on that structure it should be fine.

Not sure what “Comment link address” is. That is a permalink for the guestbook entry? That will change anyway and will be based on the ID, which is numerated starting from 1.
Not sure how to deal with SEO and redirects. That depends a bit on how the url for each entry was made. The plugin ‘redirection’ is well known and might be of help here. The standard overview is based on pages with rolling entries.
The addon has support for some xml-sitemap plugins so they can be more easily indexed by search engines.

There is a search widget for the frontend. On the dashboard is a page with entries overview, that one has only search based on author ID or email.

Please be aware that this guestbook has no threading. If you have threading in your discussions you could look into standard comments.

The plugin here on www.ads-software.com is free as in GPL license and gratis. The addon is GPL as well and costs only one time money. A few years ago I sold it on a marketplace, but when moving to my own webshop I did not know which customers had bought it before.
Anyway, it might be simplest to start with the free plugin, and afterwards, if it suits you, you can consider buying the addon.

Anything else? ??

Hi Marcel @mpol ,

I’m glad that you read my question here. Thanks for your detailed reply.

I checked the link you provided and it’s good to know that the longtext field can contain so much info (who’s going to submit an entry with 4GB of text? ?? ).

As for the backlinks, we need to find a way to redirect all comment link addresses (yes the permalinks of all entries) to the new ones in your guestbook plugin. I purchased a plugin called Permalink Manager Pro a while ago and will see if it can help.

Two questions about your reply here:

I assume indexing might help. Using a single field for status might help as well. That might need to be looked into in the future for this plugin.

My knowledge covers almost zero percentage about the database technology so could you please tell me more about how to do the “indexing” or “single field for status”? Are these something that I need to do with the CSV file?

Please be aware that this guestbook has no threading. If you have threading in your discussions you could look into standard comments.

Could you please explain what “threading” is?

Thanks. ??

Regards,

Acon

For better indexing you don’t need to do anything with the CSV. It is just me telling myself I do need to look into this some day ??

Threading means a discussion, like:

top level message
- first reply
  - second reply

WordPress Comments support threading where people can reply to comments and have a discussion.
The Guestbook plugin is really a guestbook, you can leave a message that will be then on the top of the list. You cannot really reply to a message and have it show up below the parent message.

Hi Marcel @mpol ,

Perfect! Our current guestbook has no threading too. I’ll start trying your plugin as soon as we got the crawled CSV file.

One more question: I saw Chinese (Taiwan) as one of the supported languages. That’s exactly what we need. Does it mean we can switch to that language with one click in the plugin dashboard without needing to translate everyone single word in the UI?

By the way the current entries on our guestbook are encoded in BIG5, which is used for traditional Mandarin Chinese characters in Taiwan. Is your plugin compatible with this encoding format? If your plugin only supports Unicode, what would you recommend to do the conversion?

Thanks again.

Regards,

Acon

Okay, sounds good.

Chinese (Taiwan) is 100% translated, which means that after installing the plugin you can install the translation at Dashboard > Plugins.

I am not that familiar with BIG5 versus Unicode, but I believe that all software and data should now be in Unicode. Converting the CSV before importing should most probably be the right thing.
If you start with a new CSV, you want to make sure it is BIG5 before adding your data so it is all consistent. That way the conversion is only one small step. Then if everything seems fine with the CSV as BIG5, convert it to UTF8 (without BOM) and it should import fine.

10,000 messages at once might be a bit much, you could split it into 2,000 messages over 5 CSV files.

Edit: For software to do the conversion, I have no real advise. Most code editors and IDE’s should offer that as an option. I would think for Windows, Notepad++ is a good one. For Linux I always use Geany. For MacOS I have no idea, there should be several good options as well.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 2 months ago by Marcel Pol.

Hi Marcel @mpol ,

Thanks for confirming that and for the tips to import our data. I have Notepad++ (not a coder though) but didn’t know it can be used to convert CSV encoding. Will have to do some research and experiments. My scraping tool allows me to export the data as a G sheet, a CSV file or a JSON file. The characters on the G sheet look fine, but they become unidentifiable symbols on the CSV. Have tried the JSON file yet.

No worries. I reckon this just need to be done by trial and error.

Regards,

Acon

Hi Marcel @mpol ,

I just installed the plugin and noticed this when I was playing around with the dashboard:

https://prnt.sc/23tiy8a

I always use my Microsoft Excel 2019 to deal with data and CSV files. Is it really not a good idea to use it for organising data and generating CSV for your plugin? Can you please let me know the reason?

Regards,

Acon

I don’t have Microsoft Excel, to be honest. I did see a lot of support questions from users that used it, and when they used LibreOffice for CSV files, all issues were resolved.

If you do want to use it, there are Just a few gotcha’s:
– utf8 encoding of the file (without BOM)
– comma’s for separating values
– double quotes for encapsulating values
– UNIX line endings
– probably something I forgot ??

Libreoffice uses sane defaults. Microsoft has insane defaults that are even depending on the language pack that you use.
It is not in my power to help people prepare a CSV file in Excel that will work, the only thing in my power is to advise LibreOffice Calc of which I do know that it works.

Simple test if you want to try it ??
Import the example file that is in the zip file into Excell. Change two values. Export it to CSV again. See if you can manage to create a CSV that will be imported in the plugin.

Hi Marcel @mpol ,

Thanks for these great tips. Will forward that to our database guy.

Will look into LibreOffice Calc too since it’s free. ??

Cheers.

Regards,
Acon