[wp-hackers] Forum: High query count

[Chris Meller]

On Jan 24, 2006, at 5:57 PM, Michel Valdrighi wrote:

> On 1/24/06, Mark Jaquith <mark.wordpress at txfx.net> wrote:
>> On Jan 24, 2006, at 10:02 AM, David Chait wrote:
>>> BTW, Ryan, would be nice if the dashboard had in red letters "Your
>>> hosting setup doesn't support caching to disk!" -- no joke,
>
> That's risking hosts getting angry customers feedback like "they say
> they support WP but WP says the host is not OK!", so the message
> should make it clear that it's something the user could fix by
> herself.

Big red letters may be a bit much... I dislike software that inspires  
panic with things like that which may or may not be a real issue.  
Still, I think it should be mentioned somewhere. The "Alerts" (or  
similar) tab on the Dashboard would keep it out of the way for people  
who are aware there's a problem, yet still allow you to see what's  
going on.

You could then include the ability to acknowledge or simply close an  
alert (anyone used Veritas Backup Exec? I'm thinking along the lines  
of their alerts here). After you acknowledge a respective error, it  
never shows back up again, or simply suppresses any visible  
notification and is confined to the special panel that displays that  
information exclusively. That way, we could tell people there may be  
something wrong on the Dashboard and point their attention to the  
Alerts area so they could investigate before their entire site blows  
up because their wp-content folder wasn't properly permissioned after  
a server migration (grrrrr again).

>
>
>> It might be nice to throw up errors for other common problems such
>> as /wp-content/ not being writable.
>>
>
> It might be even nicer to take this idea further and define "server
> capabilities" flags, that could be used for dependency checking in
> plugins.
>
> After all, maybe I don't want to have wp-content writable.

We would certainly want some method for dismissing errors, because  
there are a lot of situations in which this would come up -- if your  
host runs in safe mode and there's no way for you to change it, you  
don't want to get slapped with a big red error message every time you  
load a page.

> But if I activate a plugin that needs it, it would be better if it got
> deactivated right away with a message telling me that it needs to be
> able to write to wp-content.
> All too often the reality is different: plugin tries to write, fails
> and spews an error, WP's output buffering makes the page blank, user
> is confused. By enabling plugins to prevent such failures, WP would
> become more solid to both plugin developers and users.

I like this idea, because you're right. A lot of plugin / theme  
authors (myself included) don't do enough error checking -- it works  
on all the setups they've tested just fine, but then again they don't  
have PHP running in safe mode anywhere, so it barfs on some random  
user somewhere and no one knows why. If the plugin could just list a  
few requirements (we'd have to dumb them down, since I imagine a lot  
of people wouldn't know what safe mode allows or prohibits -- myself  
included again) and have WP check against them automagically when the  
plugin is activated, it'd be great.

So, did a certain someone just volunteer to write this code for us? :)

--
Chris Meller
chris at doesnthaveone.com