Martin Vicenik

Some of the FV Player users recently experienced issues with the last version - their videos were not playing. The reason was that there were bigger changes in our code and their websites used poorly configured CDN.

While CDN speeds up your site you must understand how it works to avoid issues and too much optimization which you don't understand. Just make sure that you don't remove query string versions - read on!

Keep reading How to use WordPress with CDN

Many of our clients don't like the paged comments feature of WordPress as they like to have all the keywords occurring in the comments present on our article page and not spread across multiple pages. Keeping thousands of fresh comments on the page with every possible combination of keywords helps them rank at the top of Google for very competitive product categories.

Our front-end comment moderation plugin Thoughtful Comments includes comment caching feature, this article describes why that is important even if you are caching your site HTML: Improve your WordPress speed by Caching Comments.

However the downside is that it doesn't work for administrators and that the cache has to be purged and rebuilt when comments are added or removed. It's also usually slows down logged in users as we move more and more of our clients over to a membership or at least logged in user model.

Keep reading Comment Caching Models to improve WordPress Core Performance

Moving from bbPress 1 to 2 is a pain in the neck. It's really like migrating from one forum software product to another. It's not an evolution but a revolution. In use, bbPress 2 is not much better than bbPress 1 but since John James Jacoby pushed version two out the door in 2011, it's long since time to migrate. The issue with bbPress 1 is not with the software itself (still simple and scaleable) but with plugins.

John James Jacoby forced all the bbPress v1 plugins underground (info and plugin repository were moved over to v2). Unlike almost anything else new in the WordPress world, bbPress 2 is neither crippleware (useless free version with pro version) or serviceware, so we are grateful for bbPress.

Keep reading How to convert bbPress 1 forums to bbPress 2

Some of the FV Flowplayer users play guitar and teach these skills in online classes. They picked our plugin as an effective solution for their membership websites and quickly came up with an idea:

User AB loop

With this unique feature your users will be able to pick the part of the video which they like and loop it over and over again - perfect for practicing guitar "riffs" or "licks" or basically any tutorial website.

Keep reading Let users loop your videos as they like

New version of FV Player Pro (0.5.4; it's the Pro extension for our FV Flowplayer licensed users) gives you ability to embed playlists created on YouTube:

Keep reading YouTube Playlist Embedding

Licensed users of FV Flowplayer who benefit from powerful Vimeo and YouTube embedding often ask us to convert their old video embeds into the [fvplayer] shortcodes to be able to use the same player for all their old videos and also all of our features.

That's why the new version of FV Player Pro (0.5.2; it's the Pro extension for our licensed users) gives you just the tools to do this.

Keep reading Supercharge your video embeds with FV Flowplayer

FV Flowplayer 6 it out and it has some great new features:

• HLS support in the Flash engine - making the HLS playback possible in basically every browser.
• Subtitles button with multilingual support - we need to do more testing on this one
• Engine switching in playlists - making it possible to mix the video formats.
• Better skin and other improvements
• Faster than version 5
• Improved YouTube playback

Keep reading FV Flowplayer 6 Released!

If your website has a lot of comments and uses a plugin like Subscribe to Comments Reloaded to let users subscribe to new comment notifications, you probably had an issue with your comment notification being marked as spam.

One great way of preventing that is to use SendGrid. With SendGrid, you never deliver unsolicited email again. As soon as the email fails to get delivered or is marked as spam, that email address won't see another email from you again.

Keep reading How to solve the comment notifications spam issues

Update for WordPress 4.2.2: The issue is still real. The fix described below still works. The new db_version is 31535.

When you upgrade to WordPress 4.2, it will automatically convert the tables to utf8mb4, if the following conditions are met:

• You’re currently using the utf8 character set.
• Your MySQL server is version 5.5.3 or higher (including all 10.x versions of MariaDB).
• Your MySQL client libraries are version 5.5.3 or higher. If you’re using mysqlnd, 5.0.9 or higher.

Keep reading WordPress 4.2 Database Update Difficulties

Here is the deal with the WordPress cache plugins: even if you install such plugin, there is a fair amount of users who load your sites without speed benefits of cache. No matter if you use Hyper Cache, WP Super Cache, WP Rocket or W3 Total Cache.

WP cache plugins simply skip the cache altogether if the visitor left a comment on the website with his browser by checking for the comment cookie. That's quite ineffective if you have 10K posts on your blog and the user only left a comment on a single article. Now imagine that your blog has a lot of discussion where dozens of users actively participate - you will see your server load going up.

Keep reading Improve your WordPress speed by Caching Comments