Jon Bourne

I think usmagazine.com is using Drupal, not WordPress.

Thanks for the kind words, everyone. I’ve put a lot of work into the site, and it’s nice to hear that I’ve done well.

xinfo, in answer to your questions:

1. We are using a single XServe with dual 1.33 GHZ PowerPC G4 processors and 1.75 GB RAM on a full T1 connection. Our average outgoing data transfer is about 400 Kb/s.

   The home page was loading very slowly during our morning rush around 8:00, so I created my own file-based cache of the three main sections of the home page–news, opinion and sports. I extract these from the database with my own SQL calls and save the results to simple TXT files on the server. If these files a) exist and b) are not older than 10 minutes, I then include them into the template; if they are older than 10 minutes, I update them and then include them. This method of caching optimized the database calls from the home page from 22 queries down to 7 and really sped up the site, which was especially noticeable in the mornings.

2. The classifieds portion of the site was written from scratch using PHP and MySQL. I parse a flat text file that comes from our in-house classifieds system each day and insert the ads into the database, from which I then pull them out based on what the user clicks. The classifieds site is not running on WordPress at all.

Thanks for the link. I’ve installed the CQS (Custom Query String) plugin, configured it, and it looks very much like it will work for me.

Well, not perfectly, I guess. After a poking around a little more to see if that setup would work, I found that search results showed up reverse chronologically by day. If a search brings up 4 results and the posts are from 4 different days, you have to view 4 separate pages of search results instead of getting back a list of 4 results on one page. Is there a way around this? Is there a way to override the global configuration option on only the search results page?

Leave it to me to miss the obvious… Yeah, that works perfectly. Thanks.

I, too, work for a newspaper, and I use BlueHost. For only $6.95 a month, you can get 100 GIGS of transfer, which should more than suffice for a “tiny, tiny fraction” of 8M page views. A basic plan also gives you 4 gigs of hosting space, hosting for 6 domains on 1 account, 2,500 POP email accounts, SSL, FTP, stats, and more! Ia€?ve been very happy with them, and I think they would work well for you.

I would have to agree that template design and hosting should not be sought from the same company. You could post seperately here for a custom template price quote from experienced WordPress template designers.

I don’t know about PowWeb, but BlueHost (which WordPress recommends) offers a service called Fantastico that installs and sets up many scripts for you. Among them is WordPress. Fantastico makes the installation of multiple WP blogs very simple. That may be a good choice for you.

Thanks, but no thanks. I would rather be in control of my own hosting. It’s not that expensive, anyway. On the WordPress hosting page, there is a link to BlueHost, who I now use, and I’ve been very happy with them. For only $6.95 a month, I get 100 GIGS of transfer! Not to mention 4 gigs of hosting space, hosting 6 domains on 1 account, 2,500 POP email accounts, SSL, FTP, stats, and more! Ia€?ve been very happy with them.

This may help someone:
WordPress EventCalendar plugin

Try the WordPress MultiUser Edition.

Yet another update:

Two carriage returns do work after all. I guess I was dealing with a browser-cached copy of the page or something before. Sorry for the trouble.

The glitches I mentioned in the post above are still relevant, though.

Notes to developers of bbPress:

• Backticks don’t carry through more than one carriage return
  The previous post didn’t display correctly. The backticks surround “First paragraph text followed by a carriage return

  Second paragraph text,” but it doesn’t all appear as <code>. The <code> tag is closed between the first line and second line of text, thus making “Second paragraph text” appear as normal paragraph style rather than <code> style.

  It’s a minor glitch, but someone may want to address it.

• <p> tags disappear when editing <code>
  The <p> tags disappeared from the first line of code in the post above. After I posted the comment, the text looked wrong. So I clicked the “Edit” link at the bottom of that post.

  In the edit page, the backticks were still there, but the <p> tags had been removed from the edit window.

I tried that, but it didn’t work. You actually have to use three carriage returns–press ENTER three times; you need two carriage returns between your text’s paragraphs in order to get a resulting HTML paragraph.

So to make:

<p>First paragraph text followed by a carriage return</p>
<p>Second paragraph text</p>

You would need:

First paragraph text followed by a carriage return

Second paragraph text

Hope this helps someone else.