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WordPress Plugins and Themes – Bad Business Practices

It isn’t uncommon to see freemium plugins in the official WordPress repo. The basic functionality of the plugin would be free. Some fancy features would come with a premium price. There is nothing wrong with such business model. What’s bad (business model) is switching the free features into paid features without notification. How does it feel if WordPress Foundation started charging a small fee to use the theme customizer?

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Aptitude or apt-get?

It’s 2017. I started using linux in 1999. Yes, I am getting older and older. I have always used apt-get on Debian based servers or distributions. However, in recent times, I am getting more frustrated to use apt-get. To be precise, I may want to install a package. So, I start to type apt-get. Then I may be unsure, if the package by the exact name exists. So, I tend to search the package/s, instead of installing it. Now, I have to use apt-cache to search packages. Sigh!

Note: Now we have apt to solve the above frustration!

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Crooky Cron

What Is Cron?

In simple terms, cron is a job scheduler in unix-like operating systems. It is also called as system cron or OS cron especially if the discussion is also about WP Cron. The job can be anything that needs to be done at a particular time. The job could be an one-time job (such as launching a rocket at a scheduled time) or repetitive (such as turning the lights on upon sunset and turning them off upon sunrise, every day!). Basically, the system cron is a program that runs all the time just to trigger a particular action at a particular time. You can throw hundreds of tasks on it to do at various intervals. System cron is like robot who is always available at your service!

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Recommend Settings for Redis Object Cache Plugin

WordPress Object Cache system allows transients to be stored in object cache backend, such as APC, Memcached or Redis. Without an object cache, the transients are stored in the database itself. This is the default. You could verify this yourself by looking at the (wp_)options table in the database. Fortunately, we have options to store these transients in the memory using one of the backends mentioned above. Among these, Redis has become stable and is production-ready. There are two WP plugins available that use Redis as WP Object Cache. First one is Eric Mann’s plugin. The second plugin is by Till Krüss who forked the former and made it better.

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Automatic Maintenance Mode

Often, I create a development site, such as dev.example.com, test.example.com or staging.example.com, before making any change in the production site. I even have a dedicated server to host the dev site of all my clients. If you don’t have a development site on your own, please do create it. It’d save you a lot of time in the future. Your production site might become overnight success and you can’t afford to tryout important changes in the production site.

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WP Super Cache with Caddy Web Server

Web server market is dominated by Apache HTTP server that enjoys its status because of its open source nature and because of its role in bringing the masses to the world wide web. Without it, we may not have had so many web hosts and web sites. However, its memory footprint has been a concern until today.

Nginx is the second largest in terms of Web Servers Market Share. While Nginx is still open source, the constant upselling of its commercial subscription may not be welcomed by everyone. Don’t get me wrong. I use Nginx too for its low memory footprint and its efficiency in serving static files.

Microsoft’s IIS is third most popular web server. It is rock solid, having its own use cases.

OpenLiteSpeed is very limited in its functionality.

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