I know most of you won’t care about this post because you are here to be entertained but for those of you who are having trouble with WordPress being VERY very slow, this post is for you. (The rest of you can go ahead and skip to the more entertaining posts)
So WordPress is announcing version 2.7 and to be honest I’m tired of upgrading so often that I know the process by heart, and I’m also tired of my site slowing down with each upgrade because this plugin or that other one just don’t work with the new version perfectly. How many cooks do I need to bake up some clean fast code for my web site anyway?
Personally I’m done with open source, I like my code better and nobody is openly hacking my code because I’m the only one that knows how it works. And why does your WordPress site slow down anyway? It’s because they keep tweeking the database so all of a sudden those plugins that thought the database had a certain table name all of a sudden find that the table name has changed or that the base commands of WordPress are now spelled correctly, etc. Your server slows down because it has to wait for bogus SQL statements to time out and code to be rewritten in someone’s free time, etc. It’s a mash up of crap from person after person trying to make it all better.
So my new solution is to dump the database into simple flat files so I can write my own blog setup but still keep my old WordPress posts. Why flat files? If you’ve ever had to move to a new hosting service you know how much of a pain it is to move a MySQL database, but moving flat php files is a breeze! Plus you can create and modify php files with php and if you keep your files organized you can work with them just as easily as you can with a database.
Here’s the basics, each post will no longer be a record in the database, instead it will be a php file with the name of the file being the date of the post. Within the file will be nothing but variables such as $title, $content, $author, etc. so all I have to do is write a template file and include my post file at the top and the page is built from there. You can handle comments by adding $comment[] to the bottom of the post page and parsing your comments when the post is displayed. Simple right?
So as my contribution to those that are looking for a way out of WordPress, here is a link to the script that I built to create the flat php files from my WordPress 2.6 database. CLICK HERE From here it is up to you to build the rest of your interface but this script will help you by organizing your posts by category and creating the flat files for you.
No, I won’t help you to do anything more toward freeing yourself from WordPress. Remember I’m not into Open Source Code. But if you do use this script to gain your freedom, I would love to hear if it was helpful or not and if you went back to a database or are basking in the glory of flat file freedom!