Blog of Jeff A blog about programming and random other things.

Wordpress Blues

Recently I've been having some Wordpress troubles. First wordpress randomly started displaying the install screen. As I was wondering what happened, I ignorantly attempted to recreate the site (via the install.php) which resulting in a bunch of database failure which hinted at the corrupt database (a simple repair fixed that).

Afterwards wordpress was functioning fine, but wp-supercache behaved strangely where it couldn't access its cache directory anymore and since the webserver user created it, I had no permissions to modify it (under a shared hosting account). Luckily, a quick help ticket to my host resolved that issue. Still doesn't explain why the plugin would suddenly lose access to files it had permission to read & write all-a-long.

And wordpress without some cache is horrendously slow (at least with shared hosting plan). Without caching would take approximately 5-10 seconds to load this front page. For modern blogging software, some kind of caching should be built-in and not have to be provided by a third party. A wordpress blog without some form a caching is a disaster waiting to happen.

However, my foolish attempt to reinstall wordpress brought a load of problems. Besides the new users that were successfully created (which I trivially removed), the categories and tags features of the blog no longer work, although the tag listing still display for some odd reason. Although this is partially due to my fault of (attempting to) walk through the installation process.

This ordeal lead me to a realization about the extremely limited feature set I use on wordpress:

• Pages
• Posting (kind of, see next bullet)
• XML-RPC (for live writer)
• Akismet
• FeedBurner / RSS / ATOM feeds
• WP Super Cache
• Google XML Sitemaps
• Add to Any (for social networks stuff. Although I probably should try to actively promote content-related posts)
• Disqus (for commenting)
• WP Stats (for the stat-whore inside every blogger)

Is it just me, or has anyone else experienced difficulty with wordpress or its plugins? How many plugins do you actually use?

Update: Now categories and tags now function correctly... not sure what's going on.