WordPress

WordPress CPU usage

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It looks like I’m about to have my first GPU usage overage charge since I switched to MediaTemple due to a large usage spike during my switch from Drupal to WordPress.

Most of the heavy usage occurred during the actual switch and soon after the switch. Although WordPress has a reputation as a CPU hog, I was able to get the usage down to where it was before I switched.

As you can see in the usage chart below, enabling Zend optimizer helped, but enabling WP Super Cache really got it back down to where it was before the switch. Unfortunately WP Super Cache disables the WPTouch plugin, which reformats the page for an iPhone or iPod Touch.

One interesting thing I noticed is that 404 error pages use almost twice as much CPU as successful page requests, so I added static pages for a few invalid incoming links, which also made a big difference.

GPU Usage Report
Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

WordPress Conversion Notes

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I’ve cleaned up a few more issues with the Drupal to WordPress conversion. The major remaining issue is converting users. If I can get an acceptable solution for users, I’ll set up a public test site. I may just have to require all users to reset their password the first time they log in.

One common issue when switching content management systems is changing permalinks. If a lot of sites link to specific articles, all of their links could get broken. However, there’s a very simple solution with WordPress. Go to Permalink settings and create a custom link structure of /node/%post_id%. The article URLs will then remain the same as they were with Drupal.

Most WordPress themes include the full article on the home page, but for MacMegasite I’d like to have only an excerpt. That’s also very easy to fix: in the theme’s index.php, look for the_content() and change it to the_excerpt().

If you’d like to try out my conversion script or have any ideas to improve it, it’s available at drupal2wp.php.

Drupal Disappointment

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I’m becoming very disappointed with Drupal, due to version 6’s lack of backward compatibility. A lot of very basic modules still haven’t been upgraded to work with Drupal 6, yet they’re already working on Drupal 7. I still haven’t upgraded any of my sites to Drupal 6 and I probably won’t upgrade them. I doubt if I’ll be able to upgrade to version 7 either, without first upgrading to 6.

Corey Smith wrote about moving from WordPress to Drupal, but I’m thinking of going the opposite way. Daniel first brought up the idea of moving MacMegasite to WordPress, which I discounted at first because it would lose a lot of functionality.

I would be losing the forums, buddy lists, the point system, and some of the less-used features like feed aggregators & user blogs. Some of these features could be implemented with WordPress plugins and a separate forum system. The most critical feature is the ability to have multiple authors, which WordPress supports.

On the plus side, WordPress is a lot more attractive, with more professional looking themes, and a much nicer content entry screen. I’m concerned that WordPress seems to use more GPU according to MediaTemple’s GPU usage report. My Drupal sites use anywhere from 0.0005 to 0.0014 GPUs per hit, while this site uses 0.0017 or more GPUs per hit. It may be a due to the plugin configuration.

I’ve seen a few articles about moving from Drupal to WordPress, so I know it’s been done. It would be a big project, so I probably won’t do it until after I finish my current projects and release the iPhone apps I’m working on.

WordPress & WPMU don't mix

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If you’re running a WPMU site, *never* attempt to ‘update’ it to the latest version of WordPress (non-MU). Very Bad Things will happen. Plugins such as WP-Automatic-Update do exactly that and shouldn’t be used with WPMU. To recover from it, upload the current version of WPMU, get rid of the wp_options table in the database (WPMU uses wp_n_options for each blog), and run the upgrade script if needed.

iCrapps

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After my last post, I decided to create an entire site dedicated to bad iPhone application reviews, done with humor. If you want to gripe about the iPhone crapplication you just bought, come to iCrapps.com. If you’d like to post your own application reviews, contact me and I’ll sign you up as a contributor.

My first victim is Go Figure Lite. Enjoy!