Wordpress stuck in maintenance mode

Problem: You are using WordPress’ great feature of automatic theme or plugin updates, but the AJAX throbber doesn’t stop moving – your site seems to be stuck. You hit the reload button of your browser and this is what you get: “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.” Solution: Open your (S)FTP program and delete the file called “.maintenance” in the root of the WordPress folder. This lets WordPress ignore the failed update, which you can then try again. It might be useful to update plugins one by one, or to check if some of them have become unstable. ...

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Moving Wordpress, the Dirty Way

Sometimes it’s time to say goodbye. To a Web Host for example. But we want to take our beloved WordPress website with us. If the relocation is urgent (for example because the old host charges a ridiculous yearly fee) this can cause quite some stress. Calm down. Here is a short list of how to move any WordPress site in no time. Prepare some coffee and just follow these steps. Grab your files. I normally use SFTP to copy the files from my old host to my new host. This takes about 5 minutes if your WordPress installation is not too large. Transfer mode “auto” should be fine. In case you have a lot of large plugins installed you could use yet another plugin to backup your files and download them as a zip, that you upload to your new host later. (Of course, if you have shell-access to your...

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Web Stats with Piwik

Yesterday I started using the open source alternative to Google Analytics, Piwik (www.piwik.org) on my WordPress multisite network. Setup is fast and easy. Here are some comments on the setup steps and possible issues: Download the piwik zip (about 6 MB, fast); Upload to your browser. I placed it at {root}/piwik. SSH/SFTP is recommended as there are many thousands of files and it would take a long time using FTP. Make sure transfer mode is set to “binary”, because “ascii” or “auto” would result in messing up line breaks, so that you don’t pass the file integrity check of Piwik; Creating a database is trivial. I used a separate DB that I...

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.htaccess rules

… or does it? I found this list of things you can do with .htaccess that I want to share with you. http://devmoose.com/coding/20-htaccess-hacks-every-web-developer-should-know-about Have a look if you like to prevent spammy commenters ban IP addresses protect files or directories with a password redirect to another site without being punished by the big G create custom error pages remove filename extensions from your URL and more   ...

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