Dev Diary #7

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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)

• Breaking Through WooCommerce Restrictions with Super Speedy Filters: The Power of Pretty Permalinks - May 10, 2023
• Configuring Cloudflare for WordPress and WooCommerce: Boost Your Website Speed and Security - May 10, 2023
• Boost Your Marketplace Performance: Combining WCFM with the Super Speedy Pack - April 24, 2023

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It’s been a couple of weeks since the last dev diary, but there has been quite a bit of activity around bug fixes. As always, the product pages include a CHANGE LOG tab where you can see the full updates but here’s a summary:

Scalability Pro

The main changes here were related to the WHERE EXISTS optimisation. When this works (it’s still experimental unfortunately), it changes the WP_Query speed to 0.0009 seconds on our FoundThru demo site (800,000 products). This has been temporarily removed however due to people not reading the description about it being experimental then angrily demanding refunds because it doesn’t work in their case.

I will soon be working on a more stable version that involves rewriting the WP_Query class – similarly to how HyperDB works but better and faster.

External Images

There were a few changes to this plugin to improve compatibility with ALL themes. There are still some third-party plugins and some themes that insist on fetching images directly from the database that are not out-of-the-box compatible, but I’m working on spotting this and solving 100% theme and plugin compatibility.

In the meantime, the key thing to remember is to choose the default display option for products or images in your theme or plugins – i.e. don’t choose any of their advanced gallery options or whatever as these tend to be the parts of the code that use custom SQL to fetch images from the database.

Faster Woo Widgets

There was a WooCommerce update which involved a database update. Whilst this database update was underway, widgets were not displaying, but in the end once the DB update was complete, the widgets re-appeared. Other than that, there was an update released to fix a bug causing widgets to disappear on search-results pages IF you were using the standard LIKE operator (i.e. not using our Super Speedy Search plugin).

Multicurrencyalizer

You might have noticed a new currency button appearing on the bottom left of the website. This comes from my very own Multicurrencyalizer widget/plugin. I’ve had this widget for a while available for Squarespace users but over the past month I worked to produce a WordPress plugin which does the same. If you’ve been reading my dev diaries you might remember that I had a bunch of admin work to do. There’s still some admin in that area, but one of the key things I wanted to do was to simplify my accounts and revert back to only taking payments in GBP £ Sterling.

So – the Multicurrencyalizer only affects displayed prices, and then when people make purchases they still get charged in your store currency. This simplifies things for buyers and for sellers. It’s available for free with 3 currencies over on my Multilingualizer website and there’s a Pro version available too.

It’s quite new, although thoroughly tested, but if anyone sees any issues with it please do let me know.

Hiring

This is probably my favourite piece of news. I finally have enough capital to hire a developer to help me with bug fixes and feature requests, so I’ve started looking for good talent. I’m planning to hire 2 developers on a trial basis at the beginning of June and depending on how they go and how much availability they have, I’ll hopefully keep giving them both work so we can plough through the remaining bug reports and get onto the long-promised feature requests.

Spring bank holiday 27% discount

Someone complained on our chat system that we haven’t run a promotion for a while, so here it is – 27% off until the end of the 27th May. Use coupon SPRING2019.