Dev Diary #2

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Dave Hilditch

Founder at WP Intense

Author of the WPI performance guides and creator and coder of the plugins sold by WP Intense.

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Latest posts by Dave Hilditch (see all)

• Running huge imports with WP All Import reliably (yes, even if you use Cloudflare!) - September 19, 2023
• New SQL enhancement for Scalability Pro to fix WooCommerce long-running query in the product-hero block - August 31, 2023
• Create a static favicon.ico to avoid surplus PHP requests for rush traffic - July 25, 2023

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Last week, I was aiming to release upgrades for Faster Woo Widgets and External Images. Neither of these materialised in time unfortunately, due to some other bugs being reported and other fixes being implemented.

Fixed last week

An upgrade for Scalability Pro has been coded to add a new database-based caching system for wp-admin screens. This per-row cache helps you view your massive WooCommerce -> Orders pages far more quickly as well as your Products admin pages. This fix will be released early this week. It’s already applied against FoundThru and a couple of client sites, and it’s looking good.

I also coded up an option for Super Speedy Search to use fulltext search on orders pages. This is proving tricky to get working perfectly because fulltext searches are really best against text like descriptions and titles. They don’t work as well for phone numbers or partial matches.

I’m still working on this, but I’ve moved it to the backburner for now.

This weeks updates

There is an update coming for Scalability Pro, but there are also the new features being added to Faster Woo Widgets that I mentioned in last weeks dev diary.

I’ve also been notified about some warnings and notices from some of the plugins – these are restricted to certain option sets, but anyway a fix is coming to remove these warnings and notices.

The External Images upgrade will now be deferred until next week unless I can fit it in this week. There are some other updates to Scalability Pro coming this week too, including more control options in the settings page to have more granular control over which features are disabled and when.

[Update] Midweek update

Just to let all concerned know, I’m still working on the upgrade to Faster Woo Widgets. The key issue slowing me down is the refactoring work I’m undertaking to make proper code re-use between permalink and non-permalink hyperlinks generated by the plugin.

I’m getting there on this and this work fixes 2 of the bugs reported (related to ‘search attributes’) as well as some feature updates.

On a separate note, there will probably be a minor release of External Images this week to add an extra theme to the compatibility list. Normally that plugin works straight out of the box, but some themes just refuse to grab thumbnail images using the correct functions, and/or they remove the standard WordPress or WooCommerce hooks.