Introduction
Hey WordPress Warriors! March is on the books, and here’s a rundown of some of the behind-the-scenes work that went on. This includes our changelog, new knowledge base articles, existing knowledge base updates, and a new blog post.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Changelog
The changelog has been updated and can be viewed over on our roadmap here:
https://roadmap.gridpane.com/f/changelog/
Notable Fixes/Improvements/Changes
While in March we were mostly focused on finalizing the development (and the testing) of the new releases we dropped on April first, there were also some significant improvements added to our OpenLiteSpeed stack. These run behind the scenes and it’s not something you’ll notice when using GridPane, but those releases are a part of our continuous upgrades and improvements across the board.
For the new releases we dropped on April 1st, we published these two blog posts:
Newly Published Knowledge Base Articles
We published 7 new knowledge base articles in February.
How to Stop WordPress Comment Spam Permanently (for FREE)
This is the second in our WordPress anti-spam series. This new article covers multiple methods for blocking the root cause of comment spam at the source – and it’s all 100% free. If you’re currently paying for an anti-spam solution, you may want to give these a test drive – one is simply installing a completely free plugin that solves this issue in a very clever way.
Spam is a continual nuisance, and doubly so if your website has both contact forms and comments active. Unfortunately, most solutions don’t cut it, have limited life spans, and/or charge a premium while consuming more resources than is actually necessary to get the job done.
If you need solutions for both comment spam and form spam, the two articles below go hand in hand (and they’ll both actually save your server’s resources instead of consuming them):
- NEW: How to Stop WordPress Comment Spam Permanently (for FREE)
- How to Reduce Eric Jones Spam (and all the other Contact Form Spam)
GridPane’s Top 10 Getting Started Questions Answered
When new users are getting started on the platform, there are a handful of questions that come up over and over. This article is designed to give you quick answers to our top 10.
GridPane’s Top 10 Getting Started Questions Answered
Slow Logging
MySQL and PHP slow logging can be extremely useful debugging tools for tracking down long-running requests that can lead to performance bottlenecks for your WordPress websites. We now have two dedicated articles on the topic.
By identifying the specific requests that are running slow, you can set about either fixing the code itself or replacing the plugin responsible for the bottleneck (it’s almost always a plugin).
MySQL slow logging is available on both Nginx and OpenLiteSpeed. The PHP Slow Log is currently only available on Nginx servers.
Additional Articles
We also published the following:
Knowledge Base Article Updates
In addition to the 7 new articles above, in February we updated 18 existing articles:
- Migrate sites to GridPane using Migrate Guru
- GridPane Nginoil – Automatically Fix Nginx Syntax Errors
- GridPane Logs – How to Find Them and When to Use Them
- Changing a Website’s Primary Domain: Switch with an Alias (Domain Swaps)
- WP-Cron and GridPane’s GP-Cron
- Configure Nginx
- Site Firewalls: ModSec
- How to Reduce Eric Jones Spam
- Using the PHP Slow Log
- Changing a Website’s Primary Domain: Switch with an Alias (Domain Swaps)
- How to install Ioncube Loaders
- Working with the wp-config.php on GridPane and an introduction to user-configs.php
- Getting Started: Choosing Your First Servers and Common Server Questions
- Setting DNS Records
- Plugins and themes we DON’T recommend (and some better alternatives)
- Diagnosing Migration Issues
- Migrating with Zero Downtime
The GridPane Platform Documentation was also updated.
How and Why We Built Our Knowledge Base on WordPress
Finally, if you’re interested in building a knowledge base for your business and would like to know how we ourselves built ours, we published this blog post:
How and Why We Built Our Knowledge Base on WordPress
This includes the problems we were facing, our move away from our Zendesk knowledge base to our new WordPress knowledge base, and the plugins we used.
We hope you find it useful! Have a great April everyone!
New to GridPane?
Get started with our FREE Core plan today! We bring the software, you bring the hardware.