Tag Archives: wordpress

WordPress 3.5 Initial Impressions

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This blog has been updated to WordPress 3.5. Initial impressions:

  • everything is less rounded now
  • Twenty Twelve (the new theme) sucks for following reasons:
    • uses custom font: causes this blog unreadable until fonts are loaded (at least in chrome)
    • image header: positioned below navigation menu (and the header text is above the menu)
    • no more search bar in navigation menu
  • the new media uploader looks useful

Overall there isn’t much change (what should I expect here) but the new theme sucks. At least to be used on this blog.

nginx/php single config for SSL and non-SSL connection

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This morning I noticed I haven’t upgraded WordPress MU Domain Mapping plugin to the latest version. It supposedly brings better SSL support. And after upgrading I couldn’t log in to my mapped domain blogs (e.g. this blog). Wasn’t it a great way to start my morning?

After some digging, I found out the problem was because I don’t have one PHP(?) parameter – HTTPS – passed properly. It should set to True whenever one is using SSL connection otherwise there’s no way the PHP process can know if the connection is secure or not. Previous version of WPMUDM have a bug in which skips SSL check but in turn enables using HTTPS even without such parameter. Decided it’s my fault (I believe it would completely breaks phpMyAdmin), adding the parameter then I did.

But it’s not that simple: I’m using unified config for both my SSL and non-SSL connection’s PHP include. Splitting the config would make the duplication worse (it’s already relatively bad as it is) so that’s not an option. Using the evil if is also not a solution since it doesn’t support setting fastcgi_param inside it.

Then the solution hit me. The map module – a module specifically made for things like this and to avoid usage of if. I tested it and indeed worked as expected.

Here be the config:

...
http {
  ...
  map $scheme $fastcgi_https {
    https 1;
    default 0;
  }
  ...
  server {
    ...
    location ~ .php$ {
      ...
      fastcgi_param HTTPS $fastcgi_https;
    }
...

And WordPress MU Domain Mapping is now happy.

Update 2012-02-20: nginx version 1.1.11 and up now have $https variable. No need to have that map anymore.

WordPress Multisite with nginx (subdomain/wildcard domain ver.)

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WordPress Multisite, previously known as WordPress MU (Multi User), is an application which allows hosting multiple WordPress blogs with just one installation. Instead of creating copies of WordPress for each users’ blogs, one can use one installation of Multisite to be used by multiple users, each with their own blogs. Personal/custom domain is also possible as used for this blog (this blog’s master site is genshiken-itb.org). Too bad, the official documentation only provided guide for installing on Apache. If you haven’t known, I usually avoid Apache – I simply more proficient with nginx. Of course, this blog is also running on nginx therefore it’s perfectly possible to run WordPress Multisite on nginx.

At any rate, reading the official documentation is still a must and this post will only cover the nginx version of Apache-specific parts (namely Apache Virtual Hosts and Mod Rewrite and .htaccess and Mod Rewrite) and only for subdomain install. Subdirectory one will or will not follow some time later.

Assuming you have working nginx and php-cgi (with process manager like php-fpm or supervisord), for starter you’ll want to create a specific file for this WP install. Let’s say this file named app-wordpress.conf. Obviously you have put WordPress installation somewhere in your server. In this example I put the files in /srv/http/genshiken-itb.org/.php/wordpress. Its content:

client_max_body_size 100m;
root /srv/http/genshiken-itb.org;
location /. { return 404; }
location / {
  root /srv/http/genshiken-itb.org/.php/wordpress;
  index index.php;
  try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
  rewrite ^/files/(.*) /wp-includes/ms-files.php?file=$1;
  location ~ .php$ {
    try_files $uri =404;
    fastcgi_pass unix:/tmp/php-genshiken.sock;
    fastcgi_read_timeout 600;
    fastcgi_send_timeout 600;
    fastcgi_index index.php;
    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $request_filename;
    include fastcgi_params;
  }
}

Simple enough. Actually, it’s exact same with normal WordPress install except one extra line:

rewrite ^/files/(.*) /wp-includes/ms-files.php?file=$1;

And you’re set. Note that I set fastcgi timeouts higher than default to work around the slow performance of Amazon EC2 Micro Instance. Should only needed on network upgrade and massive blog import.

Anyway, in your main nginx.conf file, put:

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name *.genshiken-itb.org;
  include app-wordpress.conf;
 }

In proper place. The usefulness of separate file for WordPress configuration will become apparent once you want to tweak performance for some blogs. I’ll explain that later if I feel like to.

Test post

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To ensure markdown works as expected, the following sentence must be block-quoted:

herp derp does it work?

And the following excerpt should show proper symbol:

100x + 5 >= 5

If it fails, then WordPress sucks.

Update: indeed it failed.

Update again: patched and now finally works.

nginx links

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Here are the links I find useful:

* [Why nginx](http://hostingfu.com/article/nginx-vs-lighttpd-for-a-small-vps)
* [WordPress with nginx](http://elasticdog.com/2008/02/howto-install-wordpress-on-nginx/)

Note that the latter link should not be followed anymore.

_Last update 2011-07-10 20:24: markdown-fied_