All posts tagged Wordpress

How To Hide Widgets For Logged In WordPress Users

by Darryl Kraemer on June 21, 2010 in Wordpress with 2 Comments

While working on the backend for a membership site we are launching later this year, we wanted to find a way with WordPress to hide widgets for logged in wordpress users, and vice-verse.

After several Google searches, I found the solution.

The plugin you need is (drum roll please……):

Widget Logic (click for link to plugin download)

Once you have downloaded and activated the plugin, you’ll notice a new input text field has shown up when you look at the widgets you have active in your blog:

The widget logic text field is what allows you to tell WordPress when, or where to show this widget. In this case, we don’t want to show the Facebook like box to our logged in members, but we do want to show it to our blog visitors. By inserting the !is_user_logged_in() conditional tag, we are telling wordpress to show this when the user is not (the ! is the opposite of the conditional tag) logged in.

I hope this helps anyone with membership sites out there control what widgets show up for their logged in members. If you have other solutions you’ve used on your membership site, please hit up the comments below and let me know.

W3 Total Cache Cut My WordPress Blog Load Time in Half

by Darryl Kraemer on March 2, 2010 in Wordpress with 5 Comments

So I’m always looking for ways to improve the load time on this blog, and my wife’s blog over at Vibrant Living. While searching Google on the benefits of eliminating whitespace in your HTML, CSS and Javascript files, I stumbled across a WordPress Plugin called W3 Total Cache.

It look interesting so I started reading the info page on it. Now, it made some big claims, and backed them up by listing the whos-whos of big blogs that rely on it to optimize the load time of their pages and posts. I include a snippet below:

The fastest and most complete WordPress performance optimization plugin. Trusted by many popular blogs like: mashable.com, briansolis.com, pearsonified.com, ilovetypography.com, noupe.com, webdesignerdepot.com, freelanceswitch.com, tutsplus.com, yoast.com, css-tricks.com, css3.info and others — W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your blog by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download time of your theme and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.

So, I decided to give it a try. I used a website tool called Pingdom Tools to capture a full page load test both before, and after installing and configuring the plugin.

Here’s my before stats for darrylkraemer.com (link to Pingdom archived stats):

And here are my stats after installation and configuration for darrylkraemer.com (link to Pingdom stats), using the default settings for W3 Total Cache:

Big difference. Over 11 seconds load time, to just over 6 seconds load time. The biggest improvement was in the Time To First Byte (TTFB) as shown in the second screenshots for the before and after. The total package delivered to the browser was the same size, but the time it took to get there was considerably quicker.

I tried this on my wife’s blog, and achieved similar results as shown below.

I want to share a neat Firefox plugin with you, that shows you TTFB, Total Load Time, Amount of Data Delivered, and Number of Requests, all in your status bar. This will help you test changes without having to go to Pingdom to see the results. It won’t replace Pingdom’s ability to show you exactly what pictures or scripts may be slowing your page load, which is a great feature if you’ve made some change, or added a plugin that suddenly slowed your load time signifigantly.

Hope these tips help, and if you tried out W3 Total Cache, I’d love to hear your results in the comments below.