A brief technical post. In the past week, I’ve offered this advice to a couple of people, so I thought I might as well write it down here, once and for all.

In running WriteToReply, JISCPress and blogs.lincoln, I’ve learned a bit about optimising WordPress’ use of RAM. Basically, the steps I use are:

1. wp-super-cache for file caching
2. eaccelerator (or xcache – don’t use APC, it doesn’t work with wp-super-cache) for PHP caching
3. MySQL usually comes with a number of sample config files (in /usr/share/mysql/) for small, medium, large and huge servers. Try the medium config file and see how you get on. Compare the variables in each file to understand how you can tweak my.cnf. Also, try tune mysql, though this might recommend more resource for optimal performance.

For your comparison, WriteToReply runs on a minimal Ubuntu VPS with 1.5GB RAM and hosts a small Mediawiki site and a WordPress network  of 34 live sites. I know from experience that reducing RAM to just 1GB will cause the server to freeze within a matter of hours as it runs out of memory.

Got any tips? I’d love to hear about them. Thanks.

My presentation for the RSP event: Doing it differently. No slides, just a live demo using the outline below.

1. WordPress is an excellent feed generator:

http://joss.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2009/04/15/addicted-to-feeds/

2. It's also an excellent, personal, scholarly CMS

http://joss.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2009/08/25/scholarly-publishing-with-wordpress/

3. If you have an RSS feed, you can create other document types, too

http://joss.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2010/01/04/creating-a-pdf-or-ebook-from-an-rss-feed/

4. We conceived a WordPress site as a document (and a WordPress
Multisite install as a personal/team/dept/institutional multi-document
authoring environment)

http://jiscpress.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk
http://jiscpress.org

5. Here's my MA Dissertation as a WordPress site using digress.it

http://tait.josswinn.org/

6. WordPress allows you to perform certain actions on feeds, such as
reversing the post/section order

http://tait.josswinn.org/feed/?orderby=post_date&order=ASC

7. EPrints allows you to 'capture' data from a URI

http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/2004/

8. Suck it into your feed reader, for storage/reading - it's searchable
there, too.

https://www.google.com/reader/view/feed/http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/2004/2/index.html%253Forderby%253Dpost_date%2526order%253DASC

9. And use another service to create an ebook or PDF version

http://www.feedbooks.com/news

10. RSS. Loosely joined services:

Author: WordPress -->
                   Preserve: EPrints -->
                                        Read: GReader
                                              Feedbooks
                                              etc...

11. p.s. How about using EPrints to drive a WordPress site, too? Why extend a perfectly good preservation and storage application to include web 2.0 features, when it can be used to populate a cutting edge CMS with repo data?

Together with our Web Manager, Chris Goddard, I ran a session on the use of WordPress in HE at the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2010. It was good to see all chairs taken and people seemed to get something out of it. It was useful for me, too, to find out about how WordPress is being used at other universities. A video interview followed.

WordPress beyond blogging from UKOLN on Vimeo.

These are slides to accompany an eight minute ‘Lightning Talk’ for the dev8D conference in London, 24-27th February 2010. Each slide is a link to a blog post I have written on ways to use WordPress and WordPress Multi User, that are not about blogging.

Brief notes are available from slide 12 onwards.