Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

The Behold User Forum is now open again. I’ve not implemented everything into it yet, but it is quite functional and should now allow public conversations about Behold again.

It feels great to finally get it up. Now instead of me developing it in the dark, it can be used while I put the final sets of features into it.

I’m very happy with its look and the integration I’ve done between this Blog and the Forum. Over the next couple of days, I’ll blog here about some of its features and what’s still left to do with it.

In the meantime, feel free now to post to the Forum. (Use the Forum tab at the top of this page to get there)

Finishing up the main screens for the Forum wasn’t hard. Yes, that only took about a week.

But I’m the type who is a bit too much of a perfectionist. I saw too many little things that could be changed. And there were a number of differences between the Blog and the Forum that would be better if they were done the same. There were just too many loose ends to leave alone.

For example, there were a number of different views of the Forum that were available, but I saw a way to put them mostly on a single view allowing you to logically click on the headings to change the order. This required some custom programming, but was doable.

Then once you view a specific topic, you might want to see the previous or following topic. In the blog, I have a next and previous post button. WordPress supplies that functionality, but bbPress does not make this available. Figuring out properly what the next and previous topics are in bbPress is not easy. You have to do at least one, and maybe two new queries and have to know on the topic page which view you are looking at. I’m not sure if I’ll get this one in right now or not.

RSS feeds are another matter. Still a bit of work to do there. Neither WordPress nor bbPress does a great job of them.

The layout of the Search results from bbPress are nicer than those from WordPress. They summarize the results and bold the highlighted search term. But WordPress paginates the results nicely. So I picked the best out of both, redid the excerpt function so that words would not be broken and there would not be a “…” at the beginning or end of an excerpt if that wasn’t a continuation. I highlighted the words with a yellow background, highlighted each word (rather than just the first occurance of the phrase), and numbered and paginated the results. Now they both look nice, but I’m still left with the blog search searching only blog entries (not the comments) and the forum searching just the forum. I’ve still got to figure a way to integrate the two and include the comment search.

Then there’s all sorts of other little things. bbPress allows you to edit your post for up to 60 minutes after you enter it. I should be able to add this functionality into WordPress as well. Except that there isn’t an editing page for users in WordPress, so I’ll have to customize one.

Then theres a matter of timezones. bbPress displays dates as either GMT or the timezone of the server. I searched and there is no PHP way (unless I include some javascript code which I don’t think I want to do for this) to find the viewer’s timezone so the time of post can be listed relative to your own timezone. I’m still thinking about this one and what to do here. But I guess that’s why bbPress decided to use relative times instead (e.g. 3 hours ago, 2 days ago) and eliminate that problem. I just don’t like the relative times.

So all of this work is a combination of me being too picky and wanting to get this working as well as possible before I go back to Behold. But no matter how much more I decide to customize, the movement of my Forum to bbPress will be great for the future, since the mySQL database will have a much higher capacity than my former Access database did.

So now I’ll try to first finish up what needs to be done to make the Forum live again ASAP. Then I’ll clean up some of the picky details.

I’ve been quiet (on this blog) for the last few weeks.

What I’ve been doing is taking some time to optimize this new blog the best it can be. I’ve removed some plugins that are expensive in terms of loading time, implemented caching correctly, optimized database calls, and tweaked some internal slowdowns in WordPress. In theory it’s now as good as it can be, and averages about one second in real response time, which is quite acceptable for WordPress.

The folks at IXWebhosting couldn’t find the direct cause of the original slowdown. They thought it might have been some abuse of the mySQL server that they had caught and stopped. But my Behold blog was still horribly slow several days after that, and I had determined the cause was slow page loading, and not the SQL requests.

But that problem went away and the blog was running fine. Then a few days ago, I had 12 hours of 15 to 30 seconds page loads. This one was different and was not file loading related. I’m not sure what it was, maybe slow mySQL server response. But that again magically repaired itself, and again the support team could not find the cause.

Another thing I looked at over the last 2 weeks was possibly changing web hosts. I looked at various VPN (Virtual Private Network) hosts and even Dedicated Hosting. I was surprised to find that shared hosting is on average, actually faster than VPN and the least expensive Dedicated Hosting plans. That’s because Shared hosts usually use very powerful servers to serve several hundred websites. Those sites on average use little load. The shared hosting companies (the good ones at least) make a point to ensure none of their servers get too overloaded, and will move things around to keep their clients happy. My conclusion was at this point to stick with IXWebhosting, at least while they can support the load on my site. They mostly fit my needs, and my experience has not been bad with them, other than the slowdown glitches. I’m hoping that if that problem rears its head again, we’ll eventually track it down. But until then, I’ll try to keep moving forward.

What I’ve got now at least is this blog in nearly final form. Next I’m going to finish my customization of the Behold Forum. It uses bbPress and will have a unique and tight integration with WordPress, sharing logins, searches and look and feel.

Let’s see if I can push myself and finish that within a week. It will be nice to open the Behold Forum again.