svedish

And I have found the cuplprit. I wouldn’t have spotted it if I didn’t go through the plug-in files as well on both installations.

For some arcane reasons, that I can’t really explain, the installation files of exploit scanner were incomplete within the website which was showing the biggest amount of results. Probably something went wrong with my FTP client when I uploaded them. The ‘hashes-3.2.1.php’ file was empty, few more files were missing. Now that I have reinstalled the plug-in all works fine. I mean, there are some different results, but all seems quite normal.

Thanks for your help.

However, and I think it’s worth highlighting this point again, there are two ‘coincidences’ that make me think that the problem is different. The fact that it looks like the fact that the amount of scanned files is different (The website with more results reaches “Files scanned: 1000…loading-icon” before showing the results, the other site reaches only 250 before spitting out the results), the fact that the site with less results shows results only from wp-content, not even *one* from wp-admin and wp-includes and the fact that the website with more results (all from wp-admin and wp-includes) is the one where I have now replaced the folders wp-admin and wp-includes from the original installation files at least twice. Just coincidences? I think not.

However, as said, I’m more than happy to do whatever needs to be done to check your theory. As far as this behavior gets explained, I’m happy. ??

Thanks!

Hi Jon,

Ok, I now understand what you mean. Ok, I’m prepared to do some checks but I’m not sure 100% what to do. Would a comparison of two files inside an application that can check for differences be enough? If there’s anything else I can do can you please advice me?

Hi Jon,

Thanks for your answer, but I seriously doubt that the two installations files differ in any way. They both run version 3.2.1, wp-admin contains 87 files while wp-includes contains 100 files in both cases.I really don’t know what is going on, but I’m pretty sure the file count is the same in both installations, including plugins.

Any other ideas?
Thanks.

The server is set up so that the domain is served in both ways, with and without www, but WP converts any www request to a non www one making the blog, technically, live on a different domain.

Can I change those two settings safely to www?

You’re absolutely right! Thanks a lot. Take care. ??

hi Duck Boy, that’s very kind. Cheers ??

Hello,

thanks for your answer and sorry, no, I’m not sure I understand what you mean re: the filter in the header.php. Soz ??

By the way, a slightly unrelated question. Adding the pages to the feed exposed a page (friends links) where I have added links to directories and stuff like that. I really wanted to keep this page hidden from Google. Is there any way to exclude this page from the feed? Or is it maybe better to use a different template for it and maybe use a robots noindex tag in it?

Thanks a lot.

Genius! Thanks.

I hate the idea of using addons for every little thing. I’ll see how this works out. And also thanks for pointing out how the query in the URL works. Basically the feature is already there. At the end of the day pages are posts types! That’s right. ??

Thanks again, really appreciated.

Hi guys,

Just to add to my post, in case anyone has had the same problem. The day after (as in today) the RSS feed widget is working. Don’t ask me why… Hehe! ??

Ah ok, so you don’t move to online website to MAMP because it wouldn’t work because of the URLs. Right?

Hi guys,

I think this is an interesting discussion and I understand both the points of people advocating for always upgrading and the concerns of people that don’t want to touch something that is working. Touching means possibility of breaking (if you are not a big expert) and rework if your custom theme needs to be adapted to a new version of WP. Rework (again, if you are not an expert that knows the Codex inside out) means research to find out what needs to be done to fix any issues. This equals time and, often, it equates to money. I personally fall a bit in the second category. I got a blog that works on version 2.8.4 and as far as it works I’m happy. Also, I don’t hold the data of the White House or Credit Cards information on that blog section of our website and I have triple daily backup on the server. If someone breaks in it’s not the end of the world. I guess some times you judge situations in a very practical way, just weighting up pros and cons, don’t you? ??

However it’s interesting that you mention that you could try the upgrade first locally. So can please someone point out how one could go about it? Do I download all files and create a copy of the DB and then put it on my MAMP installation? What about all settings and links that make use of the online domain name? Wouldn’t that come up all messed up locally on MAMP?

Thanks a lot for any suggestion.

Hi TWD,

To be very hones I have been focusing on developing another website to learn version 3 a bit more and I have not done the upgrade yet. Another reason is that the blog / news module I should upgrade is the one of my company and I really don’t want to screw it up, so I am very very cautious about it. I imagine that it should be possible without problems, but I have designed a custom theme for this website and I’m scared that this could cause at least some problems. I hate the idea of sitting down to fix issues when this 2.8.4 is just working very well.

Please let us know if you do the leap and let us know if all goes smoothly.

Hi guys,

I see no one participated to this thread, which is a shame, but I did some research and, even though I’m not sure I got a totally conclusive answer, I have some information that I think is useful to share, just in case someone stumbles upon my same problem and needs help with it.

Through his blog, in the comments to the article that points out the issue of *poor* permalinks strings and performance, Otto kind of answered my question.

Essentially the Custom (permalink) Structure (where you can type the string of your choice) apparently applies ONLY to posts, therefore pages, if you have rewrite ON, will always be named according to the title of the page in the URL, like domain.com/name-of-page/. The problem seems to be that if you have a bad structure (only %postname% for instance) WordPress will struggle to differentiate between posts and pages and will start adding lots of internal ‘notes’ to the Data Base (in particular the wp-options table in the rewrite_rules record).

So, if you have a website made of lots of pages and a BAD permalink string, the problem starts to increase the bigger the website becomes. If you use a good permalink structure (which eliminates any doubt about what that URL refers to (like /%post_id%/%postname%/) even if this applies only to posts – and not pages – this is sufficient to scale up the website quite considerably without problems.

This is that I understood by reading a couple of articles and most comments underneath. Hope this helps someone because performance is crucial. Slow websites turn users away.

** Of course, it’s still to be understood for me if it’s a good thing that the engine looks through the DataBase following alphabetical indexes as opposed to numerical ones (e.g. title-of-my-page) but I like to use pages for non time sensitive data, and I like the idea of making small sites with WordPress, so I guess I’ll stick to it as far as the DataBase doesn’t get bloated because of lots of rubbish **.

Cheers!