jeffatrackaid
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Your emails may be failing DKIM/SPF validation or your server/domain could have low reputation.
One common issue is that the use of the mail() function in PHP causes DKIM/SPF email authentication systems to break. This is true on many cPanel/WHM shared hosting systems.
You can fix this issue by using a WP SMTP plugin. The SMTP plugins cause WP to send email just like you would from your email client. This way DKIM/SPF will work if it is working for your normal emails.
In Gmail, if you click no the 3 vertical dots below the print icon, you will find a “show original” option. Click on this and you can see the email headers. Gmail will disable if SPF/DKIM is enabled if it passes or fails. If it is failing, inbox placement will be difficult. And you will need to fix your DNS records.
If you’ve never heard of DKIM, I have a primer on these records here:
3 DNS Records Every Email Marketer Must KnowForum: Plugins
In reply to: [Edit Flow] Error adding usergroupThis was a custom function in a child theme – not part of the theme itself.
The function prevented non-admins from adding new tags not from adding existing tags.
Limiting Tags
The usage case is for a regional news organization with multiple staff and freelance writers. Historically, writers tagged their own posts without any consideration of existing tags. As a result, 50K posts had 25K tags, which sort of defeats their purpose and poorly curates content.Now the editorial staff sets the tags and authors must select from them. Authors sometimes ignore the request not to use new tags or do it by mistake & editors sometimes fail to spot new tags and remove them. So, this function is needed.
This permits better use of tag archives to curate content.
Custom Status
This could be a bug in our install but the exiting WP default statuses were not displayed in the list. There were no entries. Only the newly added status was listed.Once added, this was shown as the default.
My expectation is that the current core WP statuses would be included by default. You would then customize from there — easily mark inactive the ones that ones not used. (You should not be able to delete WP’s 8 default statuses).
This may make adoption and reversion of custom statuses easier. You may already have workflow built around the existing WP statuses, so you could continue to use that workflow without having to setup too many new status items. Also, if you reuse WP’s default statuses, reverting could be easy as well.
Forum: Plugins
In reply to: [Edit Flow] Error adding usergroupWe now have this working. Your hint about the taxonomy items helped us find the issue and it was unrelated to the plugin.
The theme had a special function to prevent non-admins from adding tags. Due to how it was written, it was also preventing Edit Flow from updating taxonomy.
Once we removed that function, the plugin worked as expected.
While this was custom code, I suspect similar plugins could have the same conflict.
Usage Note/Question:
During testing, we created a single custom status. Once created, we could not delete the status as it was listed as Default. There was no delete option provided.Is this correct behavior?
We removed it manually in the database.
Just wanted to update this case as I don’t see a lot of data about scaling NextGen or Varnish.
The problem turns out to be APC. With or without the APC caching plugin, some code somewhere caches title data into APC. Since we are using a cluster of servers, this fails.
In addition to the image issues noted previously, authors saw that it took a long time for title changes to appear on the home page.
The developers now are going to dig through the code to find out why titles are getting cached into APC on the home page. I am not sure if it has to do with Nextgen or not. Oddly, this does not imapact single blog post pages. (They just acquired the site so fixing up some issues).
I have since dropped in memcached object cache and configured it to use the frontend app servers as memcache servers. This resolved the issue as did completely removing APC cache.
So the lesson here is never assume anything when dealing with code from others … 🙂
We’ve ruled out cache/infrastructure setup as the problem. The problem is in the coding for the site itself.
The cache’s are simply manifesting the problem because they are grabbing copies of the HTML code that is very ephemeral otherwise.
So you can mark this as resolved as it has nothing to do with the slider plugin itself but other code issues.
I think we have found the issue. This is a working theory at this point as has more to do with WP than the plugin.
We get this result on the home page when the problem appears:
http://screencast.com/t/pNywpnpe5
The post title is displayed with no image.
As it turns out, the HTML code does not have a link to the image.
Workflow & Last-Modified/Dates
We are still testing, but the issue appears in part due to author workflow issues and last-modified dates.
On this site, the authors use a special category (slideshow) to add an image to the home page slide show. Logic in index.php takes care of this.
An issue arises when the authors save a post into the slideshow category before selecting a slideshow image.
Even if this is short lived, the home page temporarily has a page without an image. The system then caches this.
We had implemented a Last-Modified header to fix an issue with some readers. I think this header may be the issue.
When you toggle a category or slide show image on a post, it does not update the Last-modified date on the home page.
The result is that the incorrectly cached page can persist until some other function updates the home pages last-modified date.
We are going to remove the last-modified header and see if that helps.
The main issue is that WP has many options that can influence the home pages code but it does not properly update the last modified date. This is more of a WP issue than a plugin issue.
Thanks for your attention for this.
We having been working on a Varnish/Nginx/PHP-FPM stack where we no longer have to use things like W3TC, SuperCache or similar tools. We find those tools buggy and difficult to manage over a large number of sites.
Instead, we are working on adding smarter logic to varnish/nginx to promote caching at those levels.
We have some customers doing 50 million+ page views/mo, so caching is key.
Do you happen to know if the NextGen plugin require URL arguments to work properly? That could be an issue as our cache treats
www.domain.com/index.php?arg=$ARGthe same as
www.domain.com/index.phpThe request is passed to the backend but from the eyes of the cache this is the same object.
Thanks. We may need to buy a pro license if that would help speed up support on this issue.
We actually have 2 front-end Varnish caches that are load balanced behind 2 load balancers. There’s no affinity so a user can hit any of the nodes (eventually to be 5 app nodes).
One issue with this setup is the cache’s can diverge but that’s really an issue since all images should have an unique URL.
My only though is that NextGen thinks it already has an image but it actually does not. So when it comes time to display it the browser does not have a copy nor fetches a copy.
Forum: Fixing WordPress
In reply to: Unknown plugin overloading the serverThat is a lot of plugins. You may want to checkout
That can sometimes help you find the conflict.
I just blogged about this here:
WordPress Speed TipsIf P3 Profiler does not help, you can try the divide and conquer approach or NewRelic. Newrelic is great but requires some server-side work.
Forum: Fixing WordPress
In reply to: Optimize default WP installation?I recommend using http://www.webpagetest.org for optimization. It will give you better break down of each part of your site rather than scores.
Scores are great for gaining attracting but with today’s complex sites and 3rd party includes, they often can be misleading.
While you certainly want to improve browser caching (cache-control headers)
You ability to do so may depend on the type of hosting you are using.
Some plugins, like W3TC can help with caching.
When you get your results from WebPageTest.org. I often compare the response time of static pages (images, css, and js) to your PHP page.
If your static pages are fast and your PHP page is slow, you likely have some type or limitation at the server level. Could be lack of server optimization or constrained resources.
If you are using shared hosting, consider using WP Super Cache or W3TC to cache static pages of your site. This will help speed things up.
I’ve a couple of tips on dealing with performance issues here:
http://www.rackaid.com/blog/time-to-first-byte/
http://www.rackaid.com/blog/wordpress-slow-speed-up/